Searching for Sunday

But Jesus has this odd habit of allowing ordinary, screwed-up people to introduce him, and so it was ordinary, screwed-up people who first told me I was a beloved child of God, who first called me a Christian.

stories into sermons and listen to Rush Limbaugh and sometimes love me the wrong way. I was baptized by water and by spirit and by this strange bundle of atoms and genes and experiences God has assembled, delighted in, and in an act of absurd mercy named Beloved.

Whether they come from within us or outside us, whether they represent distinct personalities or the sins and systems that compete for our allegiance, demons are as real as the competing identities that seek to possess us. But rather than casting them out of our churches, we tend to invite them in, where they tell us we’ll be children of God when . .

Baptism declares that God is in the business of bringing dead things back to life, so if you want in on God’s business, you better prepare to follow God to all the rock-bottom, scorched-earth, dead-on-arrival corners of this world—including those in your own heart—because that’s where God works, that’s where God gardens.

It’s just death and resurrection, over and over again, day after day, as God reaches down into our deepest graves and with the same power that raised Jesus from the dead wrests us from our pride, our apathy, our fear, our prejudice, our anger, our hurt, and our despair. Most days I don’t know which is harder for me to believe: that God reanimated the brain functions of a man three days dead, or that God can bring back to life all the beautiful things we have killed. Both seem pretty unlikely to me.

So this is how a girl who went to school prepared to die for her faith ended up shrieking with delight as back-row Mike shoved marshmallows into his face in pursuit of the Flush Valve Award. I attribute any trace of social acumen in my life to Brian Ward and my days in the Grace Bible Church youth group. At a time when most of my peers were struggling to find an identity, I knew exactly who I was: the church girl, the girl who always had a place in her youth group family, the girl on fire for God. I’m not sure I can ever calculate the value of that community, that sense of belonging and of being loved. It never even occurred to me that such a fire could be washed out.

the first body of water the two could find. It might have been a river, or it might have been a puddle in the road. Philip got out of God’s way. He remembered that what makes the gospel offensive isn’t who it keeps out, but who it lets in. Nothing could prevent the eunuch from being baptized, for the mountains of obstruction had been plowed down, the rocky hills had been made smooth, and God had cleared a path. There was holy water everywhere. Two thousand years later, John’s call remains a wilderness call, a cry from the margins. Because we religious types are really good at building walls and retreating to temples. We’re good at making mountains out of our ideologies, obstructions out of our theologies, and hills out of our screwed-up notions of who’s in and who’s out, who’s worthy and who’s unworthy. We’re good at getting in the way. Perhaps we’re afraid that if we move, God might use people and methods we don’t approve of, that rules will be broken and theologies questioned. Perhaps we’re afraid that if we get out of the way, this grace thing might get out of hand. Well, guess what? It already has.

Grace has been out of hand for more than two thousand years now. We best get used to it. And so the call persists: Repent. Reorient. Prepare the way of the Lord. Make clear the path. God’s tumbling through the world like white water on rock. There’s nothing left but to surrender.

We could not become like God, so God became like us. God showed us how to heal instead of kill, how to mend instead of destroy, how to love instead of hate, how to live instead of long for more. When we nailed God to a tree, God forgave. And when we buried God in the ground, God got up. The apostle Paul struggled to explain the mystery: “The first man was of the dust of the earth,” he said. “The second man is of heaven … just as we have borne the image of the earthly man, so shall we bear the image of the heavenly man” (1 Corinthians 15:47–

No shadow of turning. Wouldn’t that be nice? I feel guilty because there is a breast cancer survivor to my right and a woman recently widowed two rows ahead, each of them singing with raised hands and closed eyes. Their faith hasn’t come easy, I know, but I resent them for it. I’ve done everything right. I’ve memorized the Bible verses and observed my quiet time. I’ve studied the famous apologists and taken the right classes. There was no great personal tragedy to shake my foundations, no injustice or betrayal to justify my falling away—just a few pesky questions that unraveled my faith like twine and left me standing here unable to sing a song I know by heart, chilled by a shadow no one else can see.

theology, the seemingly shared assumption that the end times are upon us because we just elected a Democratic president with a foreign-sounding name. I glom onto these offenses, not because they are particularly grievous or even real, but because they give me reasons to hate going to church besides my own ugly doubt.

We speak openly with one another about the bereavement that can accompany a layoff, a move, a diagnosis, or a dream deferred. But no one really teaches you how to grieve the loss of your faith. You’re on your own for

Was I was supposed to believe the same suicide bomb that sent a terrorist to hell sent his victims to hell

My classmates seemed wholly unconcerned when I pointed out the fact that, based on what we’d been taught in Sunday school about salvation, the Jews killed in the gas chambers at Auschwitz went straight to hell after their murders, and the piles of left-behind eyeglasses and suitcases displayed at the Holocaust Museum represent hundreds of thousands of souls suffering unending torture at the hand of the very God to whom they had cried out for rescue. I waited for a reaction, only to be gently reminded that perhaps the dorm-wide pajama party wasn’t the best time to talk about the Holocaust.

