Mad Lib of a Vampire: Anne Rice’s Status Updates, Helpfully Taken Out of Context

Novelist Anne Rice posted some buzzworthy status updates earlier this week. She went right past the "Religious Views" field (which likely now reads "It's complicated") and tweeted a press release. Opinions undoubtedly range widely on her choice of words and even whether, in a cosmic sense, they can actually mean what she intends them to mean. But anthropologically speaking, I think there's a lot going on here worth chewing on. And I can't think of a better way to chew on them--to deconstruct her comments as an artifact of the zeitgeist--than by reproducing them as a MadLib.

My friend Rebecca occasionally reminds me of MadLibs; it's all the rage on the other side of the building where I work, and she'll be posting a fun one to our common blog Strangely Dim sometime next week. So all props to Rebecca for getting this in my head again just at the right time. You know how it works: each blank below is filled in by a word you choose in advance.

Paragraph A
1. noun
2. proper noun
3. adjective
4. noun
5. verb
6. noun
7. noun (opposite of #4)

Paragraph B
1. proper noun
2. adjective
3. adjective
4. noun
5. adjective
6. noun
7. noun
8. noun
9. proper noun (same as #1)
10. noun
11. adjective

For those who care, and I understand if you don’t: Today I quit being a ______. I’m out. I remain committed to ________ as always but not to being “________” or to being part of __________. It’s simply impossible for me to “_________” to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous _____. For ten years, I’ve tried. I’ve failed. I’m an _______. My conscience will allow nothing else.

I’m out. In the name of __________ I refuse to be anti-____. I refuse to be anti-____. I refuse to be anti-____. I refuse to be anti-____. I refuse to be anti-____. I refuse to be anti-____. I refuse to be anti-____. In the name of _____ I quit ________ and being ________. Amen.

Have fun with it, but do take at least one serious pass through it. Rice was tweeting about her faith in Christ and corresponding connection to Christianity; what other "faith commitments" (whether spiritual or secular, conscious or unacknowledged) can be so subdivided? Is it even possible to talk meaningfully about Christ without dealing with Christianity? To what can we compare the people of God?

By the way, my own first paragraph (above) is admittedly a convoluted mess. Someone could make a MadLib out of that, I'm sure.

Merton on Barth on Mozart

I forget, sometimes, when I settle down to delve into a book by mid-twentieth-century monk Thomas Merton, that he was a man of his times. I unconsciously prepare myself for deep mysticism, the kind of extrarational, nonlinear writing that shocks you into the Spirit like Leo Dicaprio gets shocked awake in Inception. I forget that as mystical as Merton often gets, he's also a man of his times, and certain things tick him off.

For example, as a practicing Protestant with sentimental attachments to the Catholicism of my youth, I take great delight in Merton's occasional salvos against the folly of the Protestantism of his day. Particularly in his Seven Storey Mountain, a memoir of his gradual embrace of Catholicism and later his entry into monastic life, he indulges the occasional rant. I picture not a red face but rather a wry smile as he writes, enjoying the mockery he makes of these earnest evangelicals with no respect for history.

Merton wasn't a bigot, it turns out; he didn't hate Protestants, but thin theology bugged him as much as poor aesthetics and bad writing. Hand him a piece by someone who knew what he was doing, and Merton would show that Protestant some respect.

I've just begun reading Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, Merton's spiritual journals from the late 1950s. I was prepared to read about war, racism, Zen, transcendence, even whooping cranes. I wasn't quite prepared for the opening line: "Karl Barth had a dream about Mozart."

Karl Barth, one of the most important theologians ever--a contemporary of Merton, and as Protestant as they come. Mozart, the child prodigy of the Classical era who dismissed Protestantism as "all in the head."

I've been eager to read Conjectures since I first heard of it; it strikes me as Merton at his sardonic, bemused best. But clearly I didn't know what to expect; leading off with Karl Barth's dreamlife shocked me awake more than the trippiest haiku ever could.

Barth, in his dream, was appointed to examine Mozart in theology. He wanted to make the examination as favorable as possible, and in his questions he alluded pointedly to Mozart's masses.

But Mozart did not answer a word. . . .

The dream concerns his salvation, and Barth perhaps is striving to admit that he will be saved more by the Mozart in himself than by his theology. . . .

