After Church: Recognizing

how do we know when something is wrong?

Friends,

Thank you for joining me here. In case you missed it, this is the first phase/part of a series called After Church that we are exploring here at The Liminality Journal.

As I shared in the announcement post for the series:

This series will be a deep-dive into my own journey leaving institutional Christian spaces, building off of so much of what I’ve written about in my books, with stories and, I hope, safety for those who are on similar journeys.

Today I’m introducing the series, and then we will go deeper into the 5 phases of leaving church spaces:

1. Recognizing

2. Leaving

3. Grieving

4. Widening (or exploring)

5. Trusting (or settling)

Today, we are diving into the first phase, recognition. It’s difficult to come to the realization that something is wrong within our faith communities, but when we do, we cannot look away. I hope the words and stories I’m sharing here are a guide and companion for those of you who may be in the middle of recognition or have experienced it before. You’re not alone.

Photo by Nigel Tadyanehondo on Unsplash

Churches are a lot like mirrors, full of stories being told and storytellers who tell them. They are full of human beings, which means sifting through those stories to try to get at the truth is messy and tricky and sometimes absolutely beautiful.

It’s a flawed system, of course, but all religion is. We are trying to find our way to each other, ourselves, and The Sacred, nonetheless. But what do we do when we first recognize that maybe something has changed within us?

Recently someone asked me if I have any hope of reconciling with evangelical Christianity, specfically, the southern baptist tradition I grew up in. The answer, in short, is no. But the longer, more complex answer is that while I see the systems I grew up in as toxic and a source of colonization, I also see the reality that I was dearly loved and cared for in a few of the spaces I was brought up in.

Both can be true, and have been true in my case, even though that’s not everyone’s experience. That being said, I find it’s important to call out the systems I grew up in and the church at large (southern baptists and well beyond!) that refuses to see the realities of colonization in its past and present. 

This may come up again in this series, but that’s what I’ve got to say on the matter for now.

Let me take you back to teenaged Kaitlin. She was going to go to John Brown University in Arkansas and eventually become a famous worship leader. She was deeply passionate about church, community, the Bible, all the things, all the things that would set someone up for Christian Success.

She also loved people, their complexity and stories, and as an empath she daily faced the challenges of being told that things were always black and white and wondered if they really were.

In her spiritual life, she still felt like maybe she wasn’t enough, and that’s the sting at the core of so many of us who grew up in Christian spaces, being told to worship a terrifying god who doesn’t really love us all that much.

She was also pretty uncomfortable with the idea of “saving” people through evangelism, as it carried so much social pressure, but it was a big thing in the church, to evangelize, which made the imposter syndrome that much worse. Still, she felt called, and that’s what mattered. She was told she was a born leader, and she took pride in that.

That Kaitlin ended up not going to John Brown, but studied psychology and social work at another college, slowly learning and opening herself up, leaving her small hometown in Missouri for Arkansas and later Atlanta where she’d experience her first female pastor. She still loved people and struggled with her faith, slowly exiting the more dualistic circles she’d grown up in. She was finding her way, wrestling, trusting.

She kept leading worship at various churches (unpaid), kept hoping to become a worship leader (maybe, but as a woman?), but as it happened, as she inched closer to some of those dreams, reality set in.

As someone who grew up being a people pleaser, trusting and obeying authority figures, it’s pretty difficult to see the truth when the truth comes out. Many of us experience a high level of self-gaslighting (that we learned directly from many of our church leaders or even parents), and it can be scary to recognize what’s happening.

As I wrote in Native, “The church wants what is white in me, but not what is Native in me.”

Slowly, that Kaitlin was being left behind, and another Kaitlin was being born. I’m who I’ve always been, but we grow, we grieve, we learn a lot about ourselves along the journey of life, don’t we?

My “deconstruction journey” came in waves, feeling like it was inch by inch at times, slowly, a trickle of doubts and concerns that I’d put down in my journals or push to the back of my mind, concerns that I left for only those churches and not the system as a whole, concerns that were bubbling and simmering and would eventually make their way forward.

I thought God/Jesus was the church and the church was God and these leaders must be really telling the full truth, but that’s not always the case, and it’s taken a lot of years of unraveling my fears to get there.

