Originally written in 2010, slightly edited and corrected
From your earliest recollection, you remember the CHURCH.
You remember the preacher, the piano player, the deacons, and your Sunday School teacher.
You remember the youth group and all the fun activities.
You remember getting saved and baptized.
You remember being in church every time the doors were open.
You remember everything in your life revolving around the church.
You remember daily praying and reading your Bible.
You remember the missionaries and the stories they told about heathens in faraway lands.
You remember revival meetings and getting right with God.
You remember . . .
Most of all, you remember the people.
You thought to yourself, my church family loves me almost as much as God does.
You remember hearing sermons about God’s love and the love Christians have for one another.
Church family, like blood family, loves you no matter what.
But then IT happened.
You know, IT.
You got older. You grew up. With adult eyes, you began to see the church, God, Jesus, and the Bible differently.
You had questions, questions no one had answers for.
Perhaps you began to see that your church family wasn’t perfect.
Perhaps the things that Mom and Dad whispered about in the bedroom became known to you.
Perhaps you found out that things were not as they seemed.
Uncertainty and doubt crept in.
Perhaps you decided to try the world for a while. Lots of church kids do, you told yourself.
Perhaps you came to the place where you no longer believed what you had believed your entire life.
And so you left.
You had an IT moment, that moment in time when things change forever.
You thought, surely Mom and Dad will still love me.
You thought, surely Sissy and Bubby and Granny will still love me.
And above all, you thought your church family would love you no matter what.
But, they didn’t.
For all their talk of love, their love was conditioned on being one of them, believing the right things, and living a certain way.
Once you left, the love stopped, and in its place came judgment and condemnation.
They are praying for you.
They plead with you to return to Jesus and the church.
They question whether you ever really knew Jesus as your savior.
They say they still love you, but deep down you know they don’t.
You know their love for you requires you to be like them.
And you can’t be like them anymore . . .
Such loss.
The church is still where it’s always been.
The same families are there, loving Jesus and speaking of their great love for others.
But you are forgotten.
A sheep gone astray.
Every once in a while, someone asks your Mom and Dad how you are doing.
They sigh and perhaps tears well up in their eyes . . .
Oh, how they wish you would come home,
To be a family sitting together in the church again.
You can’t go back.
You no longer believe.
All that you really want now is their love and respect.
You want them to love you just-as-you-are.
Can they do this?
Will they do this?
Or is Jesus more important than you?
Does the church come first?
Are chapters and verses more important than flesh and blood?
You want to be told that they still love you.
You want to be held and told it is going to be all right.
But here you sit tonight . . .
Alone . . .
Bruce Gerencser, 66, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 45 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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Poignant. I felt a little choked up.
Is chapter and verse more important than flesh and blood?
Yes, of course it is! (Was that rhetorical? Sometimes I miss things!) Chapter and verse is not only more important, it removes natural love and replaces it with Denial. Would you not trust God as is required and sacrifice your own child if He called on you? Or is all that stuff just talk to prove that you really really need to be on the team! As for me, I say, like Rodney Dangerfield, Take my wife, for instance, take my wife. No, seriously, take my wife. 😉
To be sure, I am a simple fellow. I love my children and my wife. I would not ever give them up to a God or a government. It is a simple thing for this simple man: You want me to prove my love by sacrificing those dearest to my heart? Fuck you, and your church. Such great wisdom as that is utter nonsense to me, complete and utter nonsense.
I was told that my church family and all my fellow Christians should be more important to me than any unbelievers, even if those unbelievers were members of my family; even if they were my own children. I was already teetering on the edge, but that was the push I needed. I walked out that day and never went back.
Brian, your last paragraph resonates with me. It took us 11yrs of trying before we conceived our first child. How we praised jesus for that, she was a special gift from god. But, secretly I was haunted by the idea that my omnibenevolent sky-daddy might test my faith by taking her away. Bible passages about Abraham/Isaac or Hannah giving up baby Samuel were horrific to me now. We’d been told that there was a real danger that the communists were coming to take over the West back then so we should be prepare for persecution. Those communists would tell us to deny our faith or we’d be martyred and martydom was so glorious. After some anguish, I knew my children came first, they needed parents. I’d deny god so I could raise them…..and when I got to those pearly gates, ask my all-forgiving god for pardon for that one sin….I’d try fervently to obey every other command he gave all through my life. Yup, ….such wisdom is utter nonsense indeed.
