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Deconstructions and Constructions
By Boudicca | April 27, 2007
My Journey Away From Organized Religion and Into the Arms of Christ, Part the Fifth
About the same time that I stopped attending church regularly, I began developing friendships with more and more people who had dealt with abuse in their churches. I read “The Subtle Power of Spiritual Abuse” by Jeff VanVonderen. I started realizing how widespread it was to use God-language to inflict guilt and shame on hurting people. The “shame game” (see my post “Arms of Mercy”) did not seem to be from the God I was getting to know. I grew more disillusioned.
A few months later I went to live in Germany for nine months. There was an English speaking church there that I tried to get excited about, but it felt strange to travel all the way across my big city to sit in a church that didn’t really do too much for me, while God was doing some amazing things in my heart while I sat at home in my apartment, reading, journaling, praying, and listening to God’s spirit in the silence and the loneliness in which I found myself. He provided a friend for me in a girl from San Francisco named Kate, and we got together at least weekly and sometimes more often than that, sharing our hearts, our struggles, reading books together, and talking about God and praying together. It was one of the truest experiences of “church life” that I’d ever known.
I started asking questions. Just where did we get American-style, institutional churches anyway? They didn’t remind me too much of what I read in Scripture. I started wondering about our formulation of “church”….lots of people, sitting in a room arranged with a stage and an audience, listening to what basically amounted to a concert and then listening to someone in front talk through a passage of Scripture…what did this have to do with participating in the Body of Christ, having real relationships with other believers, building them up, inviting them to live in the life of Christ, meeting each other’s needs, feeding the widow and the orphan, fighting poverty and loving our neighbors? Was it a necessary component of following God and knowing God? I had no doubt that some people could find, in the context of normal, institutional churches, true fellowship and encouragement and life as the body of Christ; some people could find a place to meet others’ needs and get their own met; some people could feed the widow and the orphan through the context of their local church, and could fight poverty, and could love their neighbors. I’d seen it, and even at one time experienced it myself. God first came for me, remember, within the context of church and church conferences.
But was it necessary that it be that way? Just because some people could find, in the context of traditional, institutional local churches, what God must have meant when he called us a “Body”, did that mean it was the only way? The God-ordained way? Did he spell it out, that it had to happen that way? Because if it was, why was I missing it, and why were so many other people missing it, when we wanted to find it so badly?
I tried to go back to church. I did. Every time I would end up either angry, or bawling my eyes out in tears from the condemnation and shame that I found there. Meanwhile, without being in the local church, I was growing more than I ever had. I was reading and learning like crazy. God was speaking to me. I was going to conferences (like Ransomed Heart’s “Captivating”) and eating up what God was teaching me there. I was spending time in relationship with other believers; I was finding myself in the unique position of meeting the needs of people who were left outside in the cold by their respective churches. For so long I’d defined myself by certain things. Bible studies. Quiet times. Small groups. Sunday school. Evangelism trips with members from church. Sermon notes. My “life in Christ” was really “life in church” – and the funny thing was, it gave me many burdens to carry, many “plates to spin” as C.J. Mahaney put it in that groundbreaking talk on legalism I talked about earlier. Even good things became burdens, part of the shame game that seemed designed to make sure my behavior matched that of “the good Christian” as defined by Church XYZ, but none of it brought me intimacy with my Father. My soul was left dry and empty by the organized church, and yet God had begun to work in amazing ways in my life….outside of the box of organized religion.
Over and over and over again God has come for me, both inside and outside the context of institutional church. He didn’t seem too interested in the context – church didn’t seem to be his “only way” or “preferred” way of reaching me. Again, one more thing that didn’t jive with the teaching I’d always received about the organized church being the primary place where God comes for us. He has come to me through sermons, to be sure – most of them at conferences or on tapes or mp3’s or podcasts in my home. He has come to me through other believers, to be sure – often outside the context of an organized church setting. He has come to me through books, movies, sunsets, and tears.
It seems a bit odd to limit his coming to a building on Sunday mornings, or even to say that’s his preferred or primary method of connecting with us.
So I guess my journey away from church started with the fact that God always seemed more interested in the business of coming for my heart, rather than getting me back inside the four walls of traditional church. It continued when so much of what I was given in church – shame, burdens, plates to spin, and sometimes downright abuse – was so opposed to the life in Christ that I had begun to experience. The journey was deepened again when I began sharing stories with other people who had also been hurt by the church, and began to be put in a position of serving and ministering to people who had been abandoned by their institutional churches. I didn’t know where God was taking me, but I did know this: life in Christ and participation in the Body of Christ could not and would not be limited to institutional, Sunday church gatherings. Not only that, but for me and for many others, it wouldn’t even be found there any longer.
