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A Letter to a Church I Left

This is a letter I wrote to myself, to process my feelings and my sense of grief and loss after choosing to stop attending a church that I respect and, honestly, that I like. I just couldn’t keep going. This was not sent, because I couldn’t see how to make sure it would be received positively; it’d be very easy to take this as scathing criticism, and that’s not what it is. I am publishing it just in case anyone else wonders if they feel the same things – and to suggest that they shouldn’t have to.

Pastor, I wanted to reach out, sort of, to just clear the air in my own mind.

If you haven’t guessed, and you have, we’re no longer attending the church. It’s fine; there’re some residual mild scars on our part (the reason we left, because we don’t do things without cause), but there’s no bitterness, and we haven’t run down you, or the church, or the Church as a whole. We just felt like we were failed in some important ways, and I wanted to write you about why.

And yes, I know, you’re unlikely to read this. I wrote this to myself, so I could work through all of it and just process it. If you do read this, rest assured, I expect it to be for information’s sake only. It really is a record of myself for myself, and if you read this I hope it might be useful to you or others somehow, and if you are reading this, I mean it for your benefit and mine.

Did you know my mother had died, or when? Why, or why not?

I get it, if you didn’t: I don’t talk to people easily or well. She died in the summer, I found out Friday morning, and played for the worship team that Sunday.

My relationship with my mother was interesting; she was a real human being, with everything that implies, faults and flaws and wonders and achievements, all together. She was able to hold immense faith in one hand and offer you betrayal and suspicion in the other, and I say that not to impugn her memory but to recognize who she was and why our relationship was fraught.

And I grieve oddly: not only am I an introvert, but I’ve seen a lot of death for most of my life. I grew up in a high risk situation, in an age of much more primitive medicine. I’ve experienced enough of the mortal coil that a passing doesn’t bother me much. It can’t. I’ve seen too much of it.

But with my mother, it’s not just the ending of her life: it’s the ending without real resolution. There can be no peace made with the dead; all peace is from stasis, and that’s where my mother and I were left. She was dead. I was not. We had not come to a point where we were satisfied, and she suffered from dementia that prevented most such clarification; I suppose there was the possibility that she’d come into her own mind and we could come to an understanding, but her passing ended that.

Such is life. Yet I am also human, and this was my mother, and I grieved in my own way… isolated, alone, in the middle of the church.

I remember. I remember “How are you doing, man?” – and the pro forma response was, and is, “Fine,” because that’s the Man Code. I was not fine. I was trying to figure out how to rebalance my world, isolated, alone, in the middle of the church. My wife had suggested I not go, but I had made a commitment, and I take commitments seriously, so we went. (Plus, what else was I going to do?)

Did you know she’d died? Did anyone? Who was I supposed to have connected to at the church such that someone, anyone, would have known? You? The worship pastor? Anyone? If not the two of you – the two people with whom I personally had the strongest connections in the church – then who? When?

Was I supposed to go to you and bare my soul? How? Because I understand that I am not necessarily like most people; most people would hear “my mother passed away” and think of the grief as a simple loss. One loves and honors one’s parents, so that’s simple enough, stiff upper lip, we’re sorry for your loss, and that’s that.

I get that. Yet that is not me. That is not my loss.

And there’s the problem, right there: I don’t think anyone at our church ever invested in us, in my family. There was some investment: I do not mean to deny everything, because I can’t in any honest way. Yet it felt like there was a sort of quid pro quo involved: if we extended effort to a specific degree, we might eventually expect a return investment to a similar degree; as we plugged in, so would we be plugged in and eventually the clique would see us as more than interlopers, as more than names and faces.

The thing is: we don’t have it to give. I hold myself apart because the maelstrom of my inner and outer lives is not your effin’ problem… but it’s an effin’ church. The Body has to concern itself with the hand, even though the hand is not the Body. And I make no demands – like I said, there is no demand here, no intended recrimination – but there were failures: we failed to signify who we were, and we were failed in that people took that as how it was, that’s fine, even in moments when I feel like it should have been obvious that it was not good enough to be fine.

You’ve asked me for insight in various ways; I appreciate that, even while I find it amusing. (Who am I to have insight? Is it worth it?) Yet when asked, I offered; you asked about deep emotions, and for the love of God and out of my own depths, I answered in my own way. And it was worth it, I hope.

And I was tentative in other ways, I know, but I still tried, to respect what people could bear while respecting myself and the people who could bear more. I know I am not simple, and I know others are, and I cannot disrespect that, and I do not disrespect that. But I tried.

