Posted by Helen on: 07.20.2006 /
Two days ago I ran into someone from my community who responded very enthusiastically about my article.
She said she could relate to a lot of what I said. She told me she’d recently left her church too.
It was awesome to find out that my article had been helpful and encouraging to her. That was actually why I wrote it: the newspaper editor had said it might help some other people who could relate.
Comment by: Bruce Logue
1A church I used to work with had a woman who acted on her convictions. Her determination led her to become the mover and shaker in a state-wide referendum on a gasoline additive that causes cancer.
She wanted to be involved in church, but her politics and activism were shunned by the church leaders. She left.
I’m thankful for all the Pam’s and Helen’s in the world who make us look at ourselves and realize that some of what we do is so unlike Jesus. People shouldn’t have to leave the church because she’s not Christlike.
Comment by: Helen M.
2Thanks Bruce.
Do you think the woman you mentioned had problems because the church leaders objected to a woman doing what she was doing? Or do you think it was more that they would have objected to any Christian associated with their church doing them?
Comment by: Bruce
3Good question, Helen. Guessing–I’m sure some of it had to be that she was a woman. A single woman to boot. She was pushy, committed, insistant, etc.
At any rate, I think she pushed the leaders to action, and they didn’t want to act. Add to that the fact that she was a woman, and they just ignored her. Benign neglect. Finally she just got discouraged and left.
What’s doubly sad is that her ideas were wonderful! She wanted to do something, as I recall, for the poor. She wasn’t asking them to do something hard or even uncomfortable. They’d probably have dismissed a man as well, but maybe not as quickly or as rudely.
She did not fit their neat little categories.
Comment by: Peter Walker
4It feels so good, getting positive feedback. I know a lot of people assume that pastors, writers and public figures often have egos massive enough to take all the argumentation, badmouthing and abuse thrown… but EVERYONE needs affirmation and positive feedback.
Helen, you did good work :)
I recently had an agnostic friend say that if she EVER got marred, she’d ask me to perform the wedding because she trusts me. That was a huge compliment.
Comment by: Helen M.
5Thanks Peter!
It’s wonderful to be trusted. Definitely.
I didn’t even bother asking whether my conservative Christian pastor would marry me to my atheist fiance. I knew the answer already. In fact I didn’t even talk to him about the situation because I didn’t want to get the ‘2 Corinthians 6:14 talk’ about it yet again.
(2 Cor 6:14 says “Do not be yoked together with unbelievers.”)
(No-one who 2 Cor 6:14′d me ever dealt with the complexity of my situation - no-one ever explained why, if God didn’t want us to get married, he a) chose to save me and not my fiance b) did it after we were were already in a serious dating relationship. Surely this was not very wise of God if God didn’t want us to get married - because he must have known I wouldn’t want to break up the relationship at that point. These were complex difficult questions for me. But I don’t remember any other Christian going there with me, or trying to understand - except maybe one kind pastor, while I was still at college, who decided that God’s plan must be to save my husband at some point so it was ok for us to marry)
Anyway, I asked a more liberal Christian pastor to marry us instead - since I definitely wanted a Christian wedding. He didn’t seem bothered in the least about doing it.
Comment by: SezMe
6Helen said:
No doubt, but consider how all the complexity and difficulty are simply stripped away if you had a world view like that of your atheist fiance.
Comment by: Helen M.
7I understand what you’re saying.
I was aware that it was my belief system which brought about the complexity and difficulty. As best I can recall, I wouldn’t have had a problem with an atheist pointing that “this would be simple if you were an atheist” - because I would have agreed with them.
What bothered me was other Christians thinking it was a simple matter of: “your choices are: 1) obey God and break off this relationship, or 2) knowingly sin against God by choosing to marry an atheist”. And not going there with me on how it seemed like such an unfair choice - like God was playing a cruel game with me - to wait until I was in a serious relationship and then say “Sorry - now you have to break up because you’re a Christian!”
It was the timing which raised the difficult, complex questions, because I wasn’t a Christian when the relationship began. That change happened when our relationship was already serious. So my situation was quite different - I thought - from that of Christians who had been warned against getting into relationships with non-Christians. But I didn’t know how to discuss this difference with other Christians without it just sounding like I was simply ‘making excuses’.
It wasn’t an option for me to resolve the questions by abandoning my beliefs. I would have had to have a change in my thinking about where the evidence lay for that to happen. Of course, that did eventually happen, but it took a long time. We had been married over 13 years already when I began to have serious doubts about my faith.