Bart says . . . that "it is a child, even a 'divine' child, who speaks in Mozart's music to us." Some, he says, considered Mozart always a child in practical affairs. . . . At the same time, Mozart, the child prodigy, "was never allowed to be a child in the literal meaning of that word." He gave his first concert at the age of six.

Yet he was always a child "in the higher meaning of that word."

Fear not, Karl Barth! Trust in the divine mercy. Though you have grown up to become a theologian, Christ remains a child in you. Your books (and mine) matter less than we might think! There is in us a Mozart who will be our salvation.

That's from page four. Page one has the title and two quotations; page two is blank. Three hundred and fifty pages to go, but I will remember throughout that Merton's books (and mine) matter less than we might think. And I will do my best throughout to trust in the divine mercy.

Paulo Freire Is a Genius--Can I Get a Witness?

On the recommendation of a friend of mine, I recently read Pedagogy of the Oppressed, a book on education that empowers people to overcome systemic oppression. Not that I have that problem myself; I am willfully complicit in the chains I bear--and by "chains" I'm thinking primarily of Caribou Coffee, Taco Johns, that sort of thing. But arguably even the complicit are victims in a system of oppression, just as often the victims are complicit. But I digress. Anyhoo, I read this book, far removed as it is from my day-to-day experience, and now I feel like getting into trouble.

Freire is mostly concerned with colonialism, but more positively what he describes is a method for initiating and sustaining any movement--another subject I've been reading a lot about lately. One might argue (several have, in fact) that Christianity began less as an institution and more as a movement; one might further argue that it would be revitalized by rediscovering this movement orientation. In any case, as a movement Christianity necessarily shares language with other movements; in at least one case, other movements share language with Christianity--the language of "witness."

I hear the word witness and think of how a person conducts herself, and how others interpret that conduct as essential Christianity. That's not how Freire intends it; he's talking about the witness of Che Guevara and his ilk. But the picture he paints of witness as an idea-informing-action--witness as praxis--is a lot more dynamic, more inspiring, by his portrayal:

The essential elements of witness which do not vary historically include: consistency between words and actions; boldness which urges the witnesses to confront existence as a permanent risk; radicalization . . . leading both the witnesses and the ones receiving that witness to increasing action; courage to love (which, far from being accommodation to an unjust world, is rather the transformation of that world in behalf of the increasing liberation of humankind); and faith in the people, since it is to them that witness is made.

All authentic (that is, critical) witness involves the daring to run risks, including the possibility that the leaders [those giving witness] will not always win the immediate adherence of the people.

A good reminder that witness--that of the Christian or that of the anarchist--is a gift offered for the benefit of the other, not a commodity to be hoarded as precious. We may die for our witness; we might trust that our death would then bear fruit.

Between Churches: Excursus on Mission

I've been writing intermittently about my ongoing experiment in finding and re-settling at a new church. (Read my earlier posts--in reverse order, I'm afraid--here.) Today I want to interrupt myself with a question that came to mind the other night: Should I be looking for a church, or do I need to find a mission?

The question came up while I sat in on a gathering in the northwestern suburbs of Chicago--close enough to home that I could crash the party, but far enough away that I didn't need to worry about getting committed. It was intended as an initial discussion about how people in this particular community could be more missional--more actively and thoughtfully engaged in showcasing the Christian faith where they lived. But it quickly became a recruiting opportunity for Forge America.

Forge is an international missionary-training organization formed in Australia by Alan Hirsch. I became a bit of a Hirsch groupie earlier this year--a little late to the party, I freely admit, since his books have been circulating for nigh on a decade now--and as it happens, Forge America is being established in the Chicago area. I met the people who are launching it here, and they're very cool--just months into this new initiative, they're bubbling with enthusiasm and creative energy. I like to be around people like that; it makes me feel more enthusiastic and creative myself.

One of the main elements of the Forge methodology is a year-long residency, in which people develop the theological grounding for their perceived mission and get skill-training in doing the work of a missionary--cultural anthropology, sociology, theology, what have you. I should hasten to add that this isn't primarily a means to the ends of the earth; Forge emphasizes the notion that being on mission is what it means to be the church, so wherever you find yourself is, to borrow a phrase from Jesus, ripe for the harvest. Some people who are trained by Forge go on to travel internationally, but the vast majority start or continue work where (or near where) they live. A year of anything costs money, of course, so my eye went quickly to the bottom line: $2500.

