evangelism

God Is Not Your Abusive Lover

Content warning: God-talk, Christianity, worship music, conservative evangelicals, intimate partner violence, child abuse, bullying, various types of -isms and shaming. Nothing graphic or detailed, but no mincing words, either.

I debated whether or not to write this. I’m still tired from a weekend at a youth event with kids from our church, so my words are running together a bit. Aside from that, this involves one of my kids. I try hard to keep them out of my public writing, and I do ask their permission first when I want to include them. Usually it’s positive stuff like their accomplishments (hey, I get to be a proud mama sometimes!). This time, it’s not so positive, and my Mama Bear claws were/are unsheathed. So there you have it—full disclosure on why this made me furious enough to blog about it.

First, the good stuff. Our weekend trip was great. I didn’t know what to expect, to be honest. I haven’t been to a youth event in years, and my experiences with them are…not good. I recall lots of negativity: wearing kids down until they’re “broken” enough for an altar call (yes, that’s really what we were instructed to do at one camp); assuring youth that they are damaged, sin-sick wretches; providing lists of sins and how they can keep themselves pure. I pretty well figured it wouldn’t be like that, since my older one has gone on this trip before. I was pleased to find that it all had a healthy tone which was outward-focused. And no altar call!

That said, the one thing which rattled me was how upset my older child was after singing a particular worship song.* I’m gonna say it—that song needs to be stabbed to death with a thousand knives, set on fire, and never, ever played at any youth function again.

At first, when my kid was upset, I let him go. He was with a friend, and he talked with a couple of other trusted adults who care about him. Eventually, I caught up with him and asked if he was willing to talk to me as well. Even after he told me why the song affected him, I couldn’t figure out what was going on. I actually ended up asking him if there was more than he was saying because it wasn’t making sense to me. I finally began to piece it together: He is fine. He isn’t hiding some secret he’s ashamed of. (Explaining how I know this would break my child’s trust on private things he’s shared.) No, he’d merely absorbed the negative message of the song and had come to (temporarily) believe that he was unlovable for who he is.

In a nutshell, the message of the song is, “You don’t fit in, people will never love you, and only God actually tolerates your existence. You’re so lucky God loves you!” On the surface, maybe it sounds okay to express a very real feeling of not fitting in. Except this is a twisted way to achieve that, and it makes God sound exactly like the kind of controlling lover who isolates and assures you they are the only one who will ever love you.

Let me just link the words for you. I had to look them up myself, and I cannot even with this song. It’s full of victim-blaming (verse one, which implies child abuse of some type), fat-shaming (verse two), and equating being hurt to being a literal murderer (verse three). All of this is wrapped in a lovely package of telling people they are so terrible that no one could possibly love them except God. And who knows exactly how God plans to show this, since God’s primary vehicle is people. But hey, I guess it’s enough to say “God loves you” while walking on by, right?

While I appreciate the acknowledgment that people in various situations can feel alone and unloved, telling them they literally are alone and unloved seems…well, unloving. In the case of my kid, he ended up dwelling on the fact that some kids at school have targeted him for homophobic and ableist bullying. You know what this song taught him? That the bullies are right, he’s too weird, and no one actually loves him. This, despite the fact that on a day when he isn’t listening to that song, he’s very well aware how many people adore him—“weirdness” and all.

This is exactly the type of thing that evangelicals** use to break people down so they can get in there with their message of “hope.” It’s othering at its finest. Convince people they’re worthless (oh, excuse me, “unworthy”) in order to deliver the promise that God (but not them personally, of course) will love them. At least, God will love them if they make some effort at changing. This is how I got sucked into an evangelical black hole and why I’m still trying to recover, nearly seven years after waking up to the harm done in God’s name.

This is not a healthy message. It’s not even a Christian one. In particular, I’m incensed at delivering a message to our youth which suggests that the hurt they’ve experienced makes them so ugly to others that only God could look on them without being disgusted (and also implies that being abused or being fat are sins equivalent to murder). It offers no real help, no suggestion for where someone could turn. No encouragement to fellow humans to be a shoulder to cry on and a loving presence in someone’s life.

I’m sure this song is powerful for some folks. I’m equally sure someone is going to come over here to comment that I’m intentionally missing the point or that one song can’t deliver everything. If only it were one song! A whole lot of worship songs are in the same vein, designed to evoke a particular feeling for the sake of “winning souls.”

