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Mike Yaconelli is owner and co-founder of Youth Specialties, former editor of the religious humor magazine The Door, and the author several books, including Messy Spirituality: God's Annoying Love for Imperfect People (Zondervan, 2002).

You start the book by saying that after 45 years of following Jesus, your life is a mess.

The subtitle of the book was going to be "Christianity for the rest of us." And the reason I put that there is because I was so tired of hearing religious speakers tell me how perfect they were. After hearing a sermon or reading a book or going to some religious meeting, I felt worse than when I got there because they had it all together. They had it all figured out. You know what? I'm almost 60. I've had five children. And let me tell you, I don't have life figured out yet.

What was your early life in faith like?

My folks were converted when I was 11 years old. [They] had this incredible conversion and just turned around. And I did then, too. I can remember the night I became a Christian. And man, this weight came off of me and all that kind of stuff. What I didn't realize was, that was just the beginning—of a huge journey.

What happened when I went to church was they edited out all the stuff in the Bible so that when I heard the story of Noah I was always just thrilled to hear about this man who believed in God—the only guy who believed in God. They didn't mention that when he got off the boat he got drunk and got naked. They never told that. Thank God they didn't put that on a flannelgraph, but I'm here to tell you that I never heard that story.

So the theology that you were raised in was not messy. It was the idea that now you've met Jesus, things are going to be straight.

They're going to be great, you're going to get fixed, you're going to be perfect.

What was the point at which you realized that this was not going to work for Mike Yaconelli?

Well, the beginnings of it happened when my daughter got cancer. She was 18 months old. And at that point, I had all these Christian people who were wonderful people come to me and tell me why God was doing it and that even if she died she'd be with God and "isn't that better?" And I'm thinking, no, not really.

That was the beginning of the sort of crack in my faith where I realized there's more to God than just fixing people.

Now here you are at this ripe old age telling us that there is a messy spirituality for the rest of us.

What that means is that it's incomplete. You and I are incomplete. I'm unfinished. I'm unfixed. And the reality is that's where God meets me is in the mess of my life, in the unfixedness, in the brokenness. I thought he did the opposite, he got rid of all that stuff. But if you read the Bible, if you look at it at all, constantly he was showing up in people's lives at the worst possible time of their life. That's where he kind of broke through, where he connected to people, where they learned so much about it, where they met him, where they understood what he was talking about.

Sometimes I think that the church is in the business of editing all of the mistakes and the flaws and the messiness out of our life.

Pretending is the grease of non-relationships. Pretending is how you and I get through the day without ever having to know each other. When I walk in the room, you say to me, "How are you?" Well, you don't want to know. And, frankly, I don't want to tell you. So I just say "fine," and you go "fine." And off we go.

The church ought to be the one place where I'm so anxious to get there because I can stop the pretending. When you ask, "Mike, how are you?" I don't go "Praise the Lord," I say, "I'm in bad shape." And you go, "Okay, great. Tell me about it."

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August (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46