A life in letters: Church

I remember the first church I attended largely for the warmth of the people, and the extreme boredom I endured there! Until the Sunday before my 10th birthday I was taken along by my parents to the Christian Brethren church they attended, Allander Hall, a corrugated iron building close to the centre of Milngavie. I remember friendly adults and Sunday School parties, though as many of the church families travelled in to Milngavie from the surrounding area, I didn’t have any close friends of my own age. The boredom was generated by the long morning meetings when I squirmed through long minutes of adult singing and talking, and even longer minutes of silence with only a notebook and pencil to divert me.

When we moved to Carluke in May 1962 my parents decided after some church-visiting and deliberation to join the town’s Baptist Church. To begin with I also experienced this church as a warm community, although I was shy of the other kids and didn’t form any real friendships. As a teenager, I believed unquestioningly that what was preached from the pulpit was truth, and that the Martin Memorial Baptist Church did Church in the way which pleased God most, but somehow I didn’t feel that I had made that progress in jumping through the necessary hoops of faith and experience which I gathered was essential if you were to belong.

And so I embraced the outward signs of faith, throwing myself dutifully at the hoops of baptism and church membership, and pretended that I had also traversed the corresponding inner hurdles. I had faith, but it was not the robust, personal experiental faith which was held up as normative. And of course I didn’t feel I belonged, but instead had a painful, mounting sense of hypocrisy. The failure of people to accept the truth of what I was telling them when I eventually confessed was very difficult.

But even after I had come to a point of more personal engagement with faith, and even after I had finally, at the age of around thirty taken ownership of the decision on what church I would attend rather than meekly following my parents, I still found the absence of a feeling of ‘belonging’ in church. This was in part due to my anxious personality, and my slowness to learn and accept that it’s OK for me to be my own person, but I think churches could have shown a little more understanding and empathy with someone feeling ‘on the edge.’

Various contributory factors heightened my sense of semi-alienation.

Fear

Fear was a particular problem in the 1960s and 70s.  From my early teen years, I was terrified by the teaching of Christ’s second coming to ‘rapture’ true believers to himself – I knew I would be ‘left behind’ when that imminent and inevitable event took place. During the years I believed I was a hypocrite, I faced weekly dread that as a result of eating and drinking bread and wine while out-with what I deemed to be true faith, I would be struck dead. 

It took many years after I had a more confident personal belief for these fears to subside. I understand now that my anxiety generated fears from nothing, and magnified other fears which most of those who sat in the pews beside me would brush aside. I regret that my reserve kept me from freely expressing my thoughts. But a little honest probing, a little recognition of the struggles Christians have, a little readiness to hear it like it is rather than you want it to be, a little display of unconditional love might have made an enormous difference. But Churches have changed, and in general have grown more aware, more compassionate.

Woundedness

I knew perplexity and a forlorn woundedness when my experience as a Christian did not match what I understood Christians were ‘supposed’ to experience. I feared that my lack of spiritual experience in the accepted form cast doubt upon the genuineness of my faith. Standing at the door of Ebenezer Hall in Coatdyke one Sunday morning, an elderly lady looked at me and said of the service which had just concluded ‘Wasn’t that wonderful?’ I nodded, dumbly, not having the confidence to say what I really felt – which was that the weekly communion service had had absolutely no impact on me whatsoever. The story of Christ’s suffering and death – though I believed it – I had heard a million times before, and it was simply a fact of faith to me, part of my mental furniture. And the symbols – the bread and wine- were likewise so familiar that they were symbols no more, and had no power to move me.

I now realise that the kind of church I was familiar with had a very word-based approach to worship, with little poetry, no art, not much beautiful music and other than the bread and wine, no symbols. What did move me profoundly was crashing together the gospel narratives on the one hand with on the other the great Old Testament stories which resonated with them, stimulating the imagination in the compacting of type and anti-type. Mine was the mind which heard in Joseph’s revelation of himself to his brothers ‘I am Joseph’ the voice of Christ addressing the world, and heard Christ all the more clearly because he spoke through Joseph.

Very few sermons blessed me – perhaps four or five in three decades. Listening to spoken word unenlightened by symbol is such a cumbersome process – you can think a dozen thoughts between the beginning and conclusion of each of the preacher’s sentences. Listening to a sermon was in those days for me, too passive.

I used to say that the only services I was blessed at were ones at which I was preaching, which sounds fearfully arrogant but was nevertheless true. In preaching (about which I’m very nervous) there is a sense of reliance and dependence on God, and that gives meaning to preaching, as does the way in which often ideas and thoughts and symbols are ‘given’ while you are in the process of speaking.

I was also wounded through my attempts to seek and receive the ‘Baptism of the Spirit’ which I’d been aware of through what was in the 1960s the charismatic fringe, but by the mid-1980s was becoming mainstream in evangelical churches. Urged to receive the Spirit, I prayed and was prayed with, and went to the right meetings and went forward, and sought advice from respected leaders but nothing changed. Much later I realised (not through church) that what I needed was to rejoice in what I already had of God, rather than seeking for more, and through that awareness the Spirit came.

