"I don't want my faith to be reactionary."

"I just don't want my faith to be reactionary."

I sipped my coffee and nodded, mulling the word over in my mind. Reactionary. Reaction-ary.

Ben was one of the many people I met in the fellowship hall of my brother's Orthodox church one Sunday.
I was still processing the fullness of the liturgy itself, and though I busied myself with many conversations, I have no idea what else he, I, or anyone said that day.

But Ben's words - "I don't want my faith to be reactionary" - those quiet, unpretentious words seemed to stick with me and encapsulate so much that I hadn't yet been able to put into words. The words have hung with me to this day.

Looking at history, it seems a lot of the "new" within the church springs up as reactions to an off-base or dangerous idea. Growing up, half of the way I defined my version of Christianity was in terms of what I was not - I was not Catholic! I did not use icons. I did not pray to Mary. I did not believe in purgatory. Etc, etc.

I was so focused on the construct of "my Christianity" - the system which defined my faith, the diagram used to explain it - that any pursuit of real Christ-worship slipped away silently in the background.


But reacting to a wrong doesn't make a right. If you go wrong in math - if you make a mistake in the equation - you can't simply move forward from that point to get to the right answer. You've got to go back to the error, fix it, and then move forward.

In the discussion of church history, one might be able to reasonably argue that the early/Eastern church started out just fine - and then an "error" was introduced (arguably) by the Catholic church. Some attempted to correct the error by reforming the church. Reformation aimed to keep the truth and ditch the "extras."  In-so-doing, the reformers introduced a new idea into Christianity: the very idea of reform on the level of the common man. The idea that a person or a group of people have every right to break away from a larger church authority in order to pursue their version of "true faith" and "right belief."

And so began the domino-effect that's ensued for the past 300+ years - one reform leads to another, and another, and another - we experience an element of sickness in a church, and so we break off and start a new church trying to "fix" what we have experienced...trying to get back to the "real faith."

Reactionary. Yep.