That recurring choice—between faith and science, Christianity and feminism, the Bible and historical criticism, doctrine and compassion—kept tripping me up like roots on a forest trail. I wanted to believe, of course, but I wanted to believe with my intellectual integrity and intuition intact, with both my head and heart fully engaged. The more I was asked to choose, the more fragmented and frayed my faith became, the more it stretched the gossamer of belief that held my world view together.

arranged parking spaces for my friends and took prayer requests for weather and election outcomes while leaving thirty thousand children to die each day from preventable disease. Instead I lay awake in my dorm room at night, begging an amorphous ghost of a deity to save me from my doubt and help me in my unbelief.

While my parents had always welcomed questions and discussion, my friends and professors diagnosed the crisis of faith as a deliberate act of rebellion. After graduation, rumors of my purported apostasy circulated around town, and I found myself on the prayer request lists of churches I didn’t even attend.

(Oh, if I had a penny for every time I’ve been informed by an evangelical male that I have trouble with submission, I could plate the moon in copper!)

Looking back, I suspect their reactions had less to do with disdain for my doubt and more to do with fear of their own. As my mother tried to tell me a million times, they weren’t rejecting me for being different, they were rejecting me for being familiar, for calling out all those quiet misgivings most Christians keep hidden in the dark corners of their hearts and would rather not name. But like most twenty-year-olds, I didn’t listen to my mother and instead approached my doubt the same way I had approached my faith—evangelistically. Where I sensed a calm sea, I conjured a storm. Where I found people happily sailing along in their faith, I rocked the boat. Where peace flowed like a river, I came in like Poseidon. You get the idea.

Dan is the son of a former pastor, and his parents divorced when he was a teenager, which is about all you need to know to understand why Dan didn’t get freaked out over a little religious turmoil. He moved through the world with the patient maturity of someone who’d already had his expectations adjusted, who already knew that faith was something you took a day at a time, not something you figured out at the start.

These were the people who threw us our wedding shower, embroidered our hand towels, and loaned us their power tools. Their initials are stamped to the bottom of casserole dishes I still haven’t returned, their handwriting scrawled across half of my recipe cards.

I have witnessed firsthand how such a network can perform miracles: a month’s worth of dinners for the mom undergoing chemo, a driveway full of men ready to haul furniture the minute the moving van pulls in, twenty-four hours of prayer and rotating visits during a complicated surgery, fully stocked cupboards for widowers, and hours of free childcare for struggling parents. These are the quotidian signs and wonders of a living, breathing church, and they are powerful and important and real. But to a woman for whom the mere mention of a “ladies’ tea” elicits a nervous sweat, sometimes being plugged in felt a bit like being assimilated.

Though the book’s teachings on traditional gender roles made me groan from time to time, it provided enough conversation starters for those of us who had been married for a grand total of three years to dispense our superior connubial wisdom upon those who had been married for a grand total of two.

It was in these late hours that we formed some of the most important friendships of our lives, the kind that go beyond small talk and beyond theological discussions to raw, unedited truth telling. We confessed our deepest fears and greatest doubts. We speculated endlessly about our futures and shared in one another’s joys and disappointments. We argued and apologized. We spewed hot chocolate across the kitchen in laughing fits and watched reruns of Arrested Development. This was our communion, our confession. This was the church that made our little three-bedroom-two-bathroom house grow spacious as a cathedral. In the company of these friends, questions and doubts were met with sympathy, not fear.

Sunday mornings, on the other hand, weren’t going so well. On Sunday mornings, my doubt came to church like a third member of the family, toddling along behind me with clenched fists and disheveled hair, throwing wild tantrums after every offhanded political joke or casual reference to hell.

Around me, people nodded their heads and raised their hands and murmured “amen,” while I raged internally at their confidence, their blithe acceptance of the very doctrines that kept me awake night after night.

there was a good chance the very people this man considered a threat to our way of life weren’t out there, but rather in here—perhaps visiting with family, perhaps squirming uncomfortably with the youth group in the back, perhaps singing with the worship band up front. How lonely they must feel, how paralyzed. Sitting there with my Bible in my hands, twisting its silk bookmark nervously between my fingers, I realized that just as I sat in church with my doubt, there were those sitting in church with their sexuality, their race, their gender, their depression, their addiction, their questions, their fears, their past, their infertility, their eating disorder, their diagnosis, their missed rent, their mess of a marriage, their sins, their shame—all the things that follow us to church on Sunday morning but we dare not name.

I didn’t stop going to church after the Vote Yes On One campaign, but I stopped being present. I was too scared to speak up in support of LGBT people, so I ignored my conscience and let it go. I played my role as the good Christian girl and spared everyone the drama of an argument. But that decision—to remain silent—split me in two.

Like a difficult marriage, my relationship with church buckled under the weight of years of silent assumptions. So I checked out—first in spirit, then in body.

