Love God, Not a Fan of Church

Faramir and I were up late, talking. Fiendishly late, actually. I was pretty much a zombie for church in the morning.

Church was actually the topic of conversation. We're both frustrated with it.

See, you know God. God is big. God is wild, raw, passionate, and untamed. God is refreshing, surprising, bold, and intimate. God is sometimes secretive, and definitely playful. God's amazing. I highly recommend getting to know Him - He's more fun than anyone else you'll ever meet.

But church isn't like God. Church is calm, cool, and controlled. Church is quiet, but not a holding-your-breath-in-anticipation quiet. You don't go to Church and raise your voice (unless you're a Southern Baptist, maybe.*). Everyone cleans up, and they put away their struggles with their marriage, struggles with God, dirt in relationships that would be inappropriate to mention, doubt rests somewhere else. We all come in and play nice.

I have one friend at Berean who does not 'play nice' at all. J shows up for church with his outsize piercings, and generally looking as though he walked here and along the way went through a carwash that fired Hot Topic merchandise instead of turtle wax and pressure washers. Sometimes he doesn't bother showering. And when you talk with him, he's a kid who doesn't want to be an adult, and grips his teen years with a jagged smile that promises to get its teeth ripped out before relinquishing its hold. But J doesn't play nice-nice. He's not on any kind of pedestal, ever, even the pedestal of humility. J's a bit of a mess, and brings his mess with him everywhere he goes. I like that.

A few years back, I'd had it with church. Just gave up on it entirely. I don't remember what I did with Sunday mornings instead - maybe homework, or mowing the lawn, or riding my bike around town while traffic was slow. Probably not homework.

At Camp, I have those kind of raw relationships with a few girls. I can tell them all of the things I'm hurting over and where I have doubts. And they do the same. And we can pull one of the others aside when we're about to cry from exhaustion or the chaos some kid created. It's so far away from what happens in church, and I'm frustrated.

There's a smaller group of us, we hang out on Tuesday nights. We're a little structured, but that's okay. Play with the dog, kind of go over a concept, and free-form argue along the way. And those relationships are more solid than anything I have at church. Crazy thing, though - church is where I met all of them.

I don't feel close to God at church. We sing tame songs about how good life is, and frankly, sometimes life stinks. We sing songs about how powerful God is, but it's somehow separated from God's power. Maybe it's the lack of percussion. I like drums. People say that you can't go into church and expect God to serve you; we're there to serve Him. I might not be a teenager, but this is still something where I'm a belligerant kid. I don't understand how this is serving Him. I get it when we're taking care of people, when we listen to each other, and help each other out. I get it when we give what we've been given.

Maybe it's a love language issue. Words of Affirmation is third on my list. They mean something ot me, but it comes after time together, and any kind of tactile contact. Telling God He's great but not getting to hang out with Him doesn't work in my brain. I don't get church.

I kind of understand the learning aspect of it. I learn more about what God has done, and a lot about history and context for the Bible, and some stuff about what it would look like to live life a certain way. Understand - I'm not turning my back on God at all with this one, or at least that's not what I want. I want to be as close to God as possible, even more than what's possible if He'll let me. I love God. I love being with Him, and talking with Him, and when He shows me cool stuff He's done or tells me how much He loves me, and I love that He's okay with how nasty I can be sometimes and just lets me yell at Him when I don't know what else to do.

Yelling at God is very helpful if you're an angry person. For some reason, it brings you closer. Closer than trying to squelch the anger would, anyway. God isn't really an angry person until you start threatening the people He cares about, and that one makes sense. God just listens, and lets you know when you're being dumb. And then if you want to go on being dumb, He lets you, just as long as you know that what you're doing doesn't really make any sense. And then later it hurts a lot, and He doesn't have to say, "I told you so," because you already know it. He just reminds you how He said to do it, and are you going to do it His way now, or go whack your head on life again?

Or at least, that's how He does it with me.

You can't yell at God in church. I seem to recall a period when I would always go out AFTER church and let God know how frustrated I was to be there. I don't remember getting any answers, but I'm also pretty convinced that I wasn't listening. I think it was summer, and I'm fairly sure I'd go off in the woods. I didn't connect with God in church - I would when I was on the lake, or climbing around in the trees, or hiking a new trail. It's the smell, I think. You can smell stuff that God made, and you get to push yourself a bit and check out something cool He made, and chat with Him about the hard stuff. I'd go for long stretches, rollerblading, just talking things out with Him and singing sometimes. This is nicely embarassing when you make a turn and find a couple who's been able to hear you for the last tenth of a mile.

You can kind of serve, in church. Almost everybody has something God's given them that the church needs. I used to be on the worship team, and then I was helping in the nursery. I like little kids, and sunlight. Ideal qualifications for working in the church nursery. Sometimes I would only go to church to be in the nursery - I'd just blow off the entire service to play with the kids. I kind of felt bad about it later, but I also felt like it didn't matter, because they didn't need me to be sitting there, and I didn't need anything they had to say.

That's not really true, by the way. Anywhere that you go where there are people, they do need you to be something. Usually not obvious what it is, but it's there. Ross can figure this stuff out - it's one of his gifts. He sees through what's being projected for what's going on underneath. So, a lot of the time, there was someone who just needed to see me there in church that day, and it made their day brighter. I don't know how this works. I don't do anything special, and people will tell me later how much better they felt, seeing me. I think it's a God-thing.

So, no. I don't get to leap into two feet of filthy water and place sandbags, or help lay a floor, or hug a little kid who misses her Mommy at 2 a.m. But weirdly, all of those things started at a church. And no, I don't get to show where the skin's been ripped off my spirit and left my soul raw and oozing - but I get to make someone else's day a little brighter sometimes, and all of those cool relationships either started at church, or started at Camp. Camp started at church. And I don't get to be knocked breathless or laugh out loud with joy over how cool God is, at least not in the same way, but I learn a lot of information about Him and what He's done, and it kind of keeps me on track so that my fantasy life doesn't run away and try to redefine God for me (I'm good at that one.)

I think my problem was that I got to the top of the Church Hill, and turned around, and was disappointed with the view. I hadn't realized that there were mountains up ahead, that were indeed everything I'd expected and so much more, but that this particular hill was the best way to get to them. Church isn't the everything. It's kind of like the springboard to all the everythings I'm looking for. And maybe my problem is just that I'm lazy, and expecting all my everythings to fit in this little building and in these quick fifteen-minute interactions after the service.

Solomon did acknowledge, when he built the most splendid temple that's ever been made for God, that God was too big and too magnificent to fit in it.



*Right now, I go to two different nondenominational churches. There are a couple of other denominations that I want to check out for maybe a year or half a year at a time, and this would be one of them.