A Statement of Faith
written by Aaron Schultz
The contemporary church has often struggled with the relationship between the faith’s communal embodiment and personal ownership. Put in another way, the faith we have as Christians is both an individual and communal expression. In my formative years as a follower of Christ, I only understood faith, sin, confession, doubt, salvation, and hope as my own private engagement with Jesus. Over time, I grew to understand these categories of faith in both the personal and the collective.
I am a person who has always struggled with faith. Coupled with the demands of authenticity as a 4 on the Enneagram, I have often felt disingenuous trying to conclusively articulate something so mysteriously complex as language about God and how God works in the world. After a few years of living outside of the circle of faith (as Paul Tillich describes in his Systematic Theology) while working in full-time ministry, I discovered an expanded pathway to faith in God by working to integrate my personal experience of God, my cognitive convictions of faith, and the communal memory of the faithful (both past and present). From this vantage point, faith in God resides in my mind, my heart, and my gut, while at the same time existing outside of my own interpretation of it. Faith becomes something I can work to embody and also, in humility, learn to be transformed by it. Faith as God’s revelation refuses to be categorically confined to pen-strokes on a page; rather it is a force drawing us deeper into God’s presence and into the shared-living of those who we worship with.
In a more cynical analysis, statements of faith often function as boundaries between tribes; highlighting just how enlightened certain groups are over others, creating walls of distinction between who has received exclusive revelation from God and those who are swimming around in the pool of misguided interpretations, Biblical unfaithfulness, and deviant unorthodoxy. For me in my journey of faith, it has been a helpful exercise to write statements of faith and slowly prayer over them; identifying congruence and dissonance between what I have come to believe, what I want to believe, and what I feel I ought to believe. This process is often uncomfortable, intimately revealing, and feels perpetually unfinished, but I have learned to be gracious with myself in understanding WHY this exercise matters. The goal of this exercise is to find God, not to try to define God. It is a matter of pursuit instead of arriving at any destination.
Here is my brief statement of faith…
I grew up in a Christian household and attended a Baptist church from a very young age. Even though there has been a lot of unlearning from what I inherited from this tribe, I’m grateful for being formed in a tradition who loves the Bible, emphasizes a personal relationship with God, and sees the Holy Spirit as a guiding Presence to bring an otherwise divided people together. Starting in high school, I led worship in various capacities and realized I wanted to use my musical and creative gifts in the local church.
At University, my faith matured beyond feeling and conviction; it became something I wanted to intellectually explore. I found temporary solace in an Eastern Orthodox Church where I experience the Divine Liturgy and a sacramental understanding of devotion to God. I dreamed of a way to see these immensely different worlds collide and inform/complement one another, so I decided to further explore worship ministry, liturgical theology and sacramental theology which led me to Garrett Theological Seminary. Through classes, studies, conversation, and worship opportunities, I felt an even deeper ambition to allow the rich traditions from a diversity of Christian expressions of the faith to be in conversation with one another; thereby “transcending and including” particular traditions to contextually create new pathways to help people discover God in the “here and now”. This Ancient-Future approach to worship planning is an awareness I bring with me to every worship gathering I craft.
Faith in the Triune God is viewed in my mind with an attention to its ecclesial role. Faith in the Father, through the mediatory work of Christ (eternal Logos and Incarnate Savior) and the work of the Holy Spirit takes form in the context of a baptismal community. In this way, my faith is both personal and collective. Faith cannot be reduced to a profession of prescribed intellectual principles; instead it is embodied and expressed through community. The knowledge component of faith is purified, refined, and qualified through our actions. My own orthodoxy (right belief) and orthopraxy (right action) have a symbiotic relationship, which on its best days allows for the freedom to ask questions, graciousness towards myself and others in the knowing and unknowing, and the conviction to live into the likeness of Christ.
My faith is Trinitarian, and the particular doctrine of the Trinity has a beautiful way of informing other doctrines of the faith. I believe Jesus Christ has brought and is in the process of bringing Salvation (wholeness, completion, eternal communion with God, healing, new life) to the world through the work of the Trinity, and I believe God desires that all living things be in communion and fellowship with God. I also believe the work of Christ is what unifies the church and makes ecumenism possible. The universal truth claims we proclaim need to be held in balance with the particularity of our own experience. The God we worship is utterly transcendent, unknowable, and “other”, yet is One who took on flesh to be with God’s people in an intimate, immanent, and revelatory way. God is YWHW and God is Immanuel. People have the capacity for evil but also are made wholly into the image of God. These are paradoxes God invites us to participate in; mysteries requiring our hearts, our minds, our affections, and our souls.
My personal faith in God has also been enriched by this journey because I allow many traditions, perspectives, and people to speak truth to me. I feel that the more I am transformed by the richness of worship, the more I can easily embody the transformative components of experiencing God.
Through personal mediation, prayer practices, nature, meeting with a Spiritual Director, and meeting God in unexpected places, I am continually challenged to seek God honestly in relation to myself and the experience of others. My personal theology is also subordinate to the demands of grace, which leads to an openness of the maturing processes of construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction.
