Church + Me these days and Glittering Images Book Club

Why is it so hard to just say, "I'm sorry. I got it wrong."

Yesterday, as I left an appointment, the thunder cracked above me and the lightning ripped through the gray sky, and I shielded myself from the downpour with a grocery bag held atop my head. This morning I woke up late and looked out the window. A low layer of fog rested on the river and the banks were swollen high, higher than I’ve seen it all summer. All the silt from the riverbed had risen too, turning the water murky and brown in the stead of its normally clear flow. The rain will do this if it’s hard enough.

Recently, during a podcast interview, the host asked me about deconstruction (her words) and my relationship with the church these days. I never call my spiritual journey deconstruction, although I don’t fault those who do. I prefer Brian Zahnd’s language of renovation:¹ the foundation doesn’t change, but the wall color or placement, appliances or furniture all move frequently. Jesus doesn’t change, but the way I see him does, and the way I know him does. In the before-times they might have just called this spiritual growth, but these days we seem to be afraid of anything that moves, calling it a monster instead.

I haven’t known how to talk about this publicly, and to be honest, haven’t felt fully ready to for various reasons. People can judge me all they want for my relative silence (although not total silence—I wrote a whole book where the story is woven through…) about my relationship with the church these days but the truth is, I don’t have much of a relationship with any local church right now.

This morning, in the wake of more bad news, I say to Nate, “I don’t know if I’ll ever trust a pastor or church leader again, at least not enough to follow them.” Befriend them, yes, I have plenty of pastor friends and ministry allies. Follow them, covenant to submit to them with church membership? It would take a miracle right now.²

And I know plenty of pastors and ministry friends who would object to me saying that, saying, “Not all of us are untrustworthy!” and that might be true. It certainly is true for many I know. Other Christian friends I love and respect who attend church every week and are committed to her in this season might judge me too, “My church isn’t like that,” and it might not be. But I’m not willing to find out. Not right now. You might think it’s because I’m looking for a perfect church, but actually, I’m looking for its opposite.

The church is made up of Christians and Christians are made up of humans and humans are, without question, prone to messing up and getting it wrong and having misguided intentions and problematic methods, and so it goes that the church will be full of messed up humans with misguided intentions and problematic methods who get it wrong a lot of the time. And I’m actually okay with that. Really, I am. I’m disinterested in a perfect church with shiny people who robotically move through life and faith in a sterilized fashion, expecting everyone to share the same theology and politics, putting on Sunday best and pretending that’s what they look like all the rest of the week. That’s unrealistic and unhealthy, not to mention boring.

But what I’m not okay with is a church who pretends to be those things, meanwhile hiding abusers in their aisles, giving them the keys to their buildings, financing “Christian nationalism,” forcing women to stay in abusive or adulterous marriages, causing immeasurable suffering to those struggling with their sexuality, and more.³

Be messy, be as messy as you like, but don’t set up a PR campaign trying to prove how clean you are. Don’t hire lawyers who advise you on ways to avoid blame or disclosure.

I’m not interested in a perfect church. I want to worship alongside sinners like me and like you. But I don’t want to worry more about embarrassing those who’ve sexually abused children than the vulnerable children in our midst. I don’t want to worry more about “grounds for divorce” than I do about the woman being battered behind closed doors. I don’t want to worry more about freaking terminology and semantics around sexuality than I do about the humans whose lives are at stake in the meantime.

Listen, we’re going to get it wrong. We don’t need watch-bloggers and discernment podcasts to broadcast it from their ivory towers. Getting it wrong should be expected. But when we get it wrong, the right thing to do is to sift the silt out from our muddy waters, not quietly wait for it to settle back down to the bottom. That’s where the bottom feeders frequent because they know it’s where the dirt is. And believe me when I say, whether it’s the bottom feeders or a torrential rain storm that brings the silt to the surface, it’s coming to the surface no matter what.

But that’s the point.

A few years ago, in one of our graduate classes, we read the novel Glittering Images by Susan Howatch. I’ve written quite a bit about the book already but I think it should be required reading for every Christian, but especially clergy and anyone in ministry. It should be required reading for all the people who judge those who aren’t in church right now or those who perceive others to be “deconstructing.” It should be required reading for those who are struggling with their own place in the story of God. Or those who are desperately trying to manage their image and most of the time don’t even know why. I’m not going to give much away, but it purports to be a mystery then seems like it’s going to be a…romance? But at its midway point, it turns into something else entirely, something most of us won’t see coming.

I’m not sure how you can read the book without facing your own brokenness and your own belovedness.

During The Understory’s launch book club, a bunch of the participants urged me to do a book club on Glittering Images and I’ve thought about it the past month a lot. We take the summer off of monthly zoom discussions around here, but I am going to run a book club over the next month-ish on the book. Each week I will have a personal reflection guide for participants and every other week we’ll do a zoom discussion on the book. We’ll kick off the week of July 21st, and then the schedule will be as follows:

Week one: Chapters I-V + Personal reflection guide

Week two: Chapters V-X + Personal reflection guide + Zoom discussion August 1st, 7pm, EST.

Week three: Chapters X-XVII + Personal reflection guide

Week four: XVIII-XXV + Personal reflection guide + Zoom discussion August 15th, 7pm, EST.

You can purchase the book here from Bookshop (no matter where you get it, make sure it’s by Susan Howatch as there are other books with the same title out there). It is not available on audio, as far as I know. You can register here. The cost to participate in the book club is $10, payable via Venmo or PayPal using one of the QR codes below:

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1. From his book, When Everything’s on Fire.

2. Listen, please don’t think I’m telling you everything about where I am in my church situation right now and please don’t message or comment asking me to share more right now or demanding to see my Christian-credentials or else.... It is complicated and a lot of it has to do with facing my own complicity in propping up broken systems. I’m not stagnate here. I’m moving and I’m moving toward goodness and wholeness, not advocating for me or anyone else to just stay in this spot.

3. You might think I’m referring to just one church, even your church, but I’m not. I have different churches and different situations in mind for each of these. But if your hackles are raised because you think I am referring to your church, perhaps ask why you feel defensive? What are you defending? Why does it need you to defend it? How much of your public persona or financial security is tied to you defending your church or its leaders? What are the implications of that?