Finding Church

It has been almost two years since my wife and I decided to pack our spiritual bags and leave our church. After more than twenty years of serving, worshipping, and living in that community it was a painful, gut-wrenching decision. It had become clear, though, that we were on a divergent path from the rest of leadership and the bulk of those who made up the body. At some point, our paths split into two and we began veering away from everyone else. At first, it was no big deal, we stayed close, but as we kept walking the distance between us became greater and greater and it was clear that the two paths were not coming back together. So, we said our goodbyes and chose to walk alone in the hopes that our path would join with another group that was willing to take us in and let us tag along.

At the time there was a part of me that wanted to just keep walking alone. There was a part of me that wanted to walk away from church completely. Part of the divergent path consisted of disillusionment with what the church had become and how far it was from what it ought to be. I didn’t want to just leave a church, I wanted to leave the church. I wanted to walk that divergent path off into the sunset and not deal with the mess anymore.

I couldn’t do that of course. As good as that sounded inside my head, in my heart I knew that walking alone was no solution. As much as I wanted to walk alone, I also wanted others to walk with me. I know that sounds like a contradictory statement, but when my path began veering away from the well-worn path that everyone else was on, it was not so much about being rebellious as it was exploring. I was doing a lot wondering out loud. I was questioning and pondering about what could be and what should be. I wanted others to join me in that, but I had no takers. We were too busy trying to figure out how to survive a tricky transition in pastoral staff and how to rebound from declining attendance. There was a large group trying to maneuver us back to “how things used to be,” and I couldn’t get on board. I felt like I spent a lot of time talking mostly to myself. When I stepped down from leadership, citing spiritual unhealthiness, I was criticized for leaving more work for others to do. As our paths grew farther apart my laments of spiritual struggles seemed to fall on deaf ears. So, even before I left physically, I felt like I was already gone.

I recently finished Barbara Brown Taylor’s book Leaving Church and came across a paragraph that summarized how I felt when we decided to leave, and to a large extent still feel today:

“All these years later, the way many of us are doing church is broken and we know it, even if we do not know what to do about it. We proclaim the priesthood of all believers while we continue living with hierarchical clergy, liturgy, and architecture. We follow a Lord who challenged the religious and political institutions of his time while we fund and defend our own. We speak and sing of divine transformation while we do everything in our power to maintain our equilibrium.”

While that summarized how I often feel about the church, it is the next sentence that explains why I could never walk away completely.

“If redeeming things continue to happen to us in spite of these deep contradictions in our life together, then I think that is because God is faithful even when we are not.”

As I read Leaving Church, I was reminded of what I was looking for when we walked away from church. I was not looking for perfection from the church, I was looking for an admission that we didn’t have it right and that we could do better, and that doing it better didn’t necessarily mean returning to the “glory days” of how things used to be and it wasn’t about making decisions based on fear of failure. I wanted others to explore the idea that church success might be less about ensuring our own survival and more about risking everything because serving and being obedient to a great God is worth it. Some use that last sentence as an excuse to wallow in our imperfections. I take as a license to try bold things. God’s grace is not a reason for complacency, it is a reason for bravery. God’s grace should not foster safety in the known, it should spark an insatiable desire to explore what is not known. The church is not an institution that needs protection, it is a weapon of war that uses love to break through the gates of hell.

It is an ironic truth in life that we often understand some things better only when we leave them or lose them. There is something about separation that clears our vision. It is stepping out of the trees so you can see the forest. But clearer vision is relatively useless if you just keep looking from the outside in. At some point, you need to walk back into the mess and trust God’s grace to hold you up. There is that first step that must happen where you move from what is to what should be, knowing that you might not ever get there, but trusting that God will honor every imperfect step that is taken for his glory.

I’ve been looking at the forest for a while now. It’s a nice view, but the trees are calling. There are some people welcoming me to walk with them into the imperfection and it is time to start walking. I think that I am learning redemption is not found in the mountaintop view of the forest; it is found along the meandering path in the trees.