I gave up on the Church to stay in love with God

I was baptized, confirmed, married and commissioned in the United Methodist Church. I love God and I loved the Church…..but not anymore. I love God and the work he does through Christ in others. But I have really grown to dislike the Church.( It stopped being God’s Church a long long long time ago) It’s dying now….and part of me hopes it dies to the Earth. But part of me…..part of me is broken inside because of this.

Like other Denominations and religions the UMC is fighting it out over what role the LGTBQ communities, (communities, they are not a monolith but unique communities with unique needs stop lumping them, and frankly it shouldn’t take someone outside of the community to finally acknowlege this) play in the Church. And that is what is the final stake in the heart but fatal strikes came from many other directions.

The UMC is a global Church and I was held hostage by extreme conservative African Conferences for over 20 years. While the US has moved on to greater inclusion, albeit kicking and screaming, the African Conferences have been trapped in 8 BC for quite a while and Good News, now they are the majority.

Here is what that means, a continent with values that are not in sync with America save for extreme Red America, used to control what I could say, do, and believe in Minnesota. To me that it was crazy.

But there is yet more crazy! Pastors growing up always seemed like parent figures. They were easy to love warts and all because they knew God and helped the community to know God. Oh boy was I naive on that!! As a local pastor in the early 2000’s I learned very quickly that pastors, (and not in general, but specifically) tended not to follow the Book of Discipline. They drank when they weren’t supposed to, smoked when they weren’t supposed to, and basically lived less than holy lives. But were really good at saying the right things to the right members to keep their jobs.

Now there were pastors who were the exception to this rule. People who lead quiet lives and lead their congregations well as good Shepherds. But the vast majority…..are not morally consistent at all. Good and loyal employees with the title of Pastor, some great leaders and preachers. But moral? No. That is a small dedicated minority.

Now the institution of the UMC is just as broken as the pastors. The General Conference and its commissions are great corporate institutions doing good work, if only it was for God and not the corporation. These organizations have become bloated. And while the declining local churches that support them are being shut. The proceeds from Grandmas home church are used to support an ever bloated corporate structure.

So we have broken Local Churches, Regional Conservative Interest Groups, and a Bloated Institutional Church. It was all too much for me. It was time for a divorce. I needed to stop caring and start healing. I needed to find God.

So I stopped. I stopped engaging within the Church and I just looked inward. And I found God again. God oversees an imperfect broken world full of happy, if occasionally evil people. Sometimes we even get together and celebrate that God hasn’t just given up on the mess and blotted us out. But no, I am done with the institutional Church. I truly hope it dies a good and noble death.

I don’t care if its not scriptural, lying isn’t and everyone does it daily. I don’t care if ruins unity. Unity is a dream. Its not that I don’t go to worship. I just don’t care about the committees and special offerings or their foibles. I just need a God that cares I exist. I want to encounter a God that cares that I need healing from illness, that I am frustrated with my spouse and my kids and understands that I am really frustrated with how the world works right now.

I want to care. No….no I don’t. And I have learned to be OK with that. I found God again.