Church is church. Church is the people. Not the building. That’s nothing new. You’ve heard it before. Wherever two or more people are gathered in his name, he is there. If that’s true, it means church can happen anywhere, anytime. Maybe we could cut the church a little more slack for its screw-ups if we didn’t rely so heavily on Sunday mornings to get our fill.
In a Texas church a young man will get up to say a few words about his pending trip to Haiti. “Christ calls us to be the salt of the earth,” he will say, “But what happens to salt when you keep it in a container? It starts to stick together. It becomes a useless clump. This is what happens in too many of our churches. We clump together as Christians, only serving each other and our building instead of spreading ourselves out as we were meant. We are the salt of the earth. Not the salt of this particular block.”
Later I will have lunch with a pastor named Bob. Bob is also from Texas. I will tell him about the salt clumping together. He will reply: “Back when the church first started it was lead by Apostles. And Apostles, what they did was build an army of believers to take out into the world. Today’s churches are lead by pastors. And pastors, they often build congregations to take out of the world and bring inside.”
Community groups, connect groups, bible study groups. I’ve never been to a church without them. I love community. In fact, I believe we will perish without it. “But too often these groups last for only a few weeks,” said a young guy in Washington named Ryan.
He didn’t like having a curriculum, but he saw past that. What he couldn’t see past was spending twelve weeks with a group of people and being expected to bond with them on some deep emotional level. “I don’t want to constantly rearrange and shuffle through friends,” he said. “I want to go through my life with the same group all year round.” It reminded me of what John Eldredge wrote in Walking With God: “You can’t just throw a random group of people together for a twelve-week study of some kind and expect them to be intimate allies.”
This young man had started his own Bible study. He decided instead of bitching about the state of church connect groups, he’d try to offer change to those around him who felt the same. A group where he wouldn’t have to take attendance, no signing-up or following a curriculum. And most importantly, anyone could come. That meant even people who didn’t go to his church. But he feared telling anyone at his church about it. He’d been going there for over three years when we met, and he was volunteering so much, falling into such a prominent position of leadership, he feared he’d be confronted and told it might look like the church was encouraging its members to start their own “unapproved” groups.
“I remember thinking, If anyone here tells me I can’t do this, I’m gone. And then I thought, What kind of environment am I in that I’m actually afraid to let people know I have a Bible study outside of church curriculum?”
He started out with just six guys. And in eight months there were twenty-two regular attenders. They prayed together, ate together, and some of them even lived together. They talked about whatever happened to them that week, and where God was in it all. They were honest with each other about their addictions and their sins and their doubt. They came out to each other as gay, straight, and completely confused. They pulled money together to help whoever was in need on any particular month. “I trusted every single guy in that group would have my back in battle if I needed him,” Ryan said. “And for those eight months, I never felt more free or safe.”
I think the church is doing a lot of things right. I grew up in the church, Vacation Bible School, youth group, weekend retreats, all of it. I love the church and all her flaws. It’s beautiful because it’s not perfect, and it never will be. But guilt has no place within, yet it’s the most common thread I have found within church exploration. Guilt for not tithing enough. Guilt for not serving enough. Guilt for starting your own Bible study. Guilt for struggling with sex and pornography. And guilt for finally leaving.
I don’t know how to make church right or better. I certainly don’t want to start one. The last thing LA needs is another place with a radical young pastor where a bunch of radical young hipsters can show up in hopes of meeting other radical young hipsters of the opposite sex who they can eventually marry and make babies with, upon whose feet they can put tiny TOMS made of hemp.
That’s why I was at church. Now I believe in the resurrection and Christ’s offer of sins forgiven, but I didn’t serve a single Sunday for him. I didn’t volunteer to please God. I served my church because they made it look glamorous. I served to meet girls because one pretty lady had told me, “You looked so hot today while you worshipped with your hands in the air.”
I decided I could get used to being a Christian. We broke up, of course. And when we broke up, members of the church staff intervened whenever they saw us hanging out together afterwards.
“Do you really think that’s healthy?”
“This is what happens when you date without the intention of marriage. You make it awkward for everyone else.”
“But we’re doing life together. I’m supposed to know everything about you.”
My church validated me. My relationship with God was entirely performance-based. After my first year at church, I was an all-star volunteer. I served seven days a week, and was two paychecks a month short of being on staff. During that time I took a girl out on a date. When it was all over, I found myself in the shower at 2 a.m., drunk and trying to “wash the sin off” because we felt each other up and made out. Worse, she wasn’t even a Christian. How unholy. I want to grab that Max, pull his naked, skinny ass out of the shower, dump his beer in the toilet and smack him across the face. I want to tell him he is pathetic. A loser. That his sin is not unique, and he has given it more weight than it deserves. I want to tell him he is embarrassing himself. I want to tell him, “These things happen. This is life. And that is guilt. It is not of God.”
