When Church Hurts

There is a lot of talk this week about author Anne Rice quitting Christianity because of all its hostility, backward-looking and anti- any number of stances on issues she believes are not only important but integral to the true practice of Christianity. All the disputes, hypocrisy, the stubbornly clinging to the status quo which might have been appropriate in previous centuries (or even milennia), the negativity towards those who do not practice the kind of Christianity that restricts women, GLBT folk, Democrats, secular humanists, those who believe in science, etc., have been the wedges between her and the church although not, as she says, between her and God and Christ. In short, the Church has become a club of like-minded folk rather than a place where one is met where one is rather than the place where someone else thinks they should be.

It's hard not to be disillusioned with the church sometimes. For every story about individual churches, parishes and congregations reaching out to the communities in which they live, move and have their being, there's usually one about how Christianity is being lost to non-believers who don't accept "the faith once delivered," who believe in science instead of just scripture and who are so certain who and what it is that God hates --- which usually looks very much like the people that group find so distasteful. God can be so convenient sometimes.

But churches can hurt in other ways. I remember my adoptive mother and the Babdist (as we pronounce it) church back home. She'd been a member of the women's Sunday school class, one of the flower ladies and took her turn chopping up the white bread cubes and filling the little glasses with grape juice for communion once a month, not to mention making countless angel appurtenances like robes, wings and halos for the Christmas pageant and countless cookies and gallons of fruit punch for the Vacation Bible School students every summer. That is, until she got so ill she could no longer get to church much less contribute in her usual and accustomed manner. I went into her room one afternoon and found her crying, something I seldom if ever saw her do no matter how much her pain and frustration with her situation caused her. When I asked what was wrong, she told me several women from her Sunday School class had come to visit and had asked if she minded having her name removed from the rolls because her continued absence was bringing down the average attendance! Even my middle school-aged self could hear, see and understand that numbers were more important to the group than the cord that bound a sick and homebound (or, increasingly hospital-bound) soul to her faith community. Sure, the preacher visited. After all, he'd been an unofficial member of our family for longer than I'd been around but the hurt never left. I saw those same women every Sunday and they were present at her funeral a few years later. I knew them to be decent, kindly women but I also saw the hypocrisy and hurtfulness they caused.

My adoptive father too was very active in the church -- as a deacon (the elected kind, elected to a specific period of service), church Treasurer, taking his turn at maintenance and cleanup, etc., etc., etc. I don't remember so much the specific incident that caused him to leave the church but it hurt that he didn't feel he could even come to hear me sing solos or participate in the Christmas play. What hurt even more was that from my place in the choir I could look out the window and see the front of my house and knew that Daddy was in the kitchen reading the paper while I sang about God's grace and glory. He reconciled with the church at some point but for years he spent Sundays doing other things because he just couldn't face the church that had hurt him and hurt his beloved wife.

I too have left a church I loved and which i still believe in. Oh, not the Church but rather the congregation in which I no longer feel a part. I've felt the hurt that a church can lay on someone and I've seen it happen to others as well. Church has often become more about money contributed and numbers rather than the virtues expounded from the pulpit and to solemn nods in the pews but laid aside in the sacristy and the narthex. Looking at the news of ecclesiastical misbehavior, abuse of and even encouragement of abuse of children, women, GLBT folk, even other Christians, it's not hard to lose heart and lose faith in the institutional church at the parish level as well as the Communion and Papal levels.

I have no doubt of my faith in God, in Christ, in the Holy Spirit, but most days I struggle with doubt when it comes to the Church. I can't divorce the Church as Anne Rice has. All I can do is pray that this is just a temporary separation and that one day I can have faith and trust in it again. I'll keep struggling until then.