Belief Part 7
Welcome to Part 7 of my post series where I am sharing about my experiences with belief and faith starting when I was young and ending with where I am today.
If you missed Part 1, you can read it here, click here for Part 2, here for Part 3, and here for part 4, and here for part 5, here for part 6.
CW: If you have church, faith, or any kind of relationship trauma or abuse, please approach with caution, take breaks, or don’t read my posts at all. I am also talking about abortion in this post.
Sometimes reading other people’s stories can help us heal and feel not-so-alone in our experiences, and other times we need to take a break from all the things that open us back up and bring the feeling back to the surface. Check in with yourself as you read. <3
I have mentioned a time or two that K and I were together off and on for almost a decade. The pattern usually went like this: he cheats, I find out, he tries to get me to stay, I break up with him, he waits for me to cool down and then shows back up and pulls out all the stops in convincing me to take him back, I take him back. Rinse and repeat.
You may be noticing a similar pattern happening here in my belief series and wondering why, if I had learned so much from my prior experiences with K, did I keep going from church to church thinking the next one was going to get any better?
It’s the same question I got when I kept going back to K after he was so clearly abusing and mistreating me.
I know this might be hard to understand if you’ve never been a church person, but the idea that you can’t do the Christian life outside of a church community is drilled into your head from day one.
It is basically a requirement.
As soon as you become a Christian you are told that if you try to live a life of God outside of being a part of a church community you will ultimately “backslide” (ie, go back to your godless ways), end up growing apart from God, start “sinning”, start hanging out with non-believers, leave the protection of “God’s will”, and eventually end up leaving God altogether.
When I would start talking about my issues with the church and wanting to leave, I would always hear some rendition of this: “The people in the pews are imperfect. Don’t leave the church just because a few imperfect people messed up or offended you. No church is perfect. You can’t be in God’s will outside of the church because the church is the Body and Bride of Christ. We can’t work without every part. To disconnect from the Vine will cause you to shrivel.”
The message was clear: You can’t be a good, effective, or REAL, Christian if you aren’t a part of a church community (more specifically: an evangelical church community).
K told me I would never make it without him and the church told me the same.
And for a damn long while I believed them both.
In truth, the main reason I kept trying, on both counts, despite my horrible experiences was because I had gotten deep into a system designed to keep me there.
Unhealthy church culture is an abusive system that takes advantage of our natural and healthy desires for connection, acceptance into a group, love, and protection. Kinda like how the tech companies have figured out how to keep us scrolling even when we know spending so much time on screens is unhealthy.
We want to be where the people are.
It’s especially enchanting when you add God into the mix. People have been using the name of God for their own benefit since the beginning of time and they’ve been blaming the “devil” for their misdeeds just as long.
When you can use the fear of rejection, especially an eternal, fiery rejection, you can get people to do just about anything.
The first 6 months after moving to Charlotte, were really challenging for our family. My parents were about 5 hours away instead of 18, but still, we only knew a few people in the area. I was working remotely and taking care of Izzy while T spent all day looking for a new job.
T eventually found a good job working back in IT, but the months of full-time job searching had taken it’s toll; on our psyche’s and our finances.
But in some ways, even more challenging than T not having a job all those months was the fact that before we could even attend one service at the church we had moved there to attend, we found out the pastor went on sabbatical.
We decided to attend the church anyway and were pleased to find that the culture of this church and the diversity of the congregation was what we had both been hoping to find.
When the pastor eventually stepped down and a new pastor took his place we were happy to find he was an amazing pastor as well.
Unfortunately, after a few months the new pastor also decided to take a sabbatical and then return only to permanently leave.
We both felt we had finally found the kind of church community we had been looking for and now everything felt so unstable.
As much as we loved this church and the people in it, we decided to leave as well.
Neither of us could take any more church transitions and disappointments at that point. We weren’t upset when we left.
We were just very tired.
For the first time in a long time, neither of us wanted to go to church or try to find a new one.
And so we didn’t. And it was awesome.
By this time I had left my ministry job and was a full time stay-at-home mom and T was working full time with a long commute.
After months of T being unhappy with his commute we decided to move closer to T’s job and decided it was time to start trying for another bambino.
Something about working on expanding our family brought up the urge in both of us to try again with finding another church. Remember, we had both been told and had believed that you can’t be a good Christian outside of a church community.