We made some mistakes in leaving our church, but perhaps the biggest was in trying to slip quietly out the back door. We thought we were doing everyone a favor by avoiding a potential conflict, but my pastor friends tell me this is a bit like breaking up with a guy by simply not returning his calls. After fifteen years, I owed my church a DTR.

Belief. We’d been taught all our lives that it was shared belief that kept us in this community of faith, so we just assumed difference in belief left us out of it.

Dan said something about appreciating all the church had done for us through the years. Pastor Doug, with the twinkle of a tear in his eye, said we’d always be welcome in this church. Always. As we walked in silence back to the car, I knew we wouldn’t be back, at least not as regulars. Dan grasped my hand, and I felt his sadness too.

I left a church of kind, generous people because I couldn’t pretend to believe things I didn’t believe anymore, because I knew that no matter how hard I tried, I could never be the stick-figured woman in the Vote Yes On One sign standing guard in front of the doors. I didn’t want to be.

How could a bunch of addicts and alcoholics manage to succeed at creating the kind of intimate fellowship so many of my Christian groups had tried to achieve and failed? Many months would pass before I understood that people bond more deeply over shared brokenness than they do over shared beliefs.”

So why do our churches feel more like country clubs than AA? Why do we mumble through rote confessions and then conjure plastic Barbie and Ken smiles as we turn to one another to pass the peace? What makes us exchange the regular pleasantries—“I’m fine! How are you?”—while mingling beneath a cross upon which hangs a beaten, nearly naked man, suffering publicly on our behalf?

suspect this habit stems from the same impulse that told me I should drop a few pounds before joining the Y (so as not to embarrass myself in front of the fit people), the same impulse that kept my mother from hiring a housekeeper because she felt compelled to clean the bathroom before the Merry Maids arrived (so as not to expose to the world the abomination that is a hair-clogged shower drain), the same impulse that Nadia refers to as the “long and rich Christian tradition which in Latin is called ‘totally faking it.’ ”21

We Christians don’t get to send our lives through the rinse cycle before showing up to church. We come as we are—no hiding, no acting, no fear. We come with our materialism, our pride, our petty grievances against our neighbors, our hypocritical disdain for those judgmental people in the church next door. We come with our fear of death, our desperation to be loved, our troubled marriages, our persistent doubts, our preoccupation with status and image. We come with our addictions—to substances, to work, to affirmation, to control, to food. We come with our differences, be they political, theological, racial, or socioeconomic. We come in search of sanctuary, a safe place to shed the masks and exhale. We come to air our dirty laundry before God and everybody because when we do it together we don’t have to be afraid.

when a church functions more like a recovery group than a religious organization, when it commits to practicing “honesty for the sake of restoration,” all sorts of unexpected people show up.

Imagine if every church became a place where everyone is safe, but no one is comfortable. Imagine if every church became a place where we told one another the truth. We might just create sanctuary.

known many Christians who say they had to leave the church to discover Sabbath. Indeed, unplugging from a church can have the same effect as unplugging from the Internet or a demanding job. Suddenly the days seem longer, fuller, and more saturated with color. It’s like climbing out of a too-small space and drinking in fresh air again, or like rolling down the windows on an open road and letting the wind wreck your hair. You go on hikes and explore new spiritual practices involving prayer beads and meditation.

“I still go because my family likes the fellowship, but mentally I left years ago. The reasons I checked out were: the use of fear to motivate people into action and keep them in line; doubts were not discussed … no one shared their own personal struggles, and if someone ever did, they became the hot topic of church gossip;

The last thing these people need is one more person calling them failures, one more person piling on the guilt and shame.

It was scary starting over at a new church and trying to make new friends, so before each visit, I girded myself with a sense of smug detachment wherein I could observe the proceedings from the safety of my intellectual superiority, certain I could do a better job at running the show thanks to my expertise as, you know, a Christian blogger.

But perhaps the most unsettling thing about a new church is the way the ghost of the old one haunts it. For better or worse, the faith of our youth informs our fears, our nostalgia, our reactions, and our suspicions. My ears perked like an anxious dog’s upon hearing evangelical language from the pulpit. Words like holiness, purity, biblical, and witness will always ring a bit differently for me than they do for someone who grew up Orthodox or Pentecostal or humanist or Sikh.

what I loved or hated about evangelicalism, which put all these good churches filled with good people in the rather awkward position of the rebound boyfriend.

They were the people the religious loved to hate, for they provided a convenient sorting mechanism for externalizing sin as something that exists out there, among other people with other problems making other mistakes. It’s the oldest religious shortcut in the book: the easiest way to make oneself righteous is to make someone else a sinner.

It certainly wasn’t shared belief that brought them together. Nowhere do the Gospels speak of converts reciting the “sinner’s prayer” or signing a doctrinal statement or pledging allegiance to a creed.

touched. But we have our own religious codes these days. We have our own scapegoats we cast from our communities and surround with Bible-wielding mobs. We have sins we delight in taking seriously, biblical instructions we interpret hyperliterally, issues we protect over-vigilantly because it helps us with our sorting system. It makes us feel righteous.

