Last Saturday I spent the afternoon grieving the death of Rachel Held Evans. My morning had been very productive... 9 boxes to Goodwill... but I had more I wanted to accomplish until I sat down mid afternoon because my back hurt and opened Twitter. Rachel had been sick for a few weeks and I knew enough in the medical world that things really could go either way with the very limited information shared... but once the news hit my Twitter it was like a hard hit. I never met Rachel, I had honestly really only started to get to know her in the past year from different podcasts I listen to. Its no secret that I have really wrestled with the American church the past few years... I wouldn't say my faith... I have believed in God through this all... but I have massively struggled with feeling like the church is more married to Donald Trump then the Bible (remember, swing voter here... I voted Republican in the primary)... and thats where I found Rachel... a group of Christians who struggled with this like me... who loved their local church but wondered a bit about it all being more of a Republican social club to spew political ideas wrapped in twisted Bible verses (I am going to state very clearly here that my church does not talk politics from the pulpit, this was never the case of this coming from the stage at my church... however I walked up upon plenty of hallway conversations and facebook rants...) that I started to feel like, even if no one directly said it, that I didn't fit in, I wasn't falling in line. It feels like often these days there is little room for conversation around things (I can be guilty of that too) and more of a statement in every section of society of in or out based on thinkings and ideas about even small topics. It starts to feel like you have to have an opinion on everything and that the worst thing in the world would be for your opinion to change... in the face of doubt double down.
I had not read one of Rachel's books though, so when she was hospitalized I bought on and started to read it... this morning I read some more... this passage struck a cord with me:
“We were, as they say, “plugged in” to a church. To be
plugged in to a church is to be wired into a highly choreographed,
interconnected system of relationships, programs, and events that
together produce a society complex enough to put on a decent Christmas
pageant. One’s function in the collective is determined by age, gender,
and marital/procreative status. So as a young married woman with no
children, my job was to host wedding and baby showers, co-lead a
newlywed small group, make casseroles for potlucks, and inform people
who had no business asking that Dan and I would start a family “in God’s
perfect time.”
I have witnessed firsthand how such
a network can perform miracles: a month’s worth of dinners for the mom
undergoing chemo, a driveway full of men ready to haul furniture the
minute the moving van pulls in, twenty-four hours of prayer and rotating
visits during a complicated surgery, fully stocked cupboards for
widowers, and hours of free childcare for struggling parents. These are
the quotidian signs and wonders of a living, breathing church, and they
are powerful and important and real. But to a woman for whom the mere
mention of a “ladies’ tea” elicits a nervous sweat, sometimes being
plugged in felt a bit like being assimilated. There were rules in this
society, particularly for women, and I still hadn’t learned my lesson
about avoiding the topic of eternal damnation at baby showers, showers
that were now, inexplicably, under my care. I was better suited for
leading a Bible study or theological discussion, but those things
happened at the men’s breakfasts (because, apparently, only men like
theology and breakfast foods), so instead I constructed diaper cakes and
mixed punch and listened to women exchange gruesome and detailed birth
stories before turning to me to sing, “So, when can we expect a baby
Evans?” ~ Searching for Sunday
In college some of my friends were at a place where they wanted to have theological conversations... I was still in the place however of feeling like I needed to have the "right" answer but I felt like I didn't have enough answers to be in those conversations... I didn't understand that those conversations help you grow. I hate conflict so those conversations with people with different ideas felt like a debate even though it was healthy conversation.
But the last several years has made me think of community and dynamics of that...
When I say I grew up in the church I mean rather literally... we were not a show up to church when it is convenient family... we were more of the family who was there all the time... Saturday night, Wednesday night, every night of the week during musical season, and feeling like we lived there when we build our new church building. Sure I had neighborhood friends and school friends... but true community was found at church.
When I went to college my true community was found in the student ministry that Brent and I were a part of. For a girl who felt a bit like a let down when she decided to follow a boy to a liberal arts college... I am SO glad that I did... and not just for the boy but also because it stretched and grew my faith in ways I never imagined.
But the last few years while I have still had community in the Church (our church has been amazing at supporting us) my community there does not look like how it did when I was growing up and it doesn't look like college either. While I see some benefits to that (the 90's evangelical culture had a firm wall between sacred and secular) sometimes it also means that I feel like I am missing some of that.
Which has made me spend time the last few years wondering about community...
Why do a we have...
Bars
Country Clubs
Philanthropic social groups
Clubs
Community!
I mean these groups serve additional purposes in addition to community but community is what causes people to often stay... it causes people to feel like they belong.
Community is often dysfunctional... people are great at bringing dysfunction even if they don't mean to....
So I have been pondering the question for a while if it is wrong to find community in these places instead of in church...
My ideas right now look like
-I think it is a problem if you are using those places to replace your church community. If you are spending your Sunday mornings (or whenever your group of believers gathers) someplace else to get community elsewhere I think that is an issue.
-I don't think God intended the only place that you get community would be church... otherwise He would have set up for you to only ever be in church.
-I think that the church is bigger then what happens inside its walls
-I think it would be wrong to move more in the direction of putting more walls up between people who are in the church and those who currently are not... if the church is just sitting around waiting for people to wander inside on their own then the church is failing. That also goes that if your church's only plan for getting people inside the walls is with shaming facebook posts then the mark is also being missed. I really feel iffy on christian only things like schools, insurance companies and stores... I think we often set those up to make ourselves a "safe" little bubble at the expense of other people's salvation.
-I think there are some things churches do in the name of community that really just is a social status show and that is a problem.
-I think that if God is truly all powerful then there is not any limits on what He can use to draw people to Him... but don't get that confused with God causing harm and bringing evil into the world to get people to submit... for God to be God He can not be evil.
-I think we often live in fake/safe community without ever really being known by anyone. I think this was occurring long before social media... infact I said about a year ago that there were some people that I follow online that I wish I could go back to just knowing them from casual social passings instead of knowing what they post of social media because that has now tainted my views on that person (and I am SURE there are people who think like that about me). We think people know us but really they just know our life circumstances.
-I think sometimes the church stinks at the balance between fluff and depth... we like to go between dropping 100s of easter eggs from a helicopter to yelling on street corners that people are going to burn in hell. In both of those extremes real community doesn't happen.
-I think the Church also has not always looked like the Americanized version that it looks like here in the states right now even though we tend to think that the church must have always looked white and evangelical.
I know I am not the only person wrestling with these things... I know there are churches all over America that are wrestling with these very same thoughts.
I don't have any huge great conclusions yet on all of this...
and that is ok!
The wrestle is ok!
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