forgetting about it to death
A friend of ours used this phrase to describe the closing of our church site. I know I walk the fine line of criticizing and maybe even gossip but if a girl can't parse her heartbreak on her blog, then, I ask, where can she?
I remember when we joined this church, when we had only lived here two seasons and we only had the two boys. Right away, Manny was chatting with the worship band, the painter-hipster offering for him to strum the Stratocaster. Benicio was taken with the other children, the gaggle of rambunctious boys. Geoff and I thought, they're comfortable here. We know God wants us to be in the city. We kind of fit into this scene of transplanted suburbanites turned hip and edgy by college and by reading Tim Keller and Jack Miller. We like this. We are like this. So, in haste we took the steps of membership. I took sermons on my ipod to the gym and to the market. I went through the Westminster confessional with the boys. We went to home group, to planning meetings, to vision-meetings, to search committee meetings, in-covenant retreat, leadership retreat. We tried with all available might to develop friendships while doing so. All in the name of community. Trying to weave this great garment together.
And after the stuttered and awkward steps of planting a site in the Northwest, the thing started to come apart. Our leadership, made of broken sinners, as we all are, had a bad string of mishaps. Family sickness, mismatched talent-set, a pool of poorly-suited pastoral candidates, and now our church must close its doors. Those friendships, some hearty and full of stories of mutual rescue you'd want to cry. And some friendships are brittle and shallow from competitiveness and sarcasm.
I sometimes think, as our friend puts it, that if I could forget about it all to death, that this wouldn't hurt. I vacillate between thinking paranoid thoughts that the church leadership is Big Brother out to get us and thinking that a season of closure and recreation would be good. As a good religion major, I know this is normal. That it is absolutely human to turns one faith over and over in one's hand-- sometimes seeing that the whole thing could be nonsense or that the whole thing is all you have.
As we go forward, I'm not interested in the ways we have been wounded, the slip-ups, the ways we were shafted or overlooked. I am interested in the shoots, the impossible and improbable growth and maturity that will, that fucking have to, appear.
I remember when we joined this church, when we had only lived here two seasons and we only had the two boys. Right away, Manny was chatting with the worship band, the painter-hipster offering for him to strum the Stratocaster. Benicio was taken with the other children, the gaggle of rambunctious boys. Geoff and I thought, they're comfortable here. We know God wants us to be in the city. We kind of fit into this scene of transplanted suburbanites turned hip and edgy by college and by reading Tim Keller and Jack Miller. We like this. We are like this. So, in haste we took the steps of membership. I took sermons on my ipod to the gym and to the market. I went through the Westminster confessional with the boys. We went to home group, to planning meetings, to vision-meetings, to search committee meetings, in-covenant retreat, leadership retreat. We tried with all available might to develop friendships while doing so. All in the name of community. Trying to weave this great garment together.
And after the stuttered and awkward steps of planting a site in the Northwest, the thing started to come apart. Our leadership, made of broken sinners, as we all are, had a bad string of mishaps. Family sickness, mismatched talent-set, a pool of poorly-suited pastoral candidates, and now our church must close its doors. Those friendships, some hearty and full of stories of mutual rescue you'd want to cry. And some friendships are brittle and shallow from competitiveness and sarcasm.
I sometimes think, as our friend puts it, that if I could forget about it all to death, that this wouldn't hurt. I vacillate between thinking paranoid thoughts that the church leadership is Big Brother out to get us and thinking that a season of closure and recreation would be good. As a good religion major, I know this is normal. That it is absolutely human to turns one faith over and over in one's hand-- sometimes seeing that the whole thing could be nonsense or that the whole thing is all you have.
As we go forward, I'm not interested in the ways we have been wounded, the slip-ups, the ways we were shafted or overlooked. I am interested in the shoots, the impossible and improbable growth and maturity that will, that fucking have to, appear.
posted by Maria at
8:03 PM
1 Comments:
I relate to a lot of what you are writing here. When I found Liberti, I hadnt even recommitted myself to Christ. And I immediately knew that I was meant to be there--I resisted, of course, but I remember going home crying the first time I went (I wasn't with John or Michael.) Well, you know the rest: John adored Roxy--I was fine with it until leadership went south and I found I was getting challenged by my own values that did not correspond with the message being preached. So I just stuck to home group and that went south too! Home group! So John joined a book group with Drew and I did yoga. I don't see practicing yoga as turning my back on Jesus, but I was turning my back on Liberti. Then Doug left and John told me that I should return, but the writing was on the wall...very sad. Since Roxy began turning for the worse, John and I both felt that we were not supported; if we belonged to a community, it was in spite of leadership, not because of it.
I too, don't want to hold onto bitterness, but it does rear its head. John said the other day that the next church he attends, he wants to make sure HE doesn't have to tell the lead pastor how to do his job. Glenn was the only one who he saw as a shephard. I saw things differently in that sense, but his point was well taken. Liberti has a mission that just doesn't include us and when that finally hit me, I felt a sense of relief and sadness for them, as I think they made a terrible mistake, not only in the plant, but in making the Roxy congregants into something contrary to Liberti's outreach. So, in short, I don't know why things shifted so dramatically from feeling welcome and loved to feeling like a burden to the central leadership. But they did and it obviously was meant to be.
God has a plan for all of us. That is what I keep telling myself.
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home