They say self-employment means living in famine or feast, and we were in the midst of famine fit to rival Pharaoh’s nightmares.

But until then, the funeral home apartment created an intimate atmosphere that invited people to settle in and stay. In the conversations following Brian’s sermons, stories emerged of doubt, disillusionment, frustration, and hope. It was as if each week we shed one more layer of Southern pretense, slowly, carefully exposing our true selves. Christine, expressive and freckled with a sharp laugh and poetic mind, opened up about the abusive church she left and her ongoing struggle with shame and guilt. Kelly and Courtney, college students and roommates, talked about their adventures churchhopping in the Bible Belt.

The fact that some people in town rooted for our demise made me all the more determined to prove them wrong, to keep working until our church was bigger and better than theirs and we won. But whenever I got all paranoid and tribal like that Brian called me out on it. We knew each other well enough now to see the blemishes and get under each other’s skin. We were learning one another’s quirks, one another’s gifts, one another’s go-to sins. (You’re not a real church, I suppose, until you know one another’s go-to sins.) We were holding one another accountable, but we were doing it as friends.

Christine, wiping away tears, said the Mission became her sanctuary, a safe place to speak freely and recover from the last church experiences, and perhaps, to fortify her for the next. Kelly and Courtney were grateful for like-minded companionship, a chance to get off campus and really talk. The others mentioned the service projects, that time we pulled some money together to help a couple with rent, the baptism, the wedding, the communion services, the prayers, the inside jokes. Carrie was grateful for how we loved on her girls, Brian for how we took a risk with him. Dan said he would do it all over again for the friendships we’d forged. I said the Mission was the first time I felt like an asset to the church instead of a liability, and I was glad that at least we tried, at least we took a risk. Maybe you can’t build a church on nights and weekends. But at least you can be one. At least you can love one another as well as you can in the midst of it.

Do not allow the wealth of the world or its enchantment flatter us into silence as to your truth. Do not permit the powerful, or judges, or our dearest friends to keep us from professing what is right. Amen.

People shared their stories and struggles with refreshing courage. They opened up about their battles with depression and suicidal thoughts, their terror of failure and their broken hearts over a failed church nine years prior. They shared how dry, lost, and alone they felt. I looked at my watch. We were seventeen minutes in and people were standing up telling complete strangers stories of pain, loss, fear and deep wounds

similar gatherings all over the country and has written a book entitled Fail: Finding Hope and Grace in the Midst of Ministry Failure.

But as nearly every denomination in the United States faces declining membership and waning influence, Christians may need to get used to the idea of measuring significance by something other than money, fame, and power. No one ever said the fruit of the Spirit is relevance or impact or even revival. The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control—the sort of stuff that, let’s face it, doesn’t always sell.

I often wonder if the role of the clergy in this age is not to dispense information or guard the prestige of their authority, but rather to go first, to volunteer the truth about their sins, their dreams, their failures, and their fears in order to free others to do the same.

And we learned, perhaps the hard way, that church isn’t static. It’s not a building, or a denomination, or a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Church is a moment in time when the kingdom of God draws near, when a meal, a story, a song, an apology, and even a failure is made holy by the presence of Jesus among us and within us. Church was alive and well long before we came up with the words relevant and missional, and church will go on long after the grass grows through our cathedral floors. The holy Trinity doesn’t need our permission to carry on in their endlessly resourceful work of making all things new. That we are invited to catch even a glimpse of the splendor is grace. All of it, every breath and every second, is grace.

Unfortunately, the difference between the clergy and the laity is often perceived as more vast than it is, which leads to all sorts of trouble, from abusive and authoritarian churches, to the idolization of religious leaders by their followers, to unhealthy and unhappy pastors who struggle to manage the weight of the expectations placed upon them, to Christians who miss the full depth of their own callings because they believe ministry is something other people do.

“To be a priest,” writes Barbara Brown Taylor, “is to know that things are not as they should be and yet to care for them the way they are.”38 Such a purpose calls us far beyond our natural postures. It means surrendering all cynicism and pride to take up the basin and towel.

An experienced farmer kept his eyes on the heaving shoulders of the beasts ahead and used his weight to nudge the plowshare down a steady path. No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back, the Teacher said, is fit for service in the kingdom of God.

After the Upper Room meal, the dog smelled the crumbs. His nose flared and his mouth watered as he scrambled up the stairs, paws scratching against the stone in frenzied patter. Soon he’d be chased out with a shout and a broom, but for a dog as skinny as he, even a few morsels would do. With animal abandon, he lapped up the spoils from under the table—some bread crumbs, a date, a scrap of fish, a few olives, and a taste of honey—before his ears perked to the far-off sound of another HaMotzi.

