Westmont Magazine Pop Goes the Bubble

How God Goaded Me Outside My Bubble

By Telford Work, Professor of Theology, Westmont College
Adapted from a 2004 Westmont Magazine Story

The campus calendar usually says orientation lasts four days. Don’t believe it. As helpful as those four days are, orientation is neither that easy nor that quick. It takes at least a semester—often a painful one—for students to be truly oriented to college life. Each new academic year brings new frustrations as they struggle to adjust to new stages in their education. 

August isn’t orientation; college is orientation. In fact, if we are living faithfully, life is orientation. And disorientation too. True discipleship involves redirection. Christians call it “conversion”—the shocking, distressing, terrifying, exhilarating, transforming corrections that turn us around and move us away from what is fading toward what is coming.

I’ve had the privilege of spending three sabbatical semesters teaching abroad. There I meet brothers and sisters in Christ with whom I have both much in common and very little. In some ways, I jump right in to the mix: as an academic teaching a class or giving a scholarly presentation, as a fellow disciple who worships and prays, and as a witness who bears my testimony and hears theirs. On these trips, my kids jumped right in too and discovered commonalities with the young people there I didn’t realize would be so strong. In minutes, they settled in to sharing viral videos and memes, common concerns at school and in youth groups, and, of course, frustrations with parents. Yet even as we found comrades, we discovered differences we hadn’t imagined. Just the labor of an afternoon shopping for food exhausted us. Icy reactions in post-Soviet Lithuanian stores perplexed us, and our suspicious surface friendliness surely perplexed the locals. Learning a Japanese or Korean mass transit system could be an exercise in frustration. I assigned papers in ethics classes in India and Ethiopia and was stunned by the ethical quandaries my students’ churches faced: pervasive corruption, polygamy, witchcraft, tribalism, crises over dowry, unwelcome western liberalism, sexism, violent persecution (in India all of my students had immediate family members who had suffered violence for being Christian), and human trafficking. During Ramadan in Ethiopia a din of sermons and prayers blared distorted from blown-out loudspeakers. Getting oriented to these contexts was both invigorating and fatiguing. Yet as weeks went on, we would at some point hit a wall of weariness and be done, ready to leave. This despite being so much better oriented than we’d been at first.

More often the exotic comes to us. How many shocks have we all endured in 2020 alone? Here at Westmont, 2020 comes on the heels of the Thomas Fire and debris flows and other disasters in a succession going back a dozen years. Then there are family crises, deaths of loved ones, losses of jobs, life stages, and ideological avalanches that we each travel through in close social circles, or even alone. Orientation lasts a lifetime. How should we face it?

For me a precipitating event was September 11, 2001. Its lessons for me remain unsurpassed by all the havoc since. Both the attacks and the worldwide responses awakened an urgent need for me to understand what was going on. Ordinarily I would have turned to my usual sources to meet that need: journalists, professional analysts and academic experts, and Christians with gifts of discernment. However, with few exceptions, the world’s journalists were ill-equipped to understand the crush of events. (They’ve descended further into parody ever since.) They had trained themselves to see the world through certain ideological and professional lenses, which proved to be unhelpful. Ditto for the western establishment’s foreign policy analysts, comparative area experts, and scholars of Islam. With a few notable exceptions, these people had grown comfortable seeing the world in ways that proved profoundly inadequate. Politicians were typically following agendas that prevented them from speaking plainly about what was happening. Big media, the power establishment, and the academy all failed massively to see 9/11 coming or to respond insightfully in the months afterward. The church failed too. Some of the oddest, least adequate, and most outrageous statements following 9/11 came from Christians. Moreover, the church snapped back to business as usual even faster than these other institutions. 

Nearly 20 years later, I could say the same for the Iraq War, the 2008 financial crisis, the rise of ISIS and waves of Middle Eastern emigration, China’s Xi Jinping era, Russia’s Putin era, escalating racial tension, the 2016 presidential race, Brexit, California brush fires, COVID-19—you name it. Time and again we face another orientation, replete with signals that we’re way out of our depth.