And yet, if you asked me if I felt seen or known at the church, I’d say no. I do not have any idea how anyone there would have described me, were they asked, even you. I’d be a name, probably a face – I know my face is pretty memorable. Some might be able to describe something of my faith. But if anyone asked what I did, or what my hopes were, or what my fears were, or what my struggles were, or when I lost my job… who would have known? Who would have cared?

Being perfectly frank, I think the caring ended at the Man Code: pro forma, we go around the room, we ask, we move on as we hope nobody really digs in the dirt of their own lives for others to see. That’s how I felt.

Why? Why was I asking the various Toms, Dicks, and Harrys about the concerns they had in their lives, but … that was the end of the exchange? I know it feels like I’m being selfish for me to say “What about us? We cared for others, what about us, us? US?” But the fact remains: a well that is never supplied runs dry.

And we ran dry.

I don’t have any answers, because I don’t have a question. I only see data, and patterns. And this was a pattern that cost my family, it cost us in time and endurance and forbearance for little slights, surely unintended but easily avoided with any understanding – and that understanding was lacking.

And there was no reason for it to be lacking. We were doing the best that we could to establish every connection we were able to make, and it was not enough. That’s not on you or the church – it’s a holistic problem, and we’re part of it… yet were I to look purely analytically, I’d say that something was missed that shouldn’t have been.

I don’t blame you, or anyone else there – in fact, I have no desire or even ability to point fingers. We all carry our own heavy burdens, and my family is not your specific concern, or anyone else’s. But I’d say that if there was a problem to observe at a systemic level, it’s this: we should have been someone’s burden, even as little as we were able to invest in creating those connections.

Maybe not yours – but someone’s. And we weren’t, and it was painfully clear, and that was untenable for us: attendance in a vacuum did more to weaken our walk than it did to encourage us, and that’s not a situation that I could put my family through.

Christians Who Leave the Faith

I recently read “I’m not a Christian anymore: a thread“, by a David Gass, on Twitter. I forget how I first saw it; maybe it was on my regular Twitter feed.

At any rate, as a person with books like “Losing Faith in Faith” on his bookshelf, it caught my eye.

This was an evangelical pastor, who declared publicly that he is abandoning Christianity. He was accepting his doubt, and dropping the sham of faithfulness – after 40 years of missing no more than twelve Sundays.

I don’t want to cherry-pick his thread; it’s not really fair to do so, as it’s not an apologetical missive. I think he’s writing honestly and emotionally, and a point-by-point rebuttal wouldn’t be kind to him…

And it would serve nothing.

I love apologetics; sophistry, the plays on words, the logic all appeals to me. But a good pastor of mine said that “nobody has ever been argued into Heaven,” and while “nobody” is a strong word to use there – surely in two thousand years of Christianity, someone has been argued into Heaven, right? – I still think the larger point is entirely valid.

Apologetics is fun. It’s not really useful as an evangelical tool.

But: looking at Mr. Gass’ thread… I feel like he’s been failed. Not by God, but by the Christian community around him.

He says he was raised in a hyper-fundamentalist environment, with the classic hallmarks of such surroundings. That implies strictness, an insistence on literal inerrancy of the Bible, an insistence that solutions exist for every problem… a sort of “prosperity Gospel” even if it manages to avoid material prosperity. The “prosperity” here isn’t money, or power; it’s that our side, God’s side, always wins. Everything gets fixed. We have it all.

And Mr. Gass saw through it: he saw no supernatural miracles in his life, his marriage struggled. When he read the books that purported to have the answers, he saw them as trite and dismissive.

I’ve read a lot of books like that. I can fully understand his viewpoint on that.

He watched people die of cancer. He buried people from “4 to 96” years old. He prayed for healing for people that didn’t come.

His parents were abusive; his kids rebelled; his marriage was painful to him. Where was God in all of this?

An inescapable reality that I came to was that the people who benefited the most from organized religion were the fringe attenders who didn’t take it too seriously. The people who were devout were the most miserable, but just kept trying harder.

https://twitter.com/DaveGass3/status/112327798932261274

He eventually found acceptance among people who didn’t believe – he said they were the most Christian people he knew, and they weren’t Christian. Given the abusive structure of the church, he just … couldn’t take it any more, and walked away.

I understand.

My heart breaks for him, because I think he missed it all.

At no point in his letter does he mention Christ. He mentions the religion, especially the structured aspect of it; he mentions the trappings, but nothing at the heart. At no point does he say anything about a God he felt was supposed to be out there.

