Thursday Thirteen #6: Thirteen Things I Don’t Miss About the Institutional Church

People keep ask­ing me if I miss church. How many ways can I say “no”? Not in the least. So here are thir­teen of the things I specif­i­cally do not miss about being a mem­ber of the insti­tu­tional church.

1. Giv­ing up end­less hours of my life every week per­form­ing var­i­ous types of ser­vice for the con­gre­ga­tion. How in the world did I do it all? That’s the biggest mys­tery. Given how busy I am, I can’t under­stand how I man­aged to donate so many hours every sin­gle week.

2. Get­ting up early on Sun­day morn­ings. This past Sun­day I slept until almost 10:00 a.m. Wow, did that feel great or what? (I don’t recall being out of bed any Sun­day since the last time I went to church before 9:00 a.m.)

3. Sit­ting through a long, ram­bling ser­mon that had no rel­e­vance to my life or the issues I face.

4. Recit­ing the same liturgy week after week after week after week after week after week after week after week after week after week after week …

5. Recit­ing any­thing — liturgy, litany, creed, prayer, what­ever — en masse. Now it can be said: I always hated that. Always felt stu­pid stand­ing there recit­ing that stuff like a robot. Never could under­stand how any­one could find any mean­ing in doing it.

6. The hor­rific organ-playing. I shud­der when I remem­ber the myr­iad ways the organ­ist could find to com­pletely, utterly butcher some of the most beau­ti­ful music ever writ­ten. To that indi­vid­ual, every song was a march. Ever heard “Onward, Chris­t­ian Sol­diers”? That’s how every song was played. With just that much emo­tion. No, I’m not kid­ding and I’m cer­tainly not exaggerating.

7. The dis­ap­point­ment fol­lowed by anger I would feel each week when I reviewed the cal­en­dar of activ­i­ties only to dis­cover that there still was no Bible study of any sort sched­uled at a time when a typ­i­cal “work­ing stiff” like me could attend.

8. The dis­ap­point­ment fol­lowed by anger I would feel each week when I reviewed the cal­en­dar of activ­i­ties only to dis­cover that there were still two Bible stud­ies sched­uled dur­ing the work­day: The “Men’s Bible Study” and the “Women’s Bible Study.” Why is it that so many Chris­tians think they can’t study the Bible with mem­bers of the oppo­site gender?

9. The dis­ap­point­ment fol­lowed by anger I would feel each week when I reviewed the cal­en­dar of activ­i­ties only to dis­cover that there still weren’t any classes being offered exam­in­ing issues of social jus­tice, per­sonal devel­op­ment or impor­tant soci­etal issues. (See #3)

10. The shame and embar­rass­ment I would feel each week when I would walk into the sanc­tu­ary, look around and real­ize that there was still no diver­sity there.

11. The sex­ist, misog­y­nis­tic atti­tude of both the mem­bers and the leadership.

12. The shame and humil­i­a­tion I would feel each time there was an assem­bly or con­fer­ence of the denom­i­na­tion attended by mem­bers of the con­gre­ga­tion and/or the pas­tor because I knew that their votes would prob­a­bly be far dif­fer­ent than mine were I to serve as a vot­ing del­e­gate. I also cringed at the thought of the big­oted, homo­pho­bic and narrow-minded remarks those peo­ple were most likely mak­ing, allegedly in their capac­ity as my rep­re­sen­ta­tives, not just to the assem­bly or con­fer­ence at large, but also to indi­vid­ual mem­bers of con­gre­ga­tions. Why would their com­men­tary be any dif­fer­ent in those set­tings than it was at the local level?

13. The cof­fee. It was hor­ri­ble, so if I was serv­ing at both ser­vices, I made a Star­bucks run dur­ing the break.

Thurs­day Thirteen

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