My existential church crisis

This is a really long post, and yet, I feel that there is so much more that I should say.  But this will have to suffice.

It’s Sunday morning, and it’s a little overcast.  For the vast majority of my life, Sundays at this time would find me sitting in a pew in a church somewhere.  But today, like most Sunday mornings over the past couple of years, I am not in a church.  I am not having a crisis of faith; I hold to the tenets of faith that I believe define Christianity; I just don’t see those tenets being reflected in “worship” and “church.”   I guess you could say that I am having a bit of an existential church crisis.

I think about church and faith a lot lately.  My dad was a Baptist minister, and I was born and raised in a tradition of church and faith.  If you know much about me, you know that my faith is a significant part of who I want to be, how I want to act, and how I want to live, even if most times, I fail spectacularly at living and acting the way that I want to (I'm in good company there: even the apostle Paul complained that he was not always able to do what is right and that he kept on doing the things that he knew were wrong!).  I was brought up believing that church – going to church and being part of a church community – was an important part of faith.  I am proud of my traditional Baptist beliefs (even if denominational theology and practice have veered away from what I believe), and my peace-making Mennonite heritage.

Until recently, I would not have been able to imagine my life without church.  My relationship with the church and the people in it has shaped me unimaginably.  I have had innumerable life-affirming and life-changing experiences through the church.  I have also faced the downside of Christian community, through betrayals and small-mindedness.  All of these experiences are a part of who I am today, warts and all.

My positive memories of “church” growing up are a mash-up of music, food, families, community.  Church choirs since I was about 10.  Professional and amateur musicians in churches sharing their gifts of music.  Invitations to share in family meals and events, both happy and sad, ordinary and extraordinary, with individual church families, and the collective church family.  An instant sense of “belonging” to a community, even if we had never been in that particular church before, based on a set of common traditions.  Camping, in a variety of settings, from lavish Keats to primitive Shänti, and everything in between (literally: as a kid, I spent time at almost every Baptist camp between BC and Manitoba).  And always, food.  So much food.  Breaking bread together, a biblical act of living as community that breaks down barriers and fosters intimacy.  Potluck suppers, so much a part of church life growing up, especially in Baptist circles, and always wonderful, but probably more so in Kitimat Baptist Church, largely populated by German immigrants, with some Portuguese families thrown in for good measure (I wrote about Kitimat here).

I attended a Baptist college for a year.  We had classes in faith, Baptist principles, church history and basic theology, and learned about leadership and faith.  It was a lived experience in community-building, getting along with others, growing and learning together.  We shared intense grief when we lost a classmate in a car accident.  And most of us rebelled and questioned.

I also had bitter experiences in church.  One instance that affected me deeply occurred when I was an adolescent. The church where my dad ministered voted to fire him after a congregational meeting, apparently because some people (who didn’t even attend the church) demanded that he preach fire, brimstone and damnation sermons; he refused.  Ironically, this meeting took place while I was innocently babysitting some of their children in the basement of the church.  My parents hardly ever talked about this incident, so I had to piece it together myself.  It gave me a deep (and I mean deep) distrust of church leadership – deacons, search committees, and so on – which continues today.  Subsequent interactions with other search committees and deacons, now that I am married to a minister, have done little to heal me.  Years later, the congregation asked for my parents’ forgiveness, but they never sought forgiveness from me or my brother.
 

As an adult, I experienced rejection from a congregation because I supposedly had “serious spiritual issues,” after I openly shared that I often question and I don’t believe in easy answers.  At another church I attended, the congregation changed its governance structure to eliminate formal committees because apparently no one wanted to commit to serving for a set period of time.  One committee, which actively led the congregation and the community through issues of social justice, decided to remain a traditional committee.  Instead of celebrating the dedication of these committee members, church leadership labelled this committee “resistant.” 

I have survived discussions about whether Christians should wear charm bracelets, whether Hallowe’en is evil, the Rapture and the Second Coming, the acceptance (or not) of LGBTQ/homeless/divorced/and other marginalized people within the walls of church buildings. I have been a part of congregations who have worked very hard to ensure that nothing would change (in one congregation, a deacon in his 40s often bragged that his hairstyle had not changed since he was in high school... very symbolic of his leadership).  And I have been part of congregations who are always seeking to remain relevant and meaningful in their larger communities. 

Church has changed a lot over my lifetime.  When I was a kid, no one would have dreamt of welcoming openly gay people sitting in the pews, let alone preaching or otherwise leading a congregation.  Women deacons were rare, women ministers even rarer (although Canadian Baptists were a relatively early denomination to support the ordination of women, apparently they did not do a fantastic job of following through with actions; even today, in my informal survey of Maritime Baptist churches, most ordained women ministers are associates, not senior ministers).  Ecumenicism, although historically a strong Christian tradition in Canada, was not overly common anywhere I lived, and I do not recall much active interfaith cooperation.

These changes are good and healthy.

However, I have issues with other changes in North American churches.
 

