Trust Trench

Trust

Trust is the foundation of all relationships, divine and human. A breach of trust is one of the most severe betrayals imaginable, and the damage is grievious. To show no trust in Jesus is fatal. But what is trust?

Cognitive & Affective

Trust can be broadly categorized into cognitive and affective.

Cognitive trust depends on a person’s performance over time. If they’ve shown themselves trustworthy by regularly doing what they’ve promised, we put our cognitive trust in them.

Affective trust is build on the confidence that we know who a person is at their core. Our trust grows as the person is open and vulnerable with us; whether in a private conversation over drinks at the pub or a raucous game of chinese checkers.

While it’s common for American’s to expect only cognitive trust in their work relationships, most of the world feels that both cognitive and affective trust are vital. And the sense of being trusted is crucial for work engagement.

Both categories of trust apply to business, but these ideas also resonate in trust of Yahweh. Evangelism in American contexts has leaned heavily towards cognitive trust. Read the Bible, remember Yahweh’s works, trust him. Trust built upon Yahweh’s track record is recommended at all times, but not to the exclusion of an affective trust. For this reason, helping people discover Jesus must include information about him, but it must also include a real encounter with him, through prayer, healing, prophesy, etc. Perhaps this helps explain why becoming a christian is a process?

Trust in Marketing

Trust is an ingredient difficult to grow in a startup and easy to lose in an established business. Startups have an advantage over big business in trust; however, because they’re more willing to directly engage people. Relation-less Ads engender immediate distrust, but when a real person talks to you about a service, even listens to your opinions and questions, your trust in that business deepens. Even if it’s not a service you need, you’ll remember and refer to your friends.

A correlated principle happens when Christian’s “market” God with Bible quotes. These quotes, deeply trusted by those who share them, are more likely to evoke distrust in their readers than faith because quotes without context invite misunderstanding.

Depth of Trust

The depth of one’s trust is made visible by how committed one is to a relationship in spite of solid evidence and clear answers. Abram’s faith in Yahweh is admirable, not because it wasn’t riddled with doubt (he failed to trust in almost every story in Genesis), but because he believed Yahweh’s promise to give him an inheritance in Canaan without ever seeing any evidence or having any answer as to how it would happen.

Abram’s path of faith is our example: to follow on a trust built by a cognitive confidence in Yahweh’s past faithfulness and an affective belief in Yahweh’s presence today. We are Abraham’s children because we follow the same pathway of trust.

As I’ve walked the path of faith, I’ve found there are uphills and downhills. the now and not yet. I think these seasons happen in individual people’s lives, but also in the lives of organizations and even of nations.

The ways that faith deepens does not look the same as a human journeys through life. The stages of faith development do an admiral job of exploring the faith epocs, overlapping and repeating, that define most human experience.

Trust and Finances

Because finances expose faith more than words, what we do with our money, and our time (time is money?) is a potent indicator of trust. It shows trust in an individual when we give resources freely to them; it shows our trust in God when we follow even when it looks like we’ll lose our earthly possessions. Not to be confused with the faith preacher’s call to give them more money, which is nothing more than greed clothed in false righteousness, but an open hand towards the needy and a loose grasp of the many ways that humans create to give themselves future security, even at the expense of others.