Mid-Faith Crisis: Finding a Path . . .
Catherine McNiel and Jason Hague coauthored Mid-Faith Crisis: Finding a Path Through Doubt, Disillusionment, and Dead Ends (IVP), in 2025. Catherine serves as a hospital chaplain, author, editor, and speaker. While Jason Hague serves as associate pastor at Christ’s Center Church near Eugene, OR. First, the authors take note, a mid-faith crisis is a common tale. And when it occurs, we face two options. Leave the faith and be done with it all or take the honest path. Taking the honest path allows us to tell the truth yet search for faith. Most significantly, a healthy faith simply does not move upward in a straight line. Rather, faith consists of predictable stages that include disorientation and disintegration.
Consequently, through this process, we may find something so much stronger and lasting. A faith that makes peace with complexity and mystery. However, the authors caution, we can’t ignore doubt, hoping that it will just go away. Nor must we fear doubt. Instead, Catherine and Jason exhort, we need to find a way forward with doubt. Hence, to survive doubt’s onslaught, we must change our attitude toward it. Thus, faith holds us up and keeps us pointed forward as we walk through the wilderness. But, the authors underscore, no path named Certainty exists. So, we choose the path of faith — and somehow, it’s enough. Above all, don’t give the place that caused your mid-faith crisis the power to name your identity, speak for God, or define your faith.
Because God and His goodness have been running after you all this time. Presence builds the foundation of our relationship with God and forms the true essence of prayer. In turn that enables us to be formed such that the searing pain of the world carries us to the suffering Jesus. In addition, the biblical mothers and fathers of the faith show us how to lament, to catapult our fears, devastation, and blind rage back on the Almighty. Also, the language we use as the whip we sling at God, over time, becomes the rope attaching us to God. And we grow through the pursuit of wisdom and humility, learning to sit comfortably with mystery.
In conclusion, the authors advise, approach apparent contradictions with curiosity and humility. Not with pridefulness and fear. For the patient, accepting love of Jesus doesn’t require us to figure everything out. Nor is following God a one-way ticket to the mountaintop — and never has been. Above all, we need both jubilant and mournful moments to produce something of lasting depth or beauty. To be lifted up in our mid-faith crisis, we often must let go. So, we begin walking the well-worn paths of desolation and consolation with honesty and hope. Because our Good Shepherd sees faith on the other side of that dark valley — and knows how to lead us there.
The real promise of faith centers on goodness, taking up Jesus’ cross — not greatness. Finally, the authors encourage:
“Let’s keep walking together, friend. Even when our strength runs out, perhaps our hope will not. And surely, we will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.”