Home Podcast Travis Dickinson: How To Make Your Church Safe for Christians Who Doubt

Travis Dickinson: How To Make Your Church Safe for Christians Who Doubt

“I don’t want my kids to doubt their faith, but I kind of do. I kind of want them to go through those times where they’re struggling a little bit.”

“If a pastor were to really get intentional about this, it’s going to need to translate into ministry training for their parents.”

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“A big part of it is establishing the relationship with your kids, too. Again, earning the right to speak into their life.”

“A lot of what I’m talking about is asking those deep and difficult questions and really probing. And if we want to call that deconstruction, I’m not completely against that. The problem is that deconstruction is a negative concept. So it’s really incomplete in a way because nobody just deconstructs. They always then construct something in place of whatever they’ve sort of taken apart and thrown away.”

“Deconstruction is fine for what it is, but don’t stay there. We need to now focus on, what do we construct in place of whatever it is we’ve changed—if we’ve changed at all.”

“I make a big point in the book to say that having faith and having some doubts is completely fine. It’s completely consistent.”

“That’s often where we’re at, is that we come to Christ, we’ve got lots of questions. We’ve got lots of areas in which we need to sort of work it out still. But we can be on board while we’re sort of still working it out.”

“When we have doubts, it sort of assumes that we still believe. Because you wouldn’t be doubting, you would just be in a place of unbelief.” 

“I think that we do a real disservice to our kids and our people—talking to the pastors now in our churches—when we act like we’ve got it all figured out, when we act like we have 100% certainty about every matter of Christian doctrine and faith and practice.”

“What I say is that we need to aim at, not certainty, but confidence because confidence can tolerate some questions.”

“If you’re somebody with doubts and questions…then it’s probably because you’re more honest and courageous in a way than others because you’re willing to sort of look those problems in the face.”