He mentions the Magic Vending Machine, certainly; it was supposed to dispense health and happiness, after all! And it failed! How dare it!

… but nothing about God saying “I died for you, as you were, and for all those lost… no matter where they were or who they were or what they were.”

He points out that the church around him was abusive and caustic. I’ve been in church; it can be!

… but nothing about the Bible saying that that’s not how the Church is supposed to be.

I think Mr. Gass’ story is tragic, because it’s not a failure of God – it’s a failure of the church around him. It’s made of humans, it will fail, but it seems like his churches failed him consistently and in routine ways, all predicated on the belief that things can and should be perfect.

Yet the Bible never says that about our lives.

He wanted to see a miracle: the miracle was him! His life was exactly what the Bible said it would be.

His crisis seems to have been inspired by a lie, that his life wasn’t supposed to work out that way.

I pity Mr. Gass, and understand him, and pray for him and others like him: all of those people looking for magic beyond the magic around them, the people expecting answers to be written on Christian fortune cookies, the people depending on the people around them to be acceptable stand-ins for God.

I pray for the people who failed him, too, because they as well need God’s hand – instead of their own. His failure is theirs. What happens to his faith is possible for them, too, for the same reasons.

I pray for myself, as well, that God guides me in such a way that my own faith remains strong.

The Nashville Statement

I am confused and conflicted by the Nashville Statement.

This is a doctrinal position on sexual purity. It’s apparently something meant as a tentpole; pastors and church members are asked to sign it to indicate their agreement and acceptance.

I will not sign it.

It’s not that I disagree with its sentiments; I think you can back those sentiments up, Biblically.

It’s that I don’t understand why it’s being written, or for whom, and I don’t know what it does to further the cause of evangelism; instead, I think it challenges potential readers in such a way that they can easily and justifiably reject the Good News in the context of what the Nashville Statement contains.

I can (and do) support the idea of sexual purity; I cannot (and will not) support something that doesn’t clearly support evangelism.

What it says

The Nashville Statement has its own website. It’s made of fourteen affirmations and rejections; the only actual reference to a Bible verse is in the Preamble. That verse is:

“Know that the LORD Himself is God; It is He who has made us, and not we ourselves…” –Psalm 100:3

The preamble also says this:

As Western culture has become increasingly post-Christian, it has embarked upon a massive revision of what it means to be a human being. By and large the spirit of our age no longer discerns or delights in the beauty of God’s design for human life.

It then embarks on a series of declarations that encompass sexuality and are limited to sexual expression.

I understand the limited scope; limiting scope is important, after all. (Otherwise, every discussion of every issue would loop back to the concept of sin and redemption, and all other concerns would disappear. That’s unrealistic.) However, while they mention salvation (sort of: “Jesus said he came that we might have life and have it in overflowing measure”) they justify the rest of the statement’s existence in the context of moral purity: “in the hope of serving Christ’s church and witnessing publicly to the good purposes of God for human sexuality revealed in Christian Scripture, we offer the following affirmations and denials.”

The points themselves

Here are the points themselves; they’re offered as an affirmation and then a rejection, often polar opposites. My summary won’t include the actual texts, unless quotes seem necessary or relevant, and my summary will also not address both the affirmation and the rejection unless there’s enough of a difference that it seems important.

  1. Marriage is between a man and a woman, and is a covenant before and with God.
  2. God’s Will is for monogamy inside of marriage and chastity outside of marriage.
  3. God created both man and woman, and both have equal value in His sight. (I’m not sure how this is scoped; are they saying hermaphrodites are not created by God, or that genetic eunuchs are not created by God? I don’t know. It’s only a few sentences. Maybe they didn’t want to cloud the issue.)
  4. The differences between men and women are natural, created by God, and are meant for good and do not reflect evil.
  5. Biology is relevant for sex identification. (I am assuming – hopefully without justification – that this is a denial of transgender concerns in all ways.)
  6. Ah, here we’re addressing transgender issues at last: such people are “eunuchs created by God” and can have morally and physically uplifting lives.
  7. Homosexuality or transgender state is contrary to God’s design in creation.
  8. Homosexuals may live a pure and rich life in God’s Will. However, homosexuality is not part of God’s Will.
  9. A desire for sin does not justify that sin, with a particular focus on sexual sin.
  10. Approval of homosexuality is sinful.
  11. We must address sexual issues with gentleness and love.
  12. Salvation can redeem anyone who suffers in sexual sin.
  13. God’s grace enables us to supercede transgender or homosexual conceptions, and is not compatible with transgender or homosexual conceptions of self.
  14. Christ came to save all.

