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I spent seven years in the first Pentecostal church I was in. The first was great. And then I went home for the summer. I didn’t like the Pentecostal churches in my parents’ area, but they were better than my parents’ church. Besides, I was committed and they believed closer to what I did, which was exactly the reason my Mom gave for us staying in a church I disliked and was alone at growing up. She didn’t argue, though she and Dad did argue about plenty.

After 18 years of church that taught nothing but the basic stories, my parents joined wholeheartedly in arguments about why I shouldn’t attend a Pentecostal church. They tried to force me to wear pants or shorts, which were against the rules for women at my new church. I had dreams that Mom would sneak in and cut my hair or insist that it be cut. She’d done that when I was younger. Their pressure made me more determined to stay Pentecostal. It gave me not one reason to leave.

I went to camp that summer excited that I would be seeing everyone from my church again, and found them totally disinterested in me. They were there to relax, shop, play, and to see their friends from other churches. And so for the first time since beginning to attend, I felt once more left out. I doubt I would have thought quite so much of it except that the pastor spent a lot of time with one young woman who was a newlywed. It was her first week apart from him, and he was very concerned about her well-being, having been separated from her new husband for a few days. I stood there watching, wondering “seriously? I’m away from my new church family for two months and no one cares, but she’s away from her husband for three days and you’re very concerned?” It was the first indication that something wasn’t right. It wouldn’t be the last.

I went back to college that fall and back to church. The first service I realized just how much had happened since I left. I felt like I was starting all over again. I wasn’t a part of them, and I wasn’t a new convert either. So this time no one cared. I looked forward to the day I’d graduate and be in one place. Three years later when I did, I moved to an apartment in town. And realized nothing had changed. I was still considered a youth. I wasn’t included in the women’s outings because I was younger than them and unmarried, but I didn’t relate to the high school youth group. After three more years of that and of struggling to make ends meet on a low paying job, I finally left, moving to a larger city, a different (hopefully better) job, and a church the pastor repeatedly invited me to join.

Things changed, but they didn’t.

When the church betrays us, pt 7
When the church betrays us, pt 6
When the church betrays us, pt 5
When the church betrays us, pt 4
When the church betrays us, pt 3
When the church betrays us, pt 2
When the church betrays us, pt 1

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As I grew up, I became more and more hopeful that I could go somewhere else to church. Friends would invite me to their youth meetings occasionally. I begged Mom to let me go more often, or to change churches completely, but I wasn’t allowed. I started riding my bike in the evenings, straight to various churches within riding distance. I’d ride around and around their parking lots if there were cars, hoping someone would invite me in. If I was invited, I reasoned, I could call home and Mom would surely say it was OK to stay. I would have been invited, after all. But no one ever invited me.

When I started driving I said with relief “Now I’ll be able to drive to a different church!” Mom responded with clenched teeth that we were committed to going where we were, and we would keep going, as a family. And so I did all I could: I started watching Christian TV and listening to Christian music and imagining that I would fit better with the people who liked those things, imagining a place of belonging for myself. The shows and the music tended to be more Charismatic, and since I’d never been taught how to study the Bible, I swallowed all of it in starving gulps.

And so I looked forward to college, when I’d finally be able to go to a church with people my age, where people actually wanted to go to church, where maybe I’d learn something beyond the Bible stories. Since my parents insisted on a limited selection of colleges for me to seriously consider I ended up in a small town with only a Catholic, Methodist, Disciples, Baptist, and Pentecostal church. I wasn’t interested in Catholic or Methodist, the Disciples church was much like my parents’, and I didn’t know much about Baptist. I ran straight to the Pentecostal church and within a month had embraced it all wholeheartedly.

When the church betrays us, pt 7
When the church betrays us, pt 6
When the church betrays us, pt 5
When the church betrays us, pt 4
When the church betrays us, pt 3
When the church betrays us, pt 2
When the church betrays us, pt 1

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Last Sunday’s readings used in many liturgical churches included 1 Corinthians 9:16-23. In all honesty, what sticks out for me the most when I encounter this passage isn’t anything I associate with something preached from a pulpit. Rather, it’s a heated online exchange that I was involved in shortly after getting online and discovering the world of Internet message boards (I guess I’m dating myself here).

In 1998, I was in high school and frequented a site called The Student Center geared towards high school and college students, which is now defunct. There were some interesting discussions there, and I even made an online friend I’m still in touch with. There were also some true “live ones” there, too.

Having been raised nominally Episcopalian and confirmed as one, my exposure to fundamentalism had been very limited. This board had attracted several evangelical and fundamentalist posters who were very militant about belief in a pre-millenial rapture and dispensationalism. There were also a few posters affiliated with a college campus ministry who were very adamant about pushing a need for a personal conversion experience that attacked virtually every expression of faith besides the ministry’s own.

