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INTRO
Good morning. I watched the sunrise a little bit this morning and it was nice and the promise of a new day the sun will rise again. It’s nice, but it’s not a given. It’s never a given. It’s never a given that we’ll have another day.
And all that can make people freak out. And it can make you anxious and it can make you a miserable, cynical person. Which I definitely can be at times. I mean, I get it. I’m not for everybody. And trying to be for everybody is difficult. And it’s not what we’re supposed to do. We’re supposed to be who we are and constantly improving who we are.
But this isn’t a self-help podcast. This is a question podcast. We ask questions. And I’m working on a few really difficult questions right now and I’ll be announcing what I’m doing in a little bit. Not in this particular recording, but soon.
TWO WORDS
The two words that have been driving me this year, not just the month of January, which felt like a year. But, you know, for the past several months.
Healthy skepticism.
Healthy skepticism is warranted. It’s always been warranted. What we see throughout human history, if you’ve even, I’m not a historian, I don’t, I’ve never written a book on the history. I don’t think I have it in me. I like it, I like details, I like original documents, I like research, I like pursuing rabbit trails, it’s all good, it’s fun. It’s interesting, sometimes it’s heartbreaking and crushing and everything you thought you knew about something falls apart. But in that process, I have found it’s for my good that I don’t want to believe lives. I don’t want to believe some whitewashed version of history. I want to know what really happened and I want to understand from more than one side the winner writes history.
So I’ve always been a healthy skeptic and from a young age and I’ll tell you right now that’s what’s gotten me into a lot of trouble because skepticism of any kind puts a big target on your back because people don’t like it.
Two kinds of people don’t like skepticism
And there’s a couple of different kinds of people who don’t like it. Abusive People and Comfortable People.
Obviously, abusive people, people who abuse and want to get away with it, which is everybody. Those are the people that cannot have you poking around and cannot have you questioning anything that they do or say when they lie. You don’t know it’s a lie. It kind of sits funny with you and you’re just like, huh. And maybe you ask a couple questions and then get met with intimidation or just a heavy spin. The spin doctors, they just know how to talk themselves out of anything.
I could be like that. I could and I have been in my life. I’ve been a liar. I’ve been someone who misrepresented the truth and it almost wrecked me. I did some really awful things in my life. and it’s led me to really dark places thankfully God has saved me and he’s used people to do it throughout my life it’s a whole other story.
But being a healthy skeptic means I’m gonna take what you said at face value until I can’t. Because at some point, there are people who say things and it just keeps kind of getting under skin, right? You think well that doesn’t add up or it’s not what you said last time or, you know, I heard someone else say XYZ and you’re saying ABC and I am trying to put that together. I’m trying to get from A to Z in a logical, rational manner, and that means asking some more questions of some more people.
Maybe you see things a certain way, and other people see it a different way, and everybody has their opinion and their own interpretation.
Everyone’s coming with their own degree of skepticism. Everybody’s coming with a need for -not everybody, but a lot of people- wanting things to be easy and comfortable and will do a lot to just ignore things that look problematic or look like conflict.
I’ve talked about that many many times that conflict is not easy, and if you want to do it well and you want to actually bring about peace and not some false performative peace, it’s hard work. It is. It just is. The human experience is filled with hard work… unless you’re abusive.
The other kinds of people that come at you when you’re a healthy skeptic are people who are comfortable. They’re not necessarily outright abusive towards you or anyone else, but they’re comfortable and you’re disrupting their comfort. You’re rocking the boat. You’re putting a, you know, what’s that expression? I’m so bad with expressions. You can ask my husband, you know, putting a spoke in the wheel? Is that right? Anyway, you know, a monkey wrench where you’re just, you’re jamming up their spot or whatever. You’re making trouble and you’re causing them to be discomforted, making them feel like they just can’t put their heads in the sand anymore.
Wow, there’s so many metaphors in there.
Anyway, I do think that we’re at a time now where there’s a lot of reward in being disconnected, you know, a lot of my former denomination dudes will say, you know, stay above the fray, stay out of the fray, just, you know, fly under the radar. And to stay out of it, why can’t you just, you know, look the other way, like we do?
