Posted by Helen on: 10.16.2007 /
I ran across this awesomely thoughtful and honest write-up on Benjamin’s blog this morning: My recent experience at Union church seattle. I hope you’ll read the original; I’ve posted some excerpts with my own thoughts added.
This was why he went:
I really didn’t wanna go today, but I went on the off chance that I could promote off the map live, because I think that it would be really connective and broadening for a lot of the people at union to attend this conference. I think Union is trying to go in some of the same directions as Off the Map, and so forth.
It turned out to be a difficult experience which messed up his whole day.
I went for that reason against my own best judgment, and pretty much paid for it the rest of Sunday, in which I felt astoundingly crappy–a feeling I could trace quite easily back to having gone to church. Not that that’s the church’s fault–like I said–it just triggers a lot of stuff for me. I should just have known better than to go. alas. I can do one week ok, but two weeks in a row is just over my limit.
Because of my own emotional experiences I completely understand how it is to have things that are off limits because they are too emotionally intense. One of the most hurtful things that ever happens to me is when people invalidate that by saying “You’re just making excuses”. I’m not and I know Benjamin isn’t either.
Then Benjamin describes having what I consider a very normal response for a compassionate person to a prayer request
Anyway, we had a kind of interesting discussion at our table. Before the discussion, there was time for prayer requests in the larger group. Someone at another table told a story of their friends who had just had a tiny little baby, and on the way to the baby shower, the dad, who was writing a motorcycle, was hit and killed. To which I responded under my breath “what a fucked up universe!”. And then when James B. was leading in prayer I was sitting there weeping quietly as I pondered the horror of the dad dying right after the smallikin was born.
He is still upset about this and not ready to switch gears into talking about how wonderful God is moments later. Again, a completely understandable response to me, but a couple of Christians can’t handle this and make invalidating comments. Benjamin clearly is outside their ROAA - a place I think Jesus probably was much of the time, by the way.
right after that, James B. introduced the sermon topic and asked us to discuss, around our table, the subject of God’s generosity–how have we experienced it, etc. So I stayed pretty quiet, but eventually my turn came, and I said I was still dealing with the dad dying in a motorcycle accident right after the baby was born, and I didn’t see how I could jump to the subject of god’s generosity that quickly. like god didn’t seem super generous in light of that. so then there were a couple really astoundingly annoying and offputting typical christian responses to that–like “Well, I can hardly talk, since I didn’t go through that–but maybe it has to do with our perspective–maybe we should instead be grateful for the time the dad *was* with the family”. blah blah blah.
Why couldn’t these two Christians handle Benjamin’s honesty? Were they afraid God would be upset if anyone failed to praise God for his honesty? Did they feel they had to correct Benjamin and try to make him ‘toe the party line’?
Interestingly there has been a fair amount of discussion over on our Off The Map Live blog because Jim included a quote from someone that ‘church sucks’ in this month’s Idealab - which caused some people to worry about the direction and emphasis of Off The Map. Jim apologized for including it but as he clarified, he doesn’t and never will apologize for valuing the honest opinions of people who think church sucks.
Benjamin describes another response which is more erudite but equally invalidating as far as I’m concerned.
Jennifer, who is a sociology prof at SPU, and whose ideas I’ve found provocative in the past, said something interesting. She said that we want to be able to switch rapidly back and forth between calvinism and armenianism. Which is to say, we want all the autonomy and control which the armenian view gives us, but then when something really bad happens, all of a sudden we’re all calvinistic and want to blame god for it. she gave as an example that her students will say things like “Well, God put me into this horrible marriage with this awful man”. And she asks questions along the lines of–well, why are you all of a sudden so calvinistic about it?
I thought it was an interesting take on it. But it also kind of bothered me because in the context of our conversation it seemed like she was saying that … maybe it was a bad decision to drive a motorcycle and take that risk when you have a new baby. which seems to me to be an enormously cold take on things. but maybe that’s just me.
I don’t see that Benjamin switched back and forth at all. It’s the other people who were doing that - the ones who want God fully praised and given all the credit when good things happen but when bad things happen they make excuses for God instead of holding him equally responsible!
Benjamin then rightly (imo) points out how toxic (in an emotional sense) it is to create an environment where negative emotion is suppressed.
