In a few days, I will be celebrating the one year anniversary of my former church's demise.

When I came to Fort Worth, I came as a secular agnostic (although one to whom God had been speaking loudly for years), and given my sexuality issues (which I shared with no one), and my interest in living life on my own, I wasn't very interested in attending church regularly, if at all, after I moved here. My parents, however, had other ideas, and as they were Mennonites--and as the Mennonite denomination is very small--they were able to hook me up (against my will) with a congregation that met in a rented Seventh Day Adventist building not far from the city.

I was shanghaied. I didn't have a car (I had totalled the one I owned shortly before moving--and yes, it was purely by accident :)), so the congregants enthusiastically volunteered to pick me up on Sunday mornings and drive me to church. I wasn't happy with this arrangement, but I couldn't say anything about it, because word would have gotten back to my parents that I wasn't attending church anymore, and my phone conversations with them would have become very unpleasant.

I knew I needed Christ, and the only thing standing in my way was . . . me. I didn't like what I'd have to reveal about myself, about my issues, and about my past.

However, God has a way of getting through even the surliest of church attenders, and eventually, I realized my need for God outweighed my desire to keep secret and do whatever I wanted. I came to Christ in fall 1999 (mid-October, in fact), and began a new spiritual journey that, while extremely difficult at times, blossomed into a spiritual rebirth that continues to this day.

I wish I could say that I was without issues afterward (I'll leave that to future blog entries), and I wish my experience with that church was always so pleasant.

I was aware of tensions within the congregation, and of what seemed to be rather vicious factional infighting. I didn't know what was going on--but in January, after I had come back from a month-long vacation with my parents, I received a notice in my mailbox that the pastor and his wife and family were leaving.

I went to church on what turned out to be the final Sunday of its existence, and learned that the pastor was starting a church of his own, which I decided (knowing that the church elders who didn't like the pastor probably wouldn't continue the congregation after he left) to attend.

It became a whirlwind experience--a brand new non-denominational church meeting in a hotel room, depending on students from Christ For the Nations Institute for much of its musical worship and ministry needs--and before long, I found myself going to prayer meetings, participating in the worship team, and attending a Sunday night Bible study that eventually morphed into a Sunday night outreach (oh, and I almost forgot--I was part of the drama team as well). It became a major conflict with my graduate studies, not only on a functional level (conflicting schedules) but on a fundamental level as well--I found my faith (as I knew it and as it was being taught) increasingly at odds with my status as a graduate student and my interest in truth and knowledge.

Also, because of my issues, I never felt right about talking with people openly about my life--and I always felt on the edge of a death sentence, dancing between a full disclosure that would humiliate me and end any role I had in the church . . . and the death of my soul as a result of my not coming forward with the issues I really had.

The factional infighting continued, heedless of the fact that a new church had started, and those who left in anger were described as runaways or even as turncoats (and not just turncoats to the church but to God himself), which just perpetuated the cycle anew. I found myself being asked more and more often to serve a role I wasn't prepared for--as the "glue" holding the struggling congregation of 20 or so people together. Meanwhile, my status as a grad student suffered, not only because of my congregation's constant demands and infighting but because of some very stupid personal decisions I made during that time as well, and I increasingly found myself hoping our congregation would die.

On August 5, 2005, the announcement was made: our church was going to close its doors on the 28th.

I'd like to be able to say I was glad, but the fact is . . . I was more shocked than anything else.

I remember the way the announcement was made--a very bitter memory to this day. The pastor stood up and made the announcement at the end, in a very sarcastic manner, saying that "I know this will probably make some of you mad, some of you glad, and some of you sad, but . . . " and continued on, blaming 2 church attenders who had left for causing him ill health and saying that while he had tried to make one young man's departure as pleasant as possible, he really didn't understand it. He then made some remarks about an attempt to position one of his sons as a new pastor for the church "not working out" and stated that he had been told by his doctors that he just couldn't be a pastor anymore, not if he wanted to recover.

To me, it was like watching a train wreck.

I spent the rest of the day at home crying, and the next week basically staring at my bedroom window.

The congregants tried to end things on a good note--the last service was on August 28th, a commemorative service that previous attenders who had left were encouraged to participate in, but to me, it was all whitewash. None of these people, I realized, even wanted to be in the same room with each other, much less a church, and I also began to see how illusory their dreams of evangelizing the larger Dallas-Fort Worth area for Christ had been. What I had been going to, in short, was a make-believe church, not a real congregation where people were interested in each other and in the larger community where they met and worshipped.

It was not a church at all--not in the sense of people coming together in common purpose and love.



I want to end my blog entry today on this point, because I know that my story, in many ways, is representative of the experiences that many Americans are having, and have had, with church . . . and for many people, the story ends right here, with disillusionment, pain, and bitterness.

However, this is not where my story ended.