Christian but not feeling anything at times.

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i've written and rewritten this post a million times just to word it right. i'm wondering if you guys can relate to appreciating spirituality (i'm Christian) but feeling left out when you don't feel emotional like everyone else. i'm pentecostal and though i've had wonderful experiences...for the most part i'm just participating manually. i'm sincere, but i can tell when almost everyone in the church is crying (usually over a modern worship song that i cannot stand) and i'm absolutely unmoved. i don't feel like withdrawing, i'm happy to be there, i'm just like out of the emotional loop. i have enough of a relationship with God to just love Him inspite of how i feel, but it would be good to know if others can relate. infact, i cry more over well written and orchestrated songs. does neurodiversity come into play, you think? i think it does because its not a bad feeling. and i'm trying to over analyze everything to be autism/adhd but this has been a huge part of my life. and i'm pretty much embracing it. just thought i'd ask

I'm a Lutheran, and my faith isn't dependent on feeling any sort of ecstatic experience. Rather, I put my trust in what Christ has done, not on my emotional response. If I display a response to God's free gift of salvation, it's by reciprocating his love by loving my neighbor.

^
Good point!

Maybe the OP should consider exploring other denominations to find a better fit.

If I were a Christian, I don’t think I would enjoy being a Pentecostal. It would just be too much. I know a bit about them because my uncle is one or was one before he went to prison. I’m not sure if he still identifies or not.

He won’t have an opportunity to go back to his old church for a LONG time.

ANYWAY, sometimes people think those feelings are proof that a group has God’s Spirit, but the truth of the matter is that other religious groups have similar experiences - both within Christianity and outside of it.

You don’t have to be emotive in your worship for God (if He exists) to note your worship of Him.

He is “all knowing,” after all.

yeah ive been to loads of churches and i would agree with the above.
I have listened to and sung christian songs like the ones from hillsong in my spare time and cried with the 'God's spirit' feeling.
I think it only happened once in the pentecostal church, but that was a special occasion over which i had no control. That was one time in about a year and a half.

I guess you're just not the emotionally-infectable type. Pentecostal services depend on quite a lot of emotional contagion, so you're probably just not a suitable target for what they try to do to people. I'm not very emotionally-infectable either, but being secular I don't expect to get anything from going to church anyway. I notice how different I am if I go to a concert by a famous, revered performer. It seems everybody else is picking up on this vibe that the act is transmitting, and getting taken through an emotional peak, while I'm just sitting there responding to each song according to my own internal compass, so I'm on a different plane. There's a bit of infectability in my mix, but nothing like as much as I see being expressed by a typical audience.

Anyway I wouldn't worry about it. Emotionally-infectable people can be dangerously open to being manipulated, and I think it's unusual that an infector is genuinely doing it for the good of the receivers. I think that more often than not they're just after something for themselves, e.g. sales people who use that kind of thing to artificially inflate demand for whatever they're selling, so that folks end up buying what they don't really want.

thank you all for your input. my church is pentecostal but besides the emotional aspect, it's very grounded in Biblical teaching. I'm happy to attend there, but i'm learning much of what you're saying. i suppose i just wonder if it's my lack of depth and i'm seeing it could be a neurodiverse element of my life. i used to feel left out, but after learning about myself, i don't. in fact, i'm seeing so many things about my life i used to think were problematic but just turned out to be the way i process things.

I really don’t think that you are the problem here. Perhaps you don’t get emotional because you are more of a thinking person than a feelings person. There’s nothing wrong with that!

Other Christian denominations use the Bible just as much as Pentecostals do. I would consider shopping around.

The intro paragraph will seem off topic, but keep reading ...

Do you remember the story of the Widow's mite? She put in 2 small copper coins, all she had. My church has a couple on display. They make a dime look huge, just 2 small pieces of copper. Jesus said she put in all she had, so she put in more than all the rich folks. We have nothing that God has not first given us. He is the Sovereign Creator, and gives this and that, spiritual and material things, according to His own perfect wisdom.

I am an autistic/Aspie with other physical disabilities. But I have Christ, so I have all I could possibly need. For those of us who are saved by faith alone in Jesus Christ, God meets all our needs as our wise Heavenly Father, not necessarily our desires. Like the man born blind, I assume that God made me the way I am for His Glory. That is an awesome privilege, rough as it may be at times. This site is well-named for me. My citizenship is in Heaven, and I dwell among these strange creatures on a strange planet who have emotions that I neither have, nor understand. Only after several decades of life, did I learn enough to write this reply with the hope that it will help you.

If God did not give you certain emotions, He does not at all expect you to have them! You may have some of the emotions of others in your congregation, or maybe far less intense, but not the full set. Worship God with what you have, including your thinking mind. The Ten Commandments say nothing about feelings, but doing! You can always think how best to serve Our Lord Christ and others, then do your duty. Determined, disciplined, well-thought-out duty keeps going where feelings fail.

“Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. And he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him” (John 14:21 ESV).

Notice the implied IF and ONLY IF logical structure of this verse in the first sentence. The set of those who keep God's commandments is identical to the set of those who love God. ('Set' is math speak for group in this case - but the logic is as solid as math.)

The Greek word translated 'love' is ἀγαπάω, which is a heavy-duty love consisting of:
.Commitment to the one loved - not fair-weather friend or only when you can get friendship in return
.Self-sacrificial for the sake of the one loved
.Normally includes an emotional affection or what the world calls affection or love, as normally between mother and baby

The first two are covered by duty.
The last is not always operative; we are commanded to love our enemies. And some of us Aspies are biologically incapable of this emotion or at least it is very weak. But there is still duty. If the poetry in the Bible goes over our heads, there is always Romans. Where feeling fail, there is disciplined duty. When others have joyful feelings in worship, there are the Rock-solid promises of God upon which to mediate and be in awe of the fantastic engineering that God put into creation, the plan of salvation, and so on. But deep down, out of reach is that Seed (the Holy Spirit) (1 John 3:9).

For what it is worth, and hope this helps.


The same analysis can apply to other emotions as well if God did not give them to us.

^

I think that people sometimes take that bizarre behavior and apparent strong emotion as proof that their faith is true because they think: why else would people behave this way?

The reality is that people behave strangely and feel strongly in many different religious communities - both inside and outside of Christianity.

The human species is in a weird position of being one of the few animals smart enough to know we are going to die.

To keep us from losing our minds, we've evolved a "circuit breaker" around death. We perceive death as something that happens to other people. We've also invented religion to tell us that it won't actually happen to us, even when it actually does.

If it gives you comfort, go for it. But most religious people are doing it out of social or family pressure. Remember that no major religion got to its "major religion" status without killing a lot of people. Christianity and Islam both had periods where they forced people to convert. They knew by doing this, it would eventually become custom and the bulk of people would go along rather than risk social ostracism.

Anyone that thinks they know what happens after you die is a narcissist trying to get power over you. We fear nothingness, and our only data point for after death is what before life was like - and thats nothing. It scares us.

Again, it is entirely possible that when we die there's some sort of reckoning. I hope its true - I'd gladly submit myself to eternal judgement if that means Adolf Hitler gets it too. But I'd say the data we do has shows that for most of this universe's existence, you will be non existing.

Cherish life, and make the best of it. It's all we know for sure we have.

I grew up Catholic, and spent a significant amount of time in Bible study as a protestant as well when I wanted to marry a Baptist. Numbers 31 is an awful, awful story that opened me eyes. How could that be God? Seems to me like the Hebrew God was just an excuse for Jewish nationalism.