How to Leave a Church Family

In 2004 I stood on the porch of a strange house, waiting for someone to answer the bell.  I remember looking through the glass panels at the a potted plants, hanging from macrame webs to catch the sunlight.  Someone made those webs, maybe decades before.  This was a house that was lived in a long time.  The kind grown children brought their own children to visit, and showed them their childhood bedrooms.This was a home where the details were assembled by time and familiarity.  And the people who lived here knew every detail, and loved it, because it was right.

It was all foreign to me.

We were there because my husband had a pastoral interview at this church, and this family had offered us lodging to spare the Conference the expense of a hotel.  I stood on that porch, waiting to meet the strangers who lived there, people whose lives we were proposing to join. It felt strangely like trying on someone else's clothing.  It wasn't made for me, it hadn't been stretched or worn to my shape.  But I was going to wear it, whether it fit or not.

In 2014 I hurried through the back halls of a church building I ought to know, flashes of recognition from the color of the carpet, or the layout of the hall, trying not to be late.  I had been a member when this building was built, nearly two decades before. I had left as a college student, and now I was proposing to return, married to their new pastor.

The clash of the familiar and the foreign was giving me a headache.  I remember looking at the table full of elders, wondering which of them I was supposed to know. I remember marveling at how very surreal it was to be interviewing--once again--for a job for which I wasn't the one applying.

They like to call it--joking--the "Great Advent Movement," and a fellow pastor pointed out we are the denomination that invests in our own moving trucks. I've read the stories, about the decades long ago, when a pastor might come to town for 18 months, and spend it in an extended evangelistic meeting. Change is in our DNA.  Leaving is our heritage.

So why doesn't it get easier?

I remember one night, perhaps a month into our time in a new church, coming home from a member's house, and realizing I knew the route without the GPS.  I didn't like it. What was worse, I had enjoyed my time with the ladies there, and I wasn't ready to make new friends.  I was still deep in mourning for the friends I had left behind.

A former professor said it takes about two years in a new place to feel like you belong. He might be right.  I never could pinpoint the moment.precisely.  Sometimes I think you don't really belong to a place until it's time to leave.  That's the time I see most clearly, I feel most deeply.

As I write this, it's time to leave again.  Last week I went to church and faced the friends who had read the announcement email two days before.  It was the usual mix of sadness, interest, and recrimination.

Leaving a church is not like any other kind of leaving.  It's because a church family is not like any other community.  We are meant to be more to each other than neighbors, or even partners in a common purpose.  We are supposed to belong to one another.  Church is about relationships. Leaving isn't meant to be normal.

But of course it's doubly complicated for the pastor.  As accepted as the change is, it's even less natural.  It's because leadership isn't a position.  It's not even entirely a skill.  It's a relationship. Trusting open relationships are the only way for a pastor to do their job, but they are not tools to use.  Members in our churches are not a means to an end.  They are an end in themselves.  What we develop and nurture and grow in the years of ministry are not systems, but human beings.

And that is why we cannot get used to leaving.

To my church family--to all of my church families--to everyone I have had to leave:  I want you to know that you have never been easy to let go.  I wish you could see the indelible marks you make in me.  I probably joked about fitting you into my suitcase, but I do actually carry you with me. And I have accepted the fate that I will never be at home any one place, because none of them will have all of you at once.  I want you to know most of all that it was real--not a job, or a role, but a relationship.  It still is.

In a little while, I'll be facing another reality--another front porch, another garment pre-made, ready to try on.  The alterations, it turns out, aren't made to the garment.  They're made to me. Because change may not be natural, but it's still inevitable.

 And I promise not to get any better at it.

Last river baptism--gathering for prayer afterward

Women are Not From Venus

I think I've found the problem--the center of sexism, not just in the church, but also outside. Patriarchy, gender battles, the glass ceiling, and snarky jokes about men--they all have one source.  And I found it in the book, Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus.