After some half-hearted searching, we ended up finding a church not far from us to try out. At that time the church was located beside AssClown Brewery in a little business strip not too far off the main road through Cornelius. Hey, if it didn’t work out, we could always go have a beer and drown our sorrows next door.
But our first visit went better than expected.
Izzy enjoyed the nursery, the sermon was good, and it was a small church community with lots of young families.
We decided to give it a shot and ended up being welcomed in by everyone and quickly made friends with a lot of the other young families there. I joined their moms group where they met weekly and provided !!!FREE CHILDCARE!!! (truly reason enough for me right there)
I had told the ladies in the mom group that we were trying for our second kiddo. They prayed for me. And within a few weeks I would come back in to announce I was pregnant.
And that was that. We had found our new church.
After Noah was born, I developed severe postpartum anxiety and no one knew how bad it had gotten. After a few months of barely sleeping or eating, I was in need of urgent medical help, but I was too exhausted and ashamed to be honest about what I was feeling and ask for help.
One day, the leader of our mom’s group, a veteran mom of 3, came by our house to bring us a meal. I had just laid Izzy down for his nap and was giving Noey his bottle when she arrived. She sat down beside me on the couch, put her hand on my knee and said in her gentle southern accent, “Honey, are you doin’ okay? I’m worried about you.”
And that was all it took. The floodgates opened and I cried a river as she sat with her arm around me.
Once I got myself together I decided to confide in her the truth of how bad I was feeling. She listened and rubbed my back.
After I was done, she gave me a big hug and thanked me for trusting her and telling her all that.
And then she asked me if I had been spending any time “in the Word” lately.
I had told her no. I could barely concentrate.
Then she said, “Well, that’s the problem right there. You need to spend more time in the Word, Honey. There isn’t a problem known to man that we can’t find an answer for in the Bible. You need to be having your devotional time and spending time reading the Bible and then you need to spend time in prayer. God will give you supernatural rest even when you aren’t getting rest in ‘the natural’. You just need to get prayed up and you are going to be just fine. We women were made for this. God designed us to be mommies. God will lead you in what to do and will give you supernatural strength to do what He has called to you do as a mommy to these boys.”
When she started to pray for me and asking God to make a way for me to spend more time with Him and get restored, I just stood there crying.
Even postpartum depression was my fault. I was a bad mom and a bad Christian. I was letting everyone down.
Shame was heaped on me like hot coals.
It was my midwife who told me I had to go to the Emergency Room and get help for my PPD. When I called the lady who had tried to pray my postpartum mental illness away and told her I was heading to the ER to be admitted for treatment for PPD and needed the church to help me find babysitters for my kids while I was in treatment, she was shocked.
But the babysitters were arranged. She even let me stay at her house after I got out of the hospital because I didn’t feel ready to go home to my kids yet.
For the next 6 months I had babysitters (we happily paid them) from our church come several times a week so I could go to counseling and support groups and get the help I needed to get well.
The church ladies knew how to show up with food and babysitters, and for that I am truly and deeply thankful. I needed help and help arrived.
But they didn’t do quite so well with knowing how to support me emotionally and spiritually. Unhealthy church culture teaches that you can be healed from anything if you only believe enough or pray the right way. But it doesn’t teach people how to support and walk alongside someone when the healing doesn’t come.
The church doesn’t know how to grieve because they are taught that in Jesus you don’t need to worry or be afraid or be sad. If someone is hurting, then they just need more Bible, prayer, or to be “given to God” (ie, “not my problem”).
What if church culture taught people how to sit in someone’s pain and suffering with them instead of trying to fix it or pray it away?
I was too exhausted at that time to do much about it. I needed this church even when they were saying and doing things that were harmful.
I didn’t have anyone else to help me recover and I wanted to get well.
(In the next two sections I am talking about abortion.)
Just like always, there was part of me that wanted to fit in, blend in, and be just like everyone else. It’s why it was hard to be honest about my postpartum anxiety. There were other moms with new babies at our church that seemed to be doing just fine. I didn’t want to be the only one again.
This wasn’t just because I wanted to be accepted, although it was very much about that. I also loved the affirmation and approval I got when I did the “right thing” in their eyes. After spending so many years of my life having people worry about me and wonder if I would ever get it together, I loved feeling like I was pleasing the “right” people.
