Goodbye Church?

I Stumbled upon some blog posts today that I really feel like sharing and then adding my own voice to.

http://marccortez.com/2011/06/14/why-we-didnt-divorce-our-church-even-though-we-wanted-to/

(For this /\ I read all three of the articles he links to, they are short and oh so fascinating)

http://marccortez.com/2011/06/14/why-we-didnt-divorce-our-church-even-though-we-wanted-to/

They are about leaving church, which is something I am very, very familiar with.

I just want to get some stuff off my chest and basically just tell my story.

I have been leaving churches since I was ten years old.

Both of my parents were heavily involved in church "leadership" and "ministry."

We went to church twice on Sundays and also on Wednesday evenings.

It seemed to completely define our lives.

...That is, until I was ten years old and my parents decided to leave the church because they felt that it was too preoccupied with issues of image instead of being focused on the love of Jesus.

We went to another church for three months but left because that church was trying to scare people into faith with end times theology. I remember one Sunday, watching a women cry on my mother's shoulder because she was worried the world would end before she could figure out how to set things right with Jesus.

After that we started a home church. That was pretty awesome because sincerity is always very obvious when it is positioned within spontaneity. When there is no routine of worship and people are still singing praise songs for Jesus, holding prayer meetings, and talking about the Bible it becomes obvious that they are not doing these things because it is all they know and they are afraid to leave behind tradition and routine, but because God is real and they have an intense desire to embrace a life lived with Him.

At least this is how that home church impacted my own life. Before then, I had just accepted God and church and prayer and the Bible. I didn't ask too many questions about it all because I was so busy questioning the rest of life, I was only 11 after all and there was a lot to think about.

However this home church made God seem real and I kept thinking about how I wanted to know him  better.

Good intentions went rotten though  and that church lost its focus on God. It became about drinking and eating and hanging out and my parents stopped going.

I was 13 years old by this time and I had questions and curiosities that my parents alone could not satisfactorily answer, so I started going to different churches and youth groups all by myself. At the same time I started going to public school for the first time (before that I had been homeschooled). Those who know me well will not be surprised that my eccentricities were not welcomed by most of my peers. I finally found acceptance in a group of agnostic, intellectual students who procrastinated their work and spent most of their times doing drugs, but they were the smartest most loving people I had ever met. They accepted me despite my beliefs and didn't ask me to change my values or my life style so I didn't press the issue either, but the more I hung out with them the more questions I had about my own faith. These questions were not welcomed at my  youth group. I was known as a rebellious frustration and a pointless instigator, they somehow glossed over my sincere confusion. The worst thing was that when my Dad died no one supported me. Angry with things that didn't make sense and disappointed by people who didn't love me I cut all ties with church and youth group by the time I was 17 and I didn't go to church at all for two years.

Then I had this moment in a field after getting in a huge fight with a family member. I ran outside balling and hating myself. Then all of a sudden I felt like really loved, but no one was in the field, so it must have been God. I realized that if grace meant I was forgiven then it meant all the church people who had hurt me were forgiven too. It's like the blog posts I started with were saying about how churches are broken because they are full of broken people. In that moment I started to forgive, but man was I still scared to go to church.

I was moving to school in half a year and I found myself wondering if I should find a church or not, I decided not to because I didn't want to deal with people telling me what to do and what to think, I wanted to be free to struggle through my own journey of confusion. I wanted my growth to be my own rather than just me learning to repeat what others told me was true. However, life is surprising at times and after going to the church that meets on my campus just once so I could find out who the Christians were in order to avoid them I made friends with people who kept bringing me back. The articles I posted at first talk about why people leave and why they stay. In the past 11 years I have left 5 churches.

Other than the first church which I stayed in for ten years, the longest time I have gone to a church is the approximate two years for which my family attended the home church. That's also about how long I have been going to my church here at school. Every year I tell my friends I'm going to leave. One of those blogs said that churches are broken because they are full of broken people and I agree with that, but its hard to keep going when everyone forgets the truth in a different way and is hurtful in a different way and messes up in a different way. You're never going to find a perfect church because that would mean a perfect group of people, but I think it is really important to have these conversations and to acknowledge the struggles that people in the church are dealing with and the failures of the church. This conversation is important because nothing can get better if you do not acknowledge what is broken.