I knew if the church discovered how badly I struggled sexually, I’d never be allowed to serve. I still hold out hope today that I was wrong. But I’ve heard too many tales from too many friends who were asked to “step down” until they got things under control. I want to tell that Max if there is no place at church for the broken to serve visibly, then it’s no church at all.
We’ve been gathering on Sunday to celebrate as far back as 40 A.D. because Sunday is the day the Christ conquered the grave. The price of our misguided hearts paid by someone else.
We were saved.
And that someone else is slated to return (as he promised he would), and worthy of celebration. But when He didn’t return as soon as we anticipated, perhaps we had to make some changes regarding where and how we gathered because more and more of us kept showing up to celebrate, and we didn’t know what to do with them all.
Have you ever played the game Telephone? Put twelve people in a room and they are guaranteed to screw it up. Now put twelve thousand in that same room…
Twelve million…
I think in 40 A.D. we showed up on Sundays for one reason: to celebrate the fact that everything was going to be okay. Unfortunately, when we show up today, it’s not always what we find. Guilt and shame and condemnation creep into our hearts when the celebration fades. When we stop believing everything is going to be okay. Yet people are still showing up to lift their hands after all these years even though the church is flawed and broken and beautiful and has a shameful, ugly side to it that I’ll bet it wishes it didn’t have and repeatedly tries to hide.
Just like me.
Just like you.
Just like always.
We Are All Screwed Up Forever And Ever, Amen
When I became a Christian my life was suddenly filled with daily conversations between other Christians over third wave coffee and cigarettes and beer; C.S. Lewis and Kerouac novels amongst our Bibles on the table as we discussed relationships, dating, sex, pornography.
I was one tattooed wife away from Christian Hipster perfection. For two years I did nothing but talk, talk, talk because “iron sharpens iron,” they all told me. I said, “But how long until I’ve finally talked enough to turn my iron into something sharp enough to became a weapon wielded with the wrong intentions?”
Everyone around me compared notes about their quiet time with God, getting into the Word, the “fierce” messages from our pastors, and dating with intention. We discussed sin and relationships as though they were something to be cured through classes, community, and communion. I could not understand why everyone was so obsessed with nailing the perfect relationship. (Take that as a euphemism or leave it.) Nearly every example of human relationships we have in the Bible is appalling. They all deal with infidelity, orgies, multiple sexual partners, lying, cheating, stealing, and back-stabbing. Not to mention the very first couple in the history of couples is responsible for the fall of the human race. Remember that the next time your pastor writes another book on “biblical relationships.” There is no absolute instruction manual for dating and abstaining, and what to do with your pulsating libido if you’re 40 and single or seventeen and gay. We are all going to screw it up, one way or another.
During debates about dating someone who wasn’t a Christian or the difference between a “tithe” and an “offering” I’d think, “Aren’t I supposed to be building orphanages in Africa, or choking the life out of Kony with my bare hands? Shouldn’t I be starting underground churches in China or feeding the homeless? I should at least be sharing the Gospel with someone, right? Or was I called to just give generously to those specifically called to help the homeless and start underground churches in China?” My whole life I’d be taught if you were a Christian, those were the things Christians did. But it was clear I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing. When I became a Christian, I played it safe within my community because the world out there was a scary place and hated me. If I could create the illusion of doing what Jesus had supposedly called me to do, and surround myself with likeminded individuals equally afraid of the world, I knew I’d be just fine.
When I got married, my wife and I started reading the book of Genesis aloud to each other. I never gave it a read all the way through because I thought all the important stuff happened right at the beginning. God created the Heavens and the Earth, blah, blah, blah, made man in his image, and so on, and so on, a talking snake gave Eve an apple, and Adam, like any good man, goes down with his beloved.
Three chapters in and it is not long before murder, envy, and adultery show their ugly faces. God says, “No, this is all wrong. I’m wiping everyone out.” Cue the great flood. But not before God puts Noah and seven others on a boat because Noah is the most righteous man alive and is now in charge of restarting the human race with his righteousness. And Noah does what any self-respecting, warm-blooded American male would do with such responsibility: the moment he gets off that bloody boat and back on dry land, he gets drunk, gets naked, and passes out. This isn’t the first time responsibility has done this to a man. The Devil has been playing the same tricks on us since Genesis.
Next(ish), God rains burning sulfur down on a city where every man in a fifty mile radius has gathered around a house occupied by Lot (some poor sap who’s just been visited by two male Angels — Biblical Goslings, I’m certain), demanding, “Hand over those men to us so we can have sex with them.” (I’m not taking fictional liberties here for entertainment value.) And Lot, demonstrating stellar parenting skills, says, “You can’t have sex with these men, but you can have my two virgin daughters.” And Lot’s two virgin daughters, after they see their mother turn to a pillar of salt for disobeying God’s command, get their father drunk and have sex with him in a dark cave so their bloodline can be protected. But who can blame them? Traumatized somewhere between being offered up by their father for a town gangbang, seeing their city burn to the ground, and watching their mother turn to a literal pillar of salt can probably have that sort of affect on someone.