Photo by Unseen Studio on Unsplash

Finally I became a part-time (under)paid worship leader at a progressive church. I’d made it, stepped out of those other toxic spaces, but the doubts still simmered.

As I began to write more words, specifically for Sojourners starting in 2017, I began to understand that leading worship, as much as I loved it, wasn’t quite my journey anymore.

The songs I was leading and listening to began to bubble up as problematic, and I wondered if I believed the words. Please understand, being a worship leader for me, from a young age, was about trying to usher healing into spaces by singing and leading, not unlike what I do now with my books. It was about building kinship and community, somehow, but, just like I struggle with the capitalistic, colonial ways publishing holds me back, I struggled with the ways the colonized church held me back.

I had to recognize and pay attention, and it hurt like hell to do so.

I write in Native:

Those of us who are angry cannot wait for the church to give us permission, because white supremacy will never give the op- pressed permission to be angry. Barbara A. Holmes says in an essay on anger, '“For people of color, anger wakes us up from our daze and desire to ‘fit in,’ no matter the cost.” When my anger finally woke me up, I realized that…anger and hope are co-laborers, just as it is the reality for so many people who are trying to decolonize.

Could the church trust an Indigenous woman to lead them in worship? Some wouldn’t care, some would celebrate me, but others would definitely find me to be a problem. My writing for Sojourners was often about challenging the Big Church to pay attention to the atrocities of colonization and white supremacy, which turned out to be a threat on other levels. The more vocal I became about injustice within American Christianity, the more of a threat I became to people who were terrified of what a voice like mine could challenge at every level of the church.

So, I had a choice to make.

We didn’t leave church spaces, not then. We ended up in a small Anglican community in another part of the city where we lived, because we were assured community and care and a loving welcome. But over time, we came to a lot more realizations about what the church is and what it isn’t.

My anger, at some point, woke me up, and really, that’s when I realized I’d been carrying suppressed anger, cycling in and out of trying to leave the church, for a while. I was just too afraid, and there were too many hopes keeping me, hopes for community and care, hopes that things might change.

How do you leave home, and what comes next when you leave?

The final recognition for me came in three waves:

First, my body’s recognition, coming home from church literally shaking from how angry I was about what was being taught from the pulpit, and the solidarity with a few friends who could see it, too

Second, the refusal of the church leadership to pay attention to injustices happening all around them even when they were pointed out by me and others, and that was a breaking point for what community is supposed to be

Third, it wasn’t just then conservative spaces that didn’t want me, but the toxicity of some progressive white spaces was dawning on me as well, and I didn’t feel safe anymore, and was seeing people I loved no longer feeling safe either

Recognition is really, really hard. Sometimes it hits like a piercing wound that reveals that things have changed, and sometimes it comes in waves.

Mine was waves, years of waves, years of ebbing and flowing, wondering if there could be a different way to experience The Sacred but too afraid to ask what that different way might be.

We are only here, in the first phase of After Church, the first moments, the doubts, the questions. But don’t be afraid here, because so many of us have walked through it.

A few things that helped me:

1. Having a marriage where I could process with someone in safety

2. Writing and reading a lot of books and exploring faith with other people

3. Attending conferences where I was exposed to other cultures and spiritual practices

4. Deepening my own sense of self as a Potawatomi woman

5. Facing my people-pleasing tendencies and being honest about my own voice and power

6. Therapy

There are two sides to the term recognition:

1. to identify someone or something from a previous encounter

2. acknowledgement of something or someone’s validity

Somehow, I think we do both in this case. We are recognizing, perhaps for the first time, years of built up injustices or wrongs, hoping to name them and pay attention so we don’t get caught up again, and in doing so, we are acknowledging the actual validity or safety of a religious space that has harmed not only us, but perhaps countless others.

Again, I am not saying that every church is bad and no church leaders are doing anything to make life better for those on the margins.

As always, I aim to enter into difficult spaces through stories and try to point out the hurt so we can move toward the healing together.

So, in light of recognition, a few questions to ask yourself:

1. When did you recognize something changed in your spiritual or faith life?

2. What does recognition feel like?

3. Who have you talked to about it?

4. If you’re in the middle of recognition, how can you hold space?

5. What practices are keeping you company along the way?

A few books to read:

1. Searching for Sunday by Rachel Held Evans

2. Native by me

3. Holy Runaways by Matthias Roberts

Until next time, friends.