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By the time I had retired from thirty years of ministry I had come to not believe any longer in many of the teachings that formed the foundation of the Christianity I had received. For instance, I did not believe that Jesus gives us life after death and I the teaching that Christ died for our sins no longer made any sense to me. As a youth recently said about belief in God, "If he &ldots;sends people to hell, and crucifies his kid, &ldots;then count me out.1."
So, worshipping within the Church community was quite often a problem for me. I just could not sing verses of some of the hymns. O Come, O Come Emmanuel, the first hymn in the United Church of Canada's newest hymn book, is wonderful in tune, and creative in text, but to me it portrayed what I no longer believed; Christ who, ransoms us and who gives us "victory o'er the grave."
Biblical sermons also became a problem when the preacher quoted Jesus as saying this or teaching that. In my mind and heart I doubted the text of the Gospels when they told us of Jesus. Behind that doubt was a question for which I did not have a satisfactory answer. The question was: Who were the authors of the New Testament? Who developed the interpretations of Christ's life and death, which became doctrines and truths for the church? I could not believe that Peter and the other 10 "Apostles" worked it out, so they had a full-blown new theology rooted in the Psalms and prophets and by the morning of Pentecost.
Rethinking the Cross: Reflections for Lent, First Church United, Port Credit Ontario, Canada. United Church Publishing house, 2003.