It’s been close to a year since I left the church I had attended for 17 years. That parting also marked my parting with conservative Evangelical Christianity after 35 years, with which I’d been involved since I was 5 years old. (Others still in Evangelicalism have documented its current problems, so I won’t open that particular can of worms).
I attended a fundamentalist, King James only, independent baptist school, from Kindergarten through 8th grade. I attended conservative Baptist churches all through childhood, my teenage years, college, and my adult life. That was the only world I knew, and I spent most of that time thinking that Christians outside of that world were lesser Christians if they were Christian at all.
It’s amazing how much reading the Bible for yourself can open your mind. As I studied the Bible, read more about the history of the Church and Christianity, and prayed and meditated on what I’d learned, I became more and more dissatisfied and disillusioned with the tradition in which I had lived for so long: the legalism, the anti-intellectualism, the politicizing of Christianity (good Christians are Republicans, you know), the heavy emphasis on sin and law and little emphasis on grace, the focus on all the things Christians aren’t supposed to do and little focus on what Christians are supposed to do, i.e. love the Lord your God and love your neighbor as yourself.
The last couple of years I spent at my former church were particularly trying for me. Lest you think I was one of those church members that just showed up on Sunday and parked it in a pew, here’s some of the things I did at that church:
- Sound engineer for Sunday morning services, Christmas, and easter programs for 17 years
- Prayer room volunteer
- Taught an adult sunday school class
- Taught multiple sunday night discipleship training classes
- Led a reading group
- Led a FAITH evangelism team
In short, I was involved. But as the years passed I had more an more conflicts with other church members. A few examples:
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The college class at my Church put on a “Creation vs. Evolution” seminar. (I’ll let you guess which side they came down on). In the Q&A session after the first class I asked some very hard questions, questions the college students were unable to answer. I suggested that just maybe Genesis 1 and 2 were not meant to be literal, scientific accounts of creation. The next week they brought in a guy who taught an adult Sunday school class at the church. After the class session he proceeded to grill me for 45 minutes on whether I was really saved or not.
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I taught a 16 week Sunday school class on the book of Revelation. It went over really well, and the minister of education agreed that it would make a good Sunday night discipleship training class. At the fourth session of that Sunday night class, someone in the class, apropos of what I don’t remember, stated that he didn’t see how anyone could “believe in evolution.” I replied that I thought that the scientific evidence was pretty strong for evolution, that Christians held many differing views on the subject, and that it wasn’t an issue on which someone’s salvation depended. A couple of people in the class asked me respectful questions, which I answered, then steered the discussion back to Revelation. I didn’t think anything else about it until I got a call from the minister of education the next day saying that he needed to meet with me. Some members of my class had gone to the pastor and complained about what I said about evolution. (The complainers didn’t come directly to me, as Jesus commanded – Mat 18:15. Funny thing, that). I had a good discussion with the pastor, we agreed to disagree on the topic, and that was that. Except that half of my class didn’t show up for the last four sessions. (And it was the younger half of the class. The older, 55 and up, group stayed. Go figure). One of the students in that class wouldn’t even meet my gaze when we passed in the hallway at church after that.
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Got called into a meeting with the associate pastor because someone had seen me drinking a beer (horrors!) with my hot wings at a local restaurant. The complainant didn’t come directly to me (again), but they thought such behavior was inappropriate for someone who was a Sunday school teacher at our church.
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Got called into a meeting with the associate pastor because of a “Believers for Barack” bumper sticker on my car. (Full disclosure: I had voted for the Republican candidate for President in every election since I was old enough to vote. George W. disappointed me over the last couple of years of his term, and I was not happy with the Republican presidential ticket. Of the choices available, I thought Obama would make the better president.) Anyway, some church members took offense at my bumper sticker and went to the associate pastor to complain. (Again, didn’t come to me directly, as commanded by Jesus. See a pattern here?) One complainant was so incensed he jabbed a finger in the associate pastor’s chest and angrily exclaimed, “no person who supports that man should be allowed to teach in this church! What are you going to do about it!” The associate pastor was very nice about it and just wanted to let me know what some people were saying about me. I told him to please tell those people that I would be happy to talk with them, and he said he’d relay that message. I’ll let you guess how many people called me.