Would I hand this book over to someone who didn’t believe in God? “Welcome to Christianity. When you get to the daughter-father rape scene in the cave, just keep reading, it gets better. I promise.”
Truth is, it does get better. The Bible is a dark and twisted story full of murder, rape, and incest. Surprise. We’ve been rebellious, lustful, gay, prideful, and stark-raving idiots since the dawn of time. There’s nothing new under the sun. Or something like that. Which makes Christ’s crucifixion all the more incredible. Why would he do that for us? We were (and still are) so far gone. We definitely didn’t deserve it.
Now I know people coming back from the dead is the stuff of George A. Romero, but if you ask me why I’ve chosen to believe in the Resurrection, I would ask you the following in return: If the stories in the Bible are not real, why would anyone creating this false religion kill all the good guys? Jesus aside, all of his disciples are murdered too. Some say this is simply to glorify these men, but really it does just the opposite. It makes me think they are fools. In every other religion the good guys win. Christianity is the only religion where its leader promises, “If you follow me, people will hate you, you will be persecuted, and chances are good you will die.”
Not exactly a Presidential campaign speech, is it? Who in their right mind would join this movement? Even the men closest to Jesus didn’t believe in his resurrection until they saw him with their own eyes. One of these fools even sold Jesus out for a couple extra bucks. Jesus knew he was going to do it, and still (in classic Godfather fashion) kept the guy close. Think about that the next time your sin causes your church, your friends, your family to cast you aside. These Christian killers and doubters and sinners wrote half the Bible. This speaks volumes about us, yet we never seem to speak about it.
A few years ago a man at a Gay Pride Parade in Chicago named Nathan held up a sign which read, “I’m Sorry.” Tristan, a gay man in the parade wearing only his underwear approached the perplexing sign-holder and asked, “Why are you sorry? It’s Pride!” The back of Nathan’s sign read, “I used to be a Bible-Banging Homophobe, and I’m sorry.” Tristan jumped off his float, hugged Nathan, and thanked him through tears.
If you’re a part of the gay community and you’re reading this, I want you to know I am sorry too. I’m beginning to suspect Christians everywhere have it wrong. There’s something broken within all of us, not just you. You don’t need “fixed.” We claim your sins are the worst, but the moment you and I were born, gay or straight, we entered this world as sinners. Christ himself says, “He who is without sin, let him cast the first stone.” No offense, but I am just as ugly on the inside as everyone claims you are. Believe it or not, we are in this together. So consider this me setting down my stone in the dirt.
If you’ve ever been ostracized from the church because of your sexuality or told that you can be fixed, I am sorry. If you’ve ever been asked to step down as a leader or criticized because of your addiction to and desire for pornography, I am sorry. If you’ve ever been told that sexual sin is the worst sin and you’ve been condemned with shame and guilt, I am sorry. If you’ve ever felt unwelcome because of the way you dress, I am sorry. And if you’ve ever been told grace and forgiveness require work or that you must earn the forgiveness of Christ, I am sorry. For grace is the most magnificent force on the planet, and it is not to be reckoned with. It is intangible, yet smothering. It is the only thing which must first drown us before it can rescue us.
Dear Atheists, homosexuals, transexuals, lesbians, Christians, Catholics and Muslims. Dear widows and orphans and slaves. Dear homeless man living in the garage beneath my apartment. Dear terrorists, anarchists, and marxists. Dear Mr. President and North Korea. Dear every woman I ever dated, and every porn star I ever saw naked. Dear Comic-Con fanatics, artists, and anyone who still owns a Dell. Dear home-schooled children, bullies, nerds, jocks, heads, geeks, squares, popular kids, and unpopular kids everywhere. Dear Ryan G
osling.
Dear Everyone.
Dear me.
You are imperfect and judgmental. You are self-addicted and lustful. You are full of hate and sin, pride and secrets. Yet God sees you through the lens of Christ’s Crucifixion: forgiven and without scars, perfect and fulfilled, destined with a purpose the way He intended you to be.
Now put down your stones and go be.
Sincerely,
a sinner.
Epilogue
I don’t know what you have been through.
And I don’t know where you’re going.
But I know sometimes faith can be a rope that hurts to hold. And I want to tell you, “Don’t let go.”
I know what it’s like to jump without knowing what’s in the water below, but confident you know how to swim.
I know how rock bottom feels, and I know the strength it takes to climb out.
I know what it’s like to be compelled, to feel called, and to be reason you say, “no.”
An Anthology of Madness Page 6
