Fitting In

It is no longer my weekly custom to attend corporate church gatherings on Sundays. For the first 60 or so years of my life, that had been my "norm." It had been a habit that was taught to me by my parents and later cultivated by my own choice. It had been my culture. And then I stopped.

For the past four years, ever since my mother-in-law died and I no longer had someone dependent upon me to fetch them to church, I have cultivated other "habits" to occupy my Sunday mornings. Coffee with the grands, grocery shopping, cleaning house. I have been trying to reprogram my thinking about how I spend my Sundays, but find that it is hard to undo 67 years of conditioning just like that. It has been difficult to not feel obliged to make excuses to those who expect to see me where and when they have always seen me. It has been difficult for my husband of 47 years, who still feels called to make Sunday church his habit, to be put in a position where he feels he must field questions and answer for me.

The reality is, I don't fit in. In retrospect, I am not sure when I crossed over from the norm and stopped fitting in, but I became acutely aware that I should not be there the morning I heard myself saying out loud, right in the middle of a sermon, "No-o-o." The words that were being spoken were out of step with the words I was reading in my Bible, and I realized at that moment that I could not continue to pretend or try to fit in to a culture that I could not in all honesty agree with.

I love the people who attend that church. I love the people who have left that church and now attend elsewhere. I appreciate the relationships that have developed over the last 40 years in this place, but I just cannot agree with them in several areas that have come to matter a great deal to me, and I cannot pretend to fit in with a tradition that has absolutely no basis in scripture but rather appears to be nothing less than a manipulation of the "faithful" by a hierarchical system which has dictated for 2 millennia that The System has more authority over The Faithful than the very Word of God.

I have come to realize that I am not the only person who feels this way, and I am certainly not the first in history to have come to this conclusion. Down through those 2 millennia, thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people who dared to think outside the ecclesiastical box must have wondered how it was that a select few would have the temerity to dictate to the masses how and when and where the Almighty Creator of the Universe was to be worshiped, particularly when that how and when and where had no foundation in the scriptures we are told was from the mouth of that same Creator, and what on earth gave those same few the right to proclaim who was admitted into that same Creator's kingdom?

Dissecting those traditions has been a long and frequently emotionally painful process, but as I have said before elsewhere, once I learn the truth of a matter, it is impossible for me to un-learn it. So, as difficult as it may be initially, I am choosing to believe that God's blueprint for our lives which is found in the Bible does in fact matter, His words are not too difficult for me to understand or apply to my life, and they are a blessing - not a curse. God's words that have been handed down through the ages are still as relevant to me in 2018 as they were to the apostles and the first followers of that Jewish rabbi from Galilee who upset the money changers' tables, who healed a blind man on a Sabbath day in defiance of rabbinical tradition, who told tax collectors and fishermen to follow Him... I am certainly capable of choosing that same path of obedience, despite the expectations of my own religious leaders (or my friends.)

For a person to call her/himself a "pastor", yet have no idea who my children are, much less their names, what I do for a living, or what I am passionate about in life, that person is a "pastor" in no sense of the word. For a leader of a congregation to have attended seminary and not teach even the basics of what the Word of God has to say, how it can shape and guide and change our lives to impact our communities and our world - or worse, to know those basics, but then knowingly perpetuate deception about such basic tenets as what day of the week we are to set apart, about how we are to live our lives in accordance with the Word we purport to follow - that is where I have to disconnect and walk away. 

Because, as difficult as it is to change a lifetime of habits and culture, to continue in a culture than I am convinced has stepped away from representing my Creator for the sake of increasing attendance and membership is a step toward compromise with that same world that we are instructed to "come out of." At some point, I have to step off the merry-go-round of tradition and go back to the basics of "What does the Lord want from me?"

Hint: The answer is not compromise, it is not "fitting in." It is repentance and obedience.