In the Beginning

A post about me and about the ways we put faith in each other

Beginnings like these feel a little artificial to me, but I want to try to be up-front about what I’m doing here: I want to let you know (briefly) who I am, and what kind of thoughts I’m hoping to offer. I’m also going to record myself reading this post before I post it, so if you’d prefer to listen than to read, you have that option. I always preferred speaking to writing anyway.

Briefly About Me

So, hi. My name is Woodrow, I’m an American who’s lived the majority of his post-educational adult life in Canada, and I first moved to Canada to work as a pastor in a small-to-medium-ish-sized church located in that scrum of cities south of Toronto. I liked that church; the people there were (for the most part) very gracious to me, very thoughtful, willing to be pushed, willing to ask questions. In a lot of ways, I ‘grew-up’ there, by which I mean I went through that awful, bumpy, awkward, stop-and-go process of maturing from a know-it-all 20-something into a burned-out man in a niche profession in his late 30s.

And so I quit. I quit for a lot of reasons, chief of which was that I knew I needed to deconstruct my faith but I didn’t feel like I could do that while being a pastor, preaching in front of people Sunday after Sunday, baptizing their kids or praying a blessing for Communion. I had always loved questions about life and faith, but there were some questions I didn’t feel like I could ask, and be a pastor.

Fast forward to now. While I no longer think of myself as a Christian per se, I do think I’m a ‘person of faith’, at least from my point of view. I think we all are. We’re all putting our faith in a bunch of things, whether we do it consciously or not. And while there are a lot of potential conversations to be had about that point, for the sake of this post I want to point out that the main thing we are regularly putting our faith in is each other.

We get into our cars trusting that the people around us will more or less follow the same rules that we are, such that we don’t kill each other on our commute. We go to our jobs trusting that our paychecks will show up on time. We cook dinner trusting that whoever built our ovens did so with skill enough that we can do it safely, and we eat trusting that someone in our government cares enough about us to make sure our food isn’t full of poison (maybe you already sense problems with this). We trust our schools to teach our kids, our plumbers to fix our toilets, and our doctors not to be making shit up when they check us.

That’s a lot of trust, a lot of dependence, confidence – a lot of faith to be putting in the people around us, most of whom we don’t really know at all. Which is normal, and I think it’s good that we do that. Our relationship with the world around is fundamentally one built, not on profit or what I can get just for myself, but on trust. And it mostly happens without us really thinking about it.

But I think our world, now, is living through a season in which our faith in each other is being stretched, undermined, and tested in ways I’m not sure we’ve ever been, before. Human beings have never before lived in a world like the one we live in, now: A world that’s been atomized by technology and luxury. A world structured and ordered by companies that seem faceless, chasing endlessly-greater profits rather than some kind of general good. The most powerful and most influential members of our species are not actually pursuing the survival of our species. It’s a profoundly strange state of affairs. I mean, do a gut-check: Think about “the world” (whatever that means to you). How much would you say you feel trust for other people? How much faith would you say that you have in the basic goodness or basic rightness of other people? And I don’t just mean the people that you know, I mean also the people that you don’t know but who’s lives touch yours maybe in dozens of different invisible or intangible ways: The people who make your clothes, or who designed your car, or who manage the apps you use to make plans with your friends.

My point is to say this: That if our world feels scary, hostile, even insane, I think that it’s in part because we don’t know how to trust each other. We don’t know what it would mean to work together for something better than what we’re seeing. We don’t know how to prioritize, as societies, the effort it takes to try to be trustworthy. And we don’t know how to get past the hundred different ways we’re being encouraged to distrust by news outlets and social media algorithms that more and more feed on our fear, our anxiety, and our rage.

In these posts, I hope to think ‘out-loud’ with you (so to speak) about what being a person of faith could mean in our own little corners of the world. I hope to wonder about why things are the way the are, and what a world might even look like that’s safer, wiser, and more intentionally built for life to flourish. And I hope that in doing so, we can impact our own communities or networks in ways that history will confirm are Good.

Anyway, that’s my hope.

Be well, be kind, and thanks for reading.