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Leaving and Coming
By Boudicca | April 26, 2007
My Journey Away From Organized Religion Into the Arms of Christ, Part the Fourth
After everything happened the summer of 2000, I stopped reading my Bible. I went to church, only because I’d begun attending the church my best friend went to and I wanted to see her. When other people at church asked me how I was doing, I told them the truth (for the first time?) — I told them I was miserable. After the predictable look of horror crossed their face, they tried to coax me back into being the good Christian they expected me to be. I refused. I was tired of games. I was tired of doing my best to be a good Christian and live the way I thought I was supposed to live and having it backfire. I was lying in a thousand pieces after having the most tender part of me – the part of me that dared to open up, dared to love, dared to vulnerably share true friendship with another - thoroughly shredded. I never stopped praying, only because it provided some emotional relief to yell at God.
He didn’t seem rebuffed at my anger. Instead of sending lightning bolts from heaven (which I feared he would do the first time I said “Damn you, God” out loud) – he came for me. I read “A Grief Observed” by C.S. Lewis and was comforted by the words of a much greater Christian than I expressing doubts about God’s goodness. I identified with the language he used to describe what he feared was true of God – that perhaps God was a “Divine Vivisectionist” or perhaps a “Cosmic Sadist”. I wept as he described how his faith in God was but a house of cards until his wife died, when the house of cards fell…and if his faith was indeed a house of cards…perhaps the kindest thing God could have done was to sweep it all away. I read his description of how easy it is to say you have faith in a rope if you use that rope to tie up a box….but how it isn’t really faith until you’re hanging from that rope over a precipice.
Late that summer I discovered “The Sacred Romance” by John Eldredge. For the first time I realized that God hadn’t failed me – religion had. Religion had taught me a cause-and-effect relationship with God, and though it had been nearly two years since I had begun to root out legalism in my life, I had no idea how deeply it was ingrained. It was not God, but religion that taught me that A+B=C. It was authors and speakers who had promised me blessing if I “stayed pure” by not dating….not God. I had been failed, not by God, but by cultural Christianity (churchianity?) telling me that relating to God was like relating to a vending machine…put in the right thing, and poof! Out comes the desired result.
In reading “The Sacred Romance” I began to see my life in the context of a much bigger story than simply “doing what was right.” I began to understand that Christianity was not an invitation to moral living, but rather to a love relationship with God. For the first time I began to understand the reasoning behind habitual sin – that I craved life, and I was trying to find it…albeit in all the wrong places – “less-wild lovers” as Eldredge called them. I began turning to God for my source of life, and instead of rooting out sin by perpetual confessions and reading about my wretchedness, I began turning to God for the life I craved, finding in the process that my old sinful standbys really weren’t appealing when I had the real thing. I began to relate to God out of love, instead of out of fear.
In the process I began becoming more and more disenchanted with organized religion and institutional churches. It seemed like the ones I’d been a part of were really missing the boat when it came to really living out of God’s grace…even in those very churches that proclaimed grace from the pulpits I saw people living on a daily basis from a place of working and performing, for God and for each other. The church I was attending at the time was very focused on being doctrinally correct and yet legalism was pervasive. I began to get cynical. Despite weekly “fellowship” potlucks after services, interactions were shallow. Prayer requests were “acceptable”, but the really tough shit that people were dealing with rarely got mentioned. We were small and met in homes, but our relationships weren’t deep. I know some people there were really struggling – heck, I was one of them – but it wasn’t ok to share vulnerably about real doubts and struggle. The times when I *did* choose to be completely vulnerable and real about what I was struggling with, I was misunderstood, judged, and ridiculed. Sermons focused on good works and behavior modification and “being right.”
I don’t remember exactly when I stopped going. It happened gradually, I think, amidst the stress of my final two years of college and the drain of my own cynicism and jaded attitude towards what I’d begun to call “churchianity.” I never intended to stop going to church altogether. I just knew I could no longer stay where I was.
During the spring and summer of 2003, following my graduation from college, I began attending a new church, one that I’d heard preach grace, one where I loved their hearts for God that I saw demonstrated in their expressive worship. A dear friend of mine also began attending there about the same time I did. She was a single teenage mom who had experienced a great deal of emotional abuse from her parents and spiritual abuse from her former church. We both had high hopes of finding grace at this new church.
My friend sought pastoral counseling to help her work through some of the issues from her past. She met once with the pastor, who said that since she was still formally on the membership roles at her previous church, that he’d like to meet with her and her former pastor to “resolve their differences” before proceeding into more in-depth counseling with her. I was invited along as an advocate for her and as someone who knew her story well. I had no idea what to expect.
I had no preparation for what happened in that counseling office during the 3+ hours that we sat there. I watched the pastor of her former church turn into a petulant child, viciously attacking her character, claimed that she’d never repented for her sin (though the church had forced her to publicly repent several times, and though she was no longer in any kind of lifestyle of sin), and laying the blame for the awful treatment she’d received squarely at her feet. The pastor of the new church maintained a more calm, more “pastoral” demeanor, yet he too loaded her down with burdens. What was it the Bible said (in reference to Christ) about “a bruised reed he does not break”? How I saw these two pastors treat this young, single mom was very much “breaking a bruised reed.” The pastor of the new church urged her to stay in her abusive home situation, boasting that he had sent abused wives back into a physically dangerous home situation to “reconcile” with their husbands. After all, he said, if they were beaten they could call the civil authorities, and if they died, they’d go to heaven! The heartlessness and lack of compassion for victims of domestic violence disturbed me, as did the fact that I’d researched shelters for abused women and only a small number were faith-based or affiliated with churches. The truth was ugly and stark: we were not doing a very good job at caring for the orphan and the widow.
I stopped attending that church, disillusioned once again. But again, I didn’t decide then in any sort of dramatic epiphany to stop being a part of any organized church. This was a journey after all, not a flash of blinding light. Since leaving that church nearly four years ago, I’ve attended institutional churches less than a dozen times.