Today I learned that my church died. Not my current church. Not my previous church. Not even a church I’ve attended in four years.
But the first church that felt something like home. The church that first included me after I wandered away from Georgia as an adult.
My old church in southern California.
No longer.
It actually closed its doors months ago, I learned this morning. If only something quicker than the Internet could’ve told me sooner.
I got turned off to church culture long before I joined that church, and I’ve certainly been re-turned off to churches in the years since. The politics. The jockeying for position. The money. The lonely. That what I see in American churches today looks very little (if anything) like what I read about in Acts and Paul’s letters.
Whatever happened to the widows and orphans and nobody living in need?
I know Francis Chan has written a book about his thoughts on today’s state of the church (slash Church). I’m eager to read his perspective as a megachurch pastor who left that life behind.
It’s hard not to feel angst and a deepening cynicism. My now dead church had a messy history even before its folding this year. A founding pastor who left, two years of interim limbo, dozens of members departing, and ultimately my own sobering it-can’t-really-be realization:
I don’t belong here anymore.
So, I left too. Hit the road. Lived between two painted lines for nine months. I found another church on the other side of the continent that would soon devolve down its own rocky road as I left again.
And this search for belonging continues, ever continues, over the crest ahead.
Today, I grieve the loss of a place what once was. A place of authentic worship, appreciation for art and story, and inspiring sermons.
A church of phenomenal people, including the first pastor who ever cared for me. Asked for my story. Even let me tell it in front of his entire congregation.
A lifegroup of gypsies who welcomed me into their fold. Weren’t scared away by my admissions of sexuality and seclusion. A group of men and women, young and old, single and married, who celebrated together each week with potlucks and prayer.
This death of my church can never erase the new life it once birthed in me — most notably my 25th birthday baptism. Though most of those relationships surrounding me at the water park that evening no longer exist. Faces in celebratory photographs fading like Back to the Future.
Over six years later, it’s hard looking back on that night without some winces. Especially now. A once meaningful occasion that grows cloudier, less distinct with each relationship that turns to shadow.
And yet these dissipations shine greater clarity on the central action of that occasion. Stepping down. Speaking out. Going under. Rising up.
Continuing. Not wallowing.
These last five years, life has often felt like death and death with the coming tide of more death yet. Everything folds. Nothing lasts. Rinse. Repeat. Never recycle.
And yet.
Out of death.
A new day always seems to dawn.
Stubborn and certain.
And I don’t know about you.
But if you also feel death lapping your feet, rising up your ankles and shins and thighs —
Can we not change it? Forge new life and new ground from this slinking tide?
Love you, brother. I know you have seen a lot of the bad side of the American church, and no doubt it exists. But, to not believe that God is working in His church is to believe too little of Him. I’ve seen what the church can be, and His people faithfully doing His work and it is beautiful. Reaching people of other nations, reaching people in cities in America, fostering, adopting, caring for widows and homeless, pouring out their lives into others. Be encouraged, because the Lord will always use His people, we just have to be ready to say yes to the things He asks of us, even when its hard. He is doing those things. He is working in believers all around the world, bringing people to Himself. Keep looking to where you see God working, ask Him to help you find it, I promise you He will.