I wasn’t going to lightly take being told I was a hell-bound apostate for not being a pre-millenialist or that I was lost because I wasn’t affiliated with their ministry. After taking so much of that, I told them why I didn’t buy into their thinking, and the message board literally lit up. Most others stayed out of the fray altogether or were at least curious about different views, but a few persisted in keeping the back-and-forth going.

Back then, I had a lot less restraint in dealing with difficult people online than I do now. Part of what worsened the overall encounter was when one of the posters accused me of having a “warped theology” and proclaiming “Woe to you, IrishLass, you are not preaching the Gospel.” Whoa, who, whoa – wait a minute people! – whose Gospel are you talking about?

I think this exchange was a classic example of proof-texting and taking a verse WAY out of context. These message board posters equated the Gospel with their own sectarian beliefs about the end-times, not the universal message of grace and reconciliation. Were I to encounter these people again, I would be glad to remind them of the words of John 3:16-17 and Romans 8:31-39, among others.

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‘Jesus never fails,’ the old hymn goes. But his church definitely does. What happens when the church betrays us? How can this impact us?

I can’t speak for everyone. But here is my story.

I was raised in a nondenominational church. It was a tiny church. My sister and I were the only kids who were there every Sunday. Mom taught our Sunday School class. Many times it was just us and her. There were three other kids who came occasionally. Two were the pastor’s grandkids. They spent time during the week at the parsonage and several times stole the Sunday School materials (crayons, construction paper, and such I think) that mom had bought with her own money. We laughed at times if we left the car unlocked after church about what would happen if someone stole our Bibles. Mom would laughingly say “well, maybe they’ll read them!” But the pastor’s grandkids never stopped stealing the Sunday School supplies.

We didn’t learn much in that church. The pastor, at least to my memory, spent more time preaching against humanism than preaching about Jesus. Mom taught us basic Bible stories, but not what they might mean to us, and definitely not how to study the Bible. She only taught because no one else would. The previous teacher handed us each a scripture puzzle and told us to figure it out. It was too advanced for us, but he just kept giving it to us week after week. There had been no teaching, just that puzzle, all rectangles, a verse on one rectangle, the ‘address’ on another. My sister was probably in kindergarten or first grade. Even I, the older sister, didn’t know enough about the Bible to look the verses up.

We went to that church until I was 18. We went even when I begged Mom to let me go somewhere else. I needed friends my age, and there weren’t any people my age at that church to make friends with. Most people were 40-50 years older than me. Dad stopped going to church while I was still in elementary school, and we soon stopped going to anything but the first hour of Sunday School. So we went, had class with just me, my sister, and Mom, and came home. I’m not sure why we went, but Mom said we committed to go there and that, besides, they taught what she believed. This was probably the one thing that I learned very, very well. And I took that teaching straight into the churches I would attend after leaving home, unfortunately.

When the church betrays us, pt 7
When the church betrays us, pt 6
When the church betrays us, pt 5
When the church betrays us, pt 4
When the church betrays us, pt 3
When the church betrays us, pt 2
When the church betrays us, pt 1

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Tonight I read an article about the way churches manipulate music and atmosphere so that people achieve feelings of well-being and peace. It’s not the first time I’ve read something like this, though most of the articles I’ve read focus on Charismatic or Pentecostal experiences. This one didn’t. And being written by a musician, it went into more detail about the way the music manipulates emotion… and not just music in certain churches but music in general.

I think this sort of thing is why I still have trouble with prayer, Christian music, and church, in part. I see this sort of thing — manipulation of atmosphere, music, volume, tone — I want to join in slipping into that ‘state’… and pull back. What I always thought of as ‘feeling God’ has become a dangerous thing to me. When I’m in that state, I’m highly suggestible. It’s easy to believe anything I’m told. I want to believe, and because I feel a certain way I think I should believe whatever is being told. The feeling makes me feel special, and I want to think that everything is right about where I am.

And yet… and yet it isn’t. Not for me, not any more. For me that state, that feeling that church is safe and that God is near (in a Pentecostal church way, not in a “God is omnipresent” way) and that I’m special isn’t right and isn’t safe. Part of me wants to slip back into that place in what must be the same way that an addict wants to go back to their drug of choice. Another part of me wants to resist. It’s hard to resist, though, because to do that I shut down and block things out.

It’s hard for me to go to church. I’ve tried churches more or less like the one I left, fundamental churches, evangelical churches, and more liturgical churches. I’m frustrated. In many I feel the same feelings and see similar emotional or mental manipulation by way of music and atmosphere that I did in my former church. In others, I feel completely foreign because they are so very different than anything I’ve ever known.

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