Last week I wrote about the difficult time I had while interning at a church as a teenager, and the impact that having our painful experiences in religious contexts dismissed or minimised can have on our well-being and relationship with church.
But there was one person who didn’t dismiss or minimise my experiences with the church we both attended. In the first conversation I had with Andy when I was introduced to him through a friend one evening in a jazz bar, I told him I was partway through the year-long internship. He asked how I was finding it, I told him it wasn’t going well, and he listened with compassion and understanding.
In the 15 years we’ve been married I’ve continued to be the one who feels big emotions and deliberates over big existential questions, and he continues to give me an accepting and empathetic space to process things aloud.
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We found a different church to attend together after the internship finished, but kept our involvement to the edges. I got a job making coffee in a busy cafe, relieved to be out of a church office and interacting with the wider community. My own questions about life and faith and following Jesus remained, and I hunted down books, blogs, and podcasts from people exploring similar questions.1
I’ve always found things that aren’t fair especially upsetting, and my experiences within patriarchal church structures got me engaged more and more in wider social issues.2 As I sought out writing from people with experiences I hadn’t had much exposure to, I saw the patterns in those experiences: racism, sexism and other unjust systems that allow some groups of people to thrive at the cost of others’ wellbeing. Patterns all the world over that also reflected what I could see directly around me, and within churches themselves.
Over the same time, I was finding Christian traditions and understandings that seemed to make more sense of both the reality of the world and the teachings of Jesus than what I’d grown up with. I’d once had a faith that focused on salvation for individuals, to live a pious life and enjoy an afterlife that dismissed the injustices and physical needs of a world that would pass away. Instead, I now saw God as active in transforming this world towards love, justice, and human flourishing. My life purpose, alongside other Christians, was to be God’s hands and feet in carrying out this work in every way I could.3
New phrases were added to my vocabulary that formed a blueprint for living a truly purposeful life, like ‘radical neighbour-love’, ‘intentional community’, ‘incarnational living’, and ‘downward mobility’.4 I was trying my hardest to befriend my immigrant neighbours, speak up against injustices I saw around me, find community projects to get involved in, and rally others at my church to commit to this mission together.
I attempted over and over to engage with others in my church about the dissonance I saw in our own faith community and suggest paths toward greater equity. But in doing so I was labeled a troublemaker by the leaders in my church. I struggled to connect with both the people I was seeking to serve, and the people I sought mutual friendships with. And, as willing as I was, I didn’t know how to cross the gap between my family’s materially comfortable life and the people I admired whose lives were completely orientated towards the poor and marginalised.
I was failing again to live out this truly meaningful and purposeful life.
Even so, there were always more difficult questions I needed to make sense of.
Outside Christian spaces, I learned about how white saviourism further reinforces unjust power dynamics and wondered what this meant for the central role my privileged peers and I saw for ourselves in God’s mission.5 I heard people with chronic illnesses and disabilities critiquing worldviews that value people based on their productivity and accomplishments and wondered what this meant for my own understanding about living a meaningful and purposeful life.
Inside the church, I saw the way those who lived radical lives were held up as heroes, but so few others actually shared those values themselves. I read the memoirs of people my own age who had spent their twenties living out the radical ideals I was longing for, only to reach their own crisis points.6 I heard others who committed their lives to this purpose describe a God who is filled with compassion for some people, but holds impossibly high standards for others of us. A God who, unless we could shed our humanity itself, would be perpetually disappointed with us.
This no longer sounded like a clear roadmap after all. It wasn’t one that seemed to lead to any kind of flourishing for me, and it wasn’t what I wanted for my children either.
I didn’t want to become a martyr anymore. I needed to learn how to just be human.
Rob Bell was a significant influence in this initial period. I’m wary of people who can be made gurus, but he was one mainstream Christian writer who actually put those complex questions into words without offering simplistic answers. Turns out, there’s not much room for those questions in Christian publishing, and when he suggested that perhaps a loving God wouldn’t send people to eternal punishment his favour in the Christian world was quickly lost.
In feminist spaces this is called ‘intersectionality’ - acknowledging that for many women, the patriarchy is just one unjust power system that affects them and not necessarily the most significant.
Significant (white, male authored) reads in my theological shift here were Tom Wright’s Surprised by Hope, Christopher Wright’s The Mission of God’s People and Walking With the Poor by Bryant Myers.
Sorry, not sure I can give worthy enough explanations for this jargon in a footnote so you’ll have to do your own googling!
The only person actively involved in cross-cultural community work under the ‘Christian ministry’ banner and writing honestly about the inherent white supremacy in this field that I’ve come across is Craig Greenfield and his book Subversive Mission.
D. L. Mayfield’s Assimilate Or Go Home and Scottie Reeve’s 21 Elephants (no longer in print) were two memoir-type books I read in a row that had significant similarities from writers at the same age and stage who shared similar worldviews.