Can we just not? This isn’t a message I want my kids hearing. It’s certainly not the message they hear in our church week after week. Like me, my older child’s spirituality is heavily bound in his love for music, so it’s much more likely he’ll absorb incorrect theology from a song. We need to do better for our kids than this warped thinking. People are not worthless, broken wretches who don’t deserve love from other humans. God is not an abusive lover who isolates us from each other in order to “fix” us.

*I’m not giving old hymns a pass on this either, but my most negative worship experiences have involved pop-Christian songs. There are certainly plenty of examples of hymns with dreadful and equally damaging theology.

**I’m using “evangelicals” to refer here to predominantly white conservative evangelical protestant denominations, mainly Calvinism/Arminianism-based. My denomination, ELCA, has “evangelical” in the name but isn’t an Evangelical Denomination. It’s still considered liturgical and isn’t by any stretch of the imagination Calvinist/Arminian.

A little more on evangelism

Christianese, Evangelism, Religion

Coppo di Marcovaldo [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

I made a commitment to a friend that I would post a bit more on this subject just to clarify a few things. My apologies to people who consider themselves evangelical who thought perhaps I was trashing the concept itself or all evangelical Christians. Let me state this as unambiguously as possible: I do not hate evangelical Christians. What I dislike is evangelical culture and many of the teachings that lead to what I call “friends with an agenda” and inauthentic relationships.

Not all people who consider themselves evangelical Christians do these things, of course. That’s because a person is separate from an institution. Not only that, there’s a big difference between “churches that evangelize” and “evangelical churches.” The former applies to any church that encourages people to tell others about their faith in Jesus. The latter refers to denominations that are built on the premise of evangelism. So churches like mine (Lutheran) and mainline Protestant churches (Methodist, Presbyterian) are not considered “evangelical churches” despite the fact that they may do some evangelizing. However, some churches that evangelize can and do encourage behaviors that are far closer to evangelical denominations and evangelical culture.

There are some specific aspects of evangelical culture that are more common in some churches than in others, and those are the things that concern me most. For example, Calvinism and its offshoots always make me a little (or a lot) irritable. Some specific things common to evangelical culture (which may or may not be true of a given church or individual):

Belief that people are either born bad or become tainted at some randomly appointed age (“age of accountability”)
Pressure to work Jesus into conversations with non-Christian friends, family, and co-workers
Belief that “salvation” means rescuing from eternal suffering after death
Encouragement to make friends with people for the express purpose of converting them
Hosting large-scale events to which people can invite others in order to either hear a salvation message or see the church in a positive light and return at a future time
Pressure to bring friends and family to church services
Door-to-door visits, mass mailings, newspaper ads, or in-church handouts used to bring people to church, frequently containing ambiguous, misleading, or provocative language in order to pique interest

None of that has anything to do with genuine relationships, no matter how hard a church tries to sell it as such.

When I was in college, I worked at a Christian camp. One part of our work was to present the message of salvation to the kids under our care. Now, let me just say, I love this camp. My own kids now go there, and I have no complaints about what they’re being taught. I am glad that they’re hearing about Jesus in a caring, fun atmosphere. If I had a problem with evangelism in general, I would not send my kids to camp–end of story. But as both a former employee and director, I am fully aware that the camp counselors often come from different backgrounds and may have learned things that are different from what our family and our church teach and believe.

This particular camp is a day camp, but there’s one overnight trip. As part of that, the counselors deliver a gospel/salvation message. One year, back when I was working, the other counselors decided to present the message in the form of a skit. In this particular atrocious story, a group of girls is in a car wreck, and they all die. One of them goes to heaven and the rest to hell. The last part of the skit is the girls, being pulled down by Satan, shrieking at their friend, “Why didn’t you ever tell us?”

I could not make this shit up.

I wasn’t part of the skit. My campers were all six and seven years old. They were absolutely terrified. One of the girls sat with me by the campfire afterward and sobbed, telling me she was scared that her parents were going to hell and that it was all her fault. It took an hour to calm her down. Needless to say, when I became camp director, I put a ban on that kind of skit.

Instead, they did the one about the teenage party girl who wants Jesus to leave her alone so she can get drunk and do some unspecified “bad” thing.* But, you know, Jesus loves her anyway.

