What is Church?
A Testimony from an Episcopal Convert
At it’s core, Church is a place where we can come to be loved and cherished as we are, for who we are, and to gather with others in the presence of God. And not just us, anyone. After reading Margaret Guenther’s book The Practice of Prayer, I was reminded that we experience God not just in Church, but in everyone we meet. Homeless people who ask for money on the street that we might try to ignore, a disabled person that we have to accommodate despite how it might inconvenience us, or the angry baby boomer who has a knack for pointing out all of my generations’ shortcomings. God isn’t this high church thing separate from us, God is us. Messy and complicated, because wherever we experience people, we experience God.
I grew up in the Pentecostal Church. That was my community and shaped how I understood what church meant. A part of me had always hoped that when I came out, they would still love and accept me. Unfortunately, but not unsurprisingly, knowing I was gay, I was asked to leave my church home.
I was angry with God for allowing this to happen. I resented the Church who told me to leave. I swore from then I wouldn’t go back and sought to find a new community somewhere, anywhere else.
Fast forward to roughly a year ago. I was seeing a someone whose roommate was in seminary school. Many nights we would talk about Church and God and my faith growing up. He never judged and always invited me to come and share his experience. He was an Episcopalian. With each invitation, I would respectfully decline. He hadn’t experienced what I had. He didn’t know what I went through. As far as I was concerned, God didn’t want me and, quite frankly, at that point I didn’t want anything to do with God either.
But I finally caved. It was a Tuesday night and a group of us were sitting over at a local restaurant, enjoying some wine when my seminary friend left to go to Tenebrae, which is a service in the Episcopal Holy Week. As he was going, he asked if I wanted to join him. Perhaps it was the two glasses of wine that had clouded my resolve, but I accepted and went.
I ended up going to every single Holy Week service. I ran the whole marathon, so to speak, and I was hooked. More importantly, I felt something like a grip that had been wrapped around my heart slowly give way.
It wasn’t until then I realized that I had been holding in all of this resentment and hate for a God.
What I found was that God never really left me, but simply was waiting for me to come home. This new church was full of people who wanted to know me and didn’t care that I was gay. This church was not a church who would reject me and tell me to leave. Instead they were a church that said I had a place there, come and break bread with us. A place where I could come and be loved and cherished as I am, for who I am, to gather in the presence of God.
The world is full of people like me that night when I first walked in there, holding onto that resentment, that hatred. Maybe it’s not toward God directly, but towards a group or a religion as a whole, and it is slowly eating away at them.
Not too long ago, I was listening to NPR when someone called in and made a comment about the current state of hate in this country. His statement was brief but it moved me when I heard it.
“Whoever you are, wherever you are, those of you who spew hate and hold evil in your hearts, I will find you, I will hunt you down, and I will love you. I will love you just as you are, whoever you are. I will love you.” — NPR, December 2018
Hearing that, I realized what the Church, the true meaning of Church is all about. It was, is, and must be a place where people can come from any walk of life and find what they have been searching for, even if they didn’t intend to. A place where anyone can break bread with one another, regardless of where their politics or ideology align. A place where in this culture of violence and hate, one can and must find acceptance and love.
A place where a lost and wandering twenty-five year old man, angry and hating God and the Church, could come home to a God who never left him and a church who was waiting for him to arrive.