It has been my experience in churches in general, especially in this country, that we are not allowed to engage our negative emotion. Like you’re not allowed to feel really really angry and super super sad and at the same time to think “god’s a bastard, the world’s FUBAR”. And if you do start thinking/feeling along these lines, you get corrected. But I think that’s pretty toxic. Cause engaging the thoughts and feelings while they are happening means dealing with them right then in some way which is a lot harder to do later on, after your attempts to disallow them have led to depression and all sorts of other crap.
Benjamin then adds some interesting comments about leadership models. He talks about what it’s like to be in a church with the leadership model he likes (which didn’t turn out to be this church, unfortunately)
there are exactly 3 churches with which I am familiar that employ a more 12 steppish model. What makes these 3 churches so astoundingly kewl is that the “leadership” isn’t afraid of the people. That is to say, they’re not the least bit worried that the people might do or say something shocking, or disruptive, or …. fill in the blank. cause god’s got things handled, so they don’t have to “handle” things. So how that comes out experientially is that I, as a “people” (and thus not as a “leader”), found that the *normal* thing was that in a regular community meeting (generally known as “Sunday morning service”), there was both opportunity for and actual practice of the regular people getting to say things–to share their stories, to share their thoughts. Not just as “prayer requests/praise reports, but also as “We are a community. Does anyone have something to share with the community?” You didn’t have to get permission to do that. There was no sense that there was a gate or a hoop through which you’d have to go to gain that platform, or what have you.
On the other hand, of course that’s ridiculous. What kind of insane community would open themselves so broadly? I mean to be *that* intentionally choosing to operate against the leadership/laity or us/them paradigm is astoundingly dangerous. People are nuts, and if don’t at least put *some* controls in place, anything is, as my dad used to say, liable to happen.
This is the model Off The Map wants to be based on. We want to give people a voice because we value their opinions even when they don’t agree with ours. We don’t want to control and suppress ‘dissident voices’ for the sake of maintaining a ‘party line’. For me, the whole ‘church sucks’ discussion is about this i.e. what do we do when someone says something that makes us uncomfortable? Do we go into a defensive, self-protective, controlling mode and try to enforce the ROAA? Or do we respond like Jim, with curiosity and appreciation?
Benjamin I’m so glad you posted this! I hope you don’t mind that I reposted excerpts and added my own thoughts.
Comment by: benjamin ady
1Helen,
Of course I don’t mind. I’m kinda stoked. You rocketh.
Comment by: joe
2I’d like to see far more churches which take a 12-step attitude to discipleship. I don’t know any in the UK which are like that.
Whilst I know many sincere people in churches, I still have no hestitation in saying that church sucks. It isn’t really their fault - it is a form of institutional inertia, whereby the church has become so obsessed with continued existance that it has forgotten the point of existance.
With reference to the other point, I think this is largely cultural. Most academic learning is done by weighing and examining evidence and opinions, yet this rarely happens in church - which is often still based on forms of oratory.
Comment by: Karen
3Benjy, I can really relate to this experience. Man, what a jarring transition - from young father brutally killed to god’s generosity! What astounds me is that apparently no one else but you was bothered enough by the cognitive dissonance to mention it. I guess I really shouldn’t be surprised.
I think I’ve mentioned it before here, but the last time I attended church was the weekend after Katrina hit New Orleans and there was a similar disconnect for me.
In terms of a purely participatory church model, the leadership of my former churches would never go for that. To them, that would be a recipe for chaos and letting in evil in the form of wrong doctrine being discussed that could lead some astray. Also, they believed the bible taught that a pastor was called by god to be “in authority” over the congregation.
Comment by: joe
4I also meant to say that I frequently feel FUBAR. I don’t really need to go to church to feel worse.
Comment by: Benjamin ady
5Karen
I like the way you put quotation marks around “in authority”. I would have gone one further, and included “over” inside the quotation marks thus: “in authority over”
I’m not sure who it was that first introduced me to the idea that, per Matthew 25, Jesus was specifically and explicitly *against* the whole model of “authority over”, and instead wanted to introduce a new model of “authority under”. This has been a profoundly helpful meme for me. (ha–see–I used the word “meme” in a blog. very kewl)
Comment by: Benjamin ady
6Joe,
I think I would say that I used to frequently feel FUBAR, but I guess over the past 10 years I’ve instituted some changes, so perhaps the A for “all” should change to M for “most”. that doesn’t really work: “I frequently feel FUBMR”… okay … synonym for “most” which starts with a vowel … hmmm “almost all”. FUBAAR. yeah, that kind of works. =)
Comment by: Helen
7Benjamin, you rocketh too :)
Joe, I definitely try to avoid what makes me feel worse also.