According to church historians, the focus of these early communion services was not on Jesus’ death, but rather on Jesus’ friendship, his presence made palpable among his followers by the tastes, sounds, and smells he loved. “With all the conceptual truths in the universe at his disposal,” writes Barbara Brown Taylor, “[Jesus] did not give them something to think about together when he was gone. Instead, he gave them concrete things to do—specific ways of being together in their bodies—that would go on teaching them what they needed to know when he was no longer around to teach them himself … ‘Do this,’ he said—not believe this but do this—‘in remembrance of me.’

Things changed when the emperor Constantine made Christianity the religion of the state and infused the Eucharist with imperial pomp and elements of pagan ceremony. Prayers grew more stylized and fixed. Solemn chants replaced the familiar hymns, vestured processions the mealtime banter. Christians no longer gathered around crowded tables but instead stood before altars of stone over which only priests could preside.

The atmosphere might be celebratory or somber, the room filled with organ music or guitar strums, Gregorian chants or clinking silverware. In more liturgical traditions, the prayers are as familiar as the taste of the bread—“Let us lift up our hearts! We lift them up to the Lord!”—while in a Baptist church or a Bible church, the pastor may simply ask a member of the congregation to say grace. The elements and the meal are identified in different ways: the body of Christ, broken; the blood of Christ, shed; the Bread of heaven, the cup of salvation, the mystery of faith, the supper of the Lamb. But in every tradition I know, someone, at some point, says, “Remember.”

“On those days when I have thought of giving up on church entirely,” writes Nora Gallagher, “I have tried to figure out what I would do about Communion.”43 Indeed it’s easier to remember things together than alone.

Like Gallagher, on the days when I contemplate leaving Christianity, I have wondered what I would do without communion. Certainly nonbelievers can care for one another and make one another food. But it is Christians who recognize this act as sacrament, as holy.

There were wrinkled hands and pierced noses and flashes of brilliant white teeth against chocolate skin. There were babies on hips, Band-Aids on fingers, hands in pockets, nervous shuffles, and teary eyes. This is Christ’s body, broken for you. In the faces that passed by I saw joy, relief, anxiety, boredom, shyness, familiarity, distraction, and hope. I saw broken families, fights with friends, doubts about God, and insecurities about the van ride home. This is Christ’s body, broken for you. This is Christ’s body, broken for you. This is Christ’s body, broken for you. I said it more than three hundred times—until at last I believed it, at last I understood: it wasn’t my job to do right by these kids; this wasn’t about me at all. I could only proclaim the great mystery of faith—that Christ has died, Christ has risen, and Christ will come again, and that somehow, some way, this is enough. This body and this blood is enough.

“When [Jesus] wanted fully to explain what his forthcoming death was all about,” writes New Testament scholar N. T. Wright, “he didn’t give a theory. He didn’t even give them a set of scriptural texts. He gave them a meal.”46 I guess sometimes you just have to taste and see.

“If we did nothing else,” writes Nora Gallagher, “if nothing was placed in our hands, we would have done two-thirds of what needed to be done. Which is to admit that we simply do not have all the answers; we simply do not have all the power. It is, as the saying goes, ‘out of our hands.’ ” “Faith,” she says, “is a catch-and-release sport. And standing at the altar receiving the bread and wine is the release part.”47

But I’m no good at the releasing and receiving, at least not without practice. Ours is a culture of achievement, of sufficiency, of bootstrap pulling and ladder climbing. We celebrate the winners, the leaders, the do-it-yourselfers. Like any good American, I like to wait until I think I’ve earned. I like to wait until I think I’ve deserved. With giving, I can maintain some sense of power, some illusion of control. But receiving means the gig is up. Receiving means I’m not the boss of what comes into life—be it trial or trouble or unmerited good.

I was in possession of my friend’s gift long before I received it, on a gray day when its stubborn, irresponsible beauty could no longer be ignored. Until then, I didn’t want to admit how badly I needed her kindness, how helpless I was at sorting all this out on my own. I didn’t want to see myself in those fragile, thirsty orchids, fighting against the gloom to trestle toward the light. But this friend knows better than most the nature of eucharisteo—thanksgiving—how it enters through our soft spots and seeps in through our cracks. She knew God would unclench my fists and unfurl my fingers and that grace would eventually get through. And so it did, when I finally opened my hands, when I received grace the way I receive communion, with nothing to offer back but thanks.

If people are hungry, let them come and eat. If they are thirsty, let them come and drink. It’s not my table anyway. It’s not my denomination’s table or my church’s table. It’s Christ’s table. Christ sends out the invitations, and if he has to run through the streets gathering up the riffraff to fill up his house, then that’s exactly what he’ll do. Who am I to try and block the door?

I’m happy to pass the bread to someone like Sara Miles or the neighbor who mows our lawn when we’re out of town. But Sarah Palin? Glenn Beck? Those gatekeeper types I was just talking about? Not so much. On a given Sunday morning I might spot six or seven people who have wronged or hurt me, people whose politics, theology, or personalities drive me crazy. The church is positively crawling with people who don’t deserve to be here … starting with me.

is the purpose of the sacraments, of the church—to help us see, to point to the bread and wine, the orchids and the food pantries, the post-funeral potlucks and the post-communion dance parties, and say: pay attention, this stuff matters; these things are holy.

