April 29, 2021
Toward the tail end of my college years, my deconstruction was in full force. My head was spinning with a whirlwind of new thoughts and I had no idea where I would land. I was stuck in a very strange place—one where the genie was out of the bottle and I knew that I wouldn’t ever be able to go back to what I once believed. But at the same time, I had no idea what the path forward looked like.
During this time, the Perspectives class caught my eye.
If you’ve never heard of it, Perspectives is a course that many churches license to teach to their congregations. It’s similar to when a church goes through a packaged Beth Moore or Dave Ramsey series. Perspectives has a curriculum, a textbook, and there are tests and quizzes. It’s quite the commitment, and since I was in college at the time, I just didn’t have the time to go through the course, even though everyone who’d ever taken it swore by it.
Toward the end of college and with my faith being swept out from under me, I decided to enroll in the course and finally see what it was all about. After all, the very name of the course promised to change my perspective on the Christian lifestyle.
So I went through the entire 15-week course and it was utterly fantastic.
Perspectives teaches about the Bible and the Christian lifestyle in a way that is very different from what you get in sermons on Sunday morning. It’s very focused on what God’s ultimate plan for the world is—to bring about his kingdom. It teaches that all Christians should be actively engaged in doing this, and gives practical ways for it to be done.
What appealed to me so much was that Perspectives actually agreed with me about some of the problems plaguing the modern church. One such example is mission trips. Perspectives teaches that short-term trips are a waste of time and that what little meaningful work can be done during a week-long mission trip is just not comparable to what can be accomplished with long-term mission work.
It also made it very clear that mission trips were not vacations, and that Christians should not be wasting time going on mission trips to places like Italy or Spain. I had come to this opinion on my own shortly before I took the class. I mean, there’s a damn cathedral on every street corner in Italy and Spain. Everyone there has already heard of Jesus.
Rather, Perspectives promotes the idea of Christians getting off their asses and actually getting their hands dirty by actually going to the uncomfortable, gritty locations that have legitimately never heard of Jesus. Once there, the missionaries were to commit the time to actually learn the local language, integrate with the customs (rather than evangelizing American Bible Belt culture), work with locals to translate the Bible into the local language, and ultimately train locals to sustain the new church well into the future. Basically, everything a short term mission trip is not.
Perspectives understood that you couldn’t just take the same missionary tactics and apply them uniformly to India or Brazil or Indonesia. They encouraged you to dive deep into one location that was proven to literally not know who Jesus was, and then taught you basic language skills and cultural awareness so that you could actually integrate with the local population there and thus evangelize effectively.
It was basically all the stuff that 99% of Christians aren’t going to do. It was a call to get out of the church building, stop singing Chris Tomlin songs, and actually get shit done for God’s kingdom.
The class put into words many of the problems I was having with the Christian lifestyle. Since I was a thinking Christian rather than a feeling Christian, I’d lost a lot of interest in emotional worship sessions and vague sermons aimed at new believers. I was looking for something to do.
And Perspectives seemingly gave me the avenue to do that. For that reason, the Perspectives class almost saved my faith.
However, the Perspectives class came a bit too late.
By then, I’d already gone too far in my other reading and research. I’d already begun traveling more and saw first-hand how the world actually worked outside the tiny, restrictive lens of religion. When I finally determined that the Resurrection was not a historical event, then my entire faith in the Christian religion fell away. Therefore, despite the Perspectives instructors being correct about modern Christian culture and what mission work should really look like, I ultimately concluded they were evangelizing lies around the world.
I believe that if I’d found the Perspectives class a lot sooner, then my deconversion would have come way, way later in life or perhaps not at all. I’d likely have become a full-time missionary in some far flung region of the world.
I’m thankful that I went down the path I did.
What about you? Have you ever heard of the Perspectives class before? Perhaps you experienced something at the tail end of your deconversion that almost saved your faith. Let me know in the comments!