Which is the other part of this–telling people that they need God because on their own, they are worthless. There’s a persistent, stubborn belief that Christians are good because we have the Holy Spirit and non-Christians are bad because they don’t. If a Christian screws up, then it’s because “we’re all still sinners.” If a non-Christian screws up, it’s because they didn’t have godly morality. If a Christian does good things, it’s because of Jesus. If a non-Christian does good things, it’s only out of selfishness or accident. Being convinced of the “truth” of these things is the only way some churches can get people to share their faith. It’s as though they’re saying our religion (yes, it is a religion) isn’t good enough on its own–we need to convince people of their need for it first, either by devaluing them or frightening them.

Which, when you think about it, is absolutely necessary if you believe that the fate of one’s soul rests on a specific set of beliefs.

Is it any wonder that my teenage self was terrified for the eternal souls of my family? I was the lone Christian, both in my immediate and my extended family. Skits–and teaching–like the one above are the reason I told family members that being gay was on par with being a rapist, in hopes that it would scare them into getting saved.

I was sixteen when my Jewish grandfather passed away. The Sunday following his death, I sat through a salvation message in Sunday school, watching a video on the eternal fate of the unsaved. By the end I was crying because of my failure to present the gospel to this man I barely knew and had been forbidden to tell I was a Christian. One of the adults made some noncommittal noises about Jews being “God’s chosen people.” It didn’t help. What if one of my neither-Jewish-nor-Christian family members died without knowing Jesus? Looking back, I truly think these people did not know what to say to me, because what I was going through was completely alien to them, far outside the reaches of their insight.

This is the screwed up kind of evangelism I’m talking about. Not the average, share-your-faith-because-Jesus-rocks kind of evangelism. I mean the sort that tells children they are “deeply broken” and frightens people into telling others about God. The kind that genuinely believes more than two-thirds of the world’s population–billions of people–are destined to fry eternally for the crime of unbelief.

I can’t get behind that. If that’s your bag, please find someone else’s eternal soul to fret over. If my failure to pressure people into belief in Jesus results in their damnation, then I don’t think I want to spend forever with that kind of God anyway.

______________________________

*Probably sex, but these were little kids, after all. We can scare ’em about hell, but forget sex.

No-vangelism 101

Evangelism, Faith and Spirituality

By Brian Sawyer from Westford, MA, USA (Wanted: Americans in Heaven) [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

I’m not entirely sure what brought this to mind. I do tend to have random progressions of thought, so that’s probably all it was. I mean, I’m the person who can hear my husband say, “You look really sexy” and respond with, “That reminds me–I should put bagels on the shopping list.” Only I know how those are related. And no, I’m not telling you. I guess this might be part of the process of reconstructing my faith after nearly losing it entirely. Not that it would have been terrible if I’d decided I no longer believed, but that wasn’t the right thing for me. I’m finally in a good place where I’m ready to begin rebuilding.

Anyway, I was thinking about evangelism. We currently attend a Lutheran church–ELCA–, and, not having grown up Lutheran (or having any prior experience), I’ve been learning some very interesting things. One of my discoveries is that “evangelism” means something really different to Lutherans than to people in denominations labeled “evangelical” (such as Baptists). The separation on this point is as wide between Lutherans and Baptists as it is between Baptists and, say, Mormons.

The main difference is that there’s no pressure to “share my faith.” That is, I’m not expected to go tell everyone how to be saved, nor am I pressured to constantly invite people to things so they can hear the message of salvation from someone else. In fact, that doesn’t even exist, and Lutherans (at least, the ones at my church) kind of think it’s weird. One woman shared with me that she attended an evangelical non-denominational church with a friend. She said someone at the church approached her and said, “Have you found Jesus?” The woman was momentarily thrown off, but she recovered and replied, “I don’t think I ever lost him.”

I have to admit, I like this approach. I really don’t mind talking about Jesus, but I hate the sense that every single one of my interactions with my friends of other (or no) religions must have some kind of Formula for Sharing the Gospel. Maybe it’s that whole random progression of thought thing, but it always just felt so forced, like I had to find some way to work God into the conversation even if we were just talking about spaghetti sauce recipes or breastfeeding or Doctor Who. I was never good at steering conversations that way.

Plus, it just felt manipulative. Those people who come door-to-door are so much more honest. They’re not trying to be your friend, they’re trying to get you to listen to them talk about their religion. You have the option to say no thank you because you’re not blindsided by it. You also have the choice to engage and either listen or argue with them. There’s no real manipulation there. Sure, they may try to hook you by asking you questions designed to elicit certain responses. But everyone knows that going in.

