the forest and the park

my re-entry into traditional church

I’m sitting across from a woman I met in a facebook group.

“You're a Christian author, so cool!”, she had commented. “I'm in the ministry! If you every want to get coffee, hit me up!”

We’re in my favorite coffee shop, just down the street from my house. It took me 10 minutes to get here, though, because of the ice on the roads. We hugged when I walked in, even though we’re total strangers. I love women. We can be so soft and open. Her coffee cup is almost empty and mine is brimming over. Too hot to drink yet. I unconsciously shift my feet to face the door. Maybe I need to be sure I can make a quick exit if I need to. Maybe I’m just nervous.
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Church as not been a safe place for me. Not just in the years since we left career ministry and the traditional church altogether, but since as long as I can remember. I’ve always felt like I didn’t belong. I was too fidgety. Too loud. Too opinionated. Too contrarian. I asked too many questions. I was “irreverent.” My edges too rough, my attitude too strong, my clothes too masculine, my boldness too unsubmissive. I have been pushed out, cast out, laughed at, rebuked, and chastised in evangelical spaces since the moment I set foot on this earth. I beat my back to a bloody pulp trying to make myself like everyone else. My journals are filled with prayers of a little girl, then a teenager, then a young adult, a young wife, a young mom, begging God to change her. Begging him to make people accept her. Begging him to help to find her place. I didn’t blame anyone else. I blamed myself. Why couldn’t I just fall in line?

Growing up in a pastor’s home and in a large ministerial family meant that church -as in the traditional, organizational expression of it - wasn’t just in my DNA, it was the whole thing. My childhood was church. My world was church. The only career options I knew of were teacher or pastor. When we went on vacation, we went to church. We even lived in a few of them.¹

Church was all I knew, all I was, and all I wanted. There were no other options. For me, to go to church was to be a Christian. To me, the most superior Christians were pastors and missionaries. We called people who weren’t in ministry “laypeople.” We led them. We ministered to them. I had no context for following Jesus without also being in full time ministry. I had never seen that modeled by any of the adults in my life. Church was everything to me and it was all I knew.

Imagine my horror when I started to feel like God was calling me away from it.

Zach and I were still in full time ministry and one day, we both confessed to each other what we had been wrestling with. Without ever having a conversation about it, without ever having read a book or listened to a podcast or seen it modeled, we both felt like God was calling us out of traditional church ministry. At the time, we didn’t have language for any of it. In secret, I had been wrestling with the idea that I was falling away from God because for me following him meant being in church. You couldn’t be a Christian if you weren’t a part of a local church. It was exciting, of course, to hear that Zach was leaning towards all the same thoughts. We sat at our dining room table with a long roll of craft paper and started mind-mapping to try to make sense of what we were thinking and feeling. (I still have this paper somewhere!) We didn’t know what it meant or what the timeline was or what it would look like, but we felt the earth starting to shift underneath us. It was exciting and terrifying and we had no idea how hard it was going to be.

Six months later was when that whole horrifyingly painful church thing happened. I wrote about it in Even if He Doesn’t, so I won’t rehash it here, but it wasn’t connected to that. We left that church bleeding out, traumatized, and spiritually exhausted from the abuse we’d endured. I was thrashing in my anger. And still - I wouldn’t let us miss a Sunday. I thought my kids needed routine and discipleship. So we hid in mega churches. Andy Stanley’s church in Atlanta. Hillsong in NYC. We melted into our seats and kept up with our habit, afraid that if we stopped we’d never go back. When we moved back home, we joined a church and were members for a little over a year. I had panic attacks in bathrooms. I walked into church with narrowed eyes, criticizing everything and hating every moment I was there. It had nothing to do with the church or the people, I was just healing and healing is messy. Being in places that looked and smelled and felt like the place where I was harmed did nothing to help me in that process. If anything, it made the process harder and longer and messier.

But Zach and I remembered what God had spoken to us years ago. We finally felt safe enough to actually do it. To skip a Sunday. To stop going to church. We weren’t on “mission.”² We weren’t going to start anything or do anything. We didn’t try to spiritualize or rationalize or make it mean something. We just left. We knew that it was the right thing. We knew that it was the good thing.

And we have never, not once, in the 6 years since, regretted that decision.

It was right.