Karen, thanks for your comments. I have seen lots of examples of (imo) unnecessary amounts of fear-based control in Christian groups.
Benjamin whatever you are, the people who have given up being honest and just say what they are supposed to say are (imo) more FUBAR than you.
I think ‘kingdom over’ and ‘kingdom under’ is from Greg Boyd’s book The Myth of a Christian Nation - I posted a review of it earlier this year. To some extent it comes up in Brian McLaren’s book also.
Comment by: Laura M.
8You know, it’s strange being an athiest who loves church hearing Christians say that church sucks.
I stopped attending church for nearly 20 years, not because I didn’t enjoy attending (I always enjoyed church), but I was afraid that someday what happened to Benjamin would happen to me.
Luckily for me, when I was young, my Aunt taught one of the Sunday School classes that I attended often. That was the only Sunday School during which I remember being allowed to ask questions. No one was ever allowed to pick on me for my ‘dissenting’ opinions, either.
In high school, though, my whole class jumped on a boy’s case for declaring that he was an atheist. What was worse was that the teacher allowed it to go on and on.
After that I decided I didn’t want to attend any churches that told the members what to believe, rather than encouraging them to think, question, and discuss. I din’t realize how difficult it would be to find a church like that.
I love the church I attend now, it rocks !
Comment by: Helen
9So, some Christians are saying “church sucks” and now we have an atheist saying “church rocks” :-)
Comment by: Benjamin ady
10yeah. What you are saying makes sense to me in that I used to be just like that, and I used to be FUBAR, rather than FUBAAR. So yeah. maybe they are also on the journey from FUBAR to FUBAAR. or something like that =)
Comment by: Benjamin ady
11maybe we should come up with a sucks/rocks contiuum in the spirit of the atheist/theist continuum posted over at OTM atheist
Comment by: Benjamin ady
12er .. “continuum”, not “contiuum”
Comment by: April Terry
13You know, it just feels like a lack of compassion when we try to compact something so difficult to understand and so complex into a one-line statement. There is an entire conversation needed here, not a one-liner.
I don’t blame Benjamin. I would’ve felt the same way. I tried to think about the things that I might have said, and I had to admit that I might have come up empty, but why can’t people admit that they did? Nothing I’ve ever read in the Bible tells me that I have to know it all in order to be a Christian.
Comment by: Helen
14April, I love that about you - you would have said nothing if you couldn’t think of anything affirming to say. You wouldn’t have jumped in with something invalidating.
Comment by: joe
15Admitting faults or doubts implies weakness, April. And the problem with any power structure is that it cannot take expressions of weakness.
Unfortunately where church becomes an institution (and come to that where any group becomes an institution) it loses the plot IMO.
Comment by: Steve S.
16I read a commentary on the book of Job once, the commentor made the point about Job’s friends; after his loss they came and sat in the dirt with him for days bringing comfort and solidarity, but when they opened their mouths they brought more pain.
This has been a powerful lesson to me to keep my big dumb mouth shut when people are in pain. Holding someone’s hand and crying with them somehow seems a more appropriate response than a pithy one-liner that shows them how smart I am, and how they can simply drop all of their emotions instantaneously…
…and I sure don’t know how a church that has in its possesion even a single copy of the psalms could ever think we should supress negative emotion, even outright indignation towards God…
As for the 12-steps v hierarchy: Roland Allen has some great stuff to say on the topic of Church leadership and control. In his book The Spontaneous Expansion of the Church and the Causes that Hinder it he makes the case that the primary reason the church doesn’t grow the way it did in the beginning is because Church leaders are too afraid to relinquish control of the Church to the Holy Spirit as He indwells the laity.
Comment by: Helen
17Thanks Steve. I’m sure it’s a great blessing to people in your church that you have the sensitivity not to say something invalidating when they are in pain.
Comment by: April Terry
18It’s ironic to me that it is the perception, and yet, the whole essence of Christ’s words tells us that in order to be strong, we must be made weak; in order to live, we must die; in order to gain, we must be willing give up everything; and in order to be first, we must be last. That doesn’t sound like a God who is weak. He doesn’t need us to defend him in that way.
