Lord forgive me…but I don’t have a church home. I haven’t had a church home for quite a while and I must say that I am disgusted and utterly turned off by organized religion. It is this stomach turning ilk that keeps me away from the fellowship that church offers, and that may be a sin…it is a conflict that greets me and rides my mind like you wouldn’t believe.
But let me tell you of my concerns. I guess it all started when I was a member of a particular church, and had one of the deacons hitting on me in the nursery where I volunteered my time during church service. You see, back in the day, I happened to be heavily involved in my church. I sang in the choir, went to Sunday school, served in the nursery (Marvalus loves the kiddies), and found myself at the church all the time. It was out of duty and out of love that I was there. This was the church that I was raised in, baptized in, married in, and thought that I would raise my own child in. But that day in the nursery, when the deacon had me cornered and began to use his hands to touch me in places that no man except my husband (at the time) should have been touching me, and looking at me in a way that was not church-like, I felt the protection that the church had offered me evaporate. I stopped working in that nursery amid questions from my family, and from the parents of the kiddies that looked to me to care for their children while they got their praise on. But something else happened. I could have told my pastor; I could have told my family…but I chose silence. I was 24 years old at the time, and I believed there was no way that my word would be believed against an older, established member of the church…a deacon, no less! So silence was my way to handle this. And then came absence. I began to stay away from the church, making less and less appearances to Sunday school and leaving the choir altogether.
It soon became apparent to me that I needed to leave this church because I no longer felt like I was comfortable there. I could have found another church but this incident shook me to my core, and did something to my foundation that sent me reeling. I believed that even if I changed churches, the incident would repeat itself. So I stayed at home, and became a bedside church goer. I got into TD Jakes, and Bishop Gilbert Patterson…oh, I made visits back to my church, but it was only for special occasions: the church anniversary, Family Day, Easter…you know. For the most part, I stayed away. I didn’t see how my going was going to change anything, so I didn’t.
Then the pastor died. The man who had baptized me, the man who I looked up to, and gotten used to having around, left this earth. I cried during the entire ceremony. I can’t even explain to you why; I guess it is just the thought of losing someone who has been a fixture in your life for so long, leave. He had spoken to my mother about why I had left the church, but he never asked me. Oh, he had told me to come back whenever he had seen me on my rare visits, but we never had the conversation, partly because I was avoiding him like the plague. I never wanted to tell him why I left in the first place.
When I see organized religion and pastors who prosper at the hands of their members, I cringe. When I see pastors who spit hate and judgements from the pulpit, I feel like I would rather stay away than be a part of that. I know that at the core, pastors and preachers are just human beings, and we must keep that in mind. Most of them have been chosen; I say most because it seems to me that some of them are self-appointed and with the message they send out, there is no way that God is condoning or giving them those words. But I also know there is some goodness. It is finding it that is the difficult chore.
I say all this to say that reading my bible is no longer enough for me. I need to talk to someone about my feelings and what this means, what I am to do with the Word, and how I can apply this to my life. I want to be able to study my bible, have an honest conversation with someone on its meanings and intricacies. I feel like that can only be done in church; but when you feel the way I do about going to church, how do you reconcile the two? I realize that I am older and more mature now, and the woman that I am now would not choose silence…but the young girl that I was then still lives inside me and still has the worries, still has the concerns, still doubts…
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