The Last Straw

The one that broke the camel's back

As I’m writing to you, “dear reader,” (I hear the voice of Lady Whistledown when I write that) I’m fully aware that a lot of this will expose me as incredibly naive. It’s kind of embarrassing, actually, but God and I both know how this could happen to me and why it took so long to figure it all out. A lot of it can be explained by my early posts in the archive. Let’s just say that life has been a struggle. Today I’m writing about my experiences in the last church I attended and how they culminated in my no longer attending any church, any where.

After my brain surgery in 2006, I began attending a Catholic Church. My brain felt scrambled from the surgery. I couldn’t walk, or see (for three years!), and had lost the hearing in my left ear. I had a constant “whooshing” noise in my head. It took me a long time to understand what or who I was looking at. It was all I could do to go out in public, and I certainly couldn’t attend the charismatic, whoop it up, get all huggie, jump all around and clap your hands church I had been attending…you know the one…the one where I was told that I had allowed Satan to steal my ministry. This was after I broke my neck and experienced enough chronic pain to have to quit my job as church secretary. Apparently, that was no excuse. A demon had pushed me down those stairs and then to top it off, I had allowed him to win. It was all my fault.

I probably would’ve continued to attend that church, even with all that, but I could not handle the noise and the movement after the brain surgery. So I began attending a Catholic Church in my neighborhood. It was quiet, reverent, and there was almost no movement (except stand up, sit down, kneel) during the Mass. I loved it. I loved the quiet, the liturgy, the feeling of knowing what will happen next…the beauty of the Cathedral itself with the gorgeous antique stained glass windows. And I especially loved the bells. They rang across the city as a call to worship and they rang at the end of mass as we walked through the parking lot and made our way home. I always thought of an old movie when I heard them. The Bells of Saint Mary’s with Bing Crosby and Ingrid Bergman always came to mind.

The Cathedral I attended from 2007-2014

One day a few “friends” from my old church asked me out to lunch. I was in still in such bad shape physically and anyone asking me out anywhere knew they would need to provide the transportation and they would need to help me walk. These gals knew what bad shape I was in. As we almost finished lunch, chatting about this and that, one woman suddenly pulled a church newspaper out of her purse and showed me a photo of me and my husband getting ready to graduate from RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults). We were joining the Catholic Church.

“What is this?!” she demanded.

This woman wanted to know what was going on. I tried to explain about my physical limitations and how I needed this type of service for now but she wouldn’t hear it and the insinuation was that I was now a heretic and had joined up with the antiChrist. That was the point of asking me to lunch. Wow.

Some years went by, and it wasn’t that I was unhappy at the Cathedral, but I wasn’t believing everything either (like paying for indulgences, for instance). My brain tumor had returned and I suddenly realized that in the years I had been there I did not really know the people. It was a very large congregation serving 1700 families and the quiet and reverence also meant hardly any time for chit chatting and getting to know folks. I began to miss the evangelical churches I had attended, and the knowledge that when I went through hard things I had a pastor and people praying for me.

At this point I was in my sixties, and had many strange experiences at almost every church I had attended. There was a ton of cognitive dissonance but I ignored it for years. I still believed I would have never recovered from the serious mental illness I suffered after the suicides of my brother and father were it not for my church attendance.

One day, I came home and saw an advertisement hanging on my door knob. It was a flyer for a church start-up coming to my town in a couple of months. I took it as a possible sign from God (like I said, I’m a slow learner). I was SO EXCITED!

The people looked cool with their skinny jeans, long hair, and worship band. I emailed them and asked them some questions and liked the answers. I couldn’t wait for the very first service and when the day arrived, we got there early enough to meet the leadership. The new young pastor was obviously nervous and my heart went out to him. I determined to try to encourage him and make him and his large family feel welcome.

I noticed some strange stuff pretty early on, but I wanted to belong so badly, so I kept telling myself everything was fine.

There was a huge push for volunteers to do all the heavy lifting. If you volunteered, you had to wear a lanyard clearly marking yourself as part of the team (it was a requirement to wear this…I asked not to and was turned down). I also explained that because of my disabilities I could only provide door greeting (with a wall behind me to hold me up), but the next Sunday I was asked to carry boxes of Sunday School supplies from the parking lot into the hotel conference room (I didn’t do it).

I met another woman within the first few Sundays and I thought she was great. I thought we had a lot in common. We became friends (I thought), and began meeting for lunch. We were both artists, so it was fun (I thought) to show each other our work.

We became Facebook friends, and I noticed that when I would post something, she’d make comments that seemed passive aggressive and designed to make me feel wrong, or stupid. One day she went too far and I commented and said, “I thought I’d see a comment from you.”

