I Learned How to Perform Certainty

And I suspect I’m Not the Only One

As a pastor, I loved preaching. With a Bible in one hand and a pulpit in front of me, I could tell you what almost any verse meant.

I even knew what God thought.

Seminary training taught me to preach with conviction. Looking back, I can’t remember ever hearing a preacher begin a point with, “I think the Bible says…”

I once preached a sermon in which I became a cheap imitation of a high-dollar evangelist. I waved the Bible in the air. I strutted back and forth across the platform. I raised and lowered my voice at all the right moments.

I projected more certainty than I possessed.

After the sermon, a woman hurried up to me and gushed, “Oh, Pastor, I just loved your sermon.”

My chest swelled with unearned pride.

“What did I say that you liked?” I asked.

She stopped, thought, and smiled.

“I don’t know. I just liked how you said it.”

I had delivered certainty so convincingly that what I said hardly mattered.

Sometimes in the church world, certainty carries more authority than truth.

But preachers aren’t the only people who learn to perform certainty.

Maybe you learned to do it in Sunday school, where every question had an answer printed in the teacher’s book. Maybe you nodded during a sermon while doubts lurked inside you. Maybe you repeated what your church believed because everyone around you repeated it too.

Maybe you sang words you were no longer sure you believed because the person beside you was singing them with eyes closed and hands raised.

Or perhaps you stayed silent when a Bible study turned toward hell, sexuality, suffering, or unanswered prayer because you knew your questions would make others uncomfortable.

We learn early that certainty belongs. It makes you part of the in-crowd.

Doubt makes people nervous. It builds fences.

I’ll let you in on a little secret: I wasn’t always completely certain about what I preached.

I had doubts. I had questions. But if certainty and conviction were the marks of a good preacher, doubts and questions seemed like evidence of a bad one.

So I learned how to perform certainty while uncertainty lived inside me.

This wasn’t conscious dishonesty. I wasn’t trying to fool anyone. I was part of a religious institution in which certainty was one of the highest virtues. If I didn’t fully understand the denomination’s interpretation of a passage, that didn’t give me permission to question it publicly.

My job was to proclaim the approved interpretation with confidence.

Most people who perform certainty aren’t trying to deceive anyone either.

We do it because we want to belong. You can no longer sit at the cool table.

We don’t want friends or family to worry about our souls. We don’t want our pastor to see us as a problem. We may be afraid that one honest question will lead to another. We are afraid of where those questions will take us.

The familiar answers may no longer feel true, but they still feel safe. They feel like home.

I eventually discovered that questions were acceptable as long as they led back to the approved church answers. You could wander around inside the fence, provided you never climbed over it.

But when your questions began leading somewhere else, you were no longer considered curious.

You were considered dangerous.

Performed certainty has a cost. We learn to mistrust the quiet voice that says, “This doesn’t make sense,” “This doesn’t seem loving,” or simply, “I’m not sure.”

It can also change how we treat other people. When protecting an answer becomes more important than understanding someone’s life, we stop listening. And we do that even when the person standing in front of us has been wounded by what we believe.

I haven’t stopped believing. I still have convictions about the Bible, God, love, justice, and what gives life meaning.

But I hold those convictions differently now.

I’ve learned to say, “This is what I believe, but I could be wrong.”

Those words once sounded weak. Now they sound honest. They leave room for another person’s story, for new understanding, and perhaps even for the voice of God.

If I stood behind a pulpit today, I would still speak with conviction. But I hope I would no longer confuse the volume of my voice with the truth of my words.

I once believed certainty was evidence of faith.

Now I wonder whether faith begins when we become honest about what we do not know.

Maybe you have questions you’ve kept behind the fence because you’re afraid of where they might lead.

Let them breathe.

You don’t have to perform certainty to belong.

And you don’t have to silence your questions to be faithful.

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