I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it really means to be a Christian, and about the challenges of being or calling oneself a Christian in American society. As a missionary kid in Liberia, I had friends from many different nations, cultures, and faiths, and was faced early with the fact that many good, devout people believed very differently than I did. The sincerity and devotion of my Muslim, Buddhist, and Jain friends challenged me. They held tight to the doctrines they were taught from infancy, lived out their faith in the ways prescribed by their sacred books and cultures.

I couldn’t help but wonder, was I any different? I had been born to Christian parents in the backwoods of Wisconsin, and I believed in Jesus with all my heart. But if I had been born in Taiwan, like my friend Yu-San, would I be a Buddhist? If I had been born in the Cameroon, like my friend Mohammed, would I be a Muslim?

The answer made me uncomfortable. I figured that if I was going to ask Yu-San or Mohammed to reconsider their beliefs, to be willing to chuck everything they had been taught by the people they loved the most out the window, I had better be willing to do the same. To ask questions. To regard my culture with a critical eye. To be willing to temper my “worldview” with as much logical and emotional distance as I could muster.

That was a very good thing, a refining and refocusing of my faith. And honestly, I think this is an are where “third culture kids,” children who are raised in a culture that is not their own, have an advantage. They are the perpetual outsiders, savvy anthropologists who don’t fit into their home or host cultures (whichever is which). Everyone sees the world through their own pair of glasses, the lenses focused by education, experience, and cultural expectations–it’s just that third culture kids tend to have several pairs lying around, and find it easier to change them at will.

Anyhow. Fast forward twenty years, to a sleepy little county in Northern Wisconsin. Churches abound, their libraries stocked with books on developing a “Christian worldview” (invariably written by evangelical Protestant males of European descent). Christian novels, Christian newspapers, Christian music, Christian tee-shirts, Christian dietary supplements (?!) are everywhere. Politicians on both sides of the aisle season their speeches with oblique allusions to their Christian faith, in the hopes that if they can just brush the hem of Jesus’ garment, some of his glory will rub off on their agendas. And while not everyone in Douglas County, Wisconsin would claim to be a Christian, there are precious few of them who would claim to be anything else, a Muslim, or a Hindu, or a Buddhist.

My question is, how is it possible to be a Christian in a place like this? How is it possible to tell the difference between your faith and your culture when they are, for all intensive purposes, one and the same? I’m overstating the point, obviously, but our preconceptions of what it means to be a Christian are HUGE. Do we assume Christians talk a certain way? Vote a certain way? Dress a certain way? Drink (or not drink!) a certain way? If we’re honest, most of us would question the salvation of a man seen swigging alcohol at a party with prostitutes. Good thing Jesus didn’t need to be saved.

If we strip away the preconceptions, take off our glasses and try our hardest to step outside our carefully crafted worldview, what are we left with? Is it enough? Is your faith built on the shifting sand of cultural Christianity, on what you’ve heard at church, from loved ones, on Christian media or from the latest Beth Moore Bible study? If those same sources told you something different, would you believe differently?

Or is your faith built on something that doesn’t change, on the salvation of God through the person of Jesus, as revealed through scripture?

It’s not an easy question to answer, and it can be hard to see Jesus through the religion that sprung up around him. I struggle with this constantly–I even struggle to remember to struggle, to keep searching for more and more of God instead of settling into the warm, familiar comfort of American “churchianity.” But I am afraid that the American church has been lulled to sleep by a false sense of security, that instead of running the race with perseverance, we’re playing the hare and hunkering down for a theological snooze, certain of our innate superiority and inevitable victory.

I guess what I’m really asking is have we put our faith in Jesus, or have we put our faith in Christianity? And which would we choose if (and when) the two are at odds?

If you’re not sure you can tell the difference between the two, a good place to start would be by reading the Gospels–Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John–in long, uninterrupted hunks, so you can get a sense of the big picture unfolding in each book, instead of little snatches of verses read out of order and out of context. Study Jesus–viewing the church through the lens of the Gospels, instead of vice-versa, can be very enlightening. I’m going to be kicking off my 2010 Bible reading with another pass through the Gospels, to refresh my focus on the person of Jesus. It’s just so, so easy to lose sight of him…

Jenny Rae Armstrong is a freelance writer and musician. She and her husband Aaron own DeepWater Music (www.deepwatermusic.net) and live in Northern Wisconsin with their four little boys. This post originally appeared at her blog jennyraearmstrong.blogspot.com.

