On the Hunt for Empathy

The other day, a friend posted an article about people who are done going to church. People, who for whatever reason, used to attend services regularly and now don’t. The writer listed several reasons for it. Some having to do with life circumstances and some, because they were wounded in the church, wounded enough that they never want to go back.

I meet people all the time who are done with the church. They love God, they talk to God, and even have a life filled with spiritual practices, but for whatever reason, painful and sometimes extremely private, they’ve left the church, and no longer attend services. What those pilgrims find, is that there are good people everywhere. Good people who are kind and thoughtful citizens, who love their families and want to live good lives. All the notions they’ve believed that the world is evil and the only safe place is with the Christians inside some building turns out to be false. There are good and bad people everywhere. If we’re being honest, most of us are bit of both. 

When I came home from Chile, I spent several months finding greater serenity in a hot yoga studio than I did in a church service. I needed silence and quiet. I also needed anonymity, not to mention that I wanted to sweat.

Slowly, I’m finding my way back into the pew. It hasn’t been easy. I’m on the hunt for things that seem difficult to encounter in a jacked-up, loud worship service. I’m searching for silence, for reverence and mystery, along with some empathy. By empathy, I mean, I’m interested in being with people who know they don’t have all the answers and are no longer content with the easy bumper sticker slogan responses that now taste like dry toast in my mouth.

Anyways, back to my original subject … the people who are done with church. I get it. Completely. I’ve had long seasons when the very last thing I could muster up the courage or desire to do was go sit in a worship service and listen to someone tell me how to behave better, which it sometimes feels like. (I say that with absolute kindness, because I’ve been on the preaching side … it’s no easy task to bring thoughtful and good messages week in a week out. It’s easy to misunderstand.)

However, for better or for worse, I can’t seem to throw off my belief that even with all the frustrating and difficult things in church, there’s something there that I need. 

My parents became Christians when I was about two years old. I’ve told the story a few times. It was a small neighborhood church close to our house, and some woman invited my mom to a Bible study, and after lots of persistence the woman finally convinced my mom to go. It changed our lives.

Over time, I have slowly discovered that by choosing to participate in a communal service dedicated to worshiping God, my life takes on a kind of order that I desperately need. This doesn’t have to be in a building, or even every week. It might be in a home or a gathering of friends … but it’s not just having coffee and talking about what we’re learning. It becomes church when there’s an intention to get out of ourselves and worship God. 

I’m comfortable giving people room to find God and discover God’s goodness in a thousand different ways. Sometimes we need room to wrestle with our paradigm shifts. We have to leave the old in order to break into a new place. There’s usually a lot of wilderness in between those two things and God isn’t confined to a building or a denomination or a country. The whole earth is God’s and he goes where he will. The point is to wrestle, let your paradigms shift, ask the hard questions, do the historical research on Scripture and the canon, on women in leadership, on the sexual orientation questions you have and come to your own conclusions about what you believe. It’s your faith. You get to wrestle with it.

After long years of wilderness and wrestling, with discontentment and frustration, I keep coming to the conclusion that despite all the bad things that have happened in church over the centuries, I continue to find hope there. Corporate worship is unlike anything I’ve experienced in private.

It’s not easy, though. I’m rarely impressed with grandeur these days. I’m more curious about the weak things of this world, about the lowly and downtrodden, about the counterintuitive nature of true greatness and honest substance. That the weak really are the strong, that the one who fears God alone is the one who is wise. This is so counterintuitive and difficult to accept. We love big and great, strong and mighty. We tend to admire people who have it all together. We like five ways to this and three ways to that. But, that isn’t the hope of the world… somewhere, somehow we have to accept that Christianity is about the small and unremarkable, about the gentle way of Jesus and learning to see the world the way He saw it.

For about ten years now, I’ve thought the church might be in the middle of a kind of reformation. Much like the first protestant reformation. We’re heading into new territory. Territory such as the internet and the new mediums for public discourse, like Facebook and Twitter. A constant media stream of news. It’s changing the face of authority structures, of institutions, of consumerism, of voice – who has one and who doesn’t. Wanted or not, the church is in the middle of a great earthquake and is figuring out how to respond.

I still want to be a part of her.