4. Church: Examining the whole body
In addition to my own faith background and evolution, I also want to talk about the state of the Church today—not any single fellowship or denomination, but the greater Church—the entire body of Christ.
I have spent my entire life in and around churches. I grew up in a deeply religious family and I went to church often. There is nowhere in the world that I have ever felt as comfortable, peaceful, and at home as I feel in a church. At the same time, there is no place I have felt as uncomfortable, alienated, and angry as in a church.
Like a home away from home
As I look back, there are certain positive church experiences that stand out in my mind.
When I was a 7, just after my folks split up, I stayed at my grandparents’ house while my mom and dad got their separate lives together. My grandparents lived in the parsonage of a little country church where my granddad preached and my grandma taught children and played piano. Two of my cousins stayed there that summer, too, right after their dad passed away. It was like a retreat for pre-adolescent asylum seekers.
I have such fond memories of that summer in the country. I remember my grandma looking at us over the upright piano, beaming with pride on the Sunday that my cousins and I stood up in front of the congregation and sang. I also remember how spooky and wonderful it was to chase one another through the stones of the graveyard out back as the sun was going down.
Later, as a teen, I remember the emotional rollercoaster of youth group, which ranged from laughing as hard as I ever had at the Bible trivia question about what the 5 foolish virgins forgot to weeping my heart out as we told stories about how hard it was to be a Christian in a world that was trying to constantly pull us down to its level. I remember praying at the altar after a “Youth Revival,” then walking outside with my heart feeling clean and new—at least for a while.
As a young man, I remember churches providing sanctuary even at the times when I was the farthest from my faith. I recall the sweetness of rolling into a packed, candlelit Catholic church off the highway somewhere in Virginia as a break from an all-night drive to see my family on Christmas Eve. I remember singing Christmas carols and getting back on the road, refreshed. On my first trip to Europe, I can remember how jet-lagged and panicky I felt, and how I could walk into one of those gorgeous ancient chapels and leave my disorientation at the door. I eased into the pew like wading into a comforting pool.
As an adult in New York City, I worked and worshipped in the largest Gothic cathedral in the world for more than 20 years. I first started going there just for the space to meditate and to be comforted under that giant, vaulted ceiling—I wasn’t even calling myself a Christian in those days. Until then, most of the time I had spent in such ornate and liturgical spaces was around Christmas time, for midnight mass or a singing performance. At the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, it felt like Christmas every Sunday.
Then I got a part time job at the Cathedral as an audio technician, attentively listening to the words and music to make sure the congregation had a seamless worship experience. I estimate that I have carefully listened to and recorded over 1,000 sermons. (I hope I picked some wisdom up along the way.) I eventually was married there, confirmed there, and watched my child be baptized there. That church—not just the people but the structure itself—was as big a part of my life as my home or my job.
“A church I can receive in”
When I travel, I like to go to other churches sometimes, whether there is a service going on or not. In fact, I typically prefer it when there isn’t a service going on, and I can sit and listen for God’s still small voice on my own. If I’m on a business trip, a side trip into a chapel or cathedral somewhere can help me keep my perspective and remind me what I really should be working for. It makes me feel like Marvel’s Daredevil, “the Man Without Fear,” dropping into an empty church on a weekday to confess to a priest and to check in on his faith.
These days, however, if I’m driving through a small town and see a cute little clapboard church, or an ancient-looking stone chapel, I feel like I have to be careful before I go in.
There is a song by the band U2, who are no strangers to singing about faith and its challenges, and it’s called Acrobat. It’s a tortured self-examination in which singer Bono says:
And I'd join the movement
If there was one I could believe in
Yeah I'd break bread and wine
If there was a church I could receive in
'Cause I need it now
There are some denominations in whose churches I know I will be welcomed or pleasantly left alone. I know I will be able to believe as I do, to pray or not pray as I choose, and that even if there happens to be a service going on, the sermon I hear will likely be something aligning generally with my values. It may be about love, kindness, forgiveness, sacrifice. It might even be uplifting.
However, there are also churches that I’m wary of going into. Churches that aren’t open for prayer between services—I find locked church doors to be the opposite of welcoming. Churches where, if there are people around, they will be wanting to shake hands and ask questions and taking down email addresses and aggressively inviting me into the fold.
There are churches where, if there is a sermon being preached, I will hear about how much danger I am in—both in this world and the next. I will hear what a fallen world this is, and how our main job is to survive this life with our souls intact so we can stand in heaven and watch it burn. I will hear churches that uncritically tell me that God will send me to hell if I do not follow the formula.
Those are the churches I dare not go into if I want to keep the peace.
Those are the churches in which I either want to stand up and shout down the pastor, or turn on my heel and march out, shaking the dust off my feet.
Those are the churches where, even though I may feel the love of Jesus in the people, I do not feel it in the message. At best, I might be seen as a lost sheep in need of rescue.
There are churches where I want to get up and say, “NO, that is simply not right. I can’t believe you are telling these people, even the most suggestible, the most vulnerable, the children, that THAT is what God is like.”
Opposing views, or any kind of response, are not typically welcome in church (except for maybe a passive-aggressive critique buried in a greeting for the pastor while shaking hands after the service). For the most part, church is a one-way communication device. In those cases, I’ve got nothing to do but stand up and walk out—which I’ve done—or just keep driving by.
At the same time, some of the people who worship at those other churches might feel like standing up and walking out of MY church, too, once they hear the progressive message, that we march with BLM, that we pray for sensible gun laws and an end to gun violence, that we support universal health care, or that we embrace gay, queer, and transgender people in all of their wholeness, made in the image of God, and so on.
One body, divided against itself
According to the Bible, we Christians who make up the Church are “one body of Christ.” However, far from that image, we are deeply divided, not just in two, but fractured into many, many pieces. Sometimes it feels like we are reading different Bibles and praying to different Gods.
The Bible says that the world will know we are believers in the Way of Jesus because of our love for one another. These days—and probably throughout history—they are more likely to see us on opposite sides of the street, carrying protest signs about the other.
Even our Jesus is different. Nonviolent Jesus vs tough guy Jesus, radically accepting Jesus vs righteously restrictive Jesus, Black Jesus vs White Jesus…
So, in addition to my own faith story, I also want to spend time in this journal looking out across the varieties of Christian experience and history, first to shed light on how many different—and valid—ways there have been and are to be Christian, and second, to see if there is any common ground we can still find and use to rebuild connections between believers in the different branches of the Church.