At its best, the church administers the sacraments by feeding, healing, forgiving, comforting, and welcoming home the people God loves. At its worst, the church withholds the sacraments in an attempt to lock God in a theology, a list of rules, a doctrinal statement, a building.

The Spirit is like a womb, from which the living are born again. We emerge—lashes still wet from the water, eyes unadjusted to the light—into a reanimated and freshly charged world. There are so many new things to see, so many gifts to give and receive, so many miracles to baffle and amaze, if only we pay attention, if only we let the Spirit surprise and God catch our breath.

“And where do you attend … services?” “Well, I grew up evangelical, but I’ve been rethinking things lately. Our last church sort of dissolved, which was a painful experience. Now I’m not sure what I am. I guess you might say I’m searching.” Before the words left my mouth, I knew I’d just violated rule number one of conversational self-preservation: never tell a religious person you’re searching.

“It was the blessed Mother’s protection,” Susan whispered. They looked at me, expecting some kind of a response, but I didn’t know how to tell them this was exactly the sort of thing that made me doubt. Christians like to claim divine protection when a long line at Starbucks miraculously saves them from the fourteen-car pileup on the interstate, or when a wildfire just misses their home to take out a dozen others, but I’m always left wondering about the victims, those whose supposed lack of faith or luck or significance puts them in the path of the tornado instead.

studied my plate, feeling both guilty for asking these questions and resentful of those who don’t. No matter where I went to church, I realized, doubt would follow, nipping at my heels. No matter what hymns I sang, what prayers I prayed, what doctrinal statements I signed, I would always feel like an outsider, a stranger.

It’s funny how, after all those years attending youth events with light shows and bands, after all the contemporary Christian music and contemporary Christian books, after all the updated technology and dynamic speakers and missional enterprises and relevant marketing strategies designed to make Christianity cool, all I wanted from the church when I was ready to give it up was a quiet sanctuary and some candles. All I wanted was a safe place to be. Like so many, I was in search of sanctuary.

The journey comes with baggage, yes. And heartbreak. But there are also many gifts. In a sense, we’re all cobblers. We’re all a bit like Brother Joseph, piecing together our faith, one shard of broken glass at a time. Just a week after my trip to St. Bernard, I visited a Quaker community where one of its members, a barefoot young man with a ponytail, put it this way: “I spent a lot of years journeying through a bunch of religious traditions, looking for a place where I fit. But now I feel perfectly at home here with the Friends, or in a Catholic mass, or swaying and clapping at the AME church down the road. When the Spirit lives within you, any place can become a sanctuary. You just have to listen. You just have to pay attention.”59

A worldwide movement of more than two billion people reaching every continent and spanning thousands of cultures for over two thousand years can’t expect homogeneity. And the notion that a single tradition owns the lockbox on truth is laughable, especially when the truth we’re talking is God.

And when we check our pride long enough to pay attention to the presence of the Spirit gusting across the globe, we catch glimpses of a God who defies our categories and expectations, a God who both inhabits and transcends our worship, art, theology, culture, experiences, and ideas.

None of these friends report perfect or painless experiences, even in their new church homes. As my friend Ed puts it: “When you join a church you’re just picking which hot mess is your favorite.” That sounds about right to me.

Our differences matter, but ultimately, the boundaries we build between one another are but accidental fences in the endless continuum of God’s grace.

Or hold your head under as you drown—triggered by an image, a question, something the pastor said, something that doesn’t add up, the unlikelihood of it all, the too-good-to-be-trueness of it, the way the lady in the thick perfume behind you sings “Up from the grave he arose!” with more confidence in the single line of a song than you’ve managed to muster in the past two years. Has it really been that long? And you’ll be sitting there in the dress you pulled out from the back of your closet, swallowing down the bread and wine, not believing a word of it. Not a word. So you’ll fumble through those back-pocket prayers—help me in my unbelief!—while everyone around you moves on to verse two, verse three, verse four without you. You will feel their eyes on you, and you will recognize the concern behind their cheery greetings: “We haven’t seen you here in a while! So good to have you back.” And you will know they are thinking exactly what you used to think about Easter Sunday Christians: Nominal. Lukewarm. Indifferent.

For me, simply reciting the Apostles’ Creed on a given Sunday means drawing from every last reserve of my faith, which is probably why I find the Episcopal Church both freeing and challenging in its elemental ecclesiology.

In the silence that followed, it was as if all the amorphous vagaries of my faith coalesced into a single, tangible call: Repent. Break bread. Seek justice. Love neighbor. Christianity seemed at once the simplest and most impossible thing in the world. It seemed to me confirmed, sealed as the story of my life—that thing I’ll never shake, that thing I’ll always be.

