Have I converted?

I've been wondering about this the past few days - did I convert. The memory that comes to mind is of talking with two boys on the school bus coming home one day. I was sort of maintaining a creationist argument - people who know me now might find this a little difficult to believe. The older boys who were trying to prove to me that I was wrong used a confusion between having to believe in every word of the creation story in Genesis (today I'd say which one of course!) if you have faith in God to argue their point. Looking back on that old argument, the thing that I see most now is how completely biblically and theologically iliterate I was and I think how very sad that is. My strong sense of faith was not really matched by any knowledge or intellectual framework to go with that.

I can still remember the wonderful liberation I felt newly arrived in France when at a weekend for 60 young people from the church one of my colleagues started us all thinking by giving a bravura performance, "in the beginning the world was round, round and flat, flat as a pancake, with a great dome above and great dome below." A real introduction to a way of thinking about how the earth was thought about in old testament times. We weren't there to try and tell young people to believe in several impossible or dogmatic things before breakfast, but rather to encourage them to understand and celebrate God's wonderful world and their and our faith.

In my early teens although I attended a fairly middle of the road and perhaps liberal church, the church youth group was run largely by evangelicals. I can remember watching at youth services as others went forward to respond to the altar call, I never did. The congregation I belonged to was ecumenical and made up of a real mix of people from very liberal to biblically conservative - and I still hold on to it as a special community and I'm truly grateful for the sense of vocation I received during that time of my life. But I would argue now that we need to rediscover a sense of passion about the Bible story and stories. Hans Ruedi Weber calls it "The Book that reads Me" - for me the way forwards in a secularised world is about sharing the story rather than dogmas or systems. It will never be about choosing science or God but choosing both. - and it's fine to share that from the outset with children and young people.

I hadn't really thought until now that perhaps I left an evangelical worldview behind at some point during my teens. I couldn't say when that happened but sometime in my teens the gradual move from evangelical to liberal just happened - and I know others who have made the opposite journey. How tolerant in the Christian churches are we of one another I wonder? So quick to pigeonhole people as in one camp or another rather than to in some way both truly discuss differences and celebrate the enormous diversity of God's church.

Enough I think, this is probably not understandable or even intereseting to anyone but me. Sleep calls!