In those years, there were house churches. There were spontaneous gatherings. There were no gatherings. There was living room floor church with just us and our kids. There were late night conversations about faith with people who love Jesus, who don’t know Jesus, or who used to know him. There was communion over coffee and donuts, prayer on Subway trains, casseroles on front steps. There were girls trips where I felt seen and welcome for the first time in my life. There were people who crossed rooms to talk to me. There were conflicts that were resolved and turned into beautiful friendships. There were griefs that I couldn’t speak out loud, held by people who believed different things about Jesus than I did. I pushed people out and they held out their arms anyway. I made a mess of my pain and they grabbed a mop. I asked audacious questions and they made room for my doubt. It was human. It was beautiful. It was torture. It was good.

It was the church.
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Chloe and Lydia’s first church fits.

When I was growing up, we moved around a lot, but one of my favorite childhood memories is of this spot in the woods behind our house in Tennessee. We called it “the moon” because whenever our younger siblings would ask where we were going we’d say with a shrug, “the moon!” Because we didn’t want to actually tell them where we were going, but we were good Christian kids, remember? So we couldn’t lie. The Moon was really just trees, but there was a small clearing where a few vines hung and we figured out that we could swing on them. We swung wildly, without any thought that the vines might break or that we might fall from 10ft in the air. We didn’t care. It was our oasis. We’d climb the trees, read in them, swing on them, play hide and seek around them, and I romanticized them as much as any 12 year old girl would.

All that to say, I prefer the woods.

When we stopped “going” to church, it felt like leaving the trees in the park for the trees in the woods. Wild, untamed, new, safe, a little scary.

Around the time we felt like God was calling us to something different, we had begun to see and understand church in a totally different way. The first thing we ever changed our minds about was our theology around the church. What it was, what it was supposed to be, what it could be. I studied the history of the church to see where things changed. I did in depth word studies on every role and office of the church that’s listed in Scripture. Once I started to see it differently, I couldn’t unsee it.

I stopped seeing the church as an organization, and started seeing it as an organism. And when you see the church as an organism, you see the church everywhere.

Like trees. They’re everywhere, they have to be, and sometimes they’re in forests and sometimes they’re in landscaped parks but the trees are still trees and they all do the same things. They all serve the same purpose. They all bow to the same creator, regardless of whether they grow wildly or in structured environments.

Where there are trees, there is oxygen.
The same is true for the people of God.

I’ve been in the forest for a long time. I’ve thrived here. I healed in the woods. I’ll probably always point others to the woods to heal, regroup, and see that wild is good and safe and allows you to breathe in ways you never have and never thought you could.

After all those years in the woods, avoiding the landscaped spaces of order and structure and rhythm, I’ve found that my internal rhythm has synced to the breath that connects all life and from where all roots are sourced. It doesn’t matter where I’m planted anymore.

Whether I’m in the forest or in the park, I am safe, connected, and alive.

I prefer the woods.

But I’m finding beauty in the park too.

___________

We’ve been visiting a church for a few months. At the beginning of this year, I said a simple little prayer : I’ll stay open and curious to what you have next for me. I need people that will love my family exactly where we are right now.³ Not even two weeks later was when I found myself in a coffee shop with a woman who always has a large family, twins, and just so happened to be a pastor’s wife as well. When I said that prayer, I wasn’t imagining church.

When I saw her comment on my facebook post, my first reaction was to think, not happening. But I had determined to be open and curious, so I stayed open. I wasn’t expecting the first opportunity to be curious to be something like that. Something that I normally would dismiss without a second thought. Not out of malice, just because the life that could relate to a woman in pastoral ministry is so far behind me now. I was so used to those kinds of connections being for a mutually beneficial reason and not for the sake of just … friendship. But I stayed open. And I said yes. And it has been good.

That curious yes led to a curious church visit which has, so far, been good. The community seems to be filled with people who have been in the woods at different times for different reasons. I see their roots and they see mine, just like what happens when I’m in the wild.

And I’m realizing - maybe this is what it’s all been about. Not that I would “end up back in church,” but that I would see the bride of Christ fully, not just the parts I prefer.

Maybe we aren’t all that different.

I want to make room in my own life and in your life and in all of our lives for the cycle of faith to continue without fear of judgment or panic.

As long as we’re moving, we’re going somewhere. We can’t stay still forever and call it a journey. We can’t assume that we’ve “arrived” at any place of spiritual finality. We can be content with where we are while being open and curious about what might come. We can recognize and accept that it’s ok if right now, you can never see yourself leaving the church. And it’s ok if you can never see yourself gathering with it in an organized way again. 