I was born a post-modern, waiting for post-modernism to be birthed, and therein finding part of my identity – not in the word-centric certainties of the post-enlightenment world, but in question and mystery and the power of symbols. When I discovered post-modernism in the 1990s it revealed to me what I already was.

Approval seeking

Over the years, I tried very hard to fit in at church, eager to do whatever I felt was expected of me. I had the impression (probably wrong) that churches were never satisfied with what you contributed, but were always seeking more – more involvement, more activity, more prayer, more money. Perhaps I heard as applying to me comments which were actually directed at those who did little, and perhaps the pressure to activism came more from within me than from externally, but I certainly felt driven.

Sometimes there wasn’t a problem with this – I do have a gift for preaching, and editing, and leading discussion groups. At the Church I attended in the 1980s I lovingly produced the church magazine, and looked after the bookstall, and was there every Sunday 40 minutes before the service to open up the church building.

But though I prayed eloquently, and with some sense of ‘givenness’ at prayer meetings, I wasn’t convinced that ‘asking for’ prayers – certainly those prayed by me – actually accomplished anything. And though I have at times been involved as a Deacon and a member of a Leadership Support Team, I agreed to take on these roles simply because I thought that’s what one did. I threw myself into organisation and planning, but always there was an inner barrier I had to push through, a sense of heaviness, a voice was ignoring saying ‘this is not you.’ I remember very shortly before I left my last leadership role walking along a drive way lined by a tall, green, sweet-smelling hedge on a beautiful summer evening. My whole being rebelled at the thought of crossing the threshold at the head of the drive and spending three hours taking minutes at a meeting, and yet I plodded resolutely forward.

Involvement in ‘evangelism’ was expected of good evangelicals. The kind of evangelism which involved going onto the town-centre streets on an evening handing out leaflets I detested – as an introvert, and as someone conscious of the need to give others space. On one occasion, I did begin a conversation with a young man outside a pub, and invited him back to the Church where he chatted to people and made a Christian commitment which lasted.  But at one town-centre Church the young people went out to share their faith on Friday evenings, and I had some kind of leadership role in this. I remember one evening very few of us turned up, and I said to the others ‘Let’s not got out this evening since we are so few,’ but I knew this was my weakness speaking, and afterwards I felt the guilt – what a poor example I was setting for these teenagers:  who might have heard and responded if only I had had the courage to go.

All this I can see was a reflection of my own sense of inadequacy, an outworking of my own need to truly belong. As I teenager I had thought that once I found the key to a personal sense of faith then I would attain the sense of belonging which I yearned for, but after I had that faith encounter I felt at times as much on the outside as ever, and tried to win my way through the invisible barrier by activism. I sought healing in the approval of others, not knowing at that point that the only approval which would heal me was self-approval, arising from the conviction of God’s approval. I was projecting on to others, and on to God my own fragile sense of self-worth.

Creating meaning

In fact, I used all this activity as a means of creating meaning in my life. During much of the 1980s I was struggling with work, and not much enjoying living alone, and being active in Church helped add meaning to my life. Which was fine when the things I did were those for which I had a genuine creative gift, but destructive when I recklessly plunged into tasks simply to keep myself busy. Even when I was expressing my true creativity, I would often do this is such a way that the task itself became the goal rather than the fruit which lay beyond the accomplishment of the task. Thus I produced far more complicated church magazines than was necessary, thus I measured my effectiveness as a bookstall manager purely in terms of the volume of books sold and cash banked.  Taking this alongside my detachment from church services, I often felt that the actual service was irrelevant, a rather tedious hour which you had to sit through between welcoming people at the start of the service and trying to sell them books at the end.

Theological questions

I naively grew up assuming that when it came to theology, the leaders of the various churches I attended were pretty much infallible. I wasn’t raised in an environment where robust theological questioning was invited, or indeed countenanced. I remember my surprise when for the first time I heard something in church, in the mid-1970s which seemed to me to be too outlandish to be believable.

It was a Brethren church, and the speaker was clearly an exponent of dispensationalism. He taught that the Old Testament system of Temple worship along with animal sacrifices would be reinstated at some point in the future, and that this would once again be the primary way of approach to God. In the light of my own knowledge this seemed to be preposterous, and I went home spluttering to my parents in protest.

In the same decade, I became aware of the publications of the Banner of Truth Trust (reprints of old works reflecting the Reformed Calvinistic position, and new titles written from the same perspective.) I learned much from these books, but once of them taught the doctrine of ‘Reprobation’, the teaching of double predestination, with some elected by God to salvation and others to eternal perdition. I thought I knew enough about the love of God (at that stage more in theory than in experience) to be sure that this could not be so.

But at this point there were few of these times of questioning. They became more urgent as I attended a Church where one minister was very literal in his approach to the biblical text, taking it unquestioningly at face value, and not addressing the issues arising from the text which to me screamed out for clarification.

