My "Leaving Church" Story

Years ago when I first started taking blogging more seriously, I gave myself a few rules of things I will not blog about.

1) Political commentary.
As it is, there are enough opinions out there to sway the crowds one way or another. I don't need, or want to, start another heated debate. Words are only of use if they compel people into action.

2) Reactionary posts.
Because the blogosphere is a public forum, I don't need to throw out a passionate reaction to an event or something I came across only to process my thoughts a little further and regret a post a week later.

3) Personal drama.
Again, the blogosphere is a public forum. Unless healing and reconciliation have taken place, dirty linen doesn't have to be aired in public.

Today, I'm breaking rules #2 and #3.
I'm treading carefully with this post today because there are episodes that I'm considering writing about where reconciliation has not taken place, so I'll throw in a disclaimer early on that these stories are only shared to give credibility to the bigger story, and not to turn this blog into a bitch-fest.

So here we go. This is my "Leaving Church" story, a response to the recent frenzy in the blogosphere.

It began in 2005, when I came across Donald Miller's Blue Like Jazz. I was on a student-leadership team in a Christian liberal arts college, and that was the book we were reading on campus that year. Miller's book articulated many of my frustrations with a brand of Christianity that I had been struggling with because it was getting too superficial for my liking, and made me want to apologise to every person whom the church had left a bad after-taste with.

A year later, as a ministry intern, I found myself watching theologians, professors of religious studies and retired ministers bickering amongst themselves about how much time our staff organist should be allowed to rehearse on the organ in the sanctuary. I realised then how broken institutions can be, and decided that if this is what becomes of theologians, professors of religious studies and retired ministers, I would never go to seminary, and never work in a religious institution (never mind that I had already "responded to my call to ministry"). I wasn't ready to completely abandon the institution--the church is family. Just because all the Big Brothers and Sisters screw up or don't play fair doesn't mean you disown them.

So instead, my first real grown-up job was at a para-church organization. Freshly graduated with the conviction that I knew nothing, I thought working at a para-church organization would still keep me involved in the local churches, but at a level where I only need to watch from the peripheries and not get tied up in the politics. That would buy me some time to work through my issues with the local church, find some healing and eventually start seminary feeling less jaded.

Maybe I only have myself to blame for getting overly-involved. But after a couple years of watching policy after policy being implemented that were quick-fixes to a more deeply-rooted problem without thorough thinking through of what long-term implications there might be to those directly affected by these new policies, one cannot help but feel even more jaded by institutions. And then I discovered more and more voices amongst my new-found community in seminary that resonated with my thoughts. Oh, I could tell you of the countless hours we spent dreaming up what Church could be like if we could just start our own church amongst our own circle of friends and not have anyone else join in--most of which happened while we were avoiding writing about sanctification and the likes of it.

But we all knew. We couldn't run away and start our own thing. Most of us who understood the history of our tradition, the Church of God Reformation Movement, started by DS Warner, knew that that was exactly how we started off. As students of Church History, we knew that it had been done before--countless times, even before DS Warner.

The summer of 2010, I had the privilege of spending a few months with a group in Berlin, Germany. This was a group that came together to figure out what Church meant in 21st Century Berlin, a cosmopolitan, global city that had moved on from the days where Luther's reformation had a significant impact on ecclesiology. The group in Berlin wasn't a sensation because they were trying to start a hip 21st-Century style of monastic-living. They were sensational because they were intentionally committed to community and to the spiritual betterment of each one in the group. But even more so, to the reality that engaging in community means engaging in each other's dirt and learning to fight fair when we disagree rather than say, I'm just going to go off and start my own thing.

Kelley Philips, my internship supervisor in Berlin explained to me that the statement, "If we would all just go back to the 1st-Century Church where everyone came together to take care of everyone else, the world would be a better place," had become a popular catch-phrase in church-language these days. But we often ignore the possibility that the 1st-Century Church probably fought all the time too, as they define what "fair share" meant. We paint idealistic pictures of what the Church should be or look like, rather than embrace it for what it is and try to work through those pieces. I could quote you one Bonhoefferian thought after another about the impact of pursuing human idealism instead of pursuing the reality of God, but the reality is, these are only words.

So what IS your leaving church story, you ask. I could tell you of the heartache of trying to find healing after that dark year in undergrad. I could tell you of the 4 years I spent defending an institution even though there were realities I faced everyday in that institution that discouraged me even more. I could tell you of how I beat up a TV in anger when this same institution told me they wanted no part in my involvement with the missio Dei since I wasn't one of them (ask my friends Emily, Ashley, Michael, Yocum and Jason. They witnessed the anger).

You want a leaving church story? I don't have one to tell you because after all this time, I haven't left. And it's not because I haven't wanted to, or haven't had the guts to. But it's because the Church is family. I can dream all day about being born into my ideal family, but it is in digging through the dirt with my real family that I can truly understand "For God so loved the world..."

Beloved Church of God theologian Gil Stafford is known for his words, "Be the Church." As I was ruminating over how to articulate my "leaving church" story, I found it ironic that we're talking about leaving the church when the reality is, we ARE the Church. How can we possibly leave the church if that requires us leaving ourselves?

Or maybe that's what it comes down to. Maybe we need to leave ourselves, our ideals and definitions of what Church should be, and just simply BE the Church.