I have found in life there are many times you cannot put your finger on the pulse of what is happening in the present. It takes months and years to grow into the person who has enough wisdom to look back and understand why something happened the way it did. To gain a perspective that isn’t laced with bitterness, but mature enough to ascertain some goodness came from the bad.
Still, isn’t it common to experience discomfort, stress, aching–signs of pain–in the present? You feel pain and it signals to your brain something is wrong.
It’s useful, but pain doesn’t bring relief, just the awareness of the disease.
Last year I was feeling pain. And now I know why.
It was an emotional time (and I hate emotions, though I certainly feel a lot of them). I was at home with the kids full-time. Through no fault of theirs we were homeschooling and keeping our heads down, noses to the grindstone. It wasn’t ideal, but it felt like the only thing to do.
We were attending a church that had initially seemed like such a nice oasis in Denver from the craziness of the world. It was a convenient stone’s throw away from our house. The neighborhood surrounding it was mostly Hmong and Spanish speaking households–kids who all attended school with our own.
Our church was perfectly positioned in a community and it seemed advantageous to me as a public school mom–the church could support the school and parents; the parents might in turn come to know Jesus better. My goal is always for Jesus to be better known, because in knowing Him, my life hasn’t fallen apart like it should have long ago.
The thing was, we didn’t know a lick about the denomination of the church. We detected it was a secretive little thing. The men who led it claimed they were from the “brethren” ideology, nothing more. There was no statement of faith printed on the bulletins, no hard, obvious rules to follow. The church was made of aging parishioners mixed with a couple young families. We were informed it was an upstart–the older folks had phoned a friend, so to speak, and the neighboring community of “brethren” believers sent a preacher and some families to add new life to the congregation. They decided on a new name.
It was fine–we were new. We were encouraged by the non-descript, plainness of the building, the lack of signage, and the absence of all those things fancy churches have that are showy and expensive. It seemed to elevate Jesus.
There were still many older ladies who only wore long skirts and placed doilies on their heads to cover when praying, but it meshed with younger moms in capris and sandals, and I didn’t sense it too divisive.
Of course, we had only been attending Baptist and reformed churches up until then, and so most everything seemed a little odd, but not off-putting. Sure, only men were allowed to pray aloud in the first service, but they served communion every week and let kids stay in the auditorium instead of rushing them off to “children’s church”.
We, as they say, got plugged in.
For two years we taught Sunday school to a handful of kids. We led a weekly kid’s night and fed the whole crew who came and sang and learned with us. We prepared communion and I helped lead worship. I became certified to teach English and set up a conversational class on Thursdays in the church building (it was remarkably unsuccessful, but some things are). I arranged coat drives and school supply drives and tried to do some community networking between the school and church. Joe led the security team. The church was positioned on a street with high crime incidence and many homeless people, so he got his permit to carry a concealed weapon. (You’ll remember this was around the time a terrible shooting incident took place in Texas at a church. Sadly, this is necessary in some cases.)
In the pandemic we were grateful our church only shut down for six weeks or so before the leadership decided it wasn’t a viable way to keep a church alive. If no one is attending, there certainly isn’t anyone putting money in the coffers.
Meanwhile, I was reading thru the stack of books on the church bookshelf (as recommended to me by our church’s resident expert, a man who has written and sold thousands of copies of books regarding church eldership)–all biographies written on heroes of the faith. All men who served in some missionary capacity to bring the Word to the lost world.
The books struck me as kind of paternalistic, because the heroes were all men doing maybe incredible things while also maybe abandoning their own families “for the sake of the gospel”.
Don’t get me wrong–there were many brave missionaries who brought light to dark places, but these books seemed a little pointed and weird. The protagonists were heartily applauded; the women and children too weak to endure the hardships were derided as crazy or unsupportive, or lacking faith.
We returned to in-person church–a weird thing at the the time, as you’ll recall in June of 2020 people were beginning to wear masks and it felt odd to all of us– but we were so grateful to have a bit of normalcy and willing to give it a hearty go. Our church blossomed that summer with people who were missing church (theirs having been shuttered for the foreseeable future). The leadership prided themselves on their tact and skill on handling people and church and that tricky balance of being relational, relevant, and religious.
For the first time, I noticed at church there were a lot of John MacArthur quotes being tossed around in the sermon. I knew only a tiny bit of MacArthur and had no hard feelings, but I noticed there were Bibles and hymn books in the pews with his name on them. Odd. Then there were emails to correct our musical worship–no drum kit, but a more acoustic set-up. No guitar between the singer and the microphone, because it’s too performance-based. Only these songs from this hymnal, must be piano-driven. There was no Biblical reasoning for any of this, it was simply something the elders had decided.
The men in the pulpit (always one of three elders) seemed to qualify their sermon points. It was as if they thought the free world might come to an end and so it fell on us, the local church, to align our values with theirs–should we have hope of not losing a foothold. A lot of bashing Catholics. Teasing out the differences on small issues. It’s us versus them.