Whew! If I were you, I’d read the actual affirmations and denials themselves, rather than relying on my summaries; the affirmations and rejections are not long.

However… a few things stick out.

One is that you might notice how many biblical verses I used in my summaries; if you look at the original texts, you’ll see the exact same number of biblical references used. This concerns me. If you’re drawing a line in the sand based on what God says about an issue, I’d think you’d… want to show what God actually says about that issue. Sure, you’d probably cherry-pick it regardless, but I’d still expect it. For a Biblical statement of some kind, the Bible’s slightly important.

Another thing you might notice is the emphasis on … sex. Look, sex (and sexuality) is important; I’d never deny that (nor would I want to.) But they mention salvation in article twelve.

To me that says that obedience to a moral watermark is more important than salvation. It says to me that the signatories think it’d be cool and kicky if you got saved, but what’s really important is that you obey the rules.

I mean, think about it: these affirmations are saying that God can save you, sure, but what’s important is that you know how to act.

That’s backwards. That’s harmful.

God can save anyone, from anything, at any time. God isn’t going to be dissuaded by the fact that you’re married to someone of the same gender while having been born as a different gender (or whatever; mix and match how you like.) God can reach across every boundary as He wills and as the recipient responds.

And it’s up to that believer, at that point, how to respond. That may mean abandoning a lifestyle and living in a manner compatible with the Nashville Statement; if so, that’s great. I’d celebrate that kind of faith and dedication and obedience.

But it also might mean doing what the new believer can do. Maybe their faith isn’t strong enough to take drastic leaps of lifestyle or denials of a lifetime of impulse or habit; I don’t know.

I can’t judge. It’s not mine to judge. What goes between a believer and God is between that believer and God, and all I can do is present myself as willing to respond if asked. (If someone came to me as a Christian who was actively homosexual, and asked if homosexuality was contrary to the Will of God, I’d… say that it was contrary, yes. But I’d do so in such a way to allow the ministration of God to work on that believer. And if you’re wondering: yes, this has happened, and I’ve seen the effects that things like the Nashville Statement can have. They’re not pretty, and it’s just not worth it.)

Like I said, it’s not that I disagree with the articles of the Nashville Statement. I believe in (and practice) sexual purity (an easy task, as I love my wife beyond all other human beings). But I don’t see where the Nashville Statement actually furthers the Gospel, nor do I see it as being written in such a way that it can easily further the Gospel to the people whom it considers in need of the Gospel the most.

Instead, it purports to drive the lost away.

That’s bad.

Christians and Covenant

Jeff Doles recently published “A Contractual View of the Gospel,” in which he makes a lot of good points – but he also de-emphasizes something that I think is crucial to the nature of our relationship with God.

He says that many Christians see our relationship with God as a contract; we exchange an act (of faith, in the Christian sense) for salvation, whereas some others attempt to exchange works for salvation. (I’m not sure which group he’s referring to here, but look around; it’s easy to find people who say they’re good Christians because they do good things, as opposed to the idea that they’re good Christians because they believe in Christ and act upon that belief.)

He says that when we emphasize the contractual nature of our relationship – “we have done this, now give us that” – that we have made the contract itself an idol, replacing our love for God with a desire for certitude.

It’s an interesting, and valid, point. In my cultural tradition, there’s the concept of Heaven and Hell, sort of – Judaism has a number of views about the regions inhabited by the soul, such as it is, after the passing of our mortal coils. But as I understand it, they’re more abstract than concrete, and their pull is more ephemeral than absolute.

Put more simply: if I go to Heaven when I die, that’s great. Likewise, if God sees fit to send me to the lake of fire, well, that’s His right and power. My desire is to glorify His Name, whatever that might mean and in whatever fashion I am able. I have an abstract covenant with Him, and I trust Him to act according to His Will; the reward for me is in that fulfillment, not in whether I get a cookie when my life is done.

But that doesn’t mean there is not a covenant! Christ is our High Priest, after all; the priesthood was founded on a covenant. If the covenant is not fulfilled – if we don’t have that certitude – then our faith is in nothing, and I don’t think that’s the case.

So the crux, for me, is in the nature of the relationship to Christ. Am I faithful because I want the quid pro quo of salvation, or am I faithful because I love the Lord? if it’s the former, I run the risk of idolatry, as Doles suggests; if the latter, then salvation is a promised result (and that’s good, right?) but that’s a secondary effect.