I also recall going with a friend in the early 1990s to hear a prominent Scottish evangelical speaking at a conference in the auditorium at Stirling University on the New Testament book of Jude. He spoke with passionate eloquence, and yet it seemed to me as I sat there that there was an emptiness behind the bombast, that the ‘sound and fury’ signified very little. Was this simply an illusion conjured within me, I wondered, or was I discerning something actually present?

Over the next fifteen years, I came to view that Bible as a human book as well as one through which God self-reveals, and to recognise that honest intellectual questioning is not only permissible, but vital. And I grew cross at confident evangelical theologians who assure their followers that there are no contradictions in the Bible when this is quite simply not true.

And so I became uneasy in churches where such questioning was not encouraged, and where the status quo on the role of women and gay people was never challenged. At that time, I lacked the courage to be as challenging as perhaps I should have been, but my theological alienation added to my sense of being ‘on the edge’.

Church conflicts

It seemed to me that almost every church I attended was a place of conflict with disagreements, infighting, flawed personalities (including my own, of course), different visions of where the church was going. In the early days in my immaturity I acted less than wisely in some situations, but later I was able to take a mature view of how I should react when division looked inevitable. But this was costly, and seemed to emphasise that church as a conflicted battlefield rather than an oasis of peace.

I began to wonder why on earth anyone would ever willingly attend church. Church sounded good in theory, but it was anything but good in my experience. I survived, sustained by reading books and articles through some of which I sensed a blessing given. I was also sustained by precious friends who loved me, blessed me, wiped away my tears, and accepted me as I was. And in time I realised that I too despite my fragility was able to be an encouragement to others.

It took a long journey of learning and re-learning before in the early 2000s I realised that it really is OK to me real, OK to be the self I am, OK not to be for ever seeking validation and approval from authority figures.

I’d also been growing aware that I was not alone – that there were others like me who did not find the experience of church helpful, some of whom were leaving their churches. The first book I saw which addressed this subject was an American title, Exit Interviews published in 1993, containing reports of conversations with church leavers. When Philip Richter and Leslie Francis’ book Gone but not forgotten appeared in 1998 I bought and read it, and I was further encouraged by Alan Jamieson’s  Churchless Faith (2002) and its sequel Church Leavers: Faith Journeys five years on (2006)  These books validated my own experiences, and validated my own scepticism about the role of church in my life.

And so when in 2011 my wife Lorna and I decided that it was time to leave the particular Church we had been attending, I resolved (probably too dogmatically) that I would never again join a church – Churches were sources of problems and pain.

One Sunday we went along to our local Church of Scotland, Hilton Church in Inverness. The speaker that morning was Peter Neilson who is now a ‘free-lance mission consultant’. He spoke about the difficulty some have in connecting with church, and about people, including someone in his own family, who was part of a group of folk who had formed what I suppose was a church beyond the church, for disaffected former churchgoers. He also spoke of the Edinburgh-based Coracle website and associated support groups, aimed at people who don’t feel at home in a conventional church context.

My immediate reaction was that if Hilton was a Church where these issues could be freely aired then it would perhaps be a Church for me. And so I began attending regularly. I appreciate the place given to image and poem as well as words in the sermons. I appreciate the church’s acceptance of me. I appreciate the fact that it’s recognised that people will have a range of views on all sorts of issues. I still find singing and hymns leave me for the most part emotionally untouched.

In the past, I had always assumed that when you affiliated with a church, there was an expectation that you would buy into all the teaching of that church, and there seemed to be little room for unanswered questions. This is no longer the case at Hilton. Perhaps in my sense of being ‘on the edge’ I had exaggerated the doctrinal expectations in the churches I attended in an attempt to explain my alienation. Perhaps I had not noticed that evangelical churches in the last half of the 20th century had moved as I had moved, towards a more flexible approach to doctrine and practice. Perhaps it was simply that having learned (still imperfectly) to accept myself, I came to Hilton church knowing who I was, and mostly comfortable to be that person, whereas before I had looked to the church to help me find and shape my identity. Now I know who I am, and am on my better days unafraid to be.

Around the same time as I began attending Hilton Church, I visited the Provost of Inverness’s Episcopalian Cathedral. Conscious that my theology was on some points no longer strictly evangelical, I was looking for local churches where there was room for people with unanswered questions. I was encouraged by my chat in Alex Gordon’s study, and later began attending many of the weekday Eucharists at the Cathedral.

I have been blessed by entering into the liturgy, a form of words used across the centuries, and blessed by the sense of community with Christians in this world and in the great invisible dimension beyond. Sometimes I will feel a sense of encounter with Joy at Eucharist, more often I remain emotionally untouched, but simply take the opportunity of affirming my belief in the words we share together.  On holiday last week, I had a sense that something was missing when I was unable to attend the regular Eucharist – I have never felt that way about church before.

It’s been a long journey, which still continues. Over the last sixty years I have changed, church has changed, society has changed. But I know that I have been deeply blessed: despite church but also in and through church. And I wonder what we can do to help others make similar journeys with less pain.