Or You know, these same guys get to be in the fray, but I don’t. “Robin Wootton doesn’t get to voice her concerns.” I don’t. I don’t have any platform, you know, I don’t have. I mean that’s why I started this podcast with another pastor’s wife friend and the two of us asked, where do we go?
Where do we go?
Some of us can’t have these conversations anywhere. We get shot down.
So when you’re a healthy skeptic, you don’t go all over the place and spreading gossip and slander.
Sidenote: Let’s remember that gossip and slander are two different things. Slander has to be a lie and you know it and you start spreading things that are not true -that you know are not true- in order to “win.”
But healthy skeptics don’t do those things. They they don’t run around from house to house spreading lies or misrepresenting the facts or disparaging people’s character. They ask questions and they find safe places to do that. And they gather research. They get evidence and evidence, remember, includes personal testimony.
So when you’re talking to someone and they tell you a story, and they don’t know what you know, they say things that don’t match up with what you previously knew. Your healthy skepticism kicks in and you say “you know I heard or so-and-so told me” -if you have permission to share it- “someone told me blah blah blah and you’re saying this and they don’t those two things don’t go together. So can you walk me through what you what you think about that?”
And then the response you get is gonna tell you everything the way that they respond, the way that they take facts and skew them, or try to interpret them a certain way. And when you push a little and you ask more questions, they get defensive. They get irritable. And sometimes they just outright say “How dare you question me?”
Right? I mean they just say that to your face. I mean I’ve had multiple people just go that route like “who are you?” It’s so discouraging when it’s Christians. It’s so discouraging when it’s Christian leaders, who, you know, ministry leaders who have been doing ministry for a long time. A long, long time, some of them. And it just makes a healthy skeptic wonder, have they always been like this? Is this how they got to where they are? Because I’ll tell you right now: the abusive person and the comfortable person make a really solid team.
The abusive person and the comfortable person make a really solid team.
– Robin Jester Wootton, on healthy skepticism
They will absolutely run the show. And they’ll cause an awful lot of pain and discomfort along the way. Nobody talks to those people. We don’t even know who they are because most people who become uncomfortable and skeptical walk away. Why would you put up with that? You just walk away.
And for, you know, I don’t have exact numbers. I’ll guess 9 out of 10 people in a church who are uncomfortable with the church are just going to go to another church. I mean, very few are going to stick it out. But I mean, and we have seen that every survey that’s come out, even 10 years ago, my husband and I read a book by a mainstream group -it was Lifeway- who came out with this study and it was like yeah people… just you know transfer growth in churches is out of control. Literally there’s no control over it because people just leave. And whether or not that church has membership vows, it’s like “well I am reneging on my vows and I’m gonna go somewhere else now.”
Sometimes that’s absolutely okay. It’s case by case, right. I’m not gonna make some blanket statement that all the time it’s bad for you to leave a church. Absolutely not! There’s no way I could make that statement! If you know my story, you would have some healthy skepticism about me saying that
At the same time for some of us who are not “just” congregants who go to a church -not to say that that’s lower than us because it’s not true- but some of us have worked for churches, been on staff, have represented our church in many ways in the community, and been pastors and elders and leaders of a church. And that’s different. It is different for us than from an average member of a church. And sometimes I think the difference comes out in the way we talk about our skepticism. Because it’s one thing when you are someone who comes to church every Sunday, but are not in leadership and don’t sit through the meetings and don’t have the conversations with the leaders of ministries and your elder board and whoever and then you think you know what’s going on, and you have a certain degree of healthy skepticism, which is, again, fully warranted.
But then there’s people like me and my husband who’ve been on the inside, and even, you know, my husband being more inside. And we know things, and we see things, and we read things, and we hear things, and they don’t add up. We just keep getting told certain messages from the GroupThink, like “this is what we’re doing and if you can’t get on board you need to get out.”
And we say “okay we don’t. We can’t. We can no longer align ourselves with this and we need to get out and we’re getting out,” that’s healthy.
But is healthy now when you do say “I can’t align with you anymore and I need to get out so I’m leaving but I also want to warn people. I also want to take people with me because they are unsafe, and if you are still in that system, you are unsafe if you are a healthy skeptic.”
I just, I can’t say it any clearer than that, I mean I guess I could, but if you push back at all, you put yourself in a position where you’re gonna be scrutinized differently, you’re gonna be treated differently, you just are.