By Jenny Rae Armstrong

It’s been a rough year up in my neck of the woods. Our church lost two babies to SIDS and two young mothers to cancer, a statistic that would be less shocking in a larger community, but slices right through the heart of a tiny town like ours. My family lost a grandfather to kidney failure and an uncle to bladder cancer. The Wall Street debacle flushed what was left of a local economy that had been in the toilet since shipping dried up in the late fifties, devastating the homes, bank accounts, and job security of those of us clinging like barnacles to the shallow, rocky soil our stoic Scandinavian ancestors dug their plows into. And that’s all on top of the ongoing, everyday problems of living in a broken world. I spent most of last night lying awake, listening to my autistic son cry in his sleep, cleaning up the mess created by a GI system that just can’t absorb food properly. Somewhere between awake and asleep, set to the dissonant sound of my son’s distress, I remember thinking, “It’s not fair, God. It’s just not fair.”

It’s true. It’s not fair. Yet in some ways it is fair, brutally fair. God causes the sun to shine and the rain to fall on the righteous and the wicked (and heaven knows we’re all more than a little bit of both!), and didn’t shrink back from experiencing all the joy and pain of being human when he came to earth in the person of Jesus, a baby born into poverty and oppression, into the hopeless mess of humankind.

Why does a loving God allow bad things to happen? Why do we even ask? We have bought into the myth that we are entitled to an easy life, that it’s God’s job to smooth our paths and make them straight, to protect us from the fall-out of simply being human. Life wasn’t so great for Jesus, or his family, or his disciples, either. Why? Because God was mad at them? Because God didn’t care? Because they didn’t have enough faith? Because God blinked, and something slipped by him? No. Life was hard for them because in the words of the bumper sticker, shit happens, and sometimes it happens to us. No one is immune.

The Western world is addicted to comfort. We cruise down the path of least resistance in our climate-controlled SUVs, singing along to our favorite Christian radio stations, but what happens when we hit a bump in the road and get a flat, when we start leaking oil and burn up our engine? Do we set the emergency brake, lock our doors, shake our fist-clamped cell phones at the sky and wait for God to show up with a tow truck? Or do we climb off our high-horse, join the ranks of suffering humanity, and start putting one foot in front of the other in the direction of home?

I babysat a lot as a teenager. When I was fifteen a family I sat for, the Muirs, decided to take in a foster baby who had been born without a brain. When Karen, the mother, told me what they were planning to do, I was angry. That baby was going to die, and everyone knew it. Why would they put themselves through the pain of becoming attached to a baby who was doomed from the get-go? Why would they put their children through that pain? “But Jenny,” Karen reasoned, “don’t you think he has a right to be loved, too?” I supposed I did, but not at the expense of people I loved. Not at the cost of causing them pain.

It was not until little Emory’s funeral, just over a year later, that I began to realize the impact his life had had. Not because of anything he had done-because really, there wasn’t much he could do, besides breathe, suckle, and mess his pants, and even those were iffy-but because of the way he had been loved. Because of the Christ-like way the Muirs embraced the blessing and suffering of this tiny bit of beautiful, broken humanity, claiming and redeeming it for a greater purpose, and received more in return than they could ever have imagined.

What did I learn from Emory and the Muirs? That pain is not something to be avoided. That suffering and blessing more often than not come wrapped in the same package. That sometimes, it’s enough to be loved by a heartbroken God who came to claim and redeem us for a greater purpose. Sometimes, it’s just enough.

It’s been a blessed year or so in our neck of the woods. May the love, peace, and joy of a God who knows what it is to suffer sustain us all through the next, and lead us safely home.

Jenny Rae Armstrong is a freelance writer and musician. She and her husband Aaron own DeepWater Music (www.deepwatermusic.net) and live in Northern Wisconsin with their four little boys. This post originally appeared at her blog jennyraearmstrong.blogspot.com.