Preface
Going to church no more makes one a Christian than standing in a garage makes one a car. — Unknown
The first time I encountered that sentence, I did not know whether to laugh or to sit very still.
I chose to sit still.
Something about it had the weight of a thing that had been true for a long time before anyone said it plainly. And once it was said, the unsaying of it seemed impossible.
This book started there.
I was a teenager when I first felt what I can only describe as a calling. A sense, confirmed by people I trusted, that my life had something to do with the word of God. I did not know what shape it would take. I knew it was real.
I did not follow it. Not then. Life moved in directions I did not plan, and decades passed. In my thirties I began theological study, the kind that was supposed to answer questions. Then that chapter closed too. A marriage ended. I concluded, with what felt like clarity at the time, that I had disqualified myself. The calling, I told myself, was not for me anymore.
That was another twenty years ago.
This book is what the calling became. Late. Arrived by a longer route than I planned. I have come to understand that this is a very old story. Jonah did not take the direct road to Nineveh either.
I have been a churchgoer most of my life. I have sat in pews ranging from megachurch auditoriums to small Reformed congregations to a brief and sincere attempt at Eastern Orthodoxy. I have wanted the church to be what it is supposed to be. Wanted it badly enough to keep returning at the lowest points of my life, when wanting something badly enough to walk through a door is about all the faith you have left.
Those returns did not go well.
Excommunicated once for the practical failure of not having transportation. Counseled, during a divorce, by people who had decided whose side the story was on before I finished speaking. Questions met with the quiet irritation of men who had graduated seminary years earlier and did not expect to be asked things they did not know.
I say this not to settle a score. I say it because the person I am writing for has probably said something like it to themselves, alone, and wondered whether the problem was them.
It was not them. And it was not you.
At twenty-eight I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. The neurologist told me she did not know how I was walking. I told her plainly that I did. She gave me five years before a wheelchair and ten before the end. That was more than two decades ago.
I am still walking.
It does not always show up as comfort. Sometimes it shows up as the bare fact that I am still here, and the morning is starting, and something in me is still willing to get up.
The nerve pain does not leave. The daily negotiation with a body that would rather not cooperate does not leave. What has also not left, through all of it, through the years the church was unavailable or unhelpful or actively harmful, is the grace that has gotten me through each day. Not a program. Not an institution. The God who does not require an institution to show up.
This book is for the person who has a Christian background but has lost confidence in what they were handed. The person who suspects the God they were shown is not quite the whole story. The one sitting with a question the framework they were given could not answer. Not necessarily an intellectual question. An honest one. Why did it fail when I needed it? Why does none of this feel real anymore? Is any of it true?
I have been that person. Some days I still am.
This is not an anti-church book. The church (what the word actually means, what the thing actually is) matters enormously. The critique in these pages is of what gets called church when it is something else.
This is not a memoir. The personal moments are windows. The argument is what you are meant to see through them.
There are no steps here. No program. Only what the text says, and what follows from it, if you are willing to look.