Closer to Conformity with Christ … Away from the Church

“We must assess our thoughts and beliefs and reckon whether they are mov­ing us closer to con­for­mity to Christ or far­ther away from it.“
~ by John Ortberg ~

Last week, I hap­pened upon a woman I had not seen in sev­eral years. She con­tin­ues to be active in the con­gre­ga­tion in which I grew up and remained a mem­ber for many years there­after. We chat­ted for a few min­utes and then she asked, “Are you still going to _____ Church?”

“No,” I responded. “I am no longer affil­i­ated with orga­nized religion.”

“Oh!” she exclaimed. “That’s too bad! I’m sorry. Would you con­sider com­ing back to ______ Church?”

She imme­di­ately assumed that my deci­sion to dis­as­so­ci­ate myself from the patri­ar­chal church was a bad thing. She jumped to the con­clu­sion that some­thing must be wrong or some awful thing must have tran­spired if I am no longer attend­ing wor­ship serves at a par­tic­u­lar congregation.

“No,” I explained. “I am not inter­ested in being part of orga­nized reli­gion any longer.”

“Why not?” she inquired with gen­uine interest.

“Oh, for many rea­sons,” I told her. “Pri­mar­ily, the homo­pho­bia and big­otry I encoun­tered there. Not to men­tion the church pol­i­tics and focus on things that I’m not inter­ested in. I’m on a spir­i­tual path now that is lead­ing me in absolutely the right direc­tion — for me.”

She looked at me as though she had never really seen my face before, even though we’ve known each other casu­ally for at least thirty years.

“Really?” her face bright­ened. “I’m delighted to hear that.” Then she leaned close to me and said, “A lot of peo­ple are leav­ing the church and walk­ing their own path. Good for you.”

And then she was called away to con­duct the busi­ness that had brought her to the place where our paths had again crossed.

I have found that peo­ple who have attended church reg­u­larly for most or a good por­tion of their lives see church mem­ber­ship as some sort of spir­i­tual panacea. Many of those folks have never really con­sid­ered or ana­lyzed pre­cisely why they are mem­bers of a par­tic­u­lar church. It is sim­ply what they know, what they do, part of their life’s rou­tine, and they are com­fort­able in their estab­lished cus­toms. They want oth­ers to expe­ri­ence the ease with which they accept what their church teaches and develop con­fi­dence in believ­ing what they believe. Church mem­ber­ship works for those folks and they are happy.

But for oth­ers of us, church mem­ber­ship either never had much mean­ing or lost its mean­ing at some point in our lives, and we felt a call to walk a dif­fer­ent path. In my case, I tried for many, many years to derive mean­ing and sub­stance from what tran­spired in Sun­day morn­ing wor­ship ser­vices. There were moments when I came away feel­ing that the time had been well spent, but far too often, I left the church won­der­ing why I did not find rel­e­vance, com­fort, enlight­en­ment or con­tent­ment either from the mes­sages I heard there or the wor­ship expe­ri­ence itself. I thought some­thing was wrong with me so I tried harder and harder to make church mem­ber­ship have sig­nif­i­cance in my life. The harder I tried, the worse I felt.

One Sun­day morn­ing sev­eral years ago, the pas­tor was teach­ing an adult class about what the Bible says about sex­ual ori­en­ta­tion and, more par­tic­u­larly, the issue of whether gay, les­bian, bisex­ual or trans­gen­dered per­sons should be ordained and allowed to marry in the church. I had lob­bied him quite intensely to teach a multi-part Sun­day School class on the topic. I was gen­uinely inter­ested in the sub­ject mat­ter and hoped to have a pro­duc­tive, respect­ful dia­logue not only with the pas­tor, but my fel­low parish­ioners on the issue.

As you might imag­ine, the debate was extremely vig­or­ous. But the con­ver­sa­tion veered into a zone with which I was extremely uncom­fort­able and I could sense that other class mem­bers were also becom­ing increas­ingly tense as, one by one, par­tic­i­pants ratch­eted up the rhetoric of judg­ment, con­dem­na­tion, dis­trust, and revulsion.

Finally, one of the pil­lars of the con­gre­ga­tion stood to express his opin­ion. He had always kind and pleas­ant to me. He was a fam­ily man who had worked hard his entire life, raised sev­eral chil­dren, and was now thor­oughly enjoy­ing his retire­ment and time with his lovely grand­chil­dren. He had been a mem­ber of the con­gre­ga­tion for most of his life and served in numer­ous capac­i­ties through­out the years.

But on that morn­ing, he rose and said, “I know how we can solve this prob­lem of gays and les­bians in the church. It’s really quite sim­ple. We should have our church — and let them have theirs!”

