Unchurched

Warning: This post may offend or upset you, if you are a Christian who attends church regularly or who thinks I should. You're welcome to stop reading here if you like, and come back tomorrow for another crafting post. Also, this post may be of little or no interest to the atheists in the crowd. OK. You've been warned.

So, as the holiday season rolls around I'm realizing that church, as in attending worship in a local building with other people, might not be for me anymore. At least not right now.

Whether it's simply my perception or the reality of the churches I've attended, they seem to have this going on. If you're not the sort inclined to follow links, here's an excerpt from the blog by Jo Hilder:

"We create this system of silence, lies and hiding whenever we promote a culture of perfection and shame. When we say the only true and authentic expression of the Christian life is a successful life, an abundant life, a life where nobody gets sick or hears voices, or dies or divorces, where nobody is anything but English-speaking, employed, middle-class and heterosexual, where nobody is addicted or abused or bitter or angry, or could possibly have ever been hurt, offended or abused by us, then we tell A Great Lie. Great Lies force people underground, into the dark, and sometimes that darkness is within ourselves. We force people to turn away from their pain and their truth, we make them split themselves in two, and sometimes into even more little pieces. And folks learn they can only ever show us one kind of face, tell us one kind of story. The perfect face. The story with the happy ending.

"But these happy, perfect stories and faces are not what Jesus came to heal.

"If people feel they cannot bring into church what Jesus came to heal them of, then what the hell are we doing, Church?

"Our churches may look great from the outside, but if they do, we have nothing to brag about. Most of our churches look great not because they’re populated with the whole, the helped and the healed, but because they’re filled with hurting and heartbroken people who have learned how to hide."

So for now I'm enjoying the writing of John Shore, Rachel Held Evans, James F. McGrath, and various others from the comfort of my own computer screen. Unfundamentalist Christians on Facebook is a major source of reading, as is Believe Out Loud. Every day, I am thinking about social justice and theological issues, which is more than I can say for all the years I attended church regularly. I enjoyed the music some of the time, sure, but the sermon, sorry, the "message" usually missed the mark, or didn't say anything at all. Most of the time, the scripture readings were not well examined with regard to their historical, etymological, or contextual meanings--they were either taken as face value "line readings" or entirely ignored.  Further, I really only thought about God, Christianity, and my faith, while I was in the sanctuary. Experiencing church online instead, through reading and writing every day instead of just listening for an hour a week, has been much more fulfilling for me in recent months. Crocheting has been my time to meditate and digest what I've been reading.

And sure, I'd love to find a church home. Right now, though, I have an unenthusiastic husband and a rowdy two year old who both like to sleep in on Sundays. When we get to the point that it feels less like a chore, an obligation, a nagging "should", then we'll go. When I can say, "Sam really loves Sunday School and would be sad to miss it this week," then we'll go. We'll probably attend once on Christmas Eve, becoming the dreaded C&E (Christmas and Easter) churchgoers.

I am weary of church-shopping. I am tired of researching and researching what I hope will be a great community for us, and then finding out that they have only one worship service per week at the butt-crack of dawn, which is a deal-breaker for us. I am leery of accidentally ending up in a pit of bigotry, sexism, heterosexism and self-congratulation. Yes, this happened once. They had a brochure about how "the homosexual agenda" had invaded Hawaii and how they were out to recruit your children. I feel like one more bad church experience and Dan will give up entirely, and I don't want to be a family where Mom drags the kids to church and Dad couldn't care less. (I mean absolutely no offense to anyone who was raised that way.) If and when we join a faith community, I want it to be as a family. And I know, I know, part of my responsibility as a member of The Church is to help build a community that serves the needs of everyone who wants to participate. Part of it is to just show up and let the Holy Spirit do what she needs to do. It's the showing up part that I'm struggling with.

It frustrates me that if we were Catholic we would have no problem at all finding a 5pm Saturday Evening Mass to attend, but the more theologically compatible protestant denominations rarely have anything later than 11am. That's typically the praise music service anyway, which makes my skin crawl. So, until further notice, we're at an impasse. I'm thanking God for the gift of modern communication and social networking that lets me participate in an alternative format faith community on my own terms, for the moment.

Further reading:
John Shore: "Is Church Necessary?"
Rachel Held Evans: "15 Reasons I Left Church"
                             "15 Reasons I Returned to The Church"
                             "The Mainline and Me"
                             A Year of Biblical Womanhood (I would love this for a Christmas gift, if anyone's still reading this far down!)

(The comments section on John's blog is an amazing community. On Rachel's blog, there are occasionally trolls in the comments. Not sure why that is.)