I Miss Church, Sometimes, but Never Enough To Go Back
By: Amanda Grace Sutter
Tags: Evangelicals, Exvangelical, Christianity, Accountability, Church

Photo by John Price on Unsplash

I miss are the people. It is an instant community, and there is a sense of safety in a church community in particular. As a person who has a yearning to feel seen and understood, churches nearly guarantee that relationships will be genuine and deep. In addition to small groups and Bible studies, you are surrounded by your “brothers and sisters” — people who are supposed to love you unconditionally yet be transparent and lovingly honest with you, guiding you back to Christ. And then you all get to sing together.

Of course I miss that! Or, I miss hoping for that. That was never really my experience at church.

I’ve been to several churches, too. There was the church that I grew up going to. I also attended a Christian school that was associated with a church (and all my friends from school attended churches that I would also go to if I spent the night on a Saturday or was invited to a youth event). There was the church my parents started going to my senior year of high school, as well as the trendy youth group I also started to go to in high school. Although I settled on a church during college, I went “church shopping” when I first moved away (in addition to going to a Christian college with chapel services 3 times a week) and I repeated this process after graduating college as well. The point is that I’ve been to many different churches and experienced many different denominations.

It was only after I stopped going to churches and started finding community outside of it that I realized how insulating churches are.

But that’s the whole point of church, right? To be “in the world, not of it.” The first part — being “in the world” — is easy. I know of no churches on the moon. So what does it look like to not be “of the world”? It means a lot of things get labeled as “sinful.”

That seems like a leap, but hear me out.

In a Christian Doctrine class in college I learned that Calvinists did not decorate their churches because this was not included in the Bible (it was also a direct response to ornately decorated Catholic cathedrals). Does this mean that art in the church building is a sin? At one point Calvinists believed so.

The church I grew up attending was a suburban Presbyterian church. The majority of the congregation was elderly and I grew up singing hymns, but during the nineties, guitar-clad worship leaders began to have their moment. And so the question at my church was, “Were guitars fit for worshipping God?”

These may seem like two silly examples but here is my point: often the church is not responding to actual injustices, but instead to cultural shifts that make its members uncomfortable. The term “sin” is a way to keep certain things “out.”

As an aside, if we were to go through a list of all the things considered “sinful” I would not say that the above is true for everything. For example, murder is bad. Abuse is bad. Exploitation is bad. But are you really “sinning against God” if you aren’t a virgin before you get married? Or if you and the person you are dating or marry have the same genitals?

But back to my point. I grew up being told that churches are places where Christians are supposed to go to worship God, learn the word of God, and encourage one another in their faith-walks (very Christian term, I know). But I was also told that we could worship God anywhere, and there’s a lot of context to the Bible that churches often miss (for years “spare the rod, spoil the child” was used to justify corporal punishment). So really, the function of a church is to provide a space where Christians can relating to one another, share their testimonies, and provide “accountability.”

I don’t believe that people in churches are bad, and I don’t believe going to church is bad. I don’t even believe that being apart of a church community is bad for everyone. For years I would have said it was a very important and positive aspect of my life! I didn’t stop going to church because I had a problem with the community. But now, that is the thing that is keeping me from returning.

Why?

Because church communities give a footing for other Christians to “speak into your life,” which often means providing unsolicited judgment and shame based on the bounds of what Evangelicalism defines as good. I might feel differently if churches kept their members accountable for things like, “How did you support your neighbors without homes this week?”, but I have found that accountability often boils down to protecting and perpetuating Evangelical culture. “Accountability” in the church is about telling people when they are “out”, and often the borders for “in” and “out” are cultural, not spiritual.