He father told her, “What you promise when you are confirmed is not that you will believe this forever. What you promise when you are confirmed is that this is the story you will wrestle with forever.”

This is what’s most annoying and beautiful about the windy Spirit and why we so often miss it. It has this habit of showing up in all the wrong places and among all the wrong people, defying our categories and refusing to take direction. Nicodemus struggled to see the Spirit outside the religious institution. Today, some of us struggle to see the Spirit within the religious institution, often for good reason. But God is present both inside and outside the traditional church, working all sorts of everyday miracles to inspire and change us if only we pay attention.

With good intentions tinged with fear, Christians scour their inventory for a cure. But there is a difference between curing and healing, and I believe the church is called to the slow and difficult work of healing. We are called to enter into one another’s pain, anoint it as holy, and stick around no matter the outcome. In

The thing about healing, as opposed to curing, is that it is relational. It takes time. It is inefficient, like a meandering river. Rarely does healing follow a straight or well-lit path. Rarely does it conform to our expectations or resolve in a timely manner. Walking with someone through grief, or through the process of reconciliation, requires patience, presence, and a willingness to wander, to take the scenic route.

The modern-day church likes results. Convinced the gospel is a product we’ve got to sell to an increasingly shrinking market, we like our people to function as walking advertisements: happy, put-together, finished—proof that this Jesus stuff WORKS!

But if the world is watching, we might as well tell the truth. And the truth is, the church doesn’t offer a cure. It doesn’t offer a quick fix. The church offers death and resurrection. The church offers the messy, inconvenient, gut-wrenching, never-ending work of healing and reconciliation. The church offers grace.

As Brené Brown puts it, “I went to church thinking it would be like an epidural, that it would take the pain away … But church isn’t like an epidural; it’s like a midwife … I thought faith would say, ‘I’ll take away the pain and discomfort, but what it ended up saying was, ‘I’ll sit with you in it.’ ”73

The scent, combined with a prayer and gentle touch, can have a powerful healing effect on a person, physically, spiritually, and emotionally. And the time and intention it takes to create a custom scent signals a commitment to stick around for the long haul.

Sometimes people ask me if I believe in faith healings. What I think they’re asking is if I believe a pastor can lay hands on a man and cure him of alcoholism, or if a religious shrine possesses the power to coax the paralyzed out of their wheelchairs, or if rallying around a little girl with twenty-four hours of prayer can reverse the progression of her cancer. I don’t know. I’ve watched too many people of strong faith succumb to illness and tragedy to believe God shows any sort of favoritism in these matters. (And yet, inexplicably, I always pray.) So when I’m asked about faith healings, I tell people about Thistle Farms. I tell them about the Gay Christian Network. I tell them about the widows I met in India who haven’t been cured of their HIV but who are healing from their poverty and hopelessness by loving one another well. I tell them about the Epic Fail Pastors Conference, and

The Baptist preacher was mad about it, too, and in his North Carolina drawl ranted all the way from the hotel to campus, which made me feel better. But having been raised in the more progressive stream of the Baptist tradition, he viewed the situation as something of an outsider, an observer of the infighting rather than a participant in it. He could safely roll his eyes and sigh, as one might while watching political pundits shout at each other on TV, without feeling a deep sense of personal investment or loss. I envied him for it.

The World Vision incident sent me into as deep a religious depression as I’ve ever known, and I’m still struggling to climb out of it. I know a lot of people who walked away from evangelicalism for good when they saw what happened, and I know a few who walked away from the entire church, unable to reconcile the love they see in Jesus with the condemnation they hear from his followers. But what I’m learning this time around, as I process my frustration and disappointment and as I catch those first ribbons of dawn’s light on the horizon, is that I can’t begin to heal until I’ve acknowledged my pain, and I can’t acknowledge my pain until I’ve kicked my dependence on cynicism.

Cynicism is a powerful anesthetic we use to numb ourselves to pain, but which also, by its nature, numbs us to truth and joy. Grief is healthy. Even anger can be healthy. But numbing ourselves with cynicism in an effort to avoid feeling those things is not.

And I am missing out. I am missing out on a God who surprises us by showing up where we don’t think God belongs. I am missing out on a God whose grace I need just as desperately, just as innately as the lady who dropped her child sponsorship in a protest against gay marriage.

The annoying thing about being human is that to be fully engaged with the world, we must be vulnerable. And the annoying thing about being vulnerable is that sometimes it means we get hurt. And when your family includes the universal church, you’re going to get hurt. Probably more than once. This doesn’t mean we stay in unhealthy churches or allow abusive people to continue to abuse. It doesn’t mean we participate in congregations that sap us of our life or make us fight to belong. It just means that if we want to heal from our wounds, including those we receive from the church, we have to kick the cynicism habit first. We have to allow ourselves to feel the pain and joy and heartache of being in relationship with other human beings. In the end, it’s the only way to really live, even if it means staying invested, even if it means taking a risk and losing it all.

