I’ve been out of church for about a year now. I can’t tell you why I’ve been gone so long, at least not concisely, anyway. I think that’s because I don’t really know why I left myself. Even if I had to stand before the Big Man and give Him an account on why, my best reasoning wouldn’t rhapsodize in a way that could save me from someone’s insistence I was a back sliding, no good, wayward, excuse making, sinner.
Call it a New Year’s resolution, call it a penitent change of behavior, call it whatever you want; the fact of the matter is, these last few weeks I’ve been returning to church, looking for some answers. Not the typical, “who is God” stuff. No, more like and understanding of why I felt the need to leave church in the first place.
When I got saved so many years ago, I went through, what people of my belief system call an “on fire” period. This was when I was happy and fervent about my new found faith with Jesus Christ. Boy, them were some good times. I was young and I didn’t care how goofy I sounded. It was like being a hippie with out the drugs or the crappy folk singers. I ate up everything Christian without questioning it because, for one, I believed everything that came with the hashtag of Christianity in front of it to be holy; and, for two, I was young in my faith and didn’t ask questions since questions ruined the buzz.
As I got older, though, the fire started to die down. Not that my faith was waning, mind you, just my intensity with it. I became more pensive; a steady burn as opposed to a raging inferno of annoying you to death with tracts of scripture and Bible themed T-shirts that read “Spirit” instead of “Sprite”. Those were the days when I started to discover the application of faith in the world around us meant more than accessorizing oneself with Christian kitsch, arm bands, and devotionals.
But this part of the faith proved troublesome. Every believer agrees that it’s great to get saved. After that, it’s like nobody can agree on anything the Bible says anymore. Everything becomes a point of contention, from having instruments in church and pastors wearing jeans, to the genre of music and the cut of a skirt. Even the translation of the Bible is an afterlife or eternal death issue.
After a time, I found that my faith was no longer centered on what constituted a relevant relationship with God, but rather a growing series of for or against arguments on spiritual issues, even among fellow believers. My faith was one big real time argument in which I searched for rhetoric that supported what I believed and denounced what I felt was wrong. After a while, I discovered that the people I got along with the least were the people I was supposed to share the same faith with!
I did what most believers do when they discover this; I jumped ship from one church to another, constantly searching for something new, refreshing, and agreeable. But, if I stayed at any one place for too long, I inevitably found something that disappointed me. I found arguments and shortcomings and imperfections. In short, I found a reason to leave, even though I knew where ever I went next, I’d undoubtedly find reasons to leave again, if I looked hard enough. And, I discovered, I was always looking for reasons.
I think the number one reason people turn away from faith is not because they lose it in God. It’s because they lose their faith in people. We are, after all, the broken part of the man + God = happiness equation. I think, and maybe unintentionally, we believers have trained ourselves to expect perfection in people, and that, for some reason, that perfection is predicated on the fact these people believe the same way we do. Perfection always seems to think more like us than someone else, doesn’t it?
Naturally, since we know better than those around us, we believe it’s our divine duty to out smart the other and assert our reasoning on why we are right and they are wrong. Sadly, this won’t fix the problem because we are never going to get it right. Never, as in, not ever. Even though all believers can regurgitate there are none perfect aside from the uppercase G himself, it doesn’t mean we believe it since we also contend we know what brand of perfection He likes better that another fella.
I’m not six feet above contradiction here. In fact, it was realizing this horrid truth in myself that has me back in church. I cannot express to you how hard it is to be in a building and not react to everything I see, to follow my training on how to spot imperfection, to push people aside and simply search for God in the presence of man. But I’m trying, and in my effort I’ve stumbled on a crazy truth: after all the years I’ve been with team Christianity, it’s still remarkably hard to let man be man, and God be God.