If you need to not be at church or not be with church, that’s ok.

If you need to throw a fortress over your family and remove all input and output, that can be wise and the best thing for you. (And people won’t understand, they’ll criticize, they’ll panic, and you’ll be OK.)

It’s also ok if church is the place where you are safe. It’s ok if church is good for you.

Faith is not a facade when it’s sincere. And from what I’ve seen from my time in the woods and my lifetime (and curious re-entry) in the park, most people are sincere. Flawed, for sure. But sincere.

If we can start to see each other as humans and not as the ideologies or structures we think the other person represents, we can heal the fractures. If we deconstruct our relationship with power and pick up the character of Christ - who declined his right to rule, we can be in relationship with each other, as one body, the way he intended, even when we don’t agree or have the same paradigms for living and believing.⁴

All ideologies are flawed — inside the building and out of them. Anytime there is group of people gathered around a central idea, the best and worst of our humanity will be exposed. We are ALL are capable of harm. And we are ALL are capable of being healers.

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When I left traditional church, I fell in love with the church.

When I stumbled into the woods, I saw the beauty of the trees for the very first time. I had never truly seen the family of God before. Not in that way, anyway. I stopped resenting the church for how it had rejected me. I stopped hating it for how it harmed my family. I stopped judging it for being a mess. I hated the church until I “left it.” And then I fell in love with it. And now, I want to be with it and in it and of it and around it in any way that I can.

My slow steps into an environment that looks like the one I left isn’t because I’ve changed my mind or because I’ve been influenced by the people closest to me (who, by the way, are not in the same place as I am with this). It’s because I love the church so much and I, for the first time in maybe ever, want more of it in my life. In any and every expression, on every spectrum, in the woods, in the park, I don’t care, give it to me, I need the oxygen.

The church was a cruel place for me. And then it wasn’t. And now I’m here - open to whatever is good and true and right and willing to fight when it isn’t.

The church needs people who are willing to be fighters and protectors. It needs healers. It needs people in and outside of the building who can protect the vulnerable, speak up about what’s wrong, spot the wolves, patch up wounds, plant flowers, heal fractures, bake casseroles.

I, so desperately, want all expressions of the church to be safe and good and beautiful. And I know that wherever I am and wherever I end up, I am a part of that beauty and safety. I am the goodness of Christ. I am his grace, his love, his kindness, his acceptance, his forgiveness, his mercy, his truth, and his righteousness to everyone around me - always, regardless of where my feet are standing.

And so are you.

I feel no pressure to get things “right”, only to do the thing that’s right for me, right now. And so should you.

And today, for me, that’s leaning into a new community and hoping that the goodness we bring will be reflected back to us.

For you, it might be stepping away. And there might not ever be a re-entry for you. I’m convinced that there is no “going back,” only going forward with the scars we’ve earned and the grace we carry - for better or worse.

Most of the time, our journeys take us to places we never expect. And we don’t all end up at the same place at the same time. But if anything has been true in my life, it’s that there will be times when you need to be closed and distant and safe inside a fortress. And also, there will be times when you’ll be safe to be open and curious about what might be next for you.

I can’t answer when that will be for you or if you’re there right now. All I can tell you is that I’ve been through the wilderness, the forest, the park, I’ve been the solitary tree on a sidewalk, I’ve been the weed in the cracks, I’ve been the dead leaves under other people’s boots and on the other side of all of it, I was OK.

I’m OK.

You will be too.

___________

She has to go pick up her kids from school. She asks me if I want to meet her at the golf club with my kids to go sledding later. I immediately (and excitedly) agree. She has caught me off guard with her candor, humor, and total lack of inviting me to church. I found out in our conversation that her husband is a pastor. She’s from LA. They just moved here a year ago. But she hasn’t invited me. I asked her the church name. We talked about how we think about ministry. I’m surprised that we think so similarly about so many things. I’m curious. This feels safe.

My feet aren’t facing the door anymore.

1. How many kids can say they woke up next to a copy machine and then walked down the hallway to Sunday school?

2. It did make the people closest to us feel better if they thought we left to do something : like plant a church, start a ministry, or something tangible. But, that wasn’t what we did or what we felt God called us to. We just felt like we were supposed to… live.

3. I wrote about our current stage of life and the struggles we’re having with the girls’ and their special needs right here : Grateful + Grieved

4. I talked about this here and in my Gentleness Good Fruit study