Cynical Christianity.

Last night, I went to Tehillah.

This is not exactly an odd event; I attend that service every Monday night. It's a Pentecostal youth service, with contemporary praise & worship music and inspirational talks. There's a post brewing about a couple of the more recent sermons.

Last night was a Starfield concert with a guest speaker. The speaker talked about faith and healing, and how you don't need much faith at all to see healing take place in your life.

And I sat in my seat (in the hall, because I was too internally disorganised and too overloaded sensation-wise to be in the sanctuary) and thought about how many people have had faith - tremendous faith - but have not experienced the kind of miraculous healing this man was talking about.

And I realised something:

I'm too cynical to be an evangelical.

That's why I can't call myself a post-evangelical.

Sure, I'm a bit more liberal than most people would expect, given my parentage and membership in a rather evangelical parish. Yes, I'm definitely postmodern in my approach to life. I'm also very traditional and rather conservative about a lot of things when it comes to my faith and the expression thereof. I'm not a feminist by any stretch of the imagination.

Now, don't get me wrong: I absolutely believe that God works in the world today, and I absolutely believe that he impacts people's lives for good. But if a tiny bit of faith were all it took to receive healing for our physical ailments, I wouldn't be dealing with a flareup of my tendonitis this week (something I've had prayer for many times in the past, with no results). People wouldn't die of cancer.

See, I don't believe that faith is this magic thing that makes God give us whatever we want. We can't just ask for stuff and if we believe enough we'll get it - it doesn't work that way.

I believe that we need to work for what we want. God gives us what we need, and when there is more that we want, we need to try for it and ask him to help us achieve it. If things don't work out just as we were hoping, that's not due to a lack of faith, and it's not an unanswered prayer. I don't pretend to know just what it is, I just know what it isn't.

Perhaps I'm too cynical to be an evangelical (or a post-evangelical), but I'm not too cynical to be a Christian.

After all, "cynic" is just another word for "realist".