Humble Faith: Holding Truth, Questions, and Trust Together | The Branch

"You can choose humility or you can be humbled by life itself and the things that you go through." - Pastor Matthew Johnson

Pastor Chris Reed opens this episode of The Branch Podcast by asking a simple question: if you could go back and tell your younger self something, what would you say? The answers from Pastor Matthew Johnson and Pastor Anthony Lombardi are honest and unhurried. Pastor Matthew Johnson reflects on how much he stressed over things that turned out not to matter, how much of his identity was tied up in things that eventually faded. Pastor Anthony Lombardi talks about the transitions of life and how no one really prepares you for the way relationships shift and seasons change. His counselor once told him that almost every relationship in his life had a countdown clock on it. That landed hard.

What starts as a lighthearted question opens into something deeper. Life has a way of not meeting our expectations. That gap between what we thought things would be and what they actually are does not just affect our relationships or our careers. For many people, it affects their faith.

As The Tree Church moves through its Reconstruct series, this episode zooms in on a dynamic that Pastor Matthew Johnson says is at the center of why so many people find themselves questioning their faith. Disillusionment. The feeling that something promised was not delivered. The question of who failed. God? The church? A parent? A pastor?

Pastor Anthony Lombardi notes that people often start with themselves and try to work their way back to God rather than starting with God and working toward themselves. That posture, he says, reflects a deeply human tendency to set our own understanding as the standard and then measure everything else against it. Including God.

Pastor Matthew Johnson is direct about this. He says one of the major problems with modern deconstruction is arrogance. Not the kind that is easy to spot, but the kind that is baked into a consumer culture that has trained people to see themselves as the center of the universe. When that orientation gets applied to God, the expectation becomes that God has to make sense on our terms. And when he does not, the conclusion too often is that something is wrong with him.

Pastor Matthew Johnson wants to handle this carefully. He is not interested in shaming people who have questions. He says the church has done enough of that. But he also wants to be honest: if we are talking about a being who created everything, who has a level of wisdom and a plan that we cannot fully fathom, then the starting point has to be humility. Not a humility that stops asking questions, but one that acknowledges we are not God.

Pastor Anthony Lombardi builds on this with a thought that is both simple and clarifying. You do not have to fully understand something for it to be true. He points to the gap between what a young child can understand and what a parent knows, and then asks how much wider that gap must be between God and us. That reality alone, he says, should bring us to a place where we can say, "I might not fully understand this, but that does not mean it is not true."

Pastor Chris Reed adds another layer. He reflects on how science was built to answer how questions and faith was built to answer why questions. The problem is not that people are asking why. The problem is that they are directing that question to the wrong thing. Reason and observation, however useful, are not equipped to carry the weight of the questions that matter most.

One of the clearest and most repeated points in this conversation is that trust in God is built through relationship, not through accumulating enough information to finally feel settled. Pastor Matthew Johnson uses a straightforward example. He has been friends with Pastor Anthony Lombardi and Pastor Chris Reed for years. If one of them does not text him back, he is not devastated. He assumes they are with their kids or missed the notification. There is enough relational history that the mystery does not become a threat.

That is what he is pointing to when it comes to God. The lowest thought of God, scripture says, is higher than the highest thought of man. Given that, the path to peace is not more information. It is a relationship deep enough to carry trust when things do not make sense. Pastor Matthew Johnson puts it plainly: connect to God, and through that, you will gain understanding, not the other way around.

He points to Paul's thorn in the flesh as the clearest example. Paul begged God to remove it. God said no. The reason was relational and purposeful. God told Paul that if he removed it, Paul would grow arrogant in ways that could cost him everything. Paul's response, once he understood the relationship, was not bitterness. It was a surrender. "His grace is sufficient for me." Pastor Matthew Johnson says that kind of response only happens inside a relationship. On a page with no relational context, it just looks like God refusing to help.

Pastor Anthony Lombardi makes a point that cuts through the noise in a helpful way. Right now, a significant number of people are rejecting Christianity because they are associating it with a nationalistic, politically charged version of it that is, by any honest reading, a distortion. Their rejection, he says, is not actually a rejection of Christianity. It is a rejection of a misunderstanding of Christianity. That distinction matters. It means the conversation is not closed.

The pastors spend real time on what it looks like to walk with someone who is in the middle of this. Pastor Anthony Lombardi says the first thing to do when someone comes to you with doubts is to recognize it as an honor. They felt safe enough to say it out loud. Acknowledge that. Do not immediately go into defense mode. Do not reach for apologetics as a weapon. The person in front of you may not even know where they land yet. They are asking questions for a reason. What they need first is to feel heard.

Pastor Matthew Johnson talks about what the church got wrong for so long. Pastors performed perfection. They shared successes and kept failures hidden, which created an unrealistic standard that made people feel broken when they struggled. He says he has been intentional about communicating his own failures to the congregation at The Tree Church because he does not want his mistakes to rock anyone's faith. When he fails, he wants people to think, of course he did, he is human.

He also says the church needs to apologize more. Not as a performance, but as an honest acknowledgment that certain issues, including how the church handled people with questions, were handled badly for a long time. When people see that kind of humility, it helps them.

Toward the end of the conversation, all three pastors speak to something they clearly believe and want people to hear. Deconstruction, done well, is not the enemy of faith. It is part of how faith becomes your own. Pastor Matthew Johnson has encouraged his own kids to ask hard questions, read different perspectives, and sit with tension. He has told them that his own mind has changed on significant issues over the last ten years. He does not want them to feel shame if they eventually see something differently than he taught them.

He shares the story of his son Tyus writing a 30-page paper at Bible college that challenged a traditional perspective on scripture. The professor disagreed with the paper's conclusion and gave it a 98. He told Tyus it was one of the best papers he had read. What Tyus heard was not "he disagrees with me." What he heard was "it is safe." That, Pastor Matthew Johnson says, is exactly what the church has failed to offer and what it must learn to give.

Pastor Anthony Lombardi closes with a word about security. He says a faith that cannot withstand questions is not a deep faith. He is completely comfortable having these conversations because his foundation is not going to be shaken by them. That kind of confidence and the willingness to keep learning are not in tension. They belong together.

The Tree Church gathers every Sunday at 9:00 AM and 11:00 AM at both our Lancaster, Ohio, and Logan, Ohio campuses. We are a church that takes Scripture seriously and believes honest questions belong in the room.

If you are looking for a church in Lancaster or a church in Logan where faith and real life intersect, we would love to have you.

Learn more at thetreechurch.com.