Tag Archive for frustration at Letters From Leavers

Dear my former church

I dearly wish you had been everything you said you were. I wih you had been a community. I wish you had been a place genuinely committed to people’s healing, a place where people could ask questions, a place were people honoured commitments, a place where people extended care.

I loved you so much and I gave you my time, my heart, my life. And you go on, unaffected by my life, unaffected by the lives of many like me who were spat out, confused, heartbroken and bewildered. Those of us who loved you so much but were never loved back because we didn’t somehow fit the mould - whatever that mould was.

It wasn’t just that I was on your staff team but unlike other staff members you weren’t interested in my development and that as soon as the leadership changed you made me redundant without taking time to get to know who I was, what I could do, what I was called to, what I dreamed of.

Nor was it just that the people in the church who promised they would not abandon and hurt me as others had done, that they were committed to me no matter what didn’t hold true to their words, didn’t care, had better things to do, better people to spend time with.

Although those things hurt, it was the way you brushed aside my questions and confusion and hurt that killed me the most - not just because it happened to me but because it could happen to so many others like me. Because you think everything that happened is purely down to me being just generally messed up, therefore there is nothing to learn from this experience for you.

When I said I wasn’t sure what the gospel was, when I didn’t see the things in the Bible reflected in my life, when I never felt peace or joy or any of that stuff, when everything God said to me the opposite happened, when my head and heart were so messed up by the failure of God’s word to come to fruition, when I saw no fulfillment on his promises or people’s promises, when I found no healing despite so much prayer ministry, when I asked for help because worship services always made me feel evil and because every Christian I tried to befriend ignored me no matter what I tried, when I was told (and was convinced myself) there were demons in me and most of all when I was devastated to the point of self-harming, panicking and attempting suicide because I had no love, no support and no answers, you told me everything that happened was my fault (with no explanation of why), you shouted at me for being upset and you told me to get over myself.

When I was most in need of people to lament for me, to call out to God for me, to sit in the sackcloth and ashes, you told me there was nothing that could be done for me and cut me off.

What will you do to the next depressed person, the drug addict, the prostitute, the next lonely person, the bereaved, the outcast? You say you want people like this in your church - but you don’t. Only the sorted, the popular, the straightforward fit in. the messy are only allowed if they get unmessy very quickly. There is no room for questions, no room for doubt and very little love for anyone who isn’t perfect.

I believed you, I believed God and I took the most risks I have ever taken in my life in loving, trusting and hoping him and you.

After nine years in your church I left in a worse mess than when I joined (no mean feat), and I’m not sure I will ever join a church again, other than some charade attendance to please my family who would emotionally blackmail and nag me to death if I ever dared to not be a good Christian. In my own heart though, I would no longer call myself a Christian, or at least I would say I was an agnostic Christian although I still try to live by some Christian principles, and I would still love it to be true.

I don’t think I will ever understand what happened - and until I do I will never dare take the same risks of loving, believing or trusting again.

Before I joined your church I was scared to hope, to love, to trust, to believe. You made me drop my guard and then beat me to death when I was most vulnerable. I loved you so much, but it was an abusive relationship. You made out I was the abusive one because I wasn’t perfect, because I wasn’t straightforward, because I got upset, I questioned, I expected returns on the things I was promised. All I did was believe and trust and obey - and have the audactity to hurt and to question when these things didn’t work.

I just wish you’d wanted me to be a part of you as much as I wanted to be.

I know what I believed God said to me, and so many of you confirmed those things. Just because you then randomly decided to do the opposite to what God was saying and told me I needed to go with your decisions because they must be from God even though you’d had no ‘words’ or anything doesn’t mean what you did was of Him. I may have heard him wrong, but if that is possible, it is also possible your words and decisions were wrong, especially as many of them were conflicting and contradictory. I wish someone had cared enough to at least understand the confusion and sit with me through it. The one person I trusted most even said they had to leave me because they were getting confused too and couldn’t handle it.

I know you would tell me the way I am living (by not going to church etc) is wrong, but no more wrong than the things you said or did. I don’t know any more if there is a right, if there is a God. If there was, why didn’t he intervene?

Life is not the way your preach it to be (become a Christian, do everything God’s way, do everything you are told, and your life will be amazing) and until you accept it, your large front door and large back door will always remain.

clergy abuse, depression, desire for community, destructive practices, fallout, forced out of church, frustration, hate, unforgiven by church
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About a year ago I was reading Church After Christendom by Stuart Murray for a class at Fuller called Theology and Culture. Part of Murray’s book examines the “back door” of the Church and asks why it is that so many people are leaving. I got the idea to create a website called Letters From Leavers while reading that book. I wanted to give people who were “leavers” a chance to tell their story in the form of a “Dear John” letter. Letters From Leavers is just about a year old now and I never expected that so many people would interact with the site. I also didn’t expect to be a “leaver” myself.

I am 28 years old and for the first 27 years of my life I was in church almost every Sunday, and the times that I wasn’t there I was gone away at camp with the youth group. Since May of 2007 I have been to church twice. The crazy part is that I don’t really miss it; I don’t feel a guilt-ridden sense of obligation or duty to be at church on Sunday. My wife has asked me a few times since May if I wanted to go back to church and I quickly say “no” and then she says “me either” and we go about our day.

So what happened?

My leaving has been a gradual process. If I am honest with myself as I look back to February 07, even though I was working full time as a youth minister at a church and attending Seminary part time, I had one foot out of the “back door.” I wasn’t doing my job to the best of my ability and I had frequently thought that if I wasn’t working at a church, then I wouldn’t be going to one.

The one thing I was truly passionate about was a worship community within our church that I had helped to start and gave leadership to. I loved to plan creative ways for us to worship together. I loved working with the other pastor that also gave leadership to this community. I loved letting our gatherings come together spontaneously, led by the Holy Spirit, as opposed to the formulaic pre-packaged worship services that I had grown weary of. I loved being a part of an environment in which every person present was given an equal opportunity to contribute and participate, rather than sit passively and consume. I had grown tired of “church” but with equal measure I was excited about thinking of church in these new and different ways.

Unfortunately we didn’t get a chance to see it through. The leadership of the church wasn’t pleased with the results of our efforts and we were basically asked to move on. I suppose it was mutual departing because like I said before I had been sensing it was time for me to leave, but the church certainly wanted me to move on as well.

Now I said before that I don’t really miss church, but that isn’t entirely true. I miss all of the things that I was a part of with the worship community I helped give leadership to. I miss the genuine relationships, the shared meals, the communal worship, and the creative expression. The truth is that I can still have most of this stuff outside of a church context but it is much harder to experience on a regular basis. I am so grateful that I still have relationships with so many people from our old church and that those relationships are bigger than having the same church membership. But as I said it is hard work to maintain that caring community that is essential for growing in faith, especially if you don’t see each other at church every week.

So I am left facing down my own laziness. Do I make the effort to “be” church now that I am not “going” to church? Can I still have the experience of a caring community of friends who do life together in spite of my tendency toward individualism? Am I able to serve others without the titles, resources or official backing of the institution known as the Church? Just some questions for me to think about as I lay in bed on Sunday mornings.

desire for community, former youth minister, frustration
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