The Devastation of Uncensorship

My earliest recollection of church was around the age of 6 while we were living in Texas. It was an early Sunday morning and on that day, I was going to get baptized. I had no idea what baptism meant and I knew that when my parents were putting me in a situation to have something strange done to me, I would inevitably be sitting on rolled out butcher paper next to a jar of tongue depressors, painfully bearing a shot to the arm. Of course, I found out soon after that I was just getting some warm water splashed on my head while being propped up in front of mass of strange people by the Jesus pastor- who sadly, resembled Elizabeth Smart's kidnapper at the time. I didn't really feel anything different following the event, but I'm not sure Simba felt anything different when Rafiki held him up atop Pride Rock, minus the Elton John song about circles and life.

So church began as something strange done to me where, for the most part, it didn't seem to be as impactful as the event was meant to be powerful- at least in the short term. I don't blame my parents for getting me baptized at the young age of 6 and I think that I understand why they did it. But as I look back through my faith journey, there just seems to be a pattern of doing things in the church that we do just because that's what we do. For instance... a baby dedication in a church service is usually just a comedy hour where we watch the baby obsessively pull on the lapel mic attached to the pastor... the pastor who cradles a kid like a chef holds a fresh honey-baked ham. We all laugh when it happens and then we recite some words of commitment at the end of the comedic routine to make it meaningful. But rarely do we actually think about those words 8 years later when that same kid is pouring Elmer's glue into the back of a little girl's hair in Sunday school.

I was publicly baptized 3 times in my life because I felt like it either never worked or somehow it expired as I got older. In my twenties, although my intentions were mostly sincere, I usually felt more like a rebellious atheist who really just wanted the sexual satisfaction from a girl with a nice rack (insert joke about "laying hands on"). I existed on the hamster wheel of wanting to do good, making bad choices and then feeling guilty afterward. The wheel violently spun until I would be thrown off. The routine would send me back to the dunk tank, hoping to renew my faith and start new... again. At one point in my life, I was just quietly taking late evening baths so that I could secretly baptize myself before I went to bed to save the public embarrassment.

Now I must say that I don't think that these traditions are pointless or without purpose in many cases. Please hear that. If done with intention and sincerity, baptisms and baby dedications can be pivotal and transformational (apparently, it was for Jesus in the Bible, among many others then and now). But for those who are just doing the routines because that's what we are supposed to do... I think that we need to stop and retreat for a bit. We need to lower the out-stretched worship hands of insincerity and put away the choir robes that cover up our transparency.

See, I believe that people cycle through the church routines and traditions without intention- not because they are lazy or unoriginal- but because they are living a fear-based life. They are serving traditions out of fear of being rejected by God and by others. Many people commit their lives to doing what looks like the most God-ordained thing, yet have no sense of a relationship to the entity that is God. It is much safer to be captive to a mission than it is to be vulnerable to a higher being. Why? Because we can control missions and control can help us avoid hurt.

I led worship for 15 years until 2010 came around and