Death is something empires worry about, not something gardeners worry about. It’s certainly not something resurrection people worry about.

It was a death, but it was a good death.83 As the shape of Christianity changes and our churches adapt to a new world, we have a choice: we can drive our hearses around bemoaning every augur of death, or we can trust that the same God who raised Jesus from the dead is busy making something new.

Clearly, the Twelve struggled to conceive of a kingdom that would begin not with the death of their enemies, but with the death of their friend at the hands of their enemies. I suspect this is why they complained about the “waste” of money exhibited by the anointing.

We cannot know for sure whether Mary saw her actions as a prelude to her teacher’s upcoming death and burial. I suspect she knew instinctively, the way women know these things, that a man who dines at a sick man’s house, who allows a woman to touch him with her hair, who rebukes Pharisees and befriends prostitutes, would not survive for long in the world in which she lived. Surely a woman in this society would understand it better than a man. The marginalized are always the first to comprehend death and resurrection.

And yet, while we break the bread and drink the wine, we rarely pour out enough oil to fill a room with its fragrance. We rarely indulge all of our senses in an act of pure, impractical worship. Jesus wanted us to remember, but we have forgotten.

Paul is not arguing that the first-century Greco-Roman household structure is the best for human flourishing and therefore God’s design for all people everywhere. Such a question was not within his purview. Rather, he is explaining that when Christians imitate Jesus in their relationships, when partners in marriage serve one another rather than fight for dominance,

For two people to commit themselves not simply to marriage, but to a lifetime of mutual love and submission in imitation of Christ is so astounding, so mysterious, it comes close to looking like Jesus’ stubborn love for the church.

Writes Alexander Schmemann, “We must understand that the real theme, ‘content’ and object of this sacrament is not ‘family,’ but love … Some of us are married and some are not. Some of us are called to be priests and ministers and some are not. But the sacraments of matrimony and priesthood concern all of us, because they concern our life as vocation. The meaning, the essence and the end of all vocation is the mystery of Christ and the Church.”

What makes a marriage holy isn’t the degree to which the two partners reflect gender stereotypes, or stick to a list of rules and roles, or even reflect cultural norms and expectations, but the degree to which the love of Christ is present in one of the most challenging and rewarding commitments two people will ever make to one another.

Just as there is something about bread and wine that reminds us of Jesus’ humanity, there is something about the tension and longing of romantic love that reminds us of our desire for God and God’s desire for us.

I may be wrong, but I think the point is this: what each of us longs for the most is to be both fully known and fully loved.87 Miraculously, God feels the same way about us. God, too, wants to be fully known and fully loved. God wants this so much that he has promised to knock down every obstacle in the way, enduring even his own death, to be with us, to consummate this love. And so, in those relationships and in those moments when we experience the joy, ecstasy, and relief of being both totally vulnerable and absolutely cherished, we get just a taste, a mere glimpse, of what God has always felt for us, and what one day we will feel for God.

Perhaps she would speak of impossible expectations and all the time she’s wasted trying to contort herself into the shape of those amorphous silhouettes that flit from magazines and billboards into her mind. Or of this screwed-up notion of purity as a status, as something awarded by men with tests and checklists and the power to give it and take it away.

Perhaps she would talk about being underestimated, about surprising people and surprising herself. Or about how there are moments when her own strength startles her, and moments when her weakness—her forgetfulness, her fear, her exhaustion—unnerve her.

This is the church. Here she is. Lovely, irregular, sometimes sick and sometimes well. This is the body-like-no-other that God has shaped and placed in the world. Jesus lives here; this is his soul’s address. There is a lot to be thankful for, all things considered. She has taken a beating, the church. Every day she meets the gates of hell and she prevails. Every day she serves, stumbles, injures, and repairs. That she has healed is an underrated miracle. That she gives birth is beyond reckoning. Maybe it’s time to make peace with her. Maybe it’s time to embrace her, flawed as she is.

In this kingdom, the people from the margins and the bottom rungs will be lifted up to places of honor, seated at the best spots at the table. This kingdom knows no geographic boundaries, no political parties, no single language or culture. It advances not through power and might, but through acts of love and joy and peace, missions of mercy and kindness and humility. This kingdom has arrived, not with a trumpet’s sound but with a baby’s cries, not with the vanquishing of enemies but with the forgiving of them, not on the back of a warhorse but on the back of a donkey, not with triumph and a conquest but with a death and a resurrection.

Still, when we consider all the messes the church has made throughout history, all the havoc she has wreaked and the things she has destroyed, when we face up to just how different the church looks from the kingdom most of the time, it’s easy to think maybe Jesus left us with a raw deal. Maybe he pulled a bait and switch, selling us on the kingdom and then slipping us the church. When I was debating titles for this book, I asked for help on social media, and one reader suggested this: Jesus Went Back to Heaven and All He Left Me Was This Lousy Church. That one got a lot of “likes,” and I have to admit I can relate.