The godly people. The good people.
There are several stories of things I did or participated in when I was a church person that I know now were very harmful, wrong, and hurtful. Things that randomly wake me up at 3am some nights and say “remember that one time…” and I spend the rest of the night tossing and turning knowing I can’t take it back.
One of the most egregious, in my eyes, is the time I joined our church at the abortion clinic in Charlotte.
It wasn’t a “protest” they said. It was a “love march”.
(Yes, I cringe just typing that.)
The plan was to go to the abortion clinic and do a prayer walk where we pray instead of protesting.
According to them, we weren’t going there to condemn anyone or make them feel shame or fear. We were going as a church only to pray and bring the peace and love of God.
The main goal being that if people don’t feel condemned or ashamed or pushed away by the church, they will be more likely to choose to continue their pregnancies.
I was close with the couple who were spearheading this event. I had grown to trust them. So I decided to go to their first event to see what it was all about.
And before I knew it, I found myself walking at the front of the “love march” line leading people in prayer. Our not-a-protest march went in a loop around the clinic. When we got to the entrance, there were lots of protestors with signs, an ultrasound van out front offering free ultrasounds to women (but these vans are run by anti-choice religious groups who bombard the women with falsehoods and fear-based information about abortion in order to scare them out of moving forward), and several volunteers standing in the parking lot with large umbrellas that they used to cover the people walking into the clinic to protect their privacy and attempt to shield them from the hateful words being shouted at them from protesters.
When I saw the umbrellas, I suddenly snapped out of it.
I realized I was on the wrong side of the sidewalk.
My body flushed with shame as I faced the truth. I had gotten myself all entangled in this trying to be a part of things and please people at church all while knowing deep down this wasn’t me or what I believed.
In that moment a memory flashed into my mind. Many years ago when I was in high school and dating K, he called me and asked me to come pick him up from a party. I hopped in my little red Subaru and drove to the location he had told me and did as he instructed. I was to pull up to the end of a road, open my trunk, leave the car running, and turn off my headlights. After a few minutes I saw him moving awkwardly through the dark and then felt my car bounce around as something heavy was dropped into the trunk.
K hopped into my car and said, “go go go”. I tried to ask what was going on but he just kept yelling at me to drive. In the dark. With my headlights off.
After a few minutes I was able to turn my headlights on and drive onto the main road. I kept asking him what was going on but he wouldn’t tell me. I could tell he was drunk, as usual, so I didn’t push too hard and get him upset at me.
I drove to his house and he told me to back my car into his driveway where he opened the door of his jeep, opened my trunk, and took whatever was in my trunk and put into in his vehicle.
“Look, you need to tell me what is going on.”
He finally told me that he had seen a really nice set of golf clubs at that party and decided to steal them so he could sell them for money. He knew he couldn’t use them himself because someone might know where they had come from. But he knew he would make money off of them once he got back to Huntington and took them to the pawn shop.
While I didn’t knowingly help him do it, I also knew something was wrong from the jump. I knew in my gut I shouldn’t be doing what he was asking me to do, but I did it anyway.
When word got out about the stolen golf clubs, I never said anything. I never turned him in or told him to do the right thing and return them. He sold them and as far as I know, no one ever found out it was him.
And that is what praying at the abortion clinic felt like to me. Like I had gotten myself into something I knew I didn’t agree with or think was right all because I wanted to please people and have them approve of me.
Right as I am having this realization, I am handed a microphone.
“Say something, Katie. Lead us in prayer.”
I had a split second to decide what to do. To hand the microphone back and walk away. To keep the microphone, but use it to tell them I couldn’t keep going because I didn’t feel like what we were doing was right.
Instead, I stood there and prayed. Just like they asked me to.
A few weeks later that same couple invited T and I out to dinner with them Uptown. The meal started great, but eventually the real reason we had been invited came out. They were looking to make their “love marches” into a non-profit and needed someone to help them get organized. They loved how I had prayed and lead during the love march, had heard I was looking to go back to work, and knew I had worked at a non-profit ministry for years. They asked me if I would join them and help them grow their dream.
I didn’t know what to say. They were our friends. We all went to church together. We were in the middle of a lovely dinner.
I told them I would think about it.
