Ah, yes. Another Sunday skipping church. Funny how I still call it that. “Skipping”. Funny how I still feel bad when I do it.
Church attendance is an interesting topic. If you don’t attend church, you are usually slammed with Hebrews 10:25. But of course, we know that church attendance is not synonymous with righteousness, or even being a decent person. It’s not bad, in fact it’s usually a good thing, in my opinion. There’s a lot I like about my church, and I have friends there, too. But after spending 6-7 or so hours commuting every week, taking the longer drive on a Sunday to go to church can sometimes be tedious.
It was good that my parents took me to church when I was young. There was a long stretch of time when we stopped going, but it was healthy that we started going again. If you let it, it can provide you with a solid spiritual foundation, and you will likely be around friends who make positive impacts on your life. But I also live haunted by the lasting scar of church. Every week. Every Sunday. Every year. It turns into obligation rather than choice. I also kind of hated that my weekend only felt like one day, because you really couldn’t sleep in very long on Sunday. You had to get up and get ready and go to church, and by the time you got home, half your day was over, and that was Sunday. As a church-attending Christian, your weekend was really more of a half-weekend. It was always easy to slightly envy those who didn’t care.
Too often, church attendance was confused with righteousness. In youth group, you were considered “mature” if you went to both youth service and adult service. Oh, yes. The old “double-service” days. Ugh. Going to both was strongly recommended, and at least when I was young, it was kind of required since I didn’t have a car to drive home in.
So I still feel bad when I skip. The chiding of friends aside, it feels like lack of faith. But oh, well.
There was a time in college when I stopped going. I can only handle so much Creationism before I want to puke. I remember trying a new church with my parents where the guest speaker went on a huge rant about how college students were coming back from college not believing that everything in the Bible was literal, and how horrible that was, and I just became enraged because I had been struggling tooth and nail to understand what I truly believed about the world, but I was basically being called an apostate for using my brain. I completely gave up on church for awhile after that. (and 10 years later, you can still hear the anger in my voice over it. Granted, lots of people can be complete whiners over church because it didn’t happen exactly the way they wanted it to, but I still reserve the right to be frustrated over specific incidents)
I remember another incident, at church ironically, where some young pastor fresh from seminary tried to teach our small class about how the Hebrews were the first to mention the heavenly firmament. This is patently false, and out of frustration I tried to argue with him afterward, showing him the Middle Egyptian determinative for ‘firmament’, predating the Hebrew notation by about a thousand years. This doesn’t affect the veracity of the Bible, it just demonstrates how many bad assumptions get made about the Bible by blind Christianity, but he avoided the argument entirely. No, he didn’t know what he was talking about, but I was also being a dick, which pretty well summarizes how I acted during that time in my life, unfortunately.
When I finally got plugged back into a church a few years later, it was a really good thing for me, more so because of community and friends than sermons and music.
Never, ever, forget this. Sure, some people turn up, listen to the sermon, and leave. Some do it just to learn, many do it just to check the church attendance box. People who plug into a church do it for the community. People matter a lot.
What’s great about the church I go to now is that they acknowledge spiritual warfar. This has been incredibly difficult to find. Most churches just want to bury their heads in the sand on this topic, and sometimes they don’t truly believe it exists. Angels? Demons? Miracles? Hearing for God? Pffffffft. We just read the Bible, and that makes us close with God. But as I say time and time again, you can only wake up crying your eyes out and praying in languages you don’t understand so many time before you realize that something is up. That started happening on rare occasions in my early twenties. Freaked me the hell out. It’s hard to take people seriously when they just blow that off. I had kind of been a part of another church that acknowledged these things, but it was in Aurora and most of my friends there bailed at one point. Finding a church that believes in the gifts of the Spirit and isn’t afraid or shy of them has been great.
…But it’s also a long drive. And I only know a few people there now. Most of whom I hung out with yesterday. So I’m skipping and writing in this blog, ’cause that’s how I roll?
A new young adult group sprung up recently. They use an app for communication. But when I checked the messages on that app…I felt old. I feel like a bunch of 20-year-olds are going back and forth, making last minute plans and getting super excited. Now in my 30s, I can only thing, “Uggggggghhhhh, I can’t deal with this”. And that may be true. I’m still technically within the age range, but I really can’t identify with college kids anymore. I’m getting deeper into my career, I HATE last minute plans, and I’m an introvert who makes friends slowly. I also don’t get super enthusiastic about things. I’ve lost so many friendships over the past several years, I really don’t have the energy or emotional strength to invest in a whole new group of people, who are probably just going to move away in a few years anyway 🙁 . It would be good for me to meet new people, but I kind of have my close friends and I’m protective of those friends. I can’t bring the old friends back into the fray; it makes me sad, but you just can’t reverse time to the old days.
I’m not ready to add more Church to my schedule, either. I have one “church” group that meets in the middle of the week – Dream Group – and I feel pretty happy with only having one non-Sunday group to go to. I have always hated church-busyness. I get that it’s more common for extroverts, but my job really wipes me out some days. And I don’t even have kids. I don’t know how these people do it. I really want to be deliberate about rest, and I really want to avoid excessive activities. But I also know it’s good to meet new people, instead of cloistering with my friends, as warm and as comfortable as that may be.
What does it all mean? I have no idea. At all. This is just me throwing up my brains on the blog. Part of why I write here. My life isn’t perfect, there’s a lot I don’t have figured out. Maybe someone needs this message? Maybe someone needs to know that Christian’s aren’t all judgemental a-holes who think that church attendance is the most important thing in your life? That just because someone has close friends that their life is amazing? There’s a lot to figure out this year.