Gulp.

Just above the bottom line, however, was another requirement: participants in the residency program have to be (and continue to be) actively engaged in an ongoing mission. That is, of course, open to interpretation, but I found myself deferring the money question and fretting instead over the mission question. What, I wondered, would I write on that line of the application form? What is it that I'm actively giving myself to? In the midst of window-shopping all these churches in and around my community, what am I producing, creating, engaging? What in the world am I doing?

Big gulp.

In the grand scheme of things, $2500 is not a ton of money; a college or graduate student would easily spend that in a semester (maybe a quarter, maybe a week) and not blink. But a mission you can point to and say with confidence "This is what God has me doing right now" . . . For a melancholic cynic like me, saying anything so emphatically is hard; for a suburban sloth like me, locking in to such audacious activism is even harder.

I know for a fact that I'm not alone in carrying a certain amount of ennui about how to relate to church. I've heard from enough people over the past several posts, over the past several months--over the course of my adulthood, really--to know that contemporary people struggle to identify with churches as institutions. But maybe we're asking the wrong questions; maybe we're setting off on the wrong quest. Maybe instead of searching for a church to consume, we should be discerning the mission God has for us, and letting whatever then passes for church coalesce around it.

OK, enough of that. I'll get back to deconstructing churches as institutions soon, I promise.

Surprised by Solitude, Part Two

Second of two posts on solitude, based on the experience of the prophet Jonah. Read the first post here.

***

In solitude the trappings we accumulate--for our protection, for our self-assertion, for our self-indulgence--all are put to the test. We find out which of our everyday accoutrements has slid from mere comfortable accessory to potential idol. We find out in solitude which relationships have dredged up in us an unhealthy dependency or given us license to behave in ways that are unseemly or destructive. In the belly of a fish Jonah comes to terms with his failure to respond to the call God has placed on him. In solitude we are judged by God and brought to a place of understanding that judgment.

But solitude—this sacramental aloneness that we find in Jonah—takes us beyond the judgment of God to the grace of God. “The LORD provided a great fish to swallow Jonah,” we recall, not as a death sentence but as a deliverance. Jonah’s prayer in chapter two acknowledges the death that awaited him when he went overboard and the grace that sustained him as he came to terms with his failure to live out his calling. God shows Jonah, and us with him, that even in our failures God is still near, and even in our desperation God still offers deliverance.

Solitude strips us of what we’ve come to depend on, in order that we can be reminded that we depend ultimately on God alone. But it’s not some accident that we stumble into. We may find ourselves alone with God, like Moses by the burning bush or Jacob by the ladder to heaven, but solitude is qualitatively different: it’s a sacramental kind of discipline that we enter into by our own volition. As such, solitude takes us beyond circumstance and assertion into the category of sacred practice, part of our everyday call to live out our faith.

And yet, solitude isn’t something that we go hunting for, as if God is a genie in a bottle that we need only to rub. Solitude is itself an act of grace, an invitation extended to us. In that respect, solitude is not so much an act of obedience as it is an act of faith--like the act of communion, in which we receive the elements and are reminded of our failings but also of our deliverance, reminded of our shortcomings but also of our salvation. We’re reminded that we haven’t solved our own problems, but that we’ve had the great fortune of entering into relationship with a loving God.

So solitude is different—dramatically different—from the loneliness we find ourselves in or the me-time we demand for ourselves. In some circumstances we find ourselves alone; in other circumstances we declare ourselves alone. But in solitude we are reminded by the God of the universe and the lover of our souls that we are never alone, and we remember that this fact in and of itself changes everything.

Surprised by Solitude, Part One

First of two posts on solitude, drawn from the experience of the prophet Jonah.

***

I think it’s worth considering, as I read the book of Jonah, that the prophet didn’t know that God would send a fish to swallow him up. Nothing in the text indicates that he did: He didn’t say “If you could just drop me by that big ole fish over there . . .” No, “Throw me into the water,” he tells his shipmates, and he and they alike fully expected that he was being thrown to his death. Jonah assumed he would die in defiance of God’s call on him to go to Nineveh.

I wonder how Jonah’s tombstone would read. “Here lies Jonah—he kept to himself”? “Here lies Jonah—alone at last”? However it might read, Jonah would be remembered in death as a prophet who refused to prophesy, who would rather be left alone, thank you very much.

