I recently watched two of my kids graduate from an eleven-week confirmation class at church. I'm not going to lie; I was an extremely proud Dad. During those three months, a group of ten middle school children learned about what it means to be a Methodist and how to find God in this crazy, modern world. When it was finally time to be presented with a certificate, the pastor said something interesting. He reminded the kids that going through confirmation class doesn't mean that you have now "graduated from church", and that it's okay to wander away and stop attending services. I took a moment to let this sink in, and I think he was right. In fact, I think it means the opposite. Once confirmed, it signals that you now have a grasp on the fundamentals of religion such that you can begin to understand what it means to follow God. It conveys a beginning, not an end.
The pastor's warning needed to be said, because culturally speaking, many people consider graduation or commencement to mean that it's now okay to move on to the next thing. Never looking back to the old, but only focusing on the future. Sometimes this is good advice, but I believe we forget that we can often do both of these things at the same time. We can move toward the future, and we can also remember and cherish where we have already been. We must continue to attend church and grow in our faith walk. God has a funny way of combining our future with our achievements in ways that aren't always immediately evident. I have this funny feeling that whenever He gives us a promotion, something more is also expected of us. The degree or certificate is never the final step.
Faith itself never "ends" ... there is no graduation from loving and pursuing God and His church. If we look at Hebrews 10:23 for a moment, it says, "Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful." We must hold fast to the gift of faith we have received from God the Father, and we dare not doubt that this same God is faithful enough to see us through whatever comes next. What He passes on to us through the Spirit doesn't need to fade away over time. We don't graduate from church and then disappear into the culture, as some are in the habit of doing.
Erwin McManus is the pastor of Mosaic Church in Los Angeles, CA. It's a megachurch with thousands of parishioners who show up every Sunday to hear what God is saying. McManus is fond of saying, "We cannot serve God in neutral." He equates our faith walk with the transmission shifter in a car. We have several gears to choose from: park, drive, neutral, etc. McManus is simply saying that if we want to follow the living God, we have to put the car into drive. There is no sense hanging out in neutral, and just kind of limping along wherever the road happens to take you. We must be more determined than that; we must take the gear out of park and hit the gas. It's hard to follow something when we are standing still.
Matthew 17:20-21 is a familiar verse from the New Testament. It says, "He [Jesus] replied, 'Because you have so little faith. Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain move from here to there, and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.'" Faith does something, it acts upon the external world. It can move mountains, as long as we make the decision to take our car out of neutral.
Staying in neutral is easy. It allows us to kind of limp along on our faith journey, maybe attending church services only on occasion, or when something difficult happens in our lives. Neutral allows us to exist seamlessly with our surrounding culture, such that people from the outside looking in may in fact find no discernible attribute linking us to the Christian faith whatsoever. God calls us to much more than this.
I have practiced martial arts for close to thirty-five years. I was a student for a long time, and the last ten years or so I have been a teacher. It is always a joy to pass along what I have learned to my students. It helps ensure a new generation of followers who recognize the beauty and discipline of the art. But I have also noticed something else that comes along with it. A good many people set their sights on the black belt as an end goal. This in and of itself is perfectly normal, and at some point it comes time to take the big test. After the belt is awarded, the temptation exists to quit training and move on to the next thing. "I have graduated from the martial arts," they might think, "and now I can stop." When this happens, all those years of learning and practice will eventually ebb away. It is sometimes tragic to witness.
Consider instead, what happens when a student decides to stay on after their "graduation" and help teach and give back to their class. They are, in effect, putting the car into drive and embracing the next part of their walk. Putting all of those principles they learned over the years into action, while continuing to learn and improve themselves. I suspect it's the same way regarding faith. We learn for a while, we graduate, and then we can give back. The faith walk never really ends - it only changes and matures.
So, what is our lesson from all of this? I believe we must strive to continue our walk with God over the course of our entire life. We need to keep the fire stoked, so to speak. Look at the apostles in the book of Acts, for example. After Jesus ascended into Heaven, they went out into the world and affected real change. Peter didn't dare keep the car in neutral; neither should we. Whatever you learn from God go pay it forward, and most likely God will do the same for you.
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