She came unglued. She went after me on Facebook so I blocked her. Then she began texting me. She told me she hoped I was going to hell, that she never liked me in the first place, that it was a joke that I was a psychotherapist, and she called me terrible names. This went on for a week. It was worse than some of the most abusive romantic relationships I had ever been in. I continued to tell her I thought we were friends and that I apologize if I had hurt her in some way. This seemed to egg her on. She wanted me to come back at her. I refused.

I had to block her from my phone as well. I was shocked, devastated, and confused. She quit attending the church so I felt I wanted to talk to my pastor about what happened to see if I could get some clarity about my own actions in the exchanges. I felt I had forgiven her and even felt some empathy (clearly she was mentally ill). One Sunday after church, I went up to my pastor and asked if we could talk about what had happened.

“I don’t want to know anything about it!” he said, holding up both hands as if to block my words.

I was surprised, but said, “Well, I’ve forgiven her, but I would never allow her back in my life again.” A look of shock crossed his face when I said that.

Two weeks later, I was home watching the service online since I had been sick that week. The sermon was on forgiveness.

“I just talked to someone a couple of weeks ago who said that they would forgive a person but not allow them back into their life!” he said, with another look of shock on his face.

My pastor…a young man who I loved and felt friendship with, used me in his sermon to tell people what not to do? Feelings of betrayal and abandonment began coursing through my veins and I shut my laptop. What if I had been sitting in church? I would’ve wanted to crawl under the seats or walk out. But by the following Sunday, I had decided to give him a pass, and told myself he couldn’t have remembered I had been the one who told him that. So I let it go.

As time went on I let a lot of things go. And things got weirder and weirder. I heard that the pastor’s wife had been telling women in her small group that they needed to vote for Trump. On the evening of January 6th, I ended up blocking quite a few of the members of the church due to their justification of things like the flying of the Confederate flag and the gallows and violence at our nation’s capitol. I then knew that this was not a church I wanted to attend any longer. But I was committed to the pastors both emotionally and monetarily. They had a lot of mouths to feed at home. So we continued to attend and each week gave our money.

Then Covid hit. My husband has a heart condition, I have a lowered immune response due to the brain surgeries, and we are both in the elderly range. When lock-down came about, we stayed away, but still sent our money each week. I was worried. Our governor made it mandatory that churches could open but only twenty-five could attend and everyone had to wear masks, but the pastor ignored that and opened the church up to everyone…wear a mask if you want…or don’t. We continued to stay home.

After a few months, we got a phone call from the pastor. He told me that when my husband expressed to him that his cardiologist told him to protect himself, it angered him. If we know Jesus, he said, why would we be afraid of something like death?

Even after several prominent Christians in town died of Covid (including the formal pastor of the church we had attended before the brain surgery, after refusing masks or vaccines, these new pastors simply doubled down. Eventually, we quit sending our money and we quit attending and we never heard from them again (2021).

That’s when it hit me. I had thought that even if my beliefs were shifting and I had my own ideas about what is Truth and how God works and the mystery of faith, I could still attend an Evangelical church so I could have friends and be around people who loved God. I can’t. I feel like someone who entered Bizarro world (Superman) where everything is backwards. Up is down, right is wrong, white is black, and illogical is logical.

I began to hear things (not just in this church but a lot of churches, that Donald Trump is like King Cyrus in the Bible. God sent him to save America. No one should protest George Floyd’s terrible death at the hands (and feet) of police officers. Immigrants are enemies and it’s fine to separate them from their children. This list could go on for pages. I knew I couldn’t do it any more.

I still believe in God, and I still love Jesus. I still pray. I believe differently about the Bible than I used to. It’s been weaponized for centuries and I do not want to be a part of that. But I still want my life to count and to build in love.

Statistics are tricky, so although I wanted to put something here, like a graph, or some other “proof” about the decline of church attendance, I decided not to. I’ll spare you that. But I do believe that over the last couple of decades, some millions quit attending church (One research article claimed 65 million).

People like Brian Mclaren, Pete Enns, and David Gushee, (wonderful writers, all) are hoping for something new, something better, something a whole more like Jesus. This will probably not happen in my lifetime, but I have hope for my children, my grandchildren, and my great-grandchildren. But hope is tricky too. If your hope is in the future, you won’t try very hard to “be the change” today. I’ll do what I can…maybe even speaking out here will move the needle forward…just a little.

(A subsection of Another Think Coming is where I’m posting full excerpts from my manuscript of an unpublished work I call “Bad Boys in the Church Pews.” I’ll continue posting partial excerpts for all readers here and full excerpts for paid subscribers (of Bad Boys in the Church Pews). That publication is about unhealthy romantic relationships and how to know if a partner is healthy enough for marriage. I’ll also be posting articles on how to make an unhealthy marriage healthier. All readers of Another Think Coming will get the partial excerpts and have a chance to become a paid subscriber if that is something that interests you).