There are, I think, at least three ways of being alone. There’s circumstantial aloneness—we find ourselves alone, as when my wife has to work late or all our friends have other plans. I have a friend who lives by himself and doesn’t want to; he goes to sleep alone every night and wakes up alone every morning, and in between he goes about his business. But he wishes he were married; he finds himself alone, but he’s not happy about it. Another friend of mine is unmarried and perfectly content: she goes to sleep alone and wakes up alone, and in between she goes about her business, and she’s happy with her life. Aloneness as a circumstance is a perfectly legitimate way to be, but it’s not the kind of aloneness that we’re considering in the curious case of Jonah.

Another way of being alone is more assertive. We hit our limit in our interactions with other people—coworkers whose demands on our time become tiresome, or children who never stop needing us, or friends, neighbors and church members whose quirkinesses gradually morph into nettlesome annoyances—and declare “me-time.” With me-time we remind ourselves and others that we aren’t just cogs in a machine but distinct persons; we may rediscover ourselves from time to time by getting away from everyone else. In some cases this can be healthy: Folk singer Dar Williams wrote of her therapy sessions—a sort of guided me-time—“Oh, how I loved everybody else when I finally got to talk so much about myself.” In some cases, of course, me-time can devolve into something tragic, when we start to believe the insidious notion that we have no need of anyone else, when we forget to remember that the other people around us aren’t just annoying or needy drains on our energy but themselves distinct persons who deserve our honor and respect.

But in any case, like circumstantial aloneness, assertive aloneness is not the type of aloneness under consideration here. No, I see Jonah as a case study in a third type of aloneness: solitude.

“But the LORD provided a great fish to swallow Jonah.” The aloneness Jonah enters into here is orchestrated by God, making it something of a sacramental experience. Henri Nouwen, the late great writer on Christian spirituality, called solitude the “furnace of transformation” because, among other reasons, solitude is uncomfortable. In solitude God puts us to the test.

Between Churches: Why I Left, Part Four

Part four of an occasional series. I'd suggest first reading parts one, two and three. As always, I welcome your feedback and insights.

Hope and disillusionment are key characters in the drama of church, and so they will be key characters in this drama of church as it unfolds. I set out, with my wife, in the wake of our leaving our church of six years, not immediately to find a place to land. We know too much, I’m afraid, for that to serve any purpose. We weren’t really on a search for a church anyway but rather something more elusive, more elemental to life lived to the full. We were disillusioned; we needed to be reminded of hope.

So we set out to be reminded of hope, without losing sight of the reality of disillusionment. We set out to find not one or the other but the right mix of both—that sweet concoction of hope + disillusionment that could generate more than the sum of its parts.

This was going to take time, we suspected. And so we set out not to shop for a church home but to see what God was doing in the churches in our area—in all their diversity, in all their varied interpretations of the meaning of life and the mission of God’s people. We also wanted to see what churches in our area were doing to God—where these collections of people were falling short, as humans inevitably do, and how God was working through those shortcomings and failings to nevertheless accomplish his purposes. We wanted to cement in our own minds, at least, the reality that there aren’t actually multiple churches but rather one church, whose one foundation is Jesus Christ her Lord, before landing on a location in which we could join our efforts to something beyond us.

It’s worth mentioning that we had occasionally been told by friends that they could see us starting a church of our own. In particular, one new friend and one old friend were quite explicit about this, although I couldn’t really tell whether my old friend was joking or not. I thought it was funny, in any event, but it’s an idea that continued to populate a corner of my brain, one that invariably influenced how we interacted with the existing churches we visited. Full disclosure: I’m writing this introduction at the front end of this experiment, so it’s entirely possible that when it's all over I’ll be my own pastor. But I doubt it: I like autonomy too much--and I don’t like people enough--to be a pastor. As my old friend once said, “Being a leader means not getting to do what you want.” And that doesn’t sound fun to me.

But then again, who knows? This cocktail of hope and disillusionment I’m currently nursing hasn’t gotten me to that question yet. Before we look seriously at that, we’ve got some churches to visit. I'll be organizing these visits according to what’s considered “conventional” and what’s thought to be “alternative.”

