Also, church breaks my heart

I’m a church lady, and it’s tender

This week, I had the absolute pleasure of being a guest on Cafeteria Christian. In conversation with hosts Natalia Terfa and Emmy Kegler, I talked about how I embrace the label “church lady,” how I love what my church is and what it stands for, how I believe so deeply in church and church participation. All of this is the truth. As I’ve reflected on this discussion, which I loved and am so happy to have been part of, I’ve heard a little voice saying, “but there’s more, and it can’t remain unsaid.” I love church, and I love being a church lady…

Also, church breaks my heart.

I struggle to say this out loud because churches have broken a lot of hearts (and spirits and bodies) over time in dramatic and traumatic ways. There are still toxins in systems. Organized religion has earned its rep.

As I discussed with Emmy and Natalia, I worry that is the story that’s most known now: church inevitably does harm. I want to tell the story of how churches are trying to do and be better, trying to live closer to the love we preach, trying to include everyone, trying and trying and trying to be a refuge instead of the worst of the storm.

I really believe that my church is succeeding in this way. Everyone is welcome and accepted as they are. Communion is wide open. So is marriage. So is being a church leader. I trust the leaders of my church both to lead my family and me well and to hold professional, healthy boundaries. We are getting so much right, and it feels important to me to say so in every available forum.

Still, the complete truth requires one more sentence: also, church breaks my heart.

Church breaks my heart in ten thousand ways because I am so invested in it. I love it, so I’ve given it the capacity to hurt me. The most difficult parts of my personality, the ones I’ve worked on in therapy and polished and shined up for work are all laid bare at church. Here’s an extremely incomplete list of examples:

• I am precious about my work and desperate to know that people value it. Professionally, I try to keep this in the range of merely obnoxious instead of overwhelmingly toxic (I plowed the overwhelmingly toxic ground until that field went barren). But at church, the effort to keep this preciousness in check dissolves. So when people don’t like or trust or show up for or question or criticize anything I’ve been involved in, I am wounded in a cartoonishly outsized way.

• I love order and systems. Church is where order and systems go to die, and that is as it should be. Church is where everyone does, actually, matter. It is where the answer can’t be, “well, he’s the boss; them’s the rules; you win some, you lose some!” It’s nice to say that decisions are made by those who show up, but in churches sometimes people don’t show up, and they swoop in later with incomplete information and no context but they’re still a member of the body of Christ and so they still count! Nothing is ever truly done and dusted. It’s all open, sitting right there on the radically-welcoming table. It’s wonderful and also terrible. Truly including people is the call, and it is hard forever.

• I super hate admitting this, but here we are: I struggle with all of people’s people-ness. I want everyone to always offer endless patience, wise counsel, boundless forgiveness, enthusiastic curiosity, limitless grace. So I don’t respond well to…well, to the opposite of any of these. I recognize that my inability to handle people deviating from this impossible standard is related to my own insecurities and harsh self-judgment. I coach myself through my own failures and everyone else’s. I’ve gotten better at cutting myself and everyone else a break. But, man, church pulls my harshest inner critic to the driver’s seat. Sometimes I leave church meetings just vibrating with confusion and disappointment and disdain, and then I crash out over those feelings because having them makes me the asshole.

• Sometimes things I try at church fail. What else even needs to be said?

So, it’s awful. I cry more about church than anything else. I lose more sleep over it. It introduces me to new forms of grief all the time.

And here’s the worst part: I think this intense, constant heartbreak means I’m on the right path. I think there’s something holy about it. I think it means that I’m bringing all of me to my faith community, even the very shitty parts of me that I have tried mightily to shove in a drawer. I think it means that my devotion, not just to faith, but to these people and this place and the mission are true. I think it means that I’m learning and living, that it’s all real.

Which brings me back to where I began: I love church. I love being a church lady. I believe in church so deeply.

Also, church breaks my heart.