I try not to go to church on Sundays

Knowing why you DON'T go may be as important as why you DO

I posted this as a Note Sunday (10/20/2024) and just felt like sharing it as a stand-alone article as well. It’s short, has no history in it, but it still is an important part of my WHY. I write about Jesus and I seek him because life is fucking HARD. Kick me in the teeth, mist up my eyes, limp along, crawl my way out of bed HARD. As a high-schooler, my very best friend shot my other very best friend and both died the summer I started my Senior year. My dad got hit by a drunk driver on his way to a work flight and, though he returned, he was never the same and neither was my family. He harmed people I love, he even harmed me once in a fit of rage that was caused simultaneously by my 16-year-old smart-ass mouth and the effects of his head injury. I judge other people through lenses they don’t deserve, I find myself stuck in situations (of my own and others making) that seem to have no easy solutions, the world sometimes seems out of control as I observe it. The church I love and trust has treated people most dear to me as pariahs, and yet it is that same place where I have learned about this crazy guy called Jesus who apparently loves me more than any love that has ever been known on this planet.

I am a Christian and I know nothing else that I could (or would) be. But the truth is that, even as this life is HARD, so is finding the truth in a faith that sometimes doesn’t allow for questions, that has replaced relationship with orthodoxy, that has spent the last 2,000 years divorcing itself from its own roots. I write about Christian history because I KNOW that Jesus is real, that he is LOVE, and that he is bigger and better than what we’ve made him out to be in our small-minded religiosity. And so I seek him in the ancients, as they were closest to him, and I look to my history to know where I came from and why the fuck I can’t recognize this religion founded on love in my own (and my family’s) interactions with it. What I wrote below is verbatim from my Sunday evening Note and attempts to (without the word fuck) explain why church is a place I USED to find answers, but no longer seem able to (at least my formerly attended churches). It’s short, perhaps some of you are saying ‘finally’, and it’s my heart, I hope it affects you somehow.

It’s Sunday, a day I ‘used’ to pretty religiously attend a Baptist (or Baptist leaning) church for the last 3 decades of my life. My family has experienced excruciating pain in the previous 2 years, I am too private to go into specifics, but suffice it to say it’s been more than I thought I could bear more than once; and the other 48 years and the ups and downs of those years pale in terms of the emotions but especially the pain we’ve experienced as a family unit

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You would think I would a) draw nearer to my faith in these awful experiences, gain the presence and power of Christ so to speak or b) reject the whole thing altogether and metaphorically shake my fist at God and tell him he ‘failed me’.

To be honest, I’d argue I’ve done neither. My family, and especially my own, grief has enabled the opening of a door I don’t know if I would have walked through without our tragic circumstances. My grief has been so intense, I don’t care if someone appreciates or agrees or would be ‘shocked’ by my faith journey. I’ve asked questions, out loud, I wouldn’t have dared ask openly before, I am willing to say to anyone, even dear friends with whom I previously shared a deep conservative Christian connection, that this journey I am on is powerful and real and, while I am sure it was influenced by this terrible tragedy we experienced, it seems to refuse to be defined by that fact. It is, in fact, bigger than ALL of my past life and too big to be defined by those old well-worn ruts I used to be so comfortable with.

I am learning about the history of my (and your) Church past, the vile way I have viewed the ‘old covenant’ and the arrogance I’ve displayed toward my Jewish brothers and sisters (and to be frank, ANY faith group I was told was ‘off’ in some theological way, like Universalists or Catholics, and so many more) and how I displayed an ugly arrogance toward other faiths that I can now see was woefully misguided and historically uninformed.

This path I find myself on is certainly one on deconstructing my faith, my Substack IS called brick by brick, after all. I honestly think, at the end, I will encounter the real Jesus, but it’s possible I may go another direction and abandon this thing I’ve never known any alternative to. THIS, I know, though. Sitting in a church I’ve sat in for years to support my children who love it there, I saw, starkly, that I genuinely don’t know where this road will lead. I also know, without a doubt, that I WON’T find the answers I’m looking for in a church like that one. So on a day I used to faithfully attend, I skip church, listen to my podcasts on Christian and Jewish history, I read academic pieces on the historicity of the Bible and the types of literature used by Biblical authors. I read authors who some I used to trust have deemed heretical, I ask and grapple with questions about this book I used to describe as infallible, I search for Jesus in places I used to think he was unreachable.

There is a massive pathway of belief out there and this ‘deconstruction’ of our faith, for some of us at least, it is not a wholesale jettisoning of Jesus, but a finding of the real Jesus we might have lost in our poor interpretations and thousands of years of church politics, the influences of the culture we’re part of rather than the other way around, the proselytizing and pulpit pounding of thousands who’ve traveled this path before us, some rightly divining truth some missing it.

I believe at journey’s end I will find him, I wish this ‘door opening’ never happened to me and I refuse to believe in a petty God who somehow takes/uses/manipulates my tragedy for a heavenly ‘greater good’ or ‘beauty from ashes’. The God I am seeking and hope is there at the end of the path isn’t so small that my pain serves him in such a way. I simply AM on this path, for reasons I cannot explain, and I am walking to Him, hoping that He is good, and powerful, and loving, and all things. I do not know what I will find, but I know the places I USED to looK for it have no answers for me. So I avoid my previously oft-frequented church, knowing the Christ I seek isn’t there and praying that the road I’m on leads me to Him.