A thoughtful Church-type post

Categories: uncategorized

Date: 27 March 2006 17:00:03

I've been thinking I should try to write sensibly about My Church and Its Issues. I'm aware that every now and again I'll have a little rant about one aspect of it all, and often gets lots of lovely thoughtful replies from you lot, which I then don't really respond to. I do think about them a lot though - promise!

But it's hard to know where to start when it's such a big chunk of life and has so many bits - both good and bad. So I think I'll start here with If It Drives You So Nuts Why Do You Keep Going There? Which is a jolly good question.

I first started going to my current church in 1997. At the time it was part of this organisation, and I moved there to do this training year. (It had a different name then but looks pretty much the same from what I can see.) When the training year ended I stuck around. I had moved after college, and had no intention of either going back to my university town or back to where I grew up. So I kind of hung around to see what would happen next.

What happened was that at the beginning of 1999 I got a job in a city about 30 miles away. I couldn't drive, so I had lifts to and from work with a guy from church who had just come home from university and also started work in that city. In 2001 I married him, which led to more sticking around here!

Through all that time it seems like I got more and more embedded in the church. Mr b's family have been there for years and many people there have known him since he was about eight, so I kind of feel like I've married into it. Then in 2004 we found out about baby b having Spina Bifida, and I have to say that the people at church were absolutely fantastic. I can't speak highly enough of the support and care we had from them.

So through all those years, on a personal relationship type level, I've become more and more a part of that church family. Our little family is also very much enmeshed with that, partly because of that support and love we've always had with regard to baby b.

However over that time my thinking about Church And What It Could/Should Be Like, and also about some theological stuff, has changed a lot. I'm not going to rehash here the difficulties I have with aspects of the church - I think they're probably clear from some of my previous whinging. I have often said that if I wasn't married to mr b I would have left our church and gone somewhere else by now, but as things stand at the moment it isn't really that simple. Neither of us want to be in a position where we are going to seperate churches, and for mr b to leave our church (without that being because we're totally relocating) would just be such a huge issue.

The main difficuly with staying is that I do feel a total fraud. I guess this is the same in most churches, but I think particularly in the evangelical bit of the church there is an assumption that everyone signs on the dotted line. (I've said this before I think). And I'm not sure I do any more. I mean, I do to my own satisfaction, if that makes sense, and the issues where I think I disagree with my church's teaching are not fundamental to salvation as I understand it. But we don't have a culture where these things are easy to discuss, and I really have no idea what the response would be were I to come out with some of what I really think.

On my worst days I suspect that the love and care which we have received over the last couple of years is actually conditional, and would be withdrawn if they knew what a liberal I really am.... Most days I'm fairly sure that's not the case, but not enough to risk it.

Any of that make sense to anyone?