I read the book in college. I was dating the man I would marry, and I wanted to do it right.  I wanted to make sure I understood him.  And the author said true things about men and women, but he started with one big, fat problem.  Men are from Mars, women are from Venus--the claim is that we are fundamentally different. He said our problems came from assuming the other gender was like us. I can only guess he was thinking of a very limited number of problems, and not the big ones.

I am a human being. So are you.  And the "different planets" idea, as charming as it sounded, is poison in the water.

Of course, the author didn't invent the idea. The pitch worked because he was saying something we already believed.  But it's wrong.  And the reason that sexism still lives, even in presumably innocuous forms, is the belief that men and women are different kinds of creatures.

So I'm not going to be stupid here, and say men aren't different from women--experience tells us that's a load of hooey.  And I'm not going to get into the argument over whether it's in our brain chemistry or our upbringing.  It doesn't really matter how we got here.  What matters is where we think here is.  Men and women are different, and I have no ambitions to erase those differences or to deify and enforce them.  I'd rather clarify them.

The place we go wrong, is this--we differ, not in type, but in degree.  We all know that not every man you meet is taller than every woman.  Not every one is better at spatial reasoning, more interested in cars, or more bored with shopping than every woman.  Our differences are statistical, not fundamental.  When we make comparisons, we're not making it up, but we're comparing averages, not species. We couldn't be, because we're the same species, made of the same stuff.

In the book of Genesis, God creates humanity from the dust of the earth, and gives his own breath to animate him.  But the man is a single unit.  He has the company of all the creatures of the earth, he has communion with the infinite God. What he doesn't have is someone like him.

You can see this is the point in the creation of woman.  When he wakes from his sleep, in Genesis 2, verse 23, and cries out in joy over her appearance, the gender arguments are missing the point.  We waste our time arguing over whether this is an act of naming her and therefore, perhaps, an exercise of authority.*  The point is what he says about her: "This is flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone!"  He is saying, "Here is someone like me!"

She is woman, named from his name, and he is man, but they are both human.  They are not first and second, or original and derivative. They are male and female.  The man is not looking for a subordinate--he has plenty of those already.  He needs a partner.

And then the fall came.  Sin drove the first wedge between man and woman.  When they leave Eden, Adam names his wife in the way he'd named the animals.  She is Eve, the mother.  She is one step removed from what he is, and a mere form of the word "man" is no longer enough to describe her. Her identity is other now.  The name emphasizes their separation, their difference.  They are distinct now, and from this moment in history on, we see each other from the outside, as strangers.

And this is the essence of patriarchy, and of sexism.  The heart of sexism is failing to see one another as made of the same stuff.  It's only when we put half of the human race in a separate box from ours, that we feel comfortable judging them by the box.  The well-meaning 1950s husband loves his wife--he wants to support and protect her. But he considers her a different kind of creature--delicate, feeling, beautiful, sensitive.  That's why he can disregard her judgment, or laugh at her driving or her manner of speech with his friends, and still feel he's showing her honor.  It's because he believes she's a collection of different traits and skills, rather than a different arrangement of his own.

This is why, today, my facebook feed is still littered with jokes about women--usually posted by women--or about what men are like.  It's because we are still allowing ourselves to see one another as our gender, instead of so many examples of human beings.  It's why so many members of our church can still feel instinctively that pastoring is a man thing.  Behind the fistful of textual arguments, genuinely believed or not, is the fact that we've had it in the man box for so many centuries, we can't picture it in the woman box.  But we don't need to.  We need to get our heads out of the boxes relate to human beings.

We are all human. We need the right to be human beings first. Our gender is only a nuance to that identity, and it's one of many.  The secret to relating to men, or to women, is relating to human beings.  And the only way to win the gender war is by making peace with the enemy, one human being at a time.

I can't fix sexism.  I can't unravel the Curse.  Probably you can't either.  But I can choose to relate to people as themselves, and not as their boxes.  I can't kill sexism, but I can make it look ridiculous.  And maybe, if we all do that, it will be enough.