When I first backslid…actually left the faith (in the mid 80s) my family’s Pentecostal church and all the people that I grew up with and in their presence, thought it was a phase. They would constantly witness to me “in love” and tell me that I had to come back to the Lord. My family was on my ass about it. My 48 year old sister crying to me…concerned that when I die, she won’t see me. My mom thinking I’m gonna be in hell. Now…things aren’t that bad. Parents leave me alone about it (except my mom has to say something’s like…”I know you don’t believe this but god told me…” or ” you should really talk to god about that”). My siblings know not to debate me about the particulars because they know I’d bury them. I think they all cringe at Christmas dinner when grace is gonna be said. The only one who sits close to me is my daughter. The others fear lightning or something (that was a joke).
It really is amazing how many people have been struck and lived…. Now, I am not recommending a strike for you, Michael, because I have not researched how many survivors of the Penetecostal church who have been struck and benefitted by it, as opposed to begging for readmission at church. Anyway, I shall research it further if you like but in the meantime know that I sit with you too at Christmas dinner, only I am with the Baptists if not among other, more reasonable folk. (I chuckled about your poor sister crying over you: My older brother did the same for me, only at the time I was not only leaving the church but shacking up with a man! Lordy, Lordy…. we give believers such a load to pray about!
I wonder what would happen…if a former believer stopped in at his old church from time to time. Inquiries like, oh he’s back! Met with, Nah, I don’t actually believe it, but I like and miss you guys.
I suppose the akwardness one would feel doing that is mirrored by the church members and that is why even though it would seem a mandate of the Bible (when has that had any effect on someone’s behavior anyway?) they don’t want anything to do with you.
Story of my life
XOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOXOX
I think some of the loneliness is a result of not knowing how to build a family (which may or may not consist of those related to you by blood or marriage) or community outside the context of the church. Most churches or religious organizations don’t help people develop the skills they need to do that. So, I would hope that after a while you develop those skills and it becomes less lonely, though you may still miss some of the people, especially if you spent a significant portion of your life with them.
I’m reminded of your analogy of the box, Bruce. The people in the church, the so-called Church Family, are in the box. But for them, it isn’t just a box, it’s a fortress. They’ve turned the cardboard walls into stone and steel in their collective minds. They’ve manned the ramparts for Jesus. They see everyone outside the walls as dangerous invaders, even though most of those folks are just walking past, and don’t see anything outside but cardboard. Most don’t care. Some of us wonder why the heck anyone wants to live in a box.
The person who slips out the side door, hops across the imaginary moat, and joins the passersby outside, is no longer Church Family by definition. They’ve joined the invaders. They’ve joined the horde, never mind that the ‘horde’ are mostly contemplating things like whether we can justify stopping by the coffee place for something involving lots of caramel, or whether our kid in Little League won the game we couldn’t get away from work to attend, or how much a new water heater for the house is going to cost, because ours is going out. No, we are all invading hordes, out to torture and kill the people in the box.
But the person who just slipped out the side door is going to be fiercely lonely for a while, and it’s really, really sad.
Spot on. We still struggle socially. That said,Polly and I are a lot closer since becoming orphans. ❤️Losing our faith was good for our marriage.
Nowadays, I often wish that my parents and some of my closest relatives were atheists. We would still disagree on a lot of things, of course, or even cut contacts. But at least nobody would cry at the prospect of not seeing me in Heaven (my mom literally said this when she was afraid that I would start “following the gay lifestyle.”)
Unfortunately, my parents’ first and only burning love is the Evangelical Jesus.
Yeah, I moved 1,000 miles away and still haven’t outright told my remaining family members that I am no longer a member of their religious tribe. Some of them would be ok with that – others would try to proselytize or maybe even cut me off if they knew.