In all of the above incidents the pastor and associate pastor were very gracious to me. They never gave me an ultimatum and never condemned me. They offered suggestions and allowed us to charitably agree to disagree where needed. I have no complaints about how they treated me.
Except.
In my conversations with them, the issue of whether I was right or wrong, whether my accusers were right or wrong, whether what I was doing was biblical or not, or what was best for the Kingdom was rarely if ever brought up. Their primary concern was always, “how does your behavior reflect on this Church.” The concern was not that I had a reputation as a good Christian; it was that that my behavior reflected the image that the Church wanted to project to the community. That attitude always disturbed and saddened me.
(Over the years I had a number of people tell me, when they found out what church I attended, that I and my wife didn’t seem like “that church’s” kind of people. I think I finally came to understand what they meant).
The last couple of incidents occurred near the end of 2008. I was turning forty in a couple of months, so, probably like most people nearing that age, I was taking stock of my life. I was thinking about where I had been and where I was going in my career, my marriage, and my religious life. I was very happy with my job and my marriage, but in thinking about my religious life, one phrase kept coming up over and over again in my mind. It was from one of the Lethal Weapon movies. The situation is getting a bit heated as it does in those movies, and Murtaugh (played by Danny Glover) says:
I’m getting to old for this sh*t.
I mean, seriously! I’m almost forty and I’m still having to look over my shoulder to see who’s going to see me having a beer or glass of wine with my dinner. To worry about who’s going to think I’m not a Christian (or at least a bad Christian) because of the bumper sticker on my car. To worry about who’s going to see me going into an R-rated movie? To have to worry about someone thinking I’m going to hell because I actually learned some science, actually studied the Bible, and know that Genesis isn’t a science textbook. To have to worry about whose opprobrium I would incur because I didn’t behave like they thought a Christian ought to behave.
No. Not any more. I was done with living like that.
I’m sure that some well-meaning Christian will whine, “What about your witness?” Those things I mentioned above have jack squat to do with my witness. My witness is not to other Christians who want to enforce man-made, legalistic rules and call them “proper Christian behavior.” My “witness” is to all the unbelievers out there who need Christ’s love and God’s grace, and don’t need a set of asinine and unnecessary rules to follow. They don’t care what bumper sticker I have on my car or what I drink with my dinner. They only care that I show them Jesus and share the Gospel by loving them as Christ loved me.
I think it must have been the same for Martin Luther when he finally came to despair because he couldn’t keep all the man-made rules the Church had invented and told him he had to follow. He’d had enough, and he realized that not only was it impossible to keep all those rules, but that he didn’t have to!. That we all stand as sinners before the cross of Christ with no hope but the blood of Jesus and the Grace of God. That our job is not to be man-pleasers but God-pleasers.
“Too old for this sh*t.” Damn straight, Murtaugh.
Am I angry about all this. Yeah, maybe just a little. But darn it, I think it’s a justified anger. For all the years that Law was emphasized and Grace was minimized. For all the years that I was made to feel like I wasn’t a “good Christian” unless I followed somebody’s “rules of good behavior.” For all the years I was taught it was more important what other Christians thought about me than how well I was following Jesus’s commandments. Yeah, I think I’m allowed a little righteous anger, and maybe a little sadness for all those people who turned away or were turned away from Christianity because they weren’t offered simply love and grace but grace plus rules and regulations.
I hold no grudges, and I still love the people at my old church. I’m thankful for the good things I learned from them over the years and the good relationships I had, and still have, with some of the church members. But I couldn’t live in that environment any more.
I moved to a Lutheran church a little shy of a year ago. I’ve probably grown more there in the past year than I have in the past 10, and I’ve learned what grace really means and what it means to live under grace. But I’ve gone on long enough, and that’s a story for another time.