The aftermath of 9/11 sent me looking elsewhere in search of answers. I ended up turning to an informal network of web loggers and online commentators that had already begun springing up before 9/11, but which exploded in the weeks and months following as more and more people like me came to the same conclusions that the usual sources of information were hopelessly behind the curve. Turning to these people was a godsend; the free market of opinion and source-referencing online turned out to be much quicker at identifying inadequacies and improving itself than traditional media. (This was before Facebook, Twitter,

Google’s algorithms, and other walled gardens narrowed and chilled so much internet expression with peer pressure and outright censorship.)

My turn to these other sources had an unintended side-effect. Online commentary’s voices come from both within and far beyond my familiar subcultures. They were also far more informal, blunt, self-revealing, and critical than print or broadcast commentary. They didn’t just offer arguments but displayed personalities and invited people into each other’s lives. So venturing into this medium brought me into contact with whole communities of people who were often unlike me, who rarely felt like going to great lengths to understand me, and who weren’t particularly interested in becoming like me. After a few years as a professor in both the so-called “Westmont bubble” and the bigger bubble of academic theology, this was a shock.

It was a real shock—what philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre calls an epistemological crisis. Rather than clearing things up right away, these encounters muddied them more, like the first sweeps of old wipers on a dusty

late-summer windshield. My theological wares were not only unwanted, they were ill-suited to the task. I chronicled the growing sense of helplessness I was feeling in an anniversary reflection called “How September 12 Destroyed My Faith.” It tells of my year-long encounter with two worlds: America after terrorism, and the Muslim world in the face of unprecedented world scrutiny. Both were acquainted with the gospel, or thought they were; neither was governed by it. Even liberal and evangelical Christians usually responded to the situation in pragmatic rather than consistently Christian ways. Each of these worlds was satisfied with itself and intent on destroying its rivals. In their conflict the good news of Jesus Christ as I understood it was marginal. As I looked on, what I had to offer began to seem more and more unattractive, irrelevant, impotent, and trivial. Realizing this in 2002 helped me see that it had been true in all sorts of other contexts throughout the church’s history. Christianity as a substantive way of life, I concluded, was on the edge of extinction. So was my own faith.

What I did next turned things around. An old adage holds that preachers should preach with the Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other. Sometimes the same is true of prayer and meditation. I took the question that most bothered me in light of what I had discovered on the internet, “Why should I believe in the Christian faith when so many people, including Christians, are doing evil things in God’s name?” and searched the Scriptures for a satisfying answer. I thought it through in writing. When I finished, I realized that the storm had passed. 

I’ve had to do the same thing with every storm that has come in the years since, and I’ve learned to expect similar results. On the other side of a crisis will be untenable assumptions I learned (the hard way) were unnecessary, as well as more room for the Jesus of scripture. Rather than reaching the point of exhaustion and longing for home, I’m now oriented toward expecting more of these and awaiting a cleaner and cleaner windshield from which to view my Savior a little more clearly.

It is well and good to trust that Jesus is the King of all kings and Lord of all lords. But in the crunch, I found that abstract trust unsatisfying. Part of that was surely my weakness of faith. But I think a powerful force behind my dissatisfaction was the Holy Spirit. My faith had grown not only comfortable but insular—at home in a world that was too small for the real thing. So God was goading me outside my bubbles. God was holding back his blessings until I ventured out in faith, both to carry my faith into a new place and to bring that new place to my faith, to test whether and how the two had anything to do with each other. Was my good news also good news to these people? Is Jesus their Lord too? It was easy to answer “of course,” but it was not satisfactory either to me or to God. The true answers had to become concrete. Actual interaction had to occur for the leaven to spread further through the lump of dough. My interim answer had to be “maybe”—or, put in a more theologically defensible way, “Let’s find out.”

This response has become habitual. Reality keeps intruding into my picture of reality. It feels like a disturbance, a glitch in the Matrix, that I can only ignore for so long until it demands attention. Sometimes it drips in like rain through a leaky roof, with droplets of inexplicable phenomena; other times it falls down on me in a chaotic avalanche. Either way, accommodating the contradictory evidence is a losing struggle and a growing source of pain until I patch or replace my framework. In the wake of this year’s racial convulsions, and similarly disenchanted with the typical reactions and interpretations, I spent a lot of my summer reading up on race and racism. “Life’s lessons will be repeated until learned,” says a proverb, so I may as well get it over with. 

