Can I go to church if I’m not sure about God is a question people ask quietly, and the answer is yes.
The fear underneath it is usually about being found out. That somebody will ask something direct. That a moment will arrive in the service where everyone else means it and you do not, and the gap will show.
It will not show. That is a thin reassurance though, so try a better one. Not being sure about God is an ordinary position to hold inside a church, rather than a temporary problem you are expected to fix in order to keep attending.
And the question itself is usually less general than it sounds.
Can I Go to Church If I’m Not Sure About God? It Helps to Ask Which God
Some people genuinely are uncertain at the broad philosophical level, and that is a serious position rather than a stage. But for a great many others the uncertainty is far less abstract than it sounds. There is a specific portrait in mind, and the portrait is doing most of the work.
If the God you are unsure about is the one who monitored your thoughts, required constant apology, kept a running total, and made love conditional on getting the answers right, then uncertainty is a reasonable response to that description. It is also worth knowing that Christian understandings of God differ from each other substantially, and have for a very long time. The description you were handed was one account among several, presented to you as the only one.
Many people receive a picture of God in childhood and are never handed a revision. The picture stays roughly the size it was while everything else about their thinking grows up. Eventually the early version becomes impossible to hold, and it can feel like losing God rather than outgrowing one sketch of God, because the difference between those two was never explained.
So when you ask can I go to church if I’m not sure about God, the more useful question underneath it is which description you are actually evaluating, and whether anybody has offered you a different one lately.
Faking It Is Not the Entry Fee
The practical version of can I go to church if I’m not sure about God is whether you will be required to say things you do not mean. Nothing in worship here is arranged to require that.
Sing or do not sing. Say the prayer or let it go past you. Sit through the parts that do not land and stay for the parts that do, which for a good many people turn out to be the music and the silence rather than the theology.
Honest participation looks different from one person to the next, and it is not tracked.
What matters is that sounding more certain than you are is not part of the arrangement. A church that needs everyone in the building to be sure has to keep producing certainty, and that tends to cost something. One of the more common ways it gets paid for is that certain subjects quietly become unmentionable, which is worth watching for rather than assuming.
A Church Can Be a Place to Wonder
Underneath can I go to church if I’m not sure about God there is usually an assumption about what a church is for. Church has been marketed as the place where the questions are already answered. It works considerably better as a place where a group of people keep asking them out loud, together, over a long stretch of time.
That is a different proposition and it asks less of you. Arriving with conclusions is not a requirement for taking part in an inquiry.
In practice this means the things that hold people are frequently not doctrinal at all. It is the meal. The singing. The work the congregation does in the neighborhood. The fact that somebody notices when you have not been there. All of that is available to a person who is not sure about God, and none of it is a consolation prize handed out while you work on the real thing.
It also explains why the question can I go to church if I’m not sure about God has a plain answer. The parts of church life that actually require settled belief are a smaller share of it than the public image of church tends to suggest.
In my experience, participation often comes first and whatever else comes later, or does not come at all. Both of those happen, and the second is not treated as a failed case.
Love Does Not Wait for Certainty
Love Above All is the entire answer to this question, and it is not a soft one.
If a community’s love shows up only after you have settled the God question, then the love is a reward for reaching a conclusion, and the conclusion is what is actually being valued. Most people can feel that arrangement from inside it, even when they could not describe it. It is also unstable for the people it currently favors, because a conclusion can always be revised, and everyone senses what that would cost.
Nothing here is set up so that people are loved more once they have figured God out.
You do not have to be sure about God to be held by a community trying to practice love.
So bring the actual answer. If the actual answer is I do not know, bring that. If it is I do not think so, bring that. If it is I want this to be true and cannot get there from where I am standing, bring that, and know that it is among the things people describe to me most often.
And if you remain unsure permanently, or arrive somewhere else altogether, that is a real destination rather than a failed attempt at the correct one. This is not a process with a required ending.
The next post is for people who left evangelicalism and discovered that a great deal of it came along.
About Pastor Brad Jagger
Pastor Brad Jagger is Senior Pastor of Windermere Union Church (UCC) in Windermere, Florida, a community committed to Love Above All. He writes about faith, doubt, deconstruction, belonging, and what Christianity can become when love matters more than certainty.
If you are looking for a church where questions are welcome, people are affirmed, and you do not have to pretend to have everything figured out, learn more at windermereunion.org.
Pastor Brad Jagger | Windermere Union Church | Love Above All