I haven’t felt at home in a church for a very long time. I have felt many other things that I do not think belong for extended periods within a faith community. I have felt ashamed. I have felt judged. I have felt anger. I have felt hate. I have been afraid. None of these are inherently bad emotions to experience when in a religious setting, because sometimes emotions are a way to check our thoughts and actions within a community. Are our actions and thoughts reflecting our individual and community values? Are we striving towards making the world a good and just place? These are useful questions that emotions can help us answer as a tool for self evaluation. However, when negative emotions become the dominate experience, the leading narrative voice within a community, they begin to overwhelm any potential good that the community might do.
I grew up in the church. My fundamental years were spent learning the doctrine of the Missouri Synod Lutheran Church. I attended a Lutheran school. My mother, grandmother, and aunt were all Lutheran. The church we attended was old and dark, and perhaps it was where my love for the medieval world was born. While not even close to being a medieval church, my childhood mind could imagine the cathedrals built centuries earlier in Europe. Stained glass and a sculpture of Christ kept me intrigued and dreaming when sermons became too long. I never felt comfortable in the Lutheran church of my childhood, but I don’t believe it wanted me to. The church was built to silence, to encourage quiet supplication, and hushed praises. It was not a comfortable place to be, but it never pretended to be otherwise. It was stoic and brooding like Luther must have intended. It encouraged no questions, but I had many.
In middle school, my mother decided we–her, my brother, and I–would begin attending an evangelical church, and this is where I first felt as if I truly connected with a faith community. I was allowed to begin asking questions the Lutheran church I had grown up in did not necessarily encourage. I didn’t realize at the time how much the evangelical church believed it’s doctrine was an absolute truth and other denominations were, “missing the mark.” In the evangelical church I began connecting with students my own age, and as a child that had struggled to fit in for so long, this was life changing. Everything within the evangelical church comes at a price however, and for me that meant conformity. Feminine modesty was encouraged, and slowly I began to incorporate these bits into my wardrobe and personality. This was probably good for my baggy, emo wardrobe but shedding the protective shell of my masculinity–both in dress and actions–was a painful experience. In the evangelical church, I experienced both the beauty of community and the cutting experience of its critique and standards, which I never truly ever lived up to. Perhaps I had learned non conformity in the church from my mother.
My mother was married to an atheist, she wore too much make up and her dresses were too short. She had too many opinions and had the shrewd distrusting nature of a woman who has been wronged by the world in clear and vicious ways. God could save her if only she conformed to the ideal cookie cutter woman the evangelical church had spent years creating. I watched her struggle to be that woman, I watched her doubt her belief in God, and slowly the anger I had pushed down in relation to my own identity began to bubble up. It would not bubble over until college. I didn’t realize it at the time, but to the individuals within the congregation, my family and I were simply souls that needed saving. This was why they cared, but the minute we began to stray too far down the path of the world, we were lost for good. It was best to cut us off. Sometimes one of them will still reach out over social media to offer me the good news of Christ, so long as I repent my identity. I try to respond in love, but I’m running out of patience for their white washed, conservative Jesus.
In my first few weeks of college I attempted to join the church group on campus, but after a few attendances in hope I would not become a church drop out statistic, I quickly realized I did not fit. Already sickeningly sour to me, the heavy evangelical overtones left my skin freezer burnt. When I attempted to return my sophomore year, I heard a sermon that assumed the sexual impurity of women. I walked out from the auditorium and became the church drop out statistic I feared becoming. Rage sat heavy in my stomach from years of seeing the same hypocrisies and hearing the repetitive verses of condemnation. Oddly enough, I would eventually work as a Youth Ministries Intern later that year. I found community there for a time, but the return to university classwork would again distance me from a religious community. My belief in God became academic, not personal.
College was perhaps the most aggressive period of religious growth for me where I began to redefine God. During senior year, I finally found the religious community I had been searching for, though it was outside any formal religious organization. God became both academic and personal. God became interfaith, which I realized was what I had needed in God since I first began asking questions. A few of us would attend the nearby Catholic church, and I found some peace in the ritual of it all. My flighty attendance left little chance for me to feel truly connected. I was not ready to return fully, nor did there seem to be enough time with graduation so close.
When I moved to Colorado, I had every intention of returning to church, partly to end having to lie to my mother about my religious involvement, and partly because since leaving, there is a part of me that has always earned to find a formal religious community again. Formal religious community can be a beautiful, satisfying, challenging experience, and I miss it. However, it was not until today–four months after first moving here–that I finally found myself in a church pew. I arrived thirty minutes late due to not realizing that this particular service day had been moved up, I didn’t take communion, and I didn’t know any of the rituals of this denomination. I arrived with a shaved head, wore all black, and couldn’t sing along to the hymns. I was sure I would never be welcomed back again.
Walking into churches as an openly Queer person is a daunting experience, and having a non-binary gender identity surely complicates things; I was not sure how the room full of middle-aged and elderly individuals would react. Usually, I receive a few dark looks, a bit of open staring, sometimes a whispered prayer, or painful anti-gay outreach. Today I received welcomes and hellos, smiles and handshakes. I was invited to a potluck and received questions about my work in the community. Congregation members gushed about the students they guessed I work with and made sure I knew I could take communion anytime I was there. They told me about their work and activism in the community and in the church. They’re proud they have the first woman priest for the denomination in the region, and they never looked at me like I was a soul that needed saving.
I left close to crying, finally feeling like I had maybe, just maybe, found a church where I can feel at home again. Perhaps if I don’t conform to their standards–that I don’t yet know–I will be left behind as my experience with the Evangelical church ended. But perhaps not. I don’t know the answer and will just have to continue to learn and grow, but this time in a formal religious community. Because I think it’s time to go back, but going back also feels like a new beginning. A new denomination, a new state, a new congregation, and in many ways, a new Lynn.
lynneggler 