Parting ways with the post evangelical church subculture
(or God, save me from your followers)

The church is a huge disappointment to me. When I say “church,” I mean both the institution and the members of the body of Christ who comprise that institution. For years now, I have wondered at my increasing hesitance to attend a church, let alone become a regular member of one.

There is a biblical model for corporate worship—it should be a source of joy for the Christian to worship God together with other believers—but mere church attendance was never intended to be viewed as synonymous with a thriving, intimate relationship with God. That is an entirely private matter, but I cannot tell you how many times I have been berated by well-meaning Christian friends—ironically, at points when my life was the most characterized by prayerfulness, intense, intimate worship, and careful meditation on scripture—who chided me, deeply concerned about my relationship with God because my name was not on the registration log of a particular congregation.

Because my relationship with God could not be seen (and no one can ever say for certain what goes on in any relationship) they thought it must be nonexistant. If any of those friends had had even one unpresumptuous conversation with me during those times, they might have felt differently.

God tells us plainly that man is concerned with the outward appearance, but that he weighs the heart. The Church, at large, is guilty of deifying the outward appearance. At best, it’s a superficial hour (maybe more, depending on your denomination) of “fellowship” with others who profess faith in Christ, but, in the inner chambers of their hearts, judge more harshly and more arrogantly than any "godless" (for the sake of this post, simply those who profess no faith or religious affiliation)person I've ever met.

Being a member of the average protestant, evangelical outfit is an exhausting obstacle course of fake smiles, cliques, and small talk peppered with Christian lingo, bake sales, game nights, and general awkwardness. It’s worse when you are a single adult past a certain age. I’ve read countless articles about the plight of Christian Singles and they all pretty much boil down to one point. Singles need to stop emphasizing their singleness and look for opportunities to get “plugged in” (one example of the lingo I was talking about) to the church community.
The Church emphasizes the singleness of the single because it is an institution for families and clans (most churches have as part of their infrastructure, groups of smaller groups to aid pastors in delegating ministerial responsibilities). But if you have no family, and have not naturally folded in with a small group(formal) or subcultural clique (informal), then you stick out like a sore thumb. It stands to reason. I don’t know that anything can be done about that, and maybe we should stop pretending that there is a solution to this issue. But what is worse, if you defy easy categorization, you will be stuck into the default, unspoken category. Terminal Single. Everyone is thinking it.

It will be subtle at first, but soon you understand that everyone around you has come to terms with the fact that your window of opportunity for love and marriage has come and gone. It is dangerous to be a single woman in any church,past a certain age, if you want to know the truth. If you are, the very nature of the institution sets you up for failure. The last time I was truly happy and unconflicted about being a member of a church, I was 25. 25 is one of the last years I could be a truly carefree Church Single. The dye of expected servitude to the "women’s ministry," role of church maven,hospitality committee (setting up the coffee andcookies after service)member, nursery attendant, etc., had not yet been cast (there are certain “intuitive” opportunities to serve that Old Maids tend to be pushed toward). It can still work out for you at 25.

If you get to 29 and remain uncoupled, the likelihood of a viable man coming to the church,who is also unmarried, dwindles. And since the church is your main source of social connection and validation (obviously, you want to marry within your faith, so it’s natural to want to meet someone through this network), you get wedged into an increasingly tight niche. As is the case in most social structures, being a single man, of any age, is infinitely easier,though single men in church also have their burdens to bear.The Church is just like the secular world that it shuns when it comes to romance. It is based on possessing obvious good looks with Christianese terms like “godly character” thrown in for good measure. I have seen any number of men and women remain “unexamined” despite their godly character if they were thought to possess below average looks. I guess only the empirically attractive are really cultivating the heart of Christ.

I have been troubled, for years, by my decreasing desire to be affiliated with a “local body.” I have wrestled with it, prayed about it, and yet it remains completely antithetical to my wishes to even attend—because I have been made to feel that anything short of total involvement is to shirk my spiritual duty.

My ideal church scenario would be to go once a week for the service, receive the sacrament, enjoy corporate singing, and to hear the Word of God faithfully proclaimed without having to feel responsible to be a contributing member to one single community of people, forever and ever amen.

I am not rejecting God. I reject the precast role I would have to play as a single woman in almost any church I attempted to join. There is no room,no categorization that would also allow me to be intellectually curious or interested in things that are culturally relevant without feeling that I have to qualify those things. Anything other than a cookie cutter believer who comes from an "acceptable" family would be a sore point.

Church membership, at this point, would feel tantamount to cutting off any chance I would have to evolve spiritually, artistically, and emotionally, at the knees. More than the inherently hypocritical social subculture of the church as it pertains to matters of singleness and false-ringin g“friendships” based on holier than thou nonsense,there is the public inability of the church to be true to what it professes. This is actually far more significant than the Church's flawed social strata.

If one is going to publicly, politically proclaim the name of Christ, then one has a responsibility to live out that faith above reproach. I am thinking of the pastor from Denver who was caught in the male prostitute and ecstasy scandal a little over amonth ago. If you know you are conducting your life in direct opposition to what you say you believe,wouldn’t you take yourself out of the limelight? Wouldn’t you, knowing that you are schismed in such a profound way, not put yourself in a position of spiritual authority or moral superiority to people who conduct the same practices you do when no one you know is looking?

How can the Church see to remove the speck from the world’s eye when it won’t first attend to the plank in its own? Honestly, after that happened,I came to a conclusion that this might be a season for the collective of believers to drop its public agendas and take a closer look at the spiritual state of the Church before God, to whom it professes to hold itself accountable.

I know how much I fail to uphold Christ’s commandments. No one can live a sinless life on this earth—it can’t be done—the bedrock of the faith is that we have been saved by God’sg race—and it is in relying on that grace that we experience the most full expression of our faith. Yet, we’ve made the house of God a prison. And ourselves liars.