People often ask me… “when are you going to get involved again and join a church?” My answer is always, “I’m still a little church shy”.
Church shy… what does that mean? For me, it means that my past experiences in the church have scarred me to the point that I’m not ready to trust any church just yet. If the count is 3 strikes then it stands to reason that the church should be out for me.
I have been involved in church my entire life. My first memories are of a little country church just up the road from my house. If I stop for a moment, I can still smell the sanctuary. I remember the Sunday School classroom where my Great Grandma taught me. I remember the blue Bible storybook she would read from after we finished our lesson. That book now sits in my library. I remember walking out of Sunday school and getting Juicy Fruit gum from my Great Grandpa who always sat on the very front row. I remember the Vacation Bible Schools I attended each summer; the crafts, the Kool-Aid, the cookies. I remember sitting next to my grandmother, singing hymns from the Heavenly Highway Hymnbook, and learning to sing the alto line. I remember walking the aisle every Sunday to pray with our pastor for my Grandaddy’s salvation. I remember the vinyl couch that I knelt beside when I asked Jesus to be the Lord of my life. I remember the blue baptistry where I was baptized. Those memories and many more will always be a part of me. The church was my happy place. I couldn’t imagine ever being anywhere else. I lived in that bubble for 12 years, until the night it all fell apart.
Strike one…
The small community we lived in was intertwined in all areas. Church activities overlapped with school and vice versa. When you live in a community with less than 500 people, everyone knows everyone, and everyone knows everything.
Let me go a step further to explain how closely tied my family was to this church. My grandmother designed the building, my granddaddy picked up supplies and gave large amounts of money to the project, the service times were set to farming hours to make it easier for my Dad to work on the farm and still go to church. My Mom was a Sunday school teacher, my dad was the music director…when I say our lives revolved around the church I am not exaggerating. But I loved it…it was home.
Until that fateful night when it abruptly ended, and I saw the ugly side of the church for the first time.
Remember how I said that the community and the church were intertwined? A “town meeting” found its way into the church. Without going into too much detail I’ll just say that my Dad was the president of the school board and found some discrepancies in the books. Things were brought to light, opinions were formed, sides were taken, and things exploded, right inside the church. What was supposed to be a meeting to talk things out, became a platform for everyone to accuse my Dad. He ended up standing on the stage, in the same place he had directed music from for all those years and handled questions and accusations for over an hour. When he stepped down, he left a part of him behind. A part that I’m not sure he ever recovered. He had been yelled at by people he had known his entire life, he had been accused by people who were so close to us that we considered them family, and he had been shunned by people he thought loved him no matter what.
I’ll never forget the look on my mom’s face when she returned home that night. They began to explain as best they could to me and my brother what had happened. And in that moment, I felt the first blow of church hurt. My sanctuary, my happy place, my church family had in one night destroyed my parents. How could we ever return to church? But return we did, the very next Sunday…
Until Next Time,
Whitney