And we all know this. Anyone who’s been in a system like this knows when the canaries in the coal mines start dying that there’s a problem, and they have a choice. They have a choice to get out, or they have a choice to just take the risk. They have a choice to just, “oh well, you know I’m not like them, so I’m gonna do it better” or “I’m just gonna keep my head under the, you know, stick my head in the sand, and everything will be fine, it’ll all blow over” or “I’m too comfortable.”
People are just too comfortable, and they’re not gonna stand up for you. They are just not.
And the healthy skepticism part of me no longer wants to wait and see if people are gonna stand up for me. I’m gonna move forward as if no one’s gonna stand up for me, because I’ve learned. I’ve learned over – I’m 51 now, I’ve learned over my whole life that whenever someone goes out on a limb, there are very, very few people that are going to have them, support them, make sure the limb doesn’t break, catch them if they fall, all the metaphors. There are very few people who will be there for you.
Now, I say that, and I think it’s changing. I think I do.
In my 50 years, I really feel like -and I don’t feel it – I’ve read it. I’ve looked at it. I’ve studied some of these surveys coming out, talked to people who research these things. The church world in America has shifted. And in my opinion, for the better, there are a lot of people that don’t think so, and there are a lot of people who are really worried because the church does not seem like, I mean, the American church across the board, Evangelical, Catholic, mainlines, they’re all facing this very strange time. People are just not going to church or, or transferring. And I don’t, you know, it’s interesting. It’s interesting. It’s going every which direction.
When someone pushes back on the system, there are more and more people willing to say, well, let’s look at that. I mean, maybe it’s the rise of healthy skepticism, right?
The Age of skepticism
We’ve seen people write things about being cynical. There’s a difference between being a cynical critic and actually pushing for truth. And in our efforts to understand the difference, people want to label, and talk about, you know, vague, broad brush, hyperbolic statements. Like people talking about deconstruction these days and what it is and what it’s not, like they get to define everything. It comes from all directions. And that’s kind of my skeptical mind.
That’s the beauty of it, that we either as a system decide who’s in, who’s out, or we let people choose for themselves. And there’s this constant tension between individualism and the collective, right?
But anyway, to wrap this up, I think we’re in the age of skepticism where people don’t trust institutions, they don’t trust leaders, they don’t trust each other and in my mind, that’s okay. It actually is. And there are a lot of people who hate that, because they’re either abusive or comfortable.
And I need us all to consider that, when it comes to pushing back, saying “being skeptical is part of following Christ.” It is.
Because Jesus himself came to this earth and walked this earth as a human being – fully God, fully man, a mystery that we’ll never fully explain- and he pushed back, pushed back on some pretty powerful people, pretty powerful people! And he definitely knew.
Now the difference between Jesus and me, obviously, obviously, was, is, he’s God. So he knew their hearts; he knew their souls, and he knew their end, like where they’re going to end up.
And so the difference is you can’t label him as a skeptic per se because he knew. I don’t know. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I don’t know. I can’t read other people’s souls. I don’t know what they’re really trying to do. I can watch and observe and listen and I could try to understand, but I’m not going to know. And there’s definitely been times I’ve overstepped and I’ve assigned motives to people, but what I’ve also learned to do is to ask questions. You know, ask it as a question. Here’s what I think you’re doing. Is it what you’re doing? Is it your heart that A, B, C, X, Y, Z, like, is this what you’re really thinking? ‘Cause I feel like that’s important.
And people don’t like that either.
The same people, the comfortable people who don’t want to be pressed and don’t want you to press on their friends. And the abusive people who don’t want you to press on them, push their buttons, they don’t want it. They just want us to accept what they do. “We’re always right. We’re always doing our best. Give us the benefit of the doubt.” All those things come out. Trust the process.
Who’s in charge of the process again? And who’s enacting the process?
It’s not me.
So yeah, Healthy Skepticism is my mantra, I guess. It’s not a mantra. I don’t repeat it to myself. I believe that this is the time for healthy skepticism. And… I admire the people who can be in the systems and can can enact that role of healthy pushback and saying yeah we need to talk about this because it’s not adding up and we can’t look away.
In this day and age we cannot look away.
Please don’t look away.
That’s my four word mantra.
Thank you.
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Asking For Me 
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