A Reckoning.

 We gather here, we line up weeping in a sunlit room…

Even on my worst day, did I deserve, babe, all the hell you gave me

Cause I loved you, I swear I loved you, until my dying day

My entire life has been so entwined with the evangelical Christian church I can’t even really begin to pick apart what is mine and what is the church’s, especially from my early years.  I went to private Christian school from preschool through my senior year of high school.  I then went to Liberty University for my college education.  All the while, and since, deeply involved in the local church community, primarily the Presbyterian Church in America.   When I was young, this meant Sunday school and morning and evening church services, then as a teenager, all of the above plus youth group.  Then in adulthood, weekly church services and memberships in various life groups and bible studies.  Everything about my worldview was informed by what the church told me I should believe.  There was never a choice of what political party I would align with.  It was a given.   I served, I worked in the nursery, taught Sunday School classes, joined women’s conferences and hosted life groups in my home. 

We gather stones, never knowing what they’ll mean

Some to throw, some to make a diamond ring 

You know I didn’t want to have to haunt you

But what a ghostly scene

But I always had questions. 

Throughout my college years I often left our thrice weekly convocations riddled with guilt.

So much of what was expected felt like a weight pulling me under.  Where I was told to have joy, I felt drudgery.  I did all of the things.  I set my alarm for 5 am to have a quiet bible and prayer time before the kids were up.  I fought for a family devotional time that always felt like I was just checking a box.  When a life group meeting would be unexpectedly cancelled I felt a deep sense of relief.  Sunday mornings I never seemed to grow out of the habit of mentally checking off each line item on the bulletin until I was one step closer to the freedom the benediction would bring.  

I read the books.  I was The Power of  a Praying Wife , Living the Cross Centered Life, Screwtape Letters, Mere Christianity and many more.  

I knew the Bible. I mean, I REALLY knew the Bible.  During my junior year of high school we had to memorize the entire book of James.  I took more Bible classes in college than classes in my major (ok, that is a lie but it’s close).  I regularly read the Bible through, always hoping for that spark, that I would love to be in scripture like I was supposed to.  Like it seemed like everyone around me loved it.  But it was ok.  This was who I was.  I knew it was who I was supposed to be, and I was so grateful for my identity as a Christian.

And I can go anywhere, anywhere I want

JUST NOT HOME 

And yet, she persisted.  She persisted for so long and kept waiting for her faithfulness to make it all feel right.  Instead, as the years went on, it only got worse.   The questions that nagged never went away, the suspicions, the “what-ifs”.  Around the time of Covid, I began to feel like such an outsider.  For the first time my worldview was beginning to differ from those I was in church community with.  I couldn’t understand how we could all love the same God but see things so vastly different.  Walking into church, I felt like I didn’t belong, and I didn’t really want to belong.  Singing the hymns I had always sung felt wrong.  When I tried to pray I felt like a fraud talking to a God I wasn’t even sure I believed existed.  Now I realize that I was rejecting the evangelical movement, not God, but at the time, in my mind, I didn’t see a difference.  And so, for a time, I walked away from all of it.

I didn’t have it in myself to go with grace

And you’re the hero flying around saving face

The best way for me to describe that year half of deconstructing is that I was angry.  As I began to pull threads, the whole basis of my faith came apart.  And I began to ask – where the hell did all of these expectation, rules and requirements in the modern church come from?  If you walk into any given church on a Sunday morning, there were so many things that looked nothing like what was described in scripture and yet had become the standard for what church was meant to look like.   And there is nothing wrong with a lot of these things (heck, my kids benefitted from over the top children’s programs as much as the next child) but it was just one more thread that had me questioning what was truly from God, and what was created by the evangelical movement.

I felt anger towards the “true love waits” movement that told me if I crossed the line in my physical relationship with boys, I was used goods and had disappointed God.

I was angry at the leaders who I had let speak into my life for years as ultimate authority, when I found out they stood by while multiple friends of mine were sexually abused by men in power in the church.

I was angry at the hatred I saw all around me, and the silence from many pulpits in response to addressing it. 

I have a lot more topics that I was angry about, but those are future blog posts.  

It was at this time that I started to realize that I wasn’t alone.  This was when I first heard the word “deconstruction”.  I know it has since become THE buzzword for those who are working through their beliefs and backgrounds, but at the time it felt like a lifeline when I was drowning in my own questions.  For years I looked at the dangling threads that didn’t tie neatly into the evangelical package that I had been raised in, and I refused to tug too hard, for fear that it would all unravel.  At the time I was scared, after all, what could possibly be more risky then asking questions that, if I was wrong, meant eternal damnation?  When you grow up as an evangelical kid, that means your childhood is often spent asking Jesus into your heart more nights than not, altar calls “just in case” and constantly checking and rechecking to make sure your eternity will be heaven and not hell.  And then, one day, you decide that maybe you don’t believe it at all?  That was by far one of the most frightening things I had ever done. 

And I still talk to you (when I’m screaming at the sky)

And when you can’t sleep at night (you hear my stolen lullabies)

But when something was going on in my life, I still felt the pull to talk to God.  I knew He was there, but I realized I needed to find Him, not the Him that is through the lens of the evangelical church.  And then, the healing began.  I learned to control the anger, but more than that I decided that my relationship with God was mine, it didn’t belong to the evangelical church.  So, I walked away from many of the theologies and principles I grew up on, and back into the arms of a loving God.

What exactly do I believe?  For the first time in my life I can comfortably admit that I don’t totally know.  And I am ok with that.  I do believe in an all loving God.  I do not believe that the book we call The Bible is the complete, inspired, inerrant word of God.  I believe the God who created this universe, didn’t have to do it in a way that fits neatly into the collection of stories and histories that were, thousands and millions of years later, made into a book.  I believe God loves all of us, regardless of how He made us – whether straight, gay, bisexual or somewhere in between.  I don’t believe He put us on earth to give each of us a finite number of years to succeed or fail at choosing heaven or hell.

I also believe I’m incredibly grateful to have walked away from the guilt and obligation that hung over my life for so many years.   I believe Taylor Swift never fails to write a lyric that will bring me to tears.  I’ve cried many times listening to “My Tears Ricochet”.  I’m grateful for the structure they gave me to share my journey through this post.

Shoutout to a couple of amazing resources that I have used in the last year as I’ve pieced my views back together: 

1 – The Exvangelicals – Loving, Living and Leaving the White Evangelical Church by Sarah McCammon. Never have a highlighted so many passages in an e-book.  I felt like I could have written many parts myself.

2 – Inspired- Slaying Giants, Walking on Water and Loving the Bible Again by Rachel Held Evans.  Again, I had my pen in my hand constantly highlighting passages.  This was just so good.  This was a book recommended to me by the pastor at a church we have been visiting occasionally. It was so refreshing to hear the perspective of a biblical scholar who so eloquently put into words the nagging sense that was so often in the back of my brain when I was reading the Bible. 

3 – The What If Podcast by Glenn Siepert.  Again, a true theologian with a deep history in Christian education who has gone through the same process I have and asked some amazing questions and had some enlightening conversations.  

*I want to be very clear that I have am grateful to my parents for what they tried to do in giving me a faith basis to grow up in.  And I love them to the moon and back.