When we have a friend who is hurting, the best thing we can do is to cry with them. I see it as a mental picture of friend who holds her friend’s hair when she’s getting sick. She isn’t telling her that she’s standing over the bowl incorrectly or making jokes of the situation, she’s just holding her hair.
Comment by: joe
19Absolutely, April.
I really don’t believe this is what church is supposed to be. I can see no logical reason or even biblical reason why it is like this. But this is the great elephant in the room which few will discuss.
Comment by: Helen
20I think it was Jan Silvious I heard say church should be like a hospital not a museum [with exhibits on display]. I liked that.
Comment by: benjamin ady
21Helen,
I heard someone once describe this process that they went through looking for a … retirement community to move into. They visited a lot of top of the line communities, with gyms, swimming pools, nice restarurants nearby, etc. etc. And when they asked about nursing care, what would happen in case of physcial disability, it was explained to them that such things weren’t availabe–and that for people who needed more care a facility with higher levels of care available should be considered. What they eventually figured out was that there were basically certain rules about physical wellness, and if you were below a certain level of physical wellness, you weren’t allowed to live there. So the residents, many of whom were quite a bit older and yet wanted to maintain a somewhat active lifestyle, would all pretend, when in each other’s company, that they were fine. Only behind closed doors would the limps and other expressions of pain and physical difficulties show up. Because they didn’t want to be asked to leave. Frightening.
Comment by: Steve S.
22Benjamin,
that is about the most damning indictment of church hypocrisy I have heard. I will definately use that story (and just to warn you, I probably won’t even cite you as a source!) ;-)
Comment by: benjamin ady
23Steve,
no problem. I bet if you poke around on the net a bit, you might even find the original iteration (or at least an earlier one), which is probably better than mine anyway.
Comment by: joe
24Meanwhile in the UK we get evangelical groups inviting the head of the British army to speak to them about Christian leadership.
I am almost lost for words.
Comment by: benjamin ady
25Joe–yeah. He said
What is this “spring harvest”? Is it representative of british evangelicals broadly? I had the sense that things weren’t as confused over there with regards to the intersection of christianity and patriotism/nationalism? Can you speak to that?
I’m a little confused. is it the christian nations’ armies occupying a muslim country, or vice versa? (I never can seem to keep these things straight).
Comment by: Steve S.
26Would you still consider any european country one?
Comment by: benjamin ady
27again-confused. I was just going with the general’s definition/description. not because I necessarily agree with them, but becase I wanted to draw attention to something else about what he said.
what the hell does “christian” even mean anymore anyway? it sure as hell doesn’t mean “someone who acts/thinks like the Jesus presented in Matthew Mark Luke John”. At least not most of the time.
Comment by: joe
28Spring Harvest is a bunch of Christian festivals which happen each easter, representing much of ‘middle-brow’ evangelicalism. It isn’t particularly conservative, not really wildly charismatic.
It seems to have mutated into something else recently.
Comment by: Steve S.
29Just interested, I know some of you are from the other side of the pond…
The people I read, and the freinds I have, who are from Europe, would describe it’s spiritual climate as distinctly different from America. Dramatically less religious, less people who associate themselves with even the title Christian. Interestingly enough, I have also heard that in Europe Christianity has a distinctly left-leaning political mindframe…
Comment by: Helen
30Steve, that was my experience when I was in England although I haven’t lived there for 21 years.
Comment by: joe
31Steve, I’ve never been to the US so I don’t have that knowledge first hand. Spirituality in Europe is very diverse and complicated - generally in the south it is much more influenced by Roman Catholicism and in the north by Protestantism in general and Evangelicalism in particular.
In the UK, the Christian community is very diverse so it is not possible to make general statements about it. The evangelical community is large, although badly divided. It does not really favour any left leaning politics over right IMO. In recent years, the churches have mass mobilised on various single-issue subjects - which being social I guess could be described as left-leaning - but this has not been reflected in patterns of voting. I have never seen a politican canvass Christians as a block, for example.
Comment by: Steve S.
32joe, would you describe that influence as peripheral? Or are there real influences on the direction culture is moving, on the way people live their daily lives?
Comment by: joe
33I’d describe the influence of most churches on most attendees as increasing, though their influence on those outside of church as massively declining. Again, that varies depending on where you are in Europe - Roman Catholicism often seems to hold a greater residual influence in southern countries than Protestantism does in the north.