Only A Church Can Break Your Heart

When my mother was alive, at her request, I’d sometimes read her snippets of my blog posts.

Not ones that had been published, but drafts that I planned for the future.  She enjoyed hearing them because she enjoyed thinking about faith and because, as my mother, she considered it her duty to praise me summarily for almost everything I ever wrote.

Almost.

The pieces that made her cringe always revolved around my critiques of the church.  No matter how gentle I was or how nuanced in my approach, I’d hear her cringe over the phone.  “Well, that isn’t really positive,” she’d say, uncomfortable.  When I replied that I didn’t intend it to be, she would either fall into a silence that meant I disapprove, but go ahead or would quietly offer a reminder: “The world critiques the church all the time, so think about if you want to add to that.”

I did think about it.  Sometimes I pulled my punches and left a draft unpublished, either out of love for her or because I realized that in some cases my critique was, if not unmerited, unnecessary. Sometimes I didn’t, because as children of God and as the body of Christ’s church we are called to speak the truth and to speak it in love, even and especially about ourselves.

I have spoken with I hope a respectful and nuanced, if critical, voice on several issues that I believe matter deeply: the church’s loss of Biblical literacy, the small group phenomenon and how it has altered the way churches engage believers, our crumbling approaches to hospitality and fellowship, a modern reliance on Christian media, and, lately, the unrecognizable evolution of the evangelical church in America. 

And others have spoken more eloquently than I on all of these issue and more; the epidemic of sexual abuse in multiple denominations, the racist assumptions at play in some of our congregations, the cost of our pursuit of relevance.  Many times I’ve read such critiques and found myself nodding along.  At others, I channel my mother, and wonder if we really need to pile on when everything is such a mess.

What I have come to realize over the years about all of these critiques, however, and the occasional call I feel to write them, is this: they stem from deep love and deep heartache.

A story: about two years ago, a church broke my heart in a way that nothing else ever has.

My husband and I have been what I jokingly call “church orphans” for some time now.  We left our “home” denomination over profound disagreements with its politicization and alarming theological interpretations; we then found something of a church home in a new denomination that we attended for over five years.  Although we struggled with feeling integrated into that church, despite our best efforts, we could find nowhere else to go—and so remained.

And then we found a church we loved, in another Christian tradition.

A series of profound experiences led us there; a series of people who loved us very deeply through very difficult times all emerged from this space.  Everything about this place felt so deeply right, called to us on a level that I think surprised us both.  But before we could join, we had to grapple with some significant theological differences we weren’t sure we could reconcile. 

In the end, we withdrew, fearful that we could not abide by what we would be asked to honor in terms of theology and practice—certain that it was better not to enter into an agreement (whether with ourselves, with God, or the church), however implicit, that we knew we could not keep.

We felt sound in the decision, one made mutually by both of us.  We both agreed to revisit if and as God commands, should that time ever come.  But I was surprised by the sense of loss I felt after we decided to look elsewhere.  That night, realizing we’d hit yet another dead end, I cried into my pillow for hours in a way that I have only ever grieved the loss of my mother.

I so wanted it, I told God.  And underneath that, longer and over the years, a deeper, more painful cry: I so want the church to be what we all know it can be.

I’ve found fragments of it, in so many different places: in the adoration chapel, in the quiet beauty of the Mass, in the deep familial commitment of the Southern Baptist congregation I attended growing up, in liturgy, in the deep hospitality of a Pentecostal church that my grandmother attended, in the AME church I once attended with a friend, in the preaching of a Methodist pastor I admire, in communion at our current congregation.

At all these brief times and moments and places I think, ah, this is it.  And yet to find it in any one place is so hard.  In America right now, it feels even harder than usual.  We are going through a profound, generational change in the American church: one that is cracking and splintering and shaking congregations in all sorts of ways, one that is making us rethink descriptions and identifiers we thought we knew, one that for many is sending us fleeing back to the elemental foundations of the church. 

I wish I could go back and tell my mother what I could not articulate then: I critique the loss of Biblical literacy because I know what it is to attend a church that invites me to drink deeply from God’s word.  I critique our modern small groups and manifestations of ‘fellowship’ because the real fellowship I have experienced renders these a pale shadow.  I worry about what we are losing in the American church because of what I have gained through it.

Only a church can break your heart.  And I would posit that only someone in love with the church can critique it honestly.  Certainly some seek to tear it down for the sake of destroying it.  Some attack it because they see it as a threat, or because they don’t understand it, or because they’re not fundamentally interested or engaged in what Christ wanted to establish in the here and now.  But a lover of the church always critiques in the hopes of growth, of nourishment, of continued refinement: those who have fallen in love with it know what it can be at its best and are not satisfied to accept less. 

Ultimately, of course, it will be fine.  Christ has established His church and so the gates of hell will not prevail against it (at times in spite of our best efforts).  Nor is the church on earth meant to be a substitute for the perfection and glory to come.  Even our best efforts must necessarily leave us longing, and those with criticisms to levy must always be careful to examine ourselves with the same eye we turn on the church in which we participate.  If our truth has no love to accompany it, and no grace or mercy to soften it, then we need not speak at all. 

The church is made up of human people; it will fall short; it will disappoint us.  We can acknowledge this.  We love it anyway.  We pick up and begin again.  But we can be better.  I’ve tasted what it’s like when we are better.  We must never stop trying.