Thankfully, I ended up declining the offer and never went to another love march again. I was so upset with myself for what I had participated in. I decided the only way to make it right was to donate to the clinic, donate to the pro-choice organizations in the area, and then be honest with the couple about how I really feel about a woman’s right to choose.
Our friendship ended quickly after that.
When the Trump/Clinton campaigns first started, I thought Trump’s bid was a clear joke. An attempt to remain relevant after becoming a B-list-at-best reality TV host.
But I was wrong.
As the clips of him talking about grabbing pussies and saying racist things about Mexican people started coming to light I thought for sure the first people to condemn him would be the Christians.
Right?
Especially the Christians at our church.
Right?
When racial tensions started to heat up in Charlotte following the 2016 riots in response to the shooting of Keith Lamont Scott, I thought for sure our pastor would speak up and condemn the racist, dangerous rhetoric coming from Trump and those who supported him.
But there was nothing.
Week after week would pass and more and more of the people we loved and thought we knew would reveal their support for Trump.
The more racist, sexist, homophobic/transphobic, and violent Trump’s rhetoric became, the more people in our church, and so many to the other churches we’d been a part of prior, seemed to run to support him.
At first it was massively confusing. As if there was some kind of mass delusion happening that T and I had somehow escaped. It wasn’t until much later, and Trump was our president, that I would see how Trump’s beliefs had been a part of our church and even worse, the entire damn country, this entire time and I had been too blind to see it.
As one of the few mixed-race families in our church, and with T being one of the few brown people there as well, we were very much effected by our church leaders not taking a loving, yet firm stance against Christians accepting and perpetuating these kinds of fear-based, harmful beliefs.
So T and I decided to meet with the pastor and his wife, whom we had both gotten very close with, and talk with them about it all.
We all met up for dinner and chatted about life for awhile, laughing and joking like we usually did. And then T told them why we had come to meet with them. He shared how we were feeling about the Christian communities support of Trump and how we had felt disappointed that they hadn’t said anything from the pulpit to condemn or stand strongly against the rhetoric coming from Trump and his supporters.
The atmosphere changed immediately. Even in their body language I could tell they had shifted to a position of defense.
“We don’t believe in getting political from the pulpit. We believe in focusing on Jesus. When we focus on Jesus it takes care of all the political stuff. Jesus is bigger than politics or any labels. His kingdom is above ours. We want to focus on the Kingdom of Jesus. Plus, politics is divisive. We don’t want to take sides.”
We tried to calmly talk with them about how these beliefs were unhelpful at best, and very literally dangerous at worst. We tried to tell them that everything is political. We tried to tell them how we were being hurt by their silence. We tried to show the ways these beliefs stood in opposition to the message of Christ.
We asked them to please take sides when it comes to racism and equality.
But no matter what we said, they continued to tell us we were the ones who had it wrong and needed to check our own hearts about why we would rather be divisive and get political instead of be unifiers and Kingdom-minded.
If calling for Christians to act more like Christ is divisive then, divisive I shall be.
We tried to keep going to church in order to “be the change we wanted to see in the world”, but we couldn’t.
The walls were up. No one could hear us.
We decided together we were going to leave. But first, we wanted to meet with the leaders of the church and with our friends and tell them why we were leaving.
I’m sure this isn’t a surprise at this point, but it didn’t go well. Only a few people were understanding and kind towards us and our decision to leave. Most of them were offended and defensive. A few people, people I am still in contact with to this day, felt similar to what we were feeling and supported us in leaving.
When we left, there were people we considered our best friends that we never heard from again.
One week we were at someone’s house having dinner with them. The next week, we were forgotten.
We left that church in 2016 and haven’t gone to another church since.
Years later I would see the pastors wife of that church share an article on Facebook that condemned “ghosting” people after they leave your church.
I couldn’t believe it.
So I wrote her privately and told her I found it very hurtful and surprising that she had shared that article after how T and I had been treated when leaving their church. How we were very literally ghosted by all but a spare few, including her and her husband the pastor, when we left.
She wrote me back and basically said: You left us. We didn’t ghost you. You ghosted us when you decided to leave.
I am going to share more about my life of faith since leaving church in 2016, but before I do that I have an important story to share that was happening in the background of some of these stories. In my next post I am going to circle back and tell a story related to my time working at the nonprofit ministry that I have never shared publicly. I wanted to save the best (worst) for last.
This is a story you don’t want to miss.