“Conventional” churches include churches that can’t yet be considered “traditional”; there’s been no shortage of experimentation in church forms over the past fifty years, but you’d sound awfully funny, for example, saying “Remember the old days when our church had four hundred people, equally representing the Latino, Arab, African American and Caucasian communities?” Nevertheless, in the context of discussing churches, there are some words that evoke a particular imagination—“mega,” “traditional,” “multiethnic”—and so some observations about a particular church can be extrapolated to describe a particular movement.

There are some expressions of church, however, that are best described as “alternative,” mainly because they as yet have not gained a significant foothold in the ecclesial imagination. Even their practitioners identify them as different. I plan to include the “Christian concert” in this group not because anyone seriously considers such a gathering as church but because it functions as much like a church as like a concert. Sometimes they even take offerings. In any case, my wife once left a Christian concert by the great Sarah Groves and told a friend of ours, “This is like worship for me.” She’s not alone in that sentiment, by any stretch of the imagination. That needs to be taken seriously, and so I’ll take it seriously here.

This is a real experiment. I visited these churches for real, out of a real desire for myself to find a local Christian community to call home. I’m writing because I’m convinced that my experiment, for all its particularities, has some resonance for people like me whose hope-disillusionment continuum has gone askew. These churches are, by and large, in the Chicago area, although my travels often bring me into contact with other churches elsewhere as well. I don’t see any need to identify most of the churches I visit by name, although I see no real harm in doing so where appropriate. You may take offense at how I characterize some of these churches and their practices, but be assured that I consider all these churches to be acting in good faith, embracing the audacious calling to be the people of God in local witness to the goodness of God, conducting the mission of God in the place God has placed them. These are finite people with an infinite agenda. These are congregations of the disillusioned hopeful, and I count them as brothers and sisters in Christ.

Between Churches: Why I Left, Part Three

Third in an occasional series. Read "Why I Left" part one here; part two here. I welcome your comments and questions.

***

I am a firm believer that disillusionment is at least value-neutral and quite possibly a dispensation of grace. By disillusionment Moses forsook his Egyptian upbringing, later embracing his identity as a Jewish deliverer; by disillusionment King David ended his silence and confessed his sin; by disillusionment Jonah sang inside the belly of a whale and changed his course, which eventually changed the destiny of the Ninevites. By disillusionment Peter told Jesus to go away from him, only to hear Jesus bid him to follow; by disillusionment did he weep at his own betrayal of Jesus before his execution, only to be restored after the resurrection. The evangelical account of conversion demands disillusionment—a turning away from our past life, with all its sins and self-assertions. We sing things as audaciously disillusioned as “This world is not my home,” “I once was lost,” “I was sinking deep in sin.” We don’t repent of our disillusionment; we repent because of it.

Nevertheless, in and of itself disillusionment doesn’t deliver the goods. A disillusioned Moses would still be wandering the desert, too jaded to waste time on a burning bush. A disillusioned King David would have ceded the throne and retired to a cave somewhere. A disillusioned Peter would have let Jesus leave, would have rejected Jesus’ offer of restoration. No, disillusionment is intimately connected, in the evangelical story, with hope.

Hope doesn’t necessarily replace disillusionment for us; rather it counterbalances it, offering our Christian experience a dynamic constructive tension that keeps us from settling into either despair or naïve optimism. Like those desk toys in which two magnets exert equally repulsive force on a metal pen or ball or some sort, hope and disillusionment conspire to leave us hanging. They keep us unsettled, shimmering with the kinetic energy of a propulsive faith, ready—-whether we want to be or not, whether we’re conscious of our readiness or not-—to be changed, uprooted, rerouted, freshly commissioned.

But nobody likes a state of perpetual tension, no matter how dynamic or constructive. Disillusionment, for all the negative energy the word connotes, by itself is at least a fixed state. We know what to expect from disillusionment, and we know what not to expect. It’s comfortable in its own way. That’s why we get so thrown when we’re surprised by hope; it disrupts our settled state, stirring up feelings we thought we’d dispensed with or been drained of.

Likewise hope--and perhaps even moreso--is a comfortable condition. Hope without disillusionment assumes that this is the best of all possible worlds and that tomorrow will be better than today. Nobody likes a person who lives entirely in the realm of hope, but that person doesn’t care—tomorrow will be better.