I recently took a university course called “Religion in Canada.”  It was an interesting reminder that “church” has always suffered from fragmentation and differences of opinions, and that faith has never been a totally effective way of dealing with schism or disagreement.  Churches have been struggling to remain relevant since the beginning of church history.  One of the things we discussed was the conflict between native spirituality and Christianity in the early days of post-contact North America.  To vastly oversimplify, native spirituality assumes that all beings are intrinsically good; the European Christian concept of “original sin” assumes that humans are naturally evil.  If you think about it, you can see how there were bound to be conflicts based on the lack of understanding of each other’s basic beliefs about humans.  I am not a church historian or a theologian, but I am quite sure that Jesus’ ideas about how humans should interact with each other have been vastly corrupted over the centuries by those who were more interested in power and authority than they were about their faith.  I do not think that it is too late for us to learn from some of the precepts of native spirituality about how we should treat each other and what our faith should look like.

Right now, churches represent a diversely wide spectrum.  At one end, there are churches and denominations whose liturgies and worships services have not changed for decades or even centuries.  (There’s that old joke about how many Presbyterians (or whatever) it takes to change a lightbulb.  Answer: CHANGE?!!!???).  At the other end, there are denominations that are trying so hard to be everything to everyone that they end up being nothing to anyone.  They have no theology; some of them even welcome and celebrate avowed atheists as their “ministers.”   “Worship services” now involve guest speakers, who might or might not be Christian, who come and talk about “issues” in our society with small group discussions following their talks.  Evangelical churches sing “worship songs” that are really just nonsense words repeated ad nauseum about how much I love you God over and over and over again that make us feel really good about ourselves and our intimate (in some cases, even creepy) relationship with Jesus, while their worship bands perform on the stage at the front of the auditorium.  Our attempts to be “relevant” have made us ridiculous; Disney themes as choir anthems, and pizza and beer instead of bread and wine make a joke of our faith and our commitment. 

Frankly, at this point in my life, I get nothing out of attending worship services.  I almost always leave feeling frustrated and alienated and sometimes even angry.  I have spent a fair bit of energy asking myself if I am just whining because church and worship no longer fulfill me.  Maybe I just need to be less traditional and more open to new ways of doing things.  But the drastically dropping attendance rates in North American churches, along with the rise of people who say they are not Christian make it abundantly clear that I am not the only person who feels alienated from the church community. 

Millennials are to blame for falling church attendance, according to much that I have read. Their parents were already beginning to have a lackadaisical attitude towards church, and now millennials are too busy, too lazy, too self-centred, and too focused on things like social media and self-care to attend church.  Much energy is being put into trying to bring millennials back to church, which is maybe part of the reason that some churches are becoming much less church-like and less Christian, and more like  social clubs.  Except that it isn’t working.  Churches are, by and large, failing in their weak attempts at being relevant.

Rachel Held Evans was a millennial, evangelical rebel, a popular cultural icon among young Christians, who died suddenly several months ago.  In the introduction to her book Searching for Sunday, she outlined issues that millennials have with church.  She wrote:

“We’re tired of the culture wars, tired of Christianity getting entangled with party politics and power.  Millennials want to be known by what we’re for... not just for what we’re against. We don’t want to choose between science and religion or between our intellectual integrity and our faith.  Instead, we long for our churches to be safe places to doubt, to ask questions, and to tell the truth, even when it’s uncomfortable.  We want to talk about the tough stuff – biblical interpretation, religious pluralism, sexuality, racial reconciliation, and social justice – but without predetermined conclusions or simplistic answers....

… when our gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered friends aren’t welcome at the table, then we don’t feel welcome either, and... not every young adult gets married or has children, so we need to stop building our churches around categories and start building them around people.... [C]ontrary to popular belief, we can’t be won back with hipper worship bands, fancy coffee shops, or pastors who wear skinny jeans....

… Millennials aren’t looking for a hipper Christianity... we’re looking for a truer Christianity, and more authentic Christianity.” (xiii-xiv – emphasis is mine)

I’m not a millennial, but that sounds like the kind of church community that I want to be part of.  A church that is authentically and unapologetically Christian, with space to explore the deeper questions of life. 

We need to re-evaluate what “church” and “worship” should mean.  Worship is the very heart of our understanding and practice of our Christian beliefs.  We need to rediscover the sacred, the mystery and the value of worship.  We can and should learn from other faiths and spiritual practices, and in fact, Christians throughout history have adopted and adapted many practices from other faiths.  We should work together with other faith groups to create a world of respect and love and acceptance.  But I am Christian, and I want to worship regularly in a Christian church that upholds Christian faith traditions.  I want a church that teaches what it means to live authentically.  I want a church that takes its worship seriously and expects its congregation to take it seriously.  I want a church where the leaders are unapologetically Christians, not atheists or wishy washy spiritualists, who are dedicated to helping other Christians learn about the faith and live out their faith. 

I don’t think I’m the only one.