I Confess . . .

I have something to confess: I don’t confess things often enough. And I’m betting you don’t either.

I heard a really thought-provoking interview the other day with Jamin Goggin talking about his new book, Pastoral Confessions. They talked about the fact that Protestants really threw the confession baby out with the bathwater when they broke off from Catholicism. Scripture talks all the time about confessing our sins, and even specifically about doing so with our brothers and sisters in Christ. “Confess your sins to each other,” James urges, “and pray for each other, so that you may be healed.”

And we SO don’t do that. We’re almost offended at the idea that we should. Forget that it’s clearly biblical teaching. We’re good at picking and choosing and re-interpreting scripture. It’s one of our biggest faults – one that we really need to . . . ahem . . . confess.

We have made the Christian faith so very American – that is, so very individualistic. It’s all about me and God. End of story. Nobody else needs to be involved in my faith walk.

And that is so very wrong.

As Skye Jethani, the interviewer, said, we are really good at deceiving ourselves. We tell the world (and ourselves) one story about who we are, and anyone who knows us well would laugh at our tale. And because we’ve defaulted to the easy legalistic version of the faith and are not very good at the walking with the Spirit thing, we can’t trust that we will accurately hear the Spirit tell us privately when we are way off track.

So, we do need others, our brothers and sisters in Christ. We are a part of a body, and intentionally so. God knew what he was doing there; he knew we would need each other. He chooses to make himself heard very often through other human beings – from the pulpit, through literature and podcasts and such, but also to our faces in actual live conversation.

And that body analogy is significant in another way. When one part of the body is messed up, the whole body is affected. Your sins are not just between you and God. They affect others whether you realize it or not. They affect your church (your microchurch) because when you are not what God means you to be, you are not being for them what you need to be. The system is broken . . . and nobody knows why.

Personally, I have noticed that when I give voice to my sins, even if it’s just praying aloud about them, they become more real to me. Even more so when I tell someone else. Even more so when that’s in person, to their face. My failings cannot disappear into the recesses of my imagination any longer, like a bad dream. They are legit, they are on the table, and they must be dealt with.

And that should be the goal. Right?

There is a phrase out there, “the priesthood of believers”. I confess that I understand it very little – I can’t even tell you for sure if it is in the Bible or not (although I think it is). But we evangelicals really need to get over our fear of the priest word and figure out how to do this.

The health of the church depends on it.