by Steve Dukes

Created on: June 02, 2008

Stepping out on Faith

Stepping out on faith is one of the most abused statements in American rhetoric. It's been abused by the seemingly religious as well as the cynical. The abuse comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of what this statement really means. This statement does not mean that you are supposed to forgo your mortgage payment because your pastor is asking for more tithe money. This is not stepping out on faith. Its an ill-conceived notion. Stepping out on faith is not jumping off a building or a mountaintop thinking that someone or an army of Angels is going to catch you before you hit rock-bottom. For the religions folk that know about Jesus' conversation with Satan, I suggest you take another look at that dialog in the bible.

So What is Stepping Out on Faith?

On further examination, images of someone stepping out onto a plank fill my mind. Also I can imagine someone stepping away from the crowd, stepping away from the flock of sheep. Right here is an apparent contradiction with church dogma, specifically Christian dogma. In Christianity you'll hear the people incessantly being compared to sheep. You'll also hear analogies of the shepherd looking for his lost sheep. It becomes crystal clear that this so called shepherd will not rest until all of his sheep are accounted for. Here is the contradiction. On one hand, religion (not just Christianity) seems to champion those that step out on faith, but at the same time believers are encouraged to stay with the flock. These two philosophies are mutually exclusive.

Necessary Tangent

You can not step out on faith and stay with the flock. Stepping out on faith is an individual's mission while staying with the flock, herd, gander, pride, pack (or whatever other metaphor you may want to use) is a community policy. Some may try to argue that stepping out on faith is indeed compatible with religion. The fallacy that lies here is that stepping out on faith is radical thinking. This type of thinking will break a church because too many of the members will start going on their own unique journeys into the wilderness. They will realize that they do not need a building to find God. Church membership will drop. By the way, Radical really means root. That's all it means. But when you look in a dictionary you'll find definitions derived from the word's connotation, which I assert are not definitions, but are connotations. Publishers of dictionaries are bound to include these connotations as definitions because of how the

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