After decades of this, I still feel like a perplexed student in one of my own classes—but a competent senior, not a panicked first-year. I am teaching, praying, and interacting with believers and non-believers differently. Parenting four young human beings has been my life’s most humbling task—but the Lord has been with us. Years of volunteer chaplain work at Santa Barbara County Jail has introduced me to a whole new population of people from a dizzying variety of lives and backgrounds, along with a still-common faith. I am slowly and painfully being converted to the broader Kingdom of God. Furthermore, my work has had an effect—tiny, often trivial, but real—in those circles. It’s intoxicating and so very encouraging that as weary as I am I still can’t wait for more.

We evangelical Christians are not the only ones who stay within our comfort zones. Everybody embraces bubbles: social classes, ideological camps, genders, lifestyles, tribes, tongues, and nations; journalists, faculties, inmates, influencers, and professions; churches, group chats, and subreddits. Humanity is not so much a global village, one big family, or a sea; rather it’s a lather: a thick layer of bubbles jostling, colliding, seeing others only through the distorting curvature of their own dividing walls, interacting with strangers only at their common surfaces, and generally minding their own business.

All of these children of the Father belong to the Son (John 17:10). So the good news of his Kingdom has to be bubble-crossing and bubble-bursting. Following the Son demands that we take on the discomforts of his apostleship, whether that means reading unfamiliar sources and taking them seriously, going on missions and cross-cultural, off-campus programs with eyes and ears as open as our mouths, living with roommates we didn’t choose, or just crossing the road to help strangers.

In Invitation to Theology, Michael Jinkins draws on Robert McAfee Brown’s Unexpected News: Reading the Bible with Third World Eyes to describe the “hermeneutical circle” of disorientation and reorientation that happens when we do that. Our action leads to a jarring experience. This shatters our old understandings and creates the need for new ones. We turn back to the Christian tradition and the Scriptures at their core with our new questions, and we receive new answers that direct us to new actions and set the stage for another turn of the circle.

These travels are a kind of pilgrimage to both our faith’s historical center and its eschatological frontier. They take us out to witness the Spirit’s work, change us, and bring us back to a home that is now inevitably different. In The Open Secret, Lesslie Newbigin describes the crises and new creations that come from and lead to cross-cultural contact as a three-way exchange between the acculturated missionary, the cultural mission field, and Scripture. All three are susceptible to being transformed in the course of their conversation as the Spirit guides the Son’s disciples into all the truth, showing the Church and ultimately the world that all that the Father has also belongs to the Son (John 16:12-15).

Heeding the call of God means going, beholding, and coming. This takes us around hermeneutical circles and punctures our social bubbles. It disorients as it reorients. It converts both the traveler and the locals to bigger and better visions of God and God’s plans. I find a reassuring instance of conversion in the story of Jonah (see the table below)—not just because Jonah is converted along with the King of Ninevah but also because his tale shows that the process can work even when the traveler is not happy or even willing. In both life and college that’s heartening to know. The pilgrims who travel through my classes, family, jail services, and Scout troop have spanned the spectrum of enthusiasm for their journeys. Along with resistant Jonahs I have enigmatic Abrahams, shrewd Jacobs, fiery Moseses, cooperative Rahabs, insistent Ruths, hospitable Naomis, idolizing Jeroboams, weeping Jeremiahs, insecure Isaiahs, daring Nehemiahs, quiet Marys, dispirited sons of Zebedee, grateful Magdalens, hopeless Cleopases, suspicious Thomases, blinded Sauls, suffering Pauls, generous Lydias, mystical Johns, dazzled Corneliuses, and baffled Peters. Or, rather, we have each other. Best of all, we have the promise that the Spirit is already on the other side of the barriers we are afraid to cross, leading us into his future rather than simply pushing us out of our present.

Does my own story qualify as the Spirit taking what the Father has given the Son and declaring it to us? We’ll see. Might the same Spirit be speaking in the midst of your life’s crises too?