Saturday, May 9, 1998

Minister helps people fashion their own theologies

By Christine Wicker / The Dallas Morning News

DUNCAN, Okla. -- "If you died tonight, would you go to hell?"

Ten-year-old Ray Dykes put that question to boys at church camp. Forty-five years later, he still feels guilty about it.

That's one piece of why he is standing before 40 people on a Friday night telling them that they can -- and must -- create their own theology. What Dykes the man has to say is directly opposite what Dykes the boy believed.

"I'll tell you all about my faith," he says now. "But you can't have it. It's mine. You have to find you own."

His gospel challenges just about everything these Duncan, Okla., Presbyterians believe. The Rev. Dykes' preaching is heavy on questions, light on doctrine and a bulldozer aimed at religious ideas revered by generations.

Once the pastor at one of Oklahoma City's biggest Presbyterian churches, Dykes is now "a personal pastor" who ministers to his flock of "heathens, pagans and ungodly golfers" one by one. This workshop is part of his plan to help people inside and outside the church build a theology they really believe in.

"Your theology has to be built of bricks," he tells the group. "You need clay and you need straw to build a brick. The clay is your own experience. And the straw is other people's ideas. When a piece of straw that fits your clay comes drifting by, you reach out and grab it. Let the rest just float by."

Dykes started this novel ministry because one day about six years ago he realized that while his preaching and teaching had taught the members of his church plenty about what he believed, it hadn't helped them know what they believed.

"I want to help people build a faith that is so important to them that they would die for it," he says. "Your faith ought to be built into the fabric of your life."

His intention, he says, is to finish the Reformation.

"The first part of the Reformation was that the clergy gave the laity license to read the Bible for themselves. Part two of the Reformation was the license to pray for oneself, but the license to build your own theology was never given to the people. If people want to know what they believe, they still have to go to a priest," he says, using "priest" to mean any ordained Christian minister.

He says his goal is to help people knock down the walls between what they are supposed to believe and what they actually believe. Some ministers fear the idea of giving people choices about what they are allowed to believe, he says, but "people make these choices anyway, consciously or unconsciously."

"I call this bringing personal faith to conscious expression. Each of us has a theology that we walk around with each day, but it's unconscious. If I hooked myself to your belt for 48 hours, I could tellyou what your theology is."

The first exercises in his workbook center on defining God. He suggests that one's experiences of God might come from other people, nature, fairy tales, from a moment with a pet, even in lovemaking. A lot of people hate God, he says, because they base their concept of God on people who abused them.

His own definition of God keeps changing. As a child, he believed in a white-bearded God of judgment. "I have fired God at least four times and hired a new one. The God I believed in when I was 6? I fired that sucker," he says.

Again and again he relates what he believes to the stories of his life. "I think belief is what you have experienced. I don't think you can believe what you haven't experienced," he says.

He talks about his own theology, not as a means of persuading people to follow him but as a way to show them how to move toward knowing what their own faith is made of, he says.

"I'm modeling what it's like to tell the truth about your own theology," he says.

One of his own most enduring images of God comes from a snowy evening when he was a boy who went sledding and didn't come home until after dark. His father, who always called him "Man," went to look for him.

Meanwhile, Ray came in through the back of the house, joining his mother and sister on the front porch. They could hear his father tromping through the snowy darkness calling, "Man, can you hear me? Man, are you hurt?"

From the porch, Ray called out in answer, "Daddy, I'm home."

As he saw his father returning, the boy ran to meet him. His father opened his arms and said, "Son, I'm so happy you're safe. I love you." The memory is still so strong that Dykes' throat tightens as he tells it.

Other moments in his workshop are less warm and more edgy. For starters, he redefines heresy.

"The No. 1 heresy in American Christianity today is that there is only one concept of the nature of God," he says. "The No. 2 heresy is that there is only one concept of the will of God."

His workshops pose questions that many Christians think of as sinful even to ask. He learned the danger of such asking long ago when his father was a Baptist preacher.

"We lived in Jefferson City, Tenn., when my daddy got up in the pulpit one Sunday to say that hell might not be a physical place," Dykes told the Duncan, Okla., group.

"On Monday morning he found out that hell was a physical place. It was Jefferson City, Tenn."

His father eventually left the Baptists to become Presbyterian. The son, who followed in his wake, now challenges more than hell.

He takes on common Christian verities about the nature of biblical truth. "Since 1966, I have been a professional student of the Bible. I love the Bible. ... Having said that, I want to tell you I do not worship the Bible. ... I know there are errors and contradictions in the Bible because I've found them and I can show them to you," he says.

He challenges accepted ideas about prayer, telling the group that much of what they take to be pious attitudes of godly prayer are merely customs handed down from earlier times.

"The God I love, worship and adore right now doesn't ask me to shut my eyes and bow my head, so I don't," he says.

Most of the prayer they hear in Christian churches is barking orders, he says. "God, do this. God, do that. They talk to God like he's their slave. Frankly, I think God's got much more important things to say to me than I have to say to him," he says.

More than 500 people have finished his workshops on building a personal theology, and not one has complained, he says. The reason is that he doesn't tell them what to believe; he merely tells them to be honest about what they do believe, he says.

You can disagree with what other "theological pilgrims" believe, but you can't say they're wrong, he contends. "When you do that, you're playing God."

Several times during the workshop, he calls on each person to comment on what he or she has learned. The participants are positive, although disturbed by what they've heard.

"I'd never thought about the concept that your ideas about God's will might change," says one woman.

"You liked that idea?" Dykes asks.

"Not particularly," she responds. "It just struck me."

"I thought I'd progressed in my concept of God until I had the right one. Now I wonder if there is a right one," says another woman.

"I bet you can ruffle some feathers," says a man.

"That's my job," says the preacher, who proceeds to redefine Christianity itself.

"Some people think the church roll is the Lamb's Book of Life," he says. "And it's not, ladies and gentlemen."

A Christian, he says, is a person who has experienced death and resurrection of Jesus Christ spiritually. Spiritual death, he says, is a despair and a grappling with mortality that comes in middle age, sometimes earlier. Sometimes that death never comes for those who die prematurely, he says.

Those people who never experience such a death never become "Christians," he says, but they are no less loved by God. "They are the innocents," he says.

Others experience the death but never the resurrection, he says. Those are the people he most wants to reach. "Nothing is worse to me than a person who is spiritually dead," he says. "That's the greatest tragedy of the human race."

So he pushes people to come alive. He pushes them to think about whether they really believe in Satan. He challenges Bible stories by retelling them in untraditional ways. He leads people to struggle with what they really think about evil by noting that most people think of evil as knowingly doing wrong and characterize Hitler as an example. But Hitler didn't think he was doing wrong; he thought he was doing a good thing -- purifying the race, says Dykes. So was he evil?

The idea upsets one woman's thinking quite a bit. "So because Hitler didn't know he couldn't create a pure race, he wasn't evil?" she asks incredulously.

He looks at her for a long moment saying nothing.

"I'm just asking," she says.

He spreads his arms, opens his eyes wide and replies with a simple sentence that could be used to sum up everything he has said that day.

"And I'm just letting you ask."

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FOR MORE INFORMATION:

For more information on the personal pastor program or "Bringing Personal Faith to Concious Expression" workshops, call 1-800-728-2844 or check the Web at www.personalpastor.org.

(c) 1998, The Dallas Morning News.

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