Fast forward to when I arrived home from Germany, summer of 2004. I’d stopped being comfortable inside church, but I wasn’t yet comfortable outside of it, either. When people asked me where I was attending church, I muttered something about being burned out on church and “being between churches.” It satisfied most people who said that they’d pray for me and hoped I’d find a good fellowship soon. It never satisfied me, though. With each passing day I felt more and more certain that I wouldn’t ever feel at home again in a traditional church setting. I began reading emerging church literature and identifying with some of it while thinking that the rest of it seemed like a new version of the seeker movement from the 90’s. I was slowly deconstructing my old ideas of what constituted church, but was not yet in the place where I could even ask the question, “Ok, so, what next?”
In “A New Kind of Christian”, Brian McLaren uses a description from Andrew Jones of the Terranova Project to explain what it’s like to let go of old paradigms and form new ones:
“Andrew Jones describes four areas people move through while undergoing a paradigm shift: first is the old paradigm, the old mental map or way of seeing things. Over time, it becomes increasingly cramped and feels more like prison than freedom. In area two, there’s a high degree of frustration and reaction. An individual in this phase turns against the old paradigm and can’t stop talking about how wrong, inhumane, or unsupportable it is. In area three, people gradually turn from deconstructing the past to constructing the future and begin the hard work of designing a new paradigm to take the place of the old one. This is a time of creative exhilaration, challenge, and perhaps anxiety: because the discovery of a new paradigm that will be superior to the old is by no means assured and because the wrath of the defenders of the old is likely to be unleashed on those who dare propose an alternative. If the creation of a new paradigm succeeds, people move into area four, where a new era develops and expands freedom and possibilities.”
That description fits my journey really well. I grew up with a certain mental map, a way of seeing things. Over time, it became increasingly cramped and stopped really working, like when I heard C.J.’s talk on legalism in 1999 and I realized how so much of my legalistic ways of relating to God were “standard protocol” in church. I skyrocketed into “area two” (a phase of reaction and frustration) after the events of 2000 when I felt that God had failed me, then came to realize that it was religion that had failed. I’ve been in that phase for six, almost seven years…frustrated, not sure where to turn, uncomfortable with church but not at all sure where I was going to go from there. Only in the last couple of years have I begun to move closer to what Jones describes as “area three” – turning from deconstructing the old paradigm to constructing the future and answering the question, “Where to now?” Like Jones says, it’s hard work but I feel that it’s a time of creative exhilaration, challenge, and even anxiety. I’ve even felt “the wrath of the defenders of the old paradigm” being unleashed whenever I begin to propose an alternative. At the same time, I feel that I’ve entering into a great conversation with others who are also on this journey. It’s exciting and we’re asking a lot of important questions. I think it’s important to note that I don’t think that my journey is in any way superior to the spiritual journeys of people who are members of a traditional church. God is coming for all of us, “churched” and “outchurched”. For many people, he is coming for their hearts in the contexts in which they are familiar and comfortable, and he is not asking them to leave. For others of us, those contexts have been found to be stifling or abusive or culturally irrelevant, and he is leading us into uncharted territories. Remember my spiritual heritage from my parents: they were innovators, not imitators. God has made me in the same mold.
But for all of us I feel his desire is the same: to live our lives on the foundation of Christ, to relate to him based on the work of his Son and not on our own works and performance, to selflessly lay down our lives for the Body of Christ, loving each other, living in community with each other, praying and worshipping and serving and teaching (and being taught!) together. It is my (perhaps grand) hope that in my writing about my own journey, my own deconstructions of old paradigms and constructions of new ones, I can most importantly point to Christ HIS work while processing and dealing with important questions that have long gone untouched. Whatever your perspective, whatever your location, whatever your thoughts on church – I invite you to the conversation. We can all learn from each other, we can all be “as iron sharpens iron”, and in some ways those of you who disagree with me are the most important part of these kinds of conversations. It is only in asking questions of each other that we will both grow, so while I hope that writing my story and my thoughts will help you understand me, I also hope that you will never fail to challenge me to examine and reevaluate my positions. If there is one thing I have learned in all of this, it is that I am often wrong about what I believe and how I view the world. Though I have grown a lot, I have no doubt that much of what I believe today is still wrong, and I trust that God in his graciousness will continue to lead me into deeper and deeper truth.
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