Departing: How I Found Myself Outside the Walls

After my last blog posting, it’s getting apparent I need to change the subject. 🙂 (Thanks for all the comments, folks.)

I’m sure I’ve covered this previously somewhere in the blog archives, but it’s sort of on my mind today. I’d like to share a little of my story, and how I have wound up outside the walls of institutional Christianity.

Reading the stories of many others out there, it is apparent that many who are among the “disenfranchised” when it comes to the IC have simply walked away. Either they left because they were disillusioned, or they left because they were wounded (and often a bit of both). Either way–they were the ones who did the walking.

For me, it hasn’t been as cut-and-dried as all that. In some ways, I have been moving away from the institutions for some time; but in other ways, the institution has been moving away from me. (I’ll unpack that in a moment.) Add to that the fact that I have been both disillusioned and hurt by the system…and it basically becomes like a stew that’s been simmering for so long you can’t really tell what the individual ingredients were. It all just sort of blends together. And I think part of the purpose of this blog, on a personal level, is to process the thoughts and feelings in this stew to find out what’s what. 🙂

What do I mean when I say the institution moved away from me? I think my best guess ties in with how the clergy/laity thing is perpetuated in the IC. When you are a “mere layperson” attending church and maybe being a worker-bee here and there…you probably will do most, if not all, of the leaving. The spiritual leadership will do everything it can to keep you in line with its agenda, and will try to draw you back if you start drifting away. The clergy won’t actually reject you unless you are perceived as a threat.

But when you are supposed to be “one of them”…then it’s more likely to be seen as a threat, because you are seen more as a person of influence, one who can draw others toward you. And that’s where I’ve found myself. I was “one of them,” and I started drifting away. So that added a whole other dynamic to my departure. Not only was I growing more skeptical of the system, but other spiritual leaders were growing increasingly suspicious of me.

I think I’ve always been sort of a reformer at heart. Growing up in church with my particular gifts, I have had the opportunity to be in or around the “inner circle” for most of my life. Early on, I saw the corruption, the hypocrisy, the politics…the behavior of brokenness in leaders, which many people don’t get to see. But I remained loyal to that system for many years, partly because I mistakenly considered the church and the institution to be one and the same, and partly because I was an idealist, believing that somehow God would get hold of our broken system and transform it from within. And with the limited knowlege I had, I tried to live in the spirit of that reform. (It didn’t really work, of course; I fell into the same snares of manipulation and control, inflicting hurt on others the same way that I saw others doing.)

So my drift out of the institution didn’t really happen while I was on staff at an IC; it began when I launched a church myself. In that process, God took me on a journey of discovery, one that showed me my own brokenness as man and as a leader, and one that progressively convinced me that the reform I was looking for wasn’t necessarily going to take place within church walls. I haven’t been too outspoken about this until just a couple of years ago; but I was allowing my convictions to play out in the way I “did church.”

All the while though, while this was happening, I still saw myself in league with other church leaders. When I first came to this town, I began earnestly attempting to develop good relationships with other church pastors, and for awhile I was reasonably successful. Even as we morphed into a house church and began functioning that way, I continued to try to relate with them. And I think at first many of them were okay with it, as long as they perceived that house church was a starting point for us, that we were going to move toward something more typical. But when it became apparent that we weren’t going to make that transition, that in fact we were going the other direction–some of those relationships started becoming less, um, relational. More and more of these leaders started to act less like we were allies, and more like we were a threat.

I didn’t see it at first–didn’t want to see it. I figured if people could just “understand us”, they would accept us. But more and more, I felt less and less welcome in circles where IC pastors were getting together.

The real wake-up call happened nearly two years ago, and I posted about that here, so I won’t repeat it. But after that one event, I think I finally woke up and realized how much of a separation there was…that all the time I had been drifting away from the institutions–the institutions had been trying to distance themselves from us, as well.

The hardest part about this whole thing is that when you realize you are not “one of them” anymore, it’s very easy to feel like the church itself has abandoned you. But if you are a follower of Jesus, that’s actually impossible. Yes, the institution may fail you, and individual brothers and sisters certainly will fail you…but if we follow Christ, we are part of His church. Period. Nothing can change that.

The institutional church leaders might not like that…but tough. As one guy said…You can pick your friends, but you’re stuck with your relatives. 🙂

So what does it look like for me today? I still believe very much in assembling together, but I have a lot more latitude about what that can look like. We still have a house church, and we have strong relationships within it. But we see ourselves as part of a much bigger picture–bigger than any institution, any mega-church, any denomination. We are part of the Body of Christ. What we, and many others, are realizing, is that the Body of Christ cannot be contained by the walls, systems, or protocols of any institution man can set up.

I am not anti-institution as much as I am for what works, what is healthy, what looks most like what Jesus intended. And for this time and place, that’s what I’m finding outside the walls. And so I have departed. I remain fiercely loyal to Jesus and to His church; but what I have come to realize is that God has not sworn any amount of loyalty to our institutions, and so I can’t, either.

That’s what I think, anyway.