No, there’s an important alchemy in the collision and collusion of hope and disillusionment. These two tastes go great together, if by “great” you mean that they do a great thing. They keep us moving: they keep us expectant while assuming no great change; they keep us grounded in reality while waiting for the happy ending; they allow us to survive and even thrive in the here and now, rather than retreating into the elusive future or sulking in the perpetual present. “An optimist,” my daddy always tells me, “can never be pleasantly surprised,” but a pessimist can never be enthused or excited. Without each other, neither can be much of anything, quite honestly. But together—together brings the magic.

The Art of Demotivation

Years ago now, my friend Judi loaned me a book by E. L. Kersten, cofounder of Despair Inc., which produces those Demotivators posters ("Burnout: If attitude is contagious, mine could kill you"). The jacket of the book reads "Ethics, Integrity and Sacrifice in the Workplace," but that's just a cover, literally: under the jacket is the real book, The Art of Demotivation: A Visionary Guide for Transforming Your Company's Least Valuable Asset--Your Employees. Har har snort.

Anyway, Judi finally asked me if I could give it back to her, so I thought, before I do, that I'd finally read it. It does what all good satire does: takes an absurd system and treats it seriously, turning it on its head in an equally absurd way. Kersten's book--at least in the eleven pages I've read so far--indicts the twentieth-century infatuation with self-actualization as the reason for the mediocrity of so many companies. The solution he proposes, with tongue at least partially in cheek, is "demotivation," or the systematic humiliation and alienation of employees so that they'll quit looking for their jobs to fulfill them and instead concentrate on fulfilling their responsibilities at their jobs. It's horrific, it's distressing, it's brilliant.

Exhibit A is this long excerpt on the "motivational industry," or consultants who are hired by corporate executives for weekend employee pick-me-ups. It makes a far less sympathetic but otherwise similar diagnosis of the culture we find ourselves in to the one I made in Deliver Us from Me-Ville. Enjoy it, understanding that he's being provocative on purpose:

Much of what passes for motivation in the motivational industry is little more than egoistic, short-term enthusiasm, or warm feelings generated by the creative packaging of the "principles" of the human potential movement, which itself is little more than a curious amalgam of common sense, humanistic religion, sophistry, and psychological snake-oil. The primary objective of the motivational industry is to stoke the fires of your employees' narcissism so that they fall in love with themselves all over again, just like they did when they saw their own beauty in the distorted reflection of their mother's adoring gaze, prior to their exposure to any of the objective, real-world criteria that would define them otherwise. The insights peddled to your employees revolve around the ideas that they are uniquely equipped to do something special, that they have a proprietary configuration of underappreciated skills that they have yet to discover (or show any evidence of), that their weaknesses are really strengths, and that they are winners who have simply not had the chance to win. They are regaled with stories about people like Thomas Edison who regarded failed experiments as stepping-stones on the path to scientific discovery, and they end up concluding that their own personal histories of failure and non-achievement are signs that they are bound for greatness. In this systematic distortion of reality, they learn to label their stubbornness as conviction; their bad attitudes as a passion for justice; their willful subversion of the company's goals as a unique, underappreciated perspective on how the company should proceed; and their general surliness as a natural response to a global lack of appreciation for their supremely valuable uniqueness.

Kersten attributes the perpetuation of the motivational industry to the way it calculates its success rate: not consequent improvement in employee productivity, but comment cards filled out by the employees in attendance. In actuality, "the life-changing insights sold by the motivational industry are the source of their problems rather than the solution to them. The consultants . . . are like ice cream vendors at a fat farm, pimps at a treatment facility for sex addicts, or drug pushers at a methadone clinic. They pander to your employees' cravings, and in so doing they exacerbate the problems they are paid to solve."

You'll get your book back soon, Judi. I promise.

Between Churches: Why I Left, Part Two

I left my church for, I admit, relatively petty reasons. I was irritated; I was burned out; I was out of sync with the culture of my church. It hadn’t always been that way, of course. My wife and I had come six years earlier, having left a far-off megachurch as an act of discipleship, a decision made when the megapastors began talking about a local witness, being salt and light in the places we live. The place we lived, we determined, was too far from the church we belonged to for us to be meaningfully engaged in both. So we found a comparatively small church within walking distance of our home, a fifty-year-old fellowship in our community, with an apparent respect for the arts and a clear commitment to the spiritual gifts of women, both of which were impressive to us. They had a new pastor with a commitment to evangelism and a connection to InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, which, full disclosure, is my employer. While they were, like so many churches in our suburban setting, lily white, they had a nice mix of ages, which was a welcome change from our demographically organized now-former church. We had a good feeling that we had hit the motherlode, and a few weeks of comparison shopping at other churches merely confirmed our suspicions. We liked the place so much, we spent our Valentine’s Day there; they hosted a dance featuring a jazz band populated almost entirely by church members, and while we didn’t dance (not my thing), we spent most of the evening talking to the pastor and his wife. I can, I almost certainly thought to myself, work with this.

