Part III: Is Church Safe?

Or are we asking the wrong question?

Hold on to your britches, friends, this one might get a little rocky.

1980s—Bucks County, PA, my parents have moved in next door to a Mennonite pastor, his wife, and their brood of seven kids. My parents are lapsed Catholics, but practically heathens. They ‘get saved’ during over-the-hedgerow conversations. My earliest memories of church are meeting in our neighbor’s house on Sundays, the long legs of their kids stretched out from folding chairs, grape juice in colored tin cups, a wood stove I was repeatedly warned not to touch and yet did. There were brownies somewhere in there. My father worries aloud about getting struck by lightning for taking communion in a tin cup from a man who dressed like Mr. Rogers. My father worries about a lot.

1990s—now the Mennonite pastor is working for a tiny stucco church in our neighborhood, our family follows him there, his son and I tangle our feet beneath church pews and his wife calls me fat when I am twelve years old and a size six. For a time, I can’t remember whether it’s before or after the stucco church, we meet in an old catholic school, where statues of Mary seem to proliferate around corners and the stained glass stories are mesmerizing. We are what you think of when you think of homeschooled kids in the 80s/90s.

1998-2001—my parents move my six brothers and me to upstate New York to a remote 180 acre farm, with plans for gardens and stockpiles for the coming apocalypse of y2k. We visit a lot of churches and “do” house church with another family for a while. The father is loud, bold, scary. The mother and daughters are fluttery and anxious and they make me anxious too. My mother wears a head covering and soft calico jumpers. My father obsesses about the end times. There is abuse of all kinds. My brother is killed. My parents split. My youngest brother is born in a NICU.

2001-2010—in the wake of my entire world falling apart, I run headlong into a charismatic-ish (doctrine was fuzzy), full-quiver, non-trinitarian, conservative church with a high emphasis on submission and headship but no actual church governance or denomination beyond the senior pastor, who had no seminary training. I stay here until aged 29, when I cannot make all the dots connect theologically anymore, and frankly, the circumstances of my life cannot work in the way they view as ideal and therefore I feel my brokenness constantly.

2011-2015—Where better to feel my brokenness than in reformed theology where I am a worm but it’s okay because we’re all worms? I flee from NY to a mega-church in Dallas, TX. I know it to be a part of Acts 29, but don’t realize until a few years in that it’s also a part of the Southern Baptist Convention, which confuses me. I’m there when shit goes down at Mars Hill. I’m on my way out when I meet Nate. We marry, move to Denver where I come on staff at a large church, and almost immediately am thrust into a leadership crisis (among twenty other traumatic events I’ve written about elsewhere).

2016-2018—We move to DC for Nate’s job, still reeling from what happened in Denver, cannot find our footing, cannot find peace inside the walls of a church at all. We don’t trust pastors, we don’t trust men, we don’t trust church networks. After almost a year there, we tentatively try an ACNA church, we like the liturgy but then we’re moving back to Dallas. We go back to our old church there but we’ve changed in one direction and they’ve changed in another direction. We can’t stay, leaving is easy and also hard.

2019-2024—We try another ACNA for a year. But then it’s the pandemic and we’re moving to NY.¹ The churches we’d want to try are closed, the only open church is the one I left at age 29 and will not return to. We print out a liturgy and meet with five or six other families on lawn chairs. with kids climbing trees and getting bee stings, for almost a year. It feels like relief. Or it would have if the shit wasn’t hitting the fan repeatedly, just about decimating our faith in the church and church leaders.

2024—churches are open again but the one in our small town that we could get on board with theologically, we can’t make peace with for other reasons. The one where we really enjoy the people, we can’t make peace with the theology. The same families from before keep meeting together, but not on Sundays. Life is busy. We decide we need to move again, to a place more populated with people and churches. We move to PA, an hour and a half from where I began. We find a church. We like it. It’s anabaptist. It’s small. The people are kind. They care about refugees. They practice the liturgy. No one takes themselves too seriously. There’s spaciousness both relationally and doctrinally, no one pressures us to join a small group or pushes us to become members, to tithe, or to show up when it’s too hard. It’s still hard to walk in, to make ourselves do it, to not be waiting every single week for the shoe to drop. We wonder if we will ever feel safe in church again?

Will we ever feel safe in church again?

This is the third part of the series I’m doing on I Changed My Mind on Sexuality. You can read the introduction, Part I, and Part II.

This series is behind a paywall for many reasons. If you absolutely cannot afford a subscription right now, contact me and I’ll get you sorted. If you can afford a subscription, it’s most economical for you to do a year’s instead of a monthly one ($3.50 a month vs $7). This series may take six months, I’m not sure 😬