Entry #21
This series was originally published on my socials in 2021. My beliefs and opinions have changed in some ways since then, but these words are still meaningful and relevant to who I am and what I believe today.
About fifteen years ago, I was in the throes of my first (or first adult) existential crisis.
I was on summer break from my Church of Christ college. It was the summer after I was a counselor at a Church of Christ camp. And I was currently serving as a children's ministry intern at, you guessed it, a Church of Christ.
I was meeting a high school girl for lunch I'd connected with who had just recently gone on a youth retreat, chatting about the church drama that had ensued at said retreat.
"So a few of the youth group kids were sitting around a campfire and Brandon had brought his guitar, and he got it out and was just messing around on it. He was playing a bunch of pop music that we all knew and we were laughing and singing along. Well then," she paused for dramatic effect, "he started playing a worship song."
She looked at me, eyes wide, waiting for my horror. It didn't come, so she continued.
"Well, then some kids started singing along, but then a bunch of kids were, like, looking around trying to figure out what to do. A couple of kids walked away and then an adult came and took his guitar and it became this whole thing."
I was 20 at the time. Young enough to think everything I grew up being taught had to be true, while simultaneously reaching the stage of, "THIS SH*T IS CRAZY."
(For those of you confused, the Church of Christ denomination classically believed-many still do-that worshipping with instruments is not biblical. You would think I'd be able to tell you why, reference the verse or something, but I don't. It wasn't ever really explained to me in depth, just ... understood.)
I looked at her and said, "So, you're telling me, that a high school kid was singing songs about girls and love and breakups and that was totally fine, but as soon as he started using his guitar to WORSHIP GOD everyone was like, 'WHOA WHOA WHOA!!'"
We sat there for a while and talked. I tried to be sensitive to her feelings, knowing this 15-year-old only believed what her parents had raised her to believe, but mostly feeling insecure about my place—how can I be honest about how utterly ridiculous I think this is without overstepping my bounds (and losing my internship).
The people pleaser in me didn't want her parents mad at me and the Good Church of Christ girl wondered if I should be feeling righteous indignation about this. Am I allowed to think that what he did was okay? What does that say about my standing in the Church of Christ? Does this mean I don't belong here anymore?
A few years later, I got married and started going to a Baptist church ... for the worship. There was a small part of me that wondered if I would go to Hell for it, but the bigger part of me really enjoyed worshiping God with a band. So shoot me.
I really felt like I was stepping away from legalism and into this world of total liberation. I mean, a Baptist church? Singing with a DRUM SET? We didn't tell my grandparents.
But the deeper I got into the SBC, the more I realized I just left one set of legalism for another, one set of dysfunctional power trips for another, one form of theological warfare for another, no matter the good intentions.
I'm weary of people arguing about whether you can use a guitar to worship God or not.
I'm weary of people arguing about whether you can use an overhead projector to put words on a screen.
I'm weary of people arguing about whether women can speak or pray or, GASP, preach from the pulpit.
I'm weary of scripture being used to suffocate, confine, traumatize, and exclude.
And it was all in the pursuit of being a "biblical church," which seems like such a noble, spiritual, lofty pursuit.
But one that only seems to detract from the whole purpose of the actual church of the Bible: tell the world the Good News of Jesus, the most inclusive, radically loving, religious-culture-flipping, friend of sinners there ever was.
So these last few years when the arguments began to multiply, when all of a sudden I could just see the vitriol sitting right there in my news feed everyday, it was like my church PTSD kicked in and I screamed,
"I CAN'T DO THIS ANYMORE. I CAN'T CARE ABOUT THIS STUFF ANYMORE. WHEN IMMIGRANT FAMILIES ARE BEING RIPPED APART AND CHRISTIAN LGBTQ+ TEENS ARE KILLING THEMSELVES AND IT SEEMS LIKE THE CHURCH CARES MORE ABOUT GETTING THE RIGHT PRESIDENT IN THE WHITE HOUSE THAN IT DOES ABOUT LOVING THEIR NEIGHBOR. GOD, WHERE ARE YOU? I CAN'T FIND YOU. I CAN'T FIND YOU IN YOUR CHURCH."
So here we are. Wading through the mess. Still messy but healing—healing by knowing others are asking and have always asked the same questions as me. To know God is bigger than an institution. He works outside its walls and reveals himself in other ways besides a daily Quiet Time or an emotional-but-theologically-questionable worship song or a fiery sermon.
I've found him in sweet moments with my kids, in unexpected friendships, in shedding guilt, in moments of quiet, in long hot showers, in loving my husband for who he is not what he should be, in nature, in conversations over yummy food, in welcoming the hurting into our home, in connecting with others without an agenda and seeing God's goodness in every human being, in not living in fear of the Big Bad World who's out to get me and my kids, and, mostly, in freedom.
I'm still processing. Just here to say this feels like the upswing.
