Searching for Sunday

I realize this will inevitably offend some people.  It is not my intent to do so, or to point out and shake my finger at any church in particular.  This post is simply the ways I'm tired and what I think we can do better.  I also realize I am not perfect, and it is way easier to sit behind a computer screen and criticize instead of act.  I'm not saying that I'm Mother Theresa and I'm feeding the homeless every day, because I'm not.  But I've found ways to scrape elbows with the needs in my community and I hope you will, too, whether that be affiliated with a church or you doing whatever you can to be the Church.      

I'm reading a book by Rachel Held Evans called Searching for Sunday:  loving, leaving, and finding the church.  It has been putting words to some of the things I haven't had words for regarding my own tension with the church lately.

The church is one of my first loves.  I was raised in the rhythm of Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights, youth group games, week long mission trips, singing specials on Sunday mornings, youth conventions, starred in church plays/dramas.  I never cussed.  I brought my Bible to school (I know…).  I invited friends to Wednesday nights and was on the youth group student leadership team every year.  I was the poster child for the good little church girl.

Now I cringe at it all.  Not that it was wrong.  None of those things are wrong (embarrassing maybe, but not wrong).  I realize it was necessary into making me into the woman who's typing these words, but I still cringe nonetheless.  I grew up in the church, but it took me forever to figure out what the Church was.  The big C.  What it looks like to be the people who make up the hands and feet and body of Jesus here.  The breath and bones of Love and action.  Moving, breathing, serving.  That Church.  Not the Sunday morning church.  Not the checklist appearance of having it all together.    

But lately the church has me defeated.  The church as a building and a Sunday morning.  The whole production of it all.  The church has become like that awkward family you see once a year.  The ones you put up with because they're family, but man... they're embarrassing.

The church has me sad.  I've been burdened with the casualties it's leaving in its wake.  My friends, coworkers, people I love whom I know feel rejected by the church.  I realize not every church is dropping the ball, but I've just been sad.  I've tried a few different churches lately, and I'm tired of most of the conversations.  I just want to put my head in my hands and heavy sigh when the church is having more conversations about car decals and donuts and the whispers of who left their church to go to that other church than refugees dying and the homeless people under the shadow of our pretty steeples and newly painted walls.  I realize it takes money to do things, but do you have to have a big announcement about how much money was raised or what color you're painting the walls or how much you've grown?  I'm just tired, you know?  I don't think any of those things are bad, please hear me.  I'm just tired of the conversation.  I don't give a shit about car decals when there are headlines about a Syrian refugee toddler drowned, face down and lifeless on a shore in Turkey.  Why isn't that part of our conversation?  I haven't heard about that on Sunday mornings.  Why aren't we more burdened to come together and find any little way we can join that conversation?

I'm not saying a building is bad or wrong.  A church, a building—I've found community and life inside its walls and the living rooms of the people there.  I don't think it's wrong to go on Sunday mornings and have Bible studies throughout the week.  I don't think it's wrong to have a nice building.  I just think there's more to being the Church than being a church.  I believe we can do better.  I believe we can move and be active and get knee deep and muddy in the trenches of our cities and ask more questions about what we can do to lessen the burdens of the people outside our walls.  (and for those of you thinking it, I know I can do more than write a blog complaining about all the things we're doing wrong.)

The church, my first love…more importantly the individuals, the Church:  I still believe in you.

I want to go out more than we go in.  I think we can spend more breath and money and sweat and tears in the streets of our cities than the aesthetics of our buildings or the numbers in our chairs.  We don't have to wear matching shirts or plan it once a month.  It doesn't have to be a big deal.  It can be quiet and small and weekly or daily instead of yearly.  Or it can be big and loud.  I don't really care what it looks like.  I just want us to do something, to do more.  We also don't have to wait for a church or a building to organize something we can be a part of.  You don't have to have a membership card to find ways your community needs life given back to it, breathe into the parts that are suffocating, mend parts that are breaking.  It doesn't have to be a Christian organization.  Non-Christian organizations do some really good things the church isn't doing.  Let's start asking more questions so we can know how to be an answer.  We can have Sunday mornings and donuts because those are good things, they are not wrong.  But let's go out more than we go in.  Let's change the conversation.  Let's get in the trenches and get dirty.  Let's do something.  We don't all have to do the same things.  I have skills and abilities to do things that you can't, just like you can do things I am not equipped to do.  I love nursing and bandaging wounds and educating about medicine and finding medical resources for people, so I'm doing some of that.  Maybe you hate doing that, and that's okay.  I can't fix cars or build things, but maybe that's what makes your blood pump, so do that for people.  Use what you have and do what you can.  Be the Hands and Feet.  Move, breathe, sweat, bleed, try, be.