church.
I put on my sweater dress and Frye boots
filled my travel mug with coffee and a generous pour of heavy whipping cream
bundled my baby
and slammed the car door shut, 10 minutes later than Jonny wanted to leave.
The first Sunday–our foray into finding a new church family.
And I sat in the pew with a smirk in my heart.
What’s my deal?
I keep wondering, wondering…
“Why do I go to church?”
The sermons.
“But I can watch Driscoll or Chandler on my laptop, in my own comfy bed.”
OK, the community.
“I’m social. I can just make nice friends.”
But there’s a deeper level of commitment within a church body. There’s the week-by-week structure, the mercy meals, the Bible studies…
(By the way…if church is all about knowing and being known…how does that work in a small town, where you don’t want to tell the wrong person the wrong thing? Not that I need to be all, ‘My name is Charlie and these are my problems’, but I want to be real with people. How does that work? How can I trust?)
I blame church for making me a dumb sheep in my late teens and early twenties. In my heart, I wish I’d just sinned with relish and vigor instead of following a set of beliefs I didn’t fully embrace. I’d rather have been MYSELF.
(But I know that’s ridiculous. Being a dumb sheep kept me safe, and it’s my own fault I was dumb, not the church’s.)
I don’t want to take stands on things, such as gay marriage, etc. It makes me feel like a jerk.
I associate church with Victorianism (just google the criticism to Mark Driscoll’s new book on marriage…)
And…I don’t really feel like writing about it anymore. In some ways, I feel like I’m just beating the church when it’s down–demanding it to be something it simply can’t.
Bottom line:
I HAVE A BABY AND I NEED TO FIGURE MY STUFF OUT.
If only we could follow Lucy’s example and poop our pants loudly, right when the pastor starts to pray and it’s quiet…metaphorically speaking.
No facade there.
Wish me luck in the search…
Oh boy, do I hear you! I’ve struggled with finding a church I love (okay, even like) in KC, and that forces me to define what is important to me (important: people in my age bracket, less important: hymns vs. praise choruses) and what hills I’m willing to die on. It’s also revealed to me things that I long for, and thought I could be reasonably happy without. When it comes down to it though, and I’m lying in bed on Sunday morning, debating over whether to get up and go to church or roll over and go back to sleep, I remind myself that church is a discipline. It’s good for me, just like oatmeal and stomach crunches. I hope to at some point, be in a place where going to church brings joy to my heart. I’ve been there before, I know what it looks like. But I’m not there now.
Anyway, you’ve inspired me to finish up and actually publish the post on church and my conflicting thoughts that I’ve had in my blog queue for a straight up year. Best of luck in your search.
i can’t wait to read it!
I don’t have much to add, but I didn’t want to read and not comment. So I’ll just say good luck, and it’s good to read as you process.
Interesting post! I, like all others, I’m sure, can relate.
Permit me to toss out this idea… Church really isn’t about you at all. It’s not about people, it’s not about your worship style, it’s not even about how compelling a sermon is. It’s ultimately about God – a place we go to know Him, obey Him, and love Him. And to do any of those three things, Church must be about truth. I mean what good is knowledge of God if it’s wrong (i.e., theology that is based on someone’s opinion… or worse yet, our own comfy interpretations)? And though obedience has merit in the sense that it cultivates a sense of discipline, what good is obedience to something that is false, unnecessary, or even (worst case scenario) out of alignment with God’s will. Finally, why love (unless you are a dumb sheep) something that is relative… for your own sake? So you feel spiritually fulfilled? Only until that love ceases to make you happy and then what? Love must be concrete and based in truth… or it will never be worth the sacrificial component true love requires.
So, dear woman, I’ve concluded that a search for a church is really more about a search for truth than anything else. And that search requires a new set of questions.
what helped you in your search for truth??
i understand your yearning, your longing for that answer. having such a similar church upbringing makes me see what you are dealing with. i know my journey was long, and the questioning hard and brazen. i feel like i’m finally at home in my church, i understand the purpose. i get it. i’m not telling you this to say that i have my stuff together, far from it! just to say that it takes time (doesn’t anything worth having?). and when you get there, you’ll know.
finally, these quotes, taken from a longer article about why we need Church, help me to see the bigger picture.
“But did he also have in mind that his followers would unite and form a body — specifically, His Body? Obviously, yes, and he apparently intended the gathering of Christians as his Body to be something more than a merely administrative entity, something charged with mystical significance.”
&
“…in the Nicene Creed, written in the fourth century, Christians proclaim that they believe in four things, not three: Father, Son, Holy Spirit, and Church. The Church is something we place our faith in; it must be more than a letterhead. Christians’ awareness that together they constituted something of spiritual importance dates back to Scripture and the faith’ s earliest centuries”
–Frederica Mathewes-Green