Dare Not to Belong
I felt it for the first time while sitting in my local Methodist church last fall, warm sun resting on my back through the huge plate-glass windows that looked out onto a downtown street. The molded aluminum chairs were filled with people who looked just like me — white, affluent, educated, progressive. I belonged as much as anybody.
And all I could think was how much I missed broken people.
I missed the way I heard God when I was caring for foster kids. I missed how the struggle of a homeless mother reminded me of my own vulnerability and aching need. I missed the random strangers and friends who didn’t pretend to know all the answers to life and could hold space for the uncertainty.
Sitting there, I thought about the non-religious and other-religious people outside those giant picture windows. I didn’t want to evangelize them and make them like me. I wanted to be out there, with them. But I still loved the people beside me too.
I grew up believing I had to choose a religion. I had to pick a team. Instead, I wanted to take a giant red pen and check the “D: All of the above” box. I’d spent decades wondering why I didn’t feel like I fit in on either side — at church or in a secular setting. That Sunday, I finally asked myself a better question:
What if I belonged everywhere? What if ‘me’ was just a part of the bigger, collective ‘we’ ? Wasn’t that enough? Wasn’t that everything?
Church should be a place to celebrate and wrestle with our collective humanity. But it seems that no matter how accepting any religious community is, and many are, there’s always someone who doesn’t get to be there.
That separteness was illustrated by the February decision by the Methodist church not to affirm LGBTQ clergy and marriages. The decision deeply saddens me, though I have less skin in the game than many. I’m straight and don’t even really consider myself a Methodist. Though I belong to a Methodist church, I haven’t attended in months.
Still, the General Conference’s decision feels personal. In 2016, we left behind a congregation that, while loving towards us, denigrated homosexuals and avidly supported Donald Trump. The shift for me was gradual, but taking leave of that community was sudden and irreversible. One moment I was an insider, and then I wasn’t.
My family found refuge in a Methodist church. The community there gave me hope that Christianity was about more than conservative American politics. I hoped that church could still demonstrate how wide open God’s arms are. Wide enough for gays. Wide enough for my mistakes and my goodness. Wide enough for all of it. The General Conference saw things differently though.
Friends have been understandably devastated by the General Conference’s decision. I feel as if I’m watching from the sidelines now as they struggle to answer, “Now what?” Many of us are losing faith in the institutions of religion to demonstrate moral authority or rise above the narrative of separating the sheep from the goats. Others are fighting to change things from the pews.
I don’t know which approach is better, only that I’m not married to one or the other. I’m not saying people shouldn’t go to church, and I’m also not saying I’ll never go back to church. I still think belonging to a small collective ‘we’ can be healthy and nurturing, so long as it remains connected with the inherent worth and dignity of all of God’s children.
But church is not the only place to do that, and belonging to a church is not the marker of spiritual-health I once believed it to be. In fact, ‘fitting in’ with the religious crowd is probably missing the point. If we’re trying to follow Jesus’ lead, we should stop asking, “Do I belong?” and wonder, “Who doesn’t belong, and where do I find them?”
Christa Hogan is a creative fiction and non-fiction writer and veteran freelancer. She also teaches mindfulness meditation. You can find her on Twitter @christachogan and on the newly launched Creative Mercies community Facebook page, where she teaches creatives how to build more productive, sustainable and resilient creative lives.