And work with it we did. Within a few weeks we were taking membership classes. A few weeks more and we were participating in their small groups program. Not long after that we were leading a group; not long after that my wife was running the program. I got involved in an adult education course that soon morphed into an Easter play; not long after that I was acting in and then writing scripts for sketches during Sunday morning worship. Before too long I was describing myself, to friends and family and even in the bio for my book Deliver Us from Me-Ville, as an “actor.” My wife participated in and then led the annual summer short-term mission to Appalachia; I participated in and helped lead the confirmation program and adolescent Sunday school. I became an elder; my wife became an employee.

Less than a year after that, my wife quit her job at the church. Fifteen months after that, my term as an elder ended, and we quit the church.

Six years of our lives, suddenly done. It didn’t end in scandal; I guest-preached four weeks before our last service. My wife quit her job despite the pastor’s effort to keep her and the church’s repeated declarations that they wanted her to stay. We didn’t unfriend anybody on Facebook, and to my knowledge, nobody at the church unfriended us. It wasn’t shocking or blistering or anything other than, I suppose, disappointing.

We were disappointed, and our disappointment gradually became disillusionment, and it gradually became clear to us that our future lay elsewhere.

***

The second in an ongoing series. Keep coming back to read about what we learn about God, the church and ourselves when we leave one faith community in search of another. Feel free to weigh in, too; when it comes to hope and disillusionment, everyone (and no one) is an expert.

Between Churches: Why I Left, Part One

There are many in American Christianity who survey the landscape and complain that the church is under attack. I am not one of them. I look around and see, in American Christianity, an embarrassment of riches, both metaphorically and literally.

The church in America is unusually powerful, exerting remarkable influence on the cultural and political system it inhabits. A few complainers notwithstanding, the general public sees no problem with the longstanding practice of presidents employing “spiritual advisors”; the military faces no serious critique for continuing to sponsor a chaplaincy program; the most constructive programs run in the nation’s prisons are sponsored and maintained by religious organizations; no one as yet has mounted a serious challenge to the tax-free status of any organization that claims religion as its reason for being; and every week—though not as pervasively as in years past—Sunday mornings are widely accepted as sacred, with communities ceding the time to religious observance. This is the influence of Christianity in America: the Jewish Sabbath is Saturday, and the Islamic Sabbath is Friday, but Sunday—the Lord’s Day in Christian tradition—gets all the press. So, despite paranoid protests to the contrary, I’m not terribly concerned about the security of the church as an American institution.

The church in America has benefited from the laissez-faire posture of other powerful institutions. Without significant intrusion from government, business or other social movements, the church has been free to flourish. Diversity of belief and practice is widespread. Whole industries undergird and append to the church’s secure base.

And yet the church fails to thrive. Membership rolls in churches across the country steadily decline every year. Congregations and denominations split in bitter disputes over money, power and piety. Adolescents complete their confirmation and confirm to their parents that they’re done, thank you very much. Revenue to churches from wedding planning and hosting is shifting to hotels and resorts. By some accounts, the church isn’t simply failing to thrive, it’s free-falling.

Oh, it’s not as dire as all that. But there are some serious, unchecked, intrinsic problems in the shared space of Christianity and contemporary culture, with its peculiar philosophies, politics and priorities. There was a time that a church centered a town; the tall steeple oriented the surrounding terrain, the bell tower kept everyone apprised of what time it is. That time is now past; the church is on the peripheries of relevance, the steeples themselves are quaint anachronisms that embarrass some and whisper sweet nostalgic nothings to others. The church as we know it is failing to thrive; it’s dying on the vine.

But that’s not why I left.

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This is the first of a series of posts--"Between Churches"--chronicling my departure from our church of several years and our exploration of the church in our area. I welcome your feedback.