With that, he sat down. The room fell totally silent. I looked at the pas­tor expec­tantly. Surely, I thought to myself, he will speak up. He will respond by talk­ing about Christ’s exam­ple of reach­ing out to all of the “unde­sir­ables” of society.

But he just stood there, say­ing noth­ing, as he sur­veyed the reac­tions of the peo­ple in the room.

Oh, come on, I thought to myself. This can’t be! He’s the pas­tor so he must be just think­ing about how to respond, search­ing for just the right words so as not to belit­tle or degrade the oth­er­wise kind-hearted and well-respected, but sadly mis­guided, elder mem­ber of the church.

And still he stood there, silent, as images of Jesus los­ing his tem­per in the tem­ple played out in my mind.

Finally, I could tol­er­ate it no more. My blood was boil­ing, my cheeks hot and flushed. I was furi­ous. But I had spo­ken out and shared my feel­ings on the topic ear­lier. And, frankly, I was afraid that if I began speak­ing again, I would voice emo­tions that I had not yet exam­ined and ana­lyzed in the quiet of my own heart. I feared being com­pletely ostra­cized because I knew that, based upon my ear­lier com­ments, I was already well on my way to being an out­cast among these fine, God-fearing, church going folks with whom I did not — could not — agree on this par­tic­u­lar topic.

So I sim­ply got up, walked out of the room and sat qui­etly by myself in the Narthex until the class was over.

The pas­tor came to me after class because he could see how upset I was. Yet he still did not speak. He just looked at me sadly with what I thought at the time was com­pas­sion. As I look back on that day now, I’m not sure that was an accu­rate assessment.

“Sep­a­rate but equal, huh? Is that what we’re preach­ing in this church?” I asked qui­etly. “Is that the note on which you let that class end after I walked out? Is that the mes­sage you left them with? Have you ever read Brown v. Board of Edu­ca­tion? It’s the same thing. Do you think that’s what Jesus would preach here today — let them have their church and us good Chris­tians will have ours? That’s not what the Jesus I know would preach. The Jesus I know hung out with the lep­ers, the out­casts, the sin­ners … the women and chil­dren. He didn’t send them to their syn­a­gogue while he stuck with the in-crowd who thought all the right thoughts and had all the right opin­ions. You just stood there. You didn’t chal­lenge him at all.”

He mum­bled some­thing about not want­ing the class to degrade into argu­ments, finger-pointing. He wanted to respect all the class mem­bers by let­ting them voice their feel­ings, right or wrong.

I just stared at him in com­plete dis­be­lief. I think that morn­ing I actu­ally saw him for the first time, even though I had known him for years.

In stand­ing silently in front of that class, he had man­aged to stand for noth­ing at all.

It took me sev­eral more years and more inci­dents like that one than I can remem­ber now to finally muster the courage to walk away from orga­nized reli­gion and seek my own spir­i­tual path. I have never been more sure of any deci­sion I have ever made. I have never been hap­pier or felt more focused upon what it truly means to live life as a believer.

I assess my thoughts and beliefs on a daily basis. I search for answers and implore the Divine Cre­ator to place and keep me in con­for­mity with Christ’s teach­ings. I lis­ten … strain­ing to hear the Spirit guid­ing me each day. I wor­ship in my own time, my own space, my own way. I never knew what it meant to truly give praise until I freed myself from the sur­round­ings that impris­oned me by forc­ing me to live within man-made bound­aries that served only to detract from the spir­i­tual nur­tur­ing I craved.

I do not stand in judg­ment of the man whose opin­ion I found repug­nant, the pas­tor who stood silent in the face of pro­fessed injus­tice and decid­edly un-Christlike behav­ior, or any­one else.

I do stand up for the prin­ci­ples and beliefs which I believe move me closer each and every day to con­for­mity with Christ and his teach­ings. I do not apol­o­gize for them. I do not hide them. I no longer hide nor immerse my true self within any insti­tu­tion or group that asks me to con­form to ways of think­ing and believ­ing that I find anti­thet­i­cal to the teach­ings of the one who died for me and all the other peo­ple who refused and refuse to con­form to the world. Only by mov­ing away from the tra­di­tional church did I dis­cover what it means to be in daily com­mu­nion and rela­tion­ship with the Divine Cre­ator. That’s how I know that I am walk­ing the right path … the path meant for me … and that I do not walk it alone.

Thanks go to Amy at In Pur­suit of Proverbs 31 for host­ing this week! Drop by and read the other par­tic­i­pants’ dis­cus­sion of this week’s quote.

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