We belonged to a church. We were active members for years. People in this church taught and loved our daughters. It was a good church. Maybe it wasn’t our ideal church, but it was a good place to call our spiritual home. Until it wasn’t.
As I write this, it’s June—Pride Month—and also the month of the annual Southern Baptist Convention conference. This year the SBC doubled down on how women are unsuited to the task of ministry. I’m not going to delve into that too much right now. I will say that the church I’m talking about here is Baptist, but moderate, not Southern, Baptist. It’s a church in a subset of Baptists that affirms the gifts and ordination of women.
Why bring up Pride? Hang with me, and you’ll see.
In the fourteen years we worshiped at this church, we witnessed much and one of the pastors harmed me a number of times. The first was when he told me not to rely on the Holy Spirit when I was teaching Sunday school. This from the guy whose idea of “sermon preparation” involved going into a prayer room before the early service and praying for inspiration from… yep, you guessed it. The Holy Spirit.
Even before this, though, there was an incident at our church. A woman had been coming with her elderly mom for worship. The woman was registered as a secondary child sex offender. He boasted about how he’d told her she had to leave the church and never come back. While others were praising him for “saving our children,” I was appalled at the complete lack of grace. There was no talk about helping her find another church, just pride in his complete legalism.
What sealed the deal and sent us to worshiping at another church for almost two years was when he violated a pastoral confidence in front of about twenty people to make me look bad and himself better. But we still liked the church and went back after he left to be a part of the next chapter in the life of our church.
In the years following, our church grew spiritually. Those who had worshiped that pastor left when he did. The interim led us in new directions, and the next pastor led us to the beginning of a radical, Jesus-following new path. He eventually responded to a call at a new church that suits him perfectly, but had he stayed, I am confident that church would’ve known new, deeper ways of loving God and others. An interim came in behind him. He is a man whose great compassion far exceeds his preaching acumen. More people left.
During the twenty months he was there, numbers dwindled and the pastor search committee (PSC) did their thing. They diligently, thoroughly, faithfully searched for our next pastor. The candidates included women, and the chair of that committee told me it was tight, that there was a female candidate they were strongly favoring. But a man emerged, and every single one of the members of the PSC felt he was the person God was calling to be our next pastor. The chair of the committee told me, “Sara, you’ll love him!”
Reader, I did not, in fact, love him. I respected his position. I liked him well enough. But it wasn’t long before the pink flags of ego started emerging. Then it got worse. He hadn’t been there a month when he spoke about seeing “people whose lifestyle is abominable” while he was enjoying some recreation. I knew deep in my spirit what and who he was talking about, though I hoped like hell he was talking about white supremacists, because those are the only people around here living “abominable” lifestyles. My mind started pondering other churches in the area that would feel like a good fit for our family.
It was probably a couple of weeks later when he was sharing from the pulpit all the people who the Kingdom of God is for: men and women; people who are white, black, brown, and any other color; Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Catholics (understanding that naming all the Christian denominations would’ve taken forever). I waited for him to say, “People who are straight and those who are gay.” It never came. And in that instant, an image flashed in my mind. It was a cartoon by David Hayward (@nakedpastor). In it, there are some white sheep standing on their hind legs throwing stones at a rainbow sheep. Jesus is in between, taking the brunt of the stone throwing. Only, in this mental flash, I was where Jesus was, my older daughter was the rainbow sheep, and this pastor was the one throwing the stones from the pulpit. Even though our daughter wasn’t going to this church at that point, I could not sit there in a place that would spiritually abuse her and those like her.
It didn’t matter that a whole bunch of people at that church loved on her as a church kid growing up and would still love her today, I couldn’t be there a moment longer.
The PSC believed that God wanted this particular pastor to shepherd that church. The guy lasted about eighteen months; his ego went from pink flag to flaming red flag and led to his parting. Many more people had left the church in that time until now when there are many empty pews, and the church is having to make adjustments to how they worship based on the pragmatics of being good stewards of their resources in light of the drop in attendance and offering.
It’s hard to see how God could want something that could lead to struggle. Perhaps God wanted the PSC to call this guy because She wanted new things for the people who left. We were part of those people. As thoughts of, “Where can we go now?” buzzed in my head, God gave me the name of an Episcopal church I’d been to once, and that was to walk its labyrinth. She and I had some discussions. I did a bit of online research. I talked it over with my husband and younger daughter. They were skeptical but trusted me to lead them. This is truly where God wanted us to be. And it’s a place where our older would be warmly welcomed, affirmed, and loved. It’s a place where we know people and they know us. It’s a place where we are comfortable serving and one where I can feel free to be completely myself without some man telling me I’m too much, too talkative, too educated. (Yes, it’s happened.) As I think of it, if this church welcomes those who are outside of the upper middle-class white cishet norm, then it welcomes me with my big thoughts, my big mouth, and my big heart.
