the Empathy List #119: To Church or Not to Church?

Part 1 of a series on post-evangelicals leaving and returning to the American Christian church.

Hello friend, Liz here.

This week, I’ve been mulling on an excellent question posed by my friend Johnna Harris which amounts to:

What do you consider when becoming part of a church? What qualities of the congregation and leadership are most important to you?

I find these questions compelling because over the past two years, I have been in church limbo (purgatory?).

A couple of years ago, we left the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) church where I’d become a member. I left for mostly personal reasons—not abuse reasons, but serious disagreements nonetheless. Part of that centered around ACNA’s greater turmoil within a Chicagoland church I’d been a part of during my college years. (The shaky role of women leaders in our region and the non-affirming stance of ACNA also had a lot to do with it.)

Illustration by Alex Cochran for Deseret News

Meanwhile, a nearby progressive church—one that I’d considered joining in the past and a church that seemed to be a local leader in progressive theology—spontaneously combusted. Half of their elders and staff left as a result of conflict between male and female pastors. (Yikes.) In the aftermath of my wild Acts 29 experience (2015-2018), I’d already tried out half of the progressive “post-evangelical” churches in town, and to my disappointment, I’d found most repeated the dysfunctional dynamics I saw within conservative evangelical congregations, as evidenced by Spontaneous Combustion Church.

Just because a church is progressive theologically, doesn’t mean it’s functional.

I knew too much for my own good. I missed church desperately—the practices, the people, the belonging, the songs—but did not trust anything associated with evangelicalism, no matter how distantly.

So, since 2022, I have been trying something different: no more post-evangelical churches for me, nu huh. I did not want to repeat that tipsy carnival ride.

Give me mainline, baby.

I’ve become a regular at several mainline churches, taking turns traveling between an Episcopal cathedral, a PC-USA megachurch, and a teeny tiny neighborhood methodist congregation, where I settled for several months. I also tried out a few teeny Episcopal communities, hoping to find one that might fit this weirdo denominational refugee.

Church Clarity was helpful in getting a peek behind the curtain theologically at many churches. (It’s a nonprofit directory that examines the stated beliefs vs. practiced expression of churches nationwide around the issues of female and LGBTQ+ inclusion.)

I’ve learned so much in all this “church hopping” (ew, hate that phrase and hate the concept even more). Mainly, I’ve come to understand that there is no magic bullet to discovering whether a church is right for you.

Illustration by Anne Ng by Thir.st

The fact that a church leadership is fully affirming of our queer sisters and brothers may not mean it’s a place you want to worship every Sunday. For example, I just walked away from a precious and functional Methodist community whose leadership I respected. I did not walk away because of anything wrong they’d done, but because I couldn’t figure out how to fit. After several months, I realized that I did not fit in the culture, and I did not feel connected to people there. That was humbling and discouraging to discover.

That church’s priorities centered around service to their nearby community. Meanwhile, I was driving thirty minutes to go to church there, so I wasn’t nearby enough to help meaningfully. Plus, I realized that my goal for church was not to find service opportunities—I have the ability to volunteer whenever I want through public school commitments!—but to seek belonging. In fact, the only reason I still wanted to be at church was that I needed a place to belong and to people with whom to belong. Our priorities were incompatible. So, I walked away, despite the grief of losing yet another community (and this one was healthy and good!).

I’m both allergic to the individualistic consumerism inherent in evangelical expressions and I’ve come to see the mercy of having so many options in a city like mine.

My hometown of Denver, Colorado is enormous. I realize that not all of us have so many choices of where to worship, depending on our location.

However, for me, the choices have offered a chance for me to (mostly anonymously) enjoy a church buffet. I feel like the adolescent who, after attending a school that required her wear a uniform everyday, transfers to public school. Suddenly, she can wear anything she wants.

I can try on Methodism, Episcopalianism, Lutheranism, Presbyterianism, and if they don’t fit, I can return the denomination to the rack. I do not mean to diminish the beauty of these congregations by glibly discarding them. It’s more like, I’ve never ever tried these flavors before because when I was evangelical, such exploration was seen as heretical, if not a reason for losing belonging and being kicked out of church.

So, what I’m experiencing is a sort of delayed spiritual adolescence. I get to experiment without repercussions to my relationships. And frankly, that’s a relief.

In fact, ironically, this has led me back toward the denominational bent of my youth.

I have begun attending (who knows for how long?) a post-evangelical church that was founded 15 years ago. At the time, it was one of the first evangelical adjacent churches in the country to embrace a fully-affirming theology in which queer Christians were welcome in their entirety. (They were certainly the first in my city, though I’d never heard of them, somehow.)

But they’re not spring chickens. They’ve been doing this for long enough that they’ve made the initial mistakes so many of these post-evangelical congregations are in the midst of making… and they’ve moved past them. The worship leans contemporary, and they write all of their own songs, which means they’re free of the baggage of our most well-known contemporary Christian “worship” bands. Their two pastors are both white women, and one is in a mixed-race marriage. The staff is mixed gender/sex orientation and they are explicit about their progressive theology that dignifies every human (including political conservatives, who are welcomed, too).

You can probably tell that I’m in a honeymoon phase with this church. That’ll pass. They always do.

For the moment, however, I’m embracing the freedom of not being tied down. I get to worship without strings attached. And for me, that is deeply healing.

Thanks for reading, my friends! And stay tuned for the rest of this series on leaving (and returning) the American Christian church. There’s more to come.

By the way, if you’re a new subscriber, would you introduce yourself? I love to get to know my readers!

Warmly, Liz Charlotte Grant

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