It’s not like that with the evangelical set. I’m not lying when I tell you that they teach classes on this stuff. You’re instructed to find ways to work it into your conversation, to “share your story,” and to find commonalities with your target. Yes, I said target because that’s what it always felt like. You’re supposed to consider who in your life “needs Jesus” and then try to “build relationship” with the express purpose of presenting the gospel message.

Of course, this all makes perfect sense if your belief going in is that anyone who hasn’t “found Jesus” is going to hell to suffer eternal conscious torment. I mean, who wants their loved ones to end up that way? Or their random acquaintances? Even Mark Driscoll doesn’t deserve that kind of punishment. Honestly, I think that must be a very scary way to live, constantly afraid that when they die the vast majority of humanity will be permanently separated from God and tortured.

Imagine my relief at not having to worry about that anymore. This particular version of hell and the requirement to believe in order to be spared were one of the first things to go when I stepped away from that strain of Christianity. I had never really looked at my friends and family as some kind of mission field anyway, but it was good to give myself permission not to feel guilty about that.

At this point, I don’t really have a clue exactly what happens after this life, and I don’t much care. Being spared some awful fate isn’t the focus of either my church or my faith. For now, it’s enough to concentrate on whether my beliefs are making me a better person. Because if they’re not, then either there’s something wrong with those beliefs, or I’m doing something wrong.

If you’re in process of deconstructing, what are some of the beliefs you want to let go of? What are some of the things that you hold on to?

Why Do Young People Leave the Church? That’s the Wrong Question

Faith and Spirituality, Outreach, Religion

There’s a lot of buzz in evangelical churches about young adults. It’s everywhere, from church ministries to surveys, books to blog posts. Speculation abounds as to why youth are graduating high school and leaving church (local) behind and what it means for the future of the Church (worldwide). In fact, there is even some disagreement about what it means for the individual young adults in question—are they leaving their Christian faith behind, or just the institutional church? Does this include youth from all of Christianity, or just the evangelical set?

I think that the panic over the loss of young people is twofold. First, well-intentioned Christians are worried that young people leaving the church means losing their faith, or possibly that they never actually had any to begin with (for those who believe one can’t lose one’s salvation). For people who see unbelief as a one-way ticket to Hell, then it’s understandable that folks would be afraid for kids who leave the church. Worry over eternal souls is a powerful motivator.

Second, and probably for most people more at a subconscious level (I hope), is the fear that our churches eventually won’t have anyone left. If all the young adults leave, who will carry on the ministries when older people retire or die? Who will be left to fill the seats? Sadly, this is probably what drives some churches’ “outreach” as well. It’s hard to argue with the idea that if we don’t get new people inside the building, the church will go the way of so many others and eventually close its doors forever.

Everyone has an opinion on what it would take to keep our young people. We develop ministries, try to cater to young people, imitate celebrity pastors in an attempt to appear “relevant” to the younger generation. Are these things making a difference? It’s hard to tell at this point.

If you ask me, we need to throw it all out and start from scratch.

I notice a couple of things right away. For one, we’re all a little pessimistic about the whole thing. (This coming from me, the Queen of Pessimism.) It sounds dramatic when we give statistics on the number of churches that go under. But we’re not factoring in the number of megachurches that are continuing to experience growth, or the new churches that are springing up. We’re not taking into account the reasons why churches close up shop. Is it because all the members got old and died and all the young people left, or is it a failed church plant, or is it a church that engaged in foolish activity? Those figures are often thrown about by a particular type of evangelical, the sort who believe they “know” which churches are “Bible believing” or “teach salvation.” That alone can make it confusing. Let’s take a step back and dig deeper instead of merely citing scary statistics.

For another thing, in our zeal to stop the bleed of young people, we’ve forgotten about the ones who didn’t leave. Has anyone asked them why they stay? Yesterday, my husband and I had the privilege of watching a friend be ordained as a Presbyterian minister. We’ve known him since he was about twelve. I have no words for how blessed I was that his first time serving communion as a Minister of the Word was to our children. As far as I know, no one there was concerned with asking him why he stayed in the church. Another friend of ours, whom we’ve known since he was younger than our children are now, is a missionary. When we pledged to support him, we didn’t say, “So, how come you decided to keep on going to church when you graduated high school?” These two young people are hardly oddities. We know many young adults who are faithful Christians, actively engaged in the life of both their churches and the world around them. They are missionaries, ministry leaders, musicians, pastors, and more. They stayed, and they deserve more from us than stalking them to make sure they don’t change their minds.