This seemed a tad obscure to me and Joe (Baptists aren’t all bad, neither are church of Christers), and we felt ourselves distancing our thinking from what was said at church.
It was around this time we began really hearing the word “eldership” pop up a lot. And the term “church-sanctioned”. A new elder had joined the group mid-pandemic, and since we had an eldership expert on the team, it wasn’t a question of qualification. Joe was urged to serve as a deacon, and when he asked what that would entail he was told it would be his usual duties of security and general service.
“So,” he said, “it would just be a title then? You want me to have a title?” He had no desire to be called a deacon, and he said so, to their disapproval (even after they offered to fly him to a John MacArthur leadership conference).
I think this is where things began rubbing the wrong way.
Nevertheless, we agreed to host a weekly home group at our house, because the elders decided–should the church face persecution in the face of Covid–we would already have sub-churches in houses. It was the practical thing to do–we were the youngest family living nearest the church, and our sprawling house could accommodate a crowd. My kids were withering from lack of social interaction (going on six months at the time), and I could use a few good friends, too.
This was our biggest mistake.
We must have looked suspicious, wearing our hearts on our sleeve. We wanted a Bible study, but our hearts were sincerely feeling turmoil over the denominational “non-denominational” vibes at church. Weren’t we invested enough in the church? Could we not allow for folks who didn’t subscribe completely to a John MacArthur theology? Shall we sit and nod dumbly while a man tells us why we ought not think Mark chapter 16 deserves to be included in canon?
Believe this, or… Agree with this, or…
In Bible study we were supposed to follow the text that was being preached on Sundays. It gave us very little wiggle room to explore what we were reading, and what were we to do with the parts where we disagreed with what the preacher had said?
No need to fear–two months in, the elders emailed out a Bible Study Life Group Mandate. Rules for how the “church-sanctioned” evening should proceed, from serving dinner to praying to what additional reading resources were or were not “elder approved”.
Angry mass emails were received that bashed “certain people” for trying to lead others astray. Warnings for church discipline.
It was many months of homeschooling kids and cleaning the house and preparing dinner on Thursdays, dreading life group. I waited and fretted and wondered why it was so miserable anticipating a Bible study. If Living Water brings Life, what was wrong with this picture? Why did it feel like a mole was planted to spy on us and report back to the elders? Why was it “for our own protection”? Where was the autonomy in having our own family culture? What would define us if we left the church? Who are Christians without a home?
You might be able to guess at the rest of the story, since I am writing this from another state entirely. It did eventually blow up in our faces in a literal way. On a spring Sunday morning one of the elders confronted Joe and said some hurtful things about me to my husband. (It didn’t help that he read my online writings regularly and thought he knew more about us than he really did.) How manipulative I am, how controlling in our marriage (this is a John MacArthur, complementarian recipe for disaster). It blew up because we did not pursue the path the local church had for us. It did not matter how many hours we served or how much we loved our community. The church was in the business of training us to follow their rules, not training up disciples of Jesus.
And it caused us great pain in the process.
This morning I was listening to a lesson by J. Vernon McGee about the time Jesus met for dinner at a Pharisee’s house. (I do still study my Bible with unconventional, non-church-sanctioned references. McGee’s been dead 35 years.)
As the culture of the day was, neighbors gathered to watch and observe the meeting, and one woman showed up and began doing an odd thing. She was crying and letting her tears drip on the feet of Jesus. He let her continue the bizarre behavior even to the point of her kissing his feet and wiping them with her hair and the perfume she’d brought.
You have to admit, it is odd.
Simon, the Pharisee, couldn’t ignore it anymore, and Jesus, knowing his thoughts, pointed out to him that it isn’t the righteous, church-ruling leaders who are full of love for God. It’s the common folk who can’t ever get over what Jesus has done for them in forgiving their sins.
In fact, the woman with the tears and perfume performed the common courtesy of the day– washing a visitor’s feet and greeting him warmly–where Simon only had Jesus into his home as a curiosity.
And don’t I know it, the girl who can’t join a church to save her soul. Women that were cured of demons and unclean spirits and diseases followed Jesus everywhere–they invested their money and lives into making disciples; they didn’t sign up at the local church to have their wrists slapped for minor infractions.
So I will keep trailing after the lot of them, following Jesus. He lets us do that, do you know it? Even me, who was less than a stellar wife to my husband for the first decade of our marriage. Me, a pharisee in my own right. Me, a mom sending her kids to public school while culture unravels around us. It doesn’t seem so odd to me to throw myself at Jesus. He allows us to anoint his feet and drip our salty tears on Him. He invites us to get personal.
Pain that is borne is pain that can be overcome–we know this because Jesus bore it all. And He has overcome.
So then, just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, continue to live your lives in him,
rooted and built up in him, strengthened in the faith as you were taught,
and overflowing with thankfulness.
See to it that no one takes you captive through hollow and deceptive philosophy, which depends on human tradition and the elemental spiritual forces of this world rather than on Christ.
Colossians 2:6-8
