Last weekend I had a friend spend the weekend with me. She mentioned she wasn’t sure about Sunday
morning plans because she had read my last blog, Valentine's Day Lies in Church and didn’t know where I "stood with church" at the moment.
Another cue that I need to do some clarifying came a couple
of weeks ago when I was dropping my kids off at our homeschool co-op play
practice, giving me a rare opportunity to interact with some of the other
mothers I don’t see very often. One gal
I hadn’t seen in a while hugged me, and then we sat and chatted while our kids
figured out where to stand on the stage.
“I just love seeing everything you post on Facebook. Except the stuff about church, that just
breaks my heart.”
So, yeah, need to clarify. Here’s the bottom line (as of today). Church is hard. I still go.
I’m a Christian (trying). It’s
what I (mostly) do. I have yet to ditch
church attendance for any length of time since I was carried in as a baby. Probably has mostly to do with my long history/habit
of being and doing everything in church that one possibly can do.
As a brief clarification, Biblically and theologically the Church
(with a capital C) is people, not a building.
Biblically, church is supposed to be Jesus followers, doing
life together, and showing and telling everyone else around them the good news
of Jesus. But they/we don’t do that very
well. That simple concept of
church is as messed up as anything else is in our messed up broken world. And so, as part of the brokenness, when most
people speak of “going to church” (with a small c) they are referring to a
specific group or sub-division of Christians that meet in a building or place,
under the signboard of a denomination or name.
As far as my involvement with the Church, I’ve pretty much
done it all- from full time ministry/missions overseas for six continuous
years where I did everything from teaching in indigenous Bible schools, to
evangelizing unreached areas, to smuggling Bibles to the underground church, to
discipling new believers to helping plant churches, to preaching on Sunday, to
organizing conferences, to participating in giant crusades, to writing
newsletters, to itinerating and fund raising – and, I must not forget to mention,
that I was pregnant and delivering and raising my kids during this time. This isn’t counting various stateside church roles
I’ve filled both before and since then: home group leader, lead children’s
church teacher, VBS volunteer, mission director, altar
prayer team member, women’s conference speaker, and church janitor. I’ve done
everything from preaching behind the pulpit to vacuuming under it. And I’m really familiar with church toilets.
(You could definitely say I know all about the Church
excrement, both literal and figurative kinds.)
As a child and a teenager raised in Church, I was taught to
expect that the greatest attacks on my faith and the hardest things that would
come my way in life would come from “the world”- the secular community outside
of the church. However, this was not where
any of my hardest trials of life actually came from. The greatest temptation to “quit”
my faith did not come from the evil government, from the secular community, or
from non-Christians from any sector.
My greatest trials and personal attacks have all very much come from within and from the place that was supposed to be safe and where I was supposed to find support. The church.
Christians. People who say they follow
Jesus. And especially the leaders of
this group of folks, and those in ministry.
While I have found and kept many good and loyal friends
within the Church who have stood by me through thick and thin (including pastors), I have found
that the Church as a group doesn’t handle certain things very well, nor do many
of its individual members.
The Church doesn’t handle marriage problems between its
members well. Church leaders are not
trained to know how to discern the difference between a couple needing counselling,
and an abusive or unsafe situation, nor what to do about it when they do figure
it out. The Church doesn’t know what to
do when its leaders start sinning or getting out of line. The Church often doesn’t know what to do with
singles, either before marriage or after a divorce. The Church clings desperately to rules and
legalism, no matter how much they profess grace and freedom in Christ, and
often default to applying these arbitrarily to anyone and everyone. The Church gets really hung up on external
appearances and behavior and status and has trouble valuing everyone equally. The Church has big issues with both race and
gender. The Church does not understand grief nor is it comfortable with brokenness, messy circumstances, pain or depression- therefore it often minimizes, rejects or ignores its members who have these things. The Church is more comfortable with a “top down”
business model of organization than servant leadership and relationships.
And sadly, the Church is not exempt from corruption. Some
people are attracted to church leadership and Christian ministry precisely because they have narcissism
and control issues, and the church is a good place to act those out. In other
situations when sincere church leaders gain status and influence and fame, they
are just as likely to be corrupted by them as their secular counterparts in business,
entertainment and politics.
And, as a Jesus-follower who has drunk of many bitter waters
of life, I found my church tribe as a whole hasn’t always done so well by
me. In some cases they flat out
abandoned me and failed me. In other
cases they were just at a loss. In other
cases I got in the way of their carefully planned agendas. In a few situations, they totally screwed me, and, I have also been burned.
But at other times, at so many other times, the Church has
been my place of comfort. It is where I have
gone- and still go- to find strength to face the coming week. It is where I go to worship corporately. It is where I go to take communion. It is where I go to hear the Word of God
taught and proclaimed publicly. It is where I go because I have freedom of
religion and I can, at a time when many Christians in other countries do not have that privilege.
And it is where I take my kids to do all these things
too. You see, it isn’t just about me and
how I struggle with feeling jaded about church as I approach half a century of
life on the twisted planet. It is about my teenagers who are only at the
beginning of their journey. There have
been times I “got nothing” out of a church service and one of my kids might say,
“That was the best sermon I ever heard.”
And I would think, okay, that’s why I went today.
Because, I am the
church, my kids are the church, and in participating and attending, we are also a part of making it better.
My blogging about my negative experiences and frustrations with church
are nothing more than a chapter in my own journey of short-comings and pain,
and how sometimes that intersected with the short-comings of the body of Christ
as a whole. It is not a deserter’s
diatribe, nor the railings of a bitter backslider.
It is me telling the truth about how we - us- the church- need
to change. It is me saying, hey, how about we stop hurting broken people, because that is actually most of us. It is me saying, how about we admit most of the people here are struggling with everything everyone else in the world struggles with, and start helping them instead of ignoring it. It is me saying, how about we be less about programs and doctrines and politics and more about support and love and honesty and relationships?
So as we say on Facebook, yes, I’m "in a relationship" with a
local church. Yes, I “attend” a
specific sub-group of the body of Christ.
No, I am not always happy with things that are said and done there- sometimes they are hurtful and damaging to me and many others. And so, yes, I will speak up, for how else
will there be change?
And is it only the church I attend or the church at large that needs to change? Of course not.
And that’s another reason I keep going. I know I need to be there for me,
for my own spiritual growth.
Yes. It’s
complicated.
But most relationships are- at least, ones worth having.
Yes! Thank you.
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