Finally, we talk a lot about what we can do to coax young adults back into the church, what ministries or programs might work. But one thing we don’t do is a whole lot of listening. Or maybe we just don’t like what we hear when we ask young people why they leave. We are happy to latch onto it when they say they don’t feel the sermons are relevant to their lives, or when they complain there’s no way for them to connect with each other, or that they don’t know how and where to serve. But we don’t hear them when they say they see hypocrisy or they don’t like the way LGBT people are treated or they are frustrated by having to choose between science and the Bible as though they’re mutually exclusive. We ignore them when they say that we’re too wrapped up in what happens inside the walls of our building. We respond with, “Maybe we need to say it better, so they understand.” We remind ourselves that we’re teaching “truth,” and that some people won’t like it. We carry on fixating on intra-church ministry. But we don’t examine ourselves, or ask young people why they have reached those conclusions.

Let’s stop looking at people as target populations. Treating people like that doesn’t work in education or health, and it doesn’t work in church. Jesus isn’t a brand to be marketed and sold, with research on what kind of advertising will attract the right demographic. Maybe that’s exactly what our young people are seeing through when they say they don’t find church genuine enough. Are we ready to stop looking for answers and start looking at people?

Relationships: Friends with Strings Attached

Evangelism, Relationships

Almost two years ago, my husband and I attended a Bible study. It was a video series on reaching out to bring Christ to the people around you called “Just Walk Across the Room” with Bill Hybels. Overall, it was a great series. In one of the last sessions, Hybels talks about reconnecting with an old friend. This friend had left the faith of his childhood behind. He mentions having told this friend that he would be there for him, continue to be his friend, regardless of whether this person ever made a commitment to follow Christ.

After watching, several of the members of our group seemed confused and a little uncomfortable. More than one wondered how a Christian could be close friends with a non-Christian, especially without continuing to “witness” to this friend (i.e., talk about Jesus). There were murmurings about being “unequally yoked,” as in marriage. Some people expressed concern that just being friends without actively evangelizing might be a failure on our part to do God’s will.

I don’t know about you, but I prefer that my friendships not have strings attached. If I want to have a relationship with you, it absolutely must go deeper than trying to convert you to my religion. All of my friends who are of other faiths know exactly where I stand, that I am a Christian. But they also know that I am not going to spend as much time as possible “sharing the good news” with them. They also know (I hope) that I am not friends with them for the express purpose of finding new disciples. I choose my friends because I like them and we have common interests. They also know (I hope) that should they tell me flat-out that there is nothing that would ever make them want to become followers of Christ, I would still want to be friends.

When I was a new Christian, I thought that’s what evangelism was—continuing to remind people that Jesus died for their sins, in those exact words. It was my job to persuade people that they were essentially bad and that they were facing the wrath of what one friend aptly termed “Big Angry Sky Daddy.” If I could convince them of those two facts, then I could move in for the “kill”: That if they said the magic words, Jesus would save them from Hell. I think I’m oversimplifying it a bit, but not much. This was really the gist of the message I believed I was supposed to spread. I also had the impression that I wasn’t supposed to be friends with anyone unless I was going to make an effort to convert them. I don’t think that part was really what I was being taught, but at least some of the Christians around me seemed to look at the world that way. You can imagine how much my family, being non-Christians, appreciated my efforts.

People can tell when we are being fake with them. No one is fooled by a Christian who strikes up a relationship solely to create converts. It’s far better to develop friendships with people you enjoy, then let God work in both your hearts to develop mutual respect and understanding. We must also learn to live with and respect family members who don’t see things the same way we do. It doesn’t make family life pleasant for anyone when we act as though the love we have for our family members only goes so far. Withholding love, putting conditions on friendships, and using spiritual blackmail doesn’t demonstrate Jesus’ love for all people. Instead, love people, respect people, share your faith, and let the Holy Spirit handle the rest.

God Is Not Your Abusive Lover

A little more on evangelism

No-vangelism 101

Why Do Young People Leave the Church? That’s the Wrong Question

Relationships: Friends with Strings Attached

Let's Be Friends

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