*The Hebrew text gives good reason to say that it isn't.

Why I Don't Say Jesus is Coming Soon

Church has a special language.  We learn this as kids, when we go to Sabbath School and sing about "This Little Light of Mine" which really isn't a light.  The teachers tell us to be good sheep, but then they make us walk upright and speak in words.  Most disappointing of all, they offer us swords, and then hand us the Bible.  But we learn.  Church has a different language, and words mean something a little different there.

I don't remember what age I was when I realized "soon" had more than one meaning.  There was the usual soon--as in, when I should be ready to leave for school.  And then there was the Second Coming "soon."  There's only so long you can go, expecting it to happen in a few days, or a week, before you catch on that this a different meaning for the word.  We go on believing Jesus is coming soon, we just have to change the definition a little.

For more than 150 years, our church has proclaimed that Jesus is coming soon.  It is our first doctrine, from back in Millerite times.  It's very nearly the center of our identity, people who care about getting things right, from the Bible, because Jesus is coming soon.  But we have to admit that it hasn't come as soon as we expected.

We're not the first.  At the end of the book of John, Jesus tells Peter, "If I want him (John) to remain alive until I return, what is that to you?"  The twelve expected him to return in a single lifespan.

 I've often thought, as I hear someone fear-mongering about world events signalling the end, what it would have felt like to live through WWII, to learn about the Holocaust.  Surely, the world couldn't continue any longer after those things.  But what about the fall of Jerusalem, or the collapse of the Roman empire?  US politics might be intense right now, but they're not barbarian-hordes-and-Nero-burning-Rome intense.  It's painfully possible we will have to live beyond this, too.

I have three kids, and like every Adventist parent before me, I don't expect them to grow up and have their own kids before the Second Coming.  But I don't say "soon" to them.  I say someday. It's hard enough trying to explain how long they have to wait for Campmeeting, and I'm just not ready to try explaining the other.

Someday, not soon.  How can I justify that kind of heresy?  It's because one day I quit listening to the evangelists, and listened to the teacher who sent us back to Matthew 24 with more careful eyes.*  It's because the same Jesus who said, "Yes, I am coming soon" (Revelation 22:20), also said, "see to it that you are not alarmed . . . the end is still to come." (Matthew 24:6)  In fact, look at the larger passage:

You will hear of wars and rumors of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed.  Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom.  There will be famines and earthquakes in various places.  All these are the beginning of birth pains.
                                                                                                                     --Matthew 24:6-8

The point isn't the wars or the earthquakes.  Jesus isn't trying to shake the disciples up.  He's trying to comfort them.  And the last illustration is telling--birth pains.

At 2am on January 25, 2007, I woke in labor.  It was my first child.  I didn't know how it would go, but I knew for certain now that my daughter was coming.  I took a shower.  I braided my hair so it wouldn't look awful in the new-baby photos.  I packed the last items I would need at the hospital.  I was nervous, but excited.  I didn't know how long it would take, or how bad it would be.  But I knew how it would end.

Soon isn't the most useful word, even though we get closer every day.  Soon tries too hard to tell us when, but it isn't the point.  The point about the Second Coming, is that it's certain.

After 2000 years of waiting, after seeing every sign of the end repeated ad naseum, after the public pain of the Great Disappointment, we have to answer the question of whether it's even going to happen.  Were we all fooled about this?  Was the promise false?

That's the moment we can be glad Jesus said it's not yet.  Whatever the cause of these last 2000 years, I'm glad he warned us not to be alarmed. It's still coming.

And I still believe in it.  I am a Seventh-day Adventist.  I believe my Savior is coming again.  Not because the world is falling apart, but because he promised it. This is the point.  I don't know if this is the end, or just another contraction.  But I know it will end, and I know how, and it's good news.

*Dr. Jon Paulien, to be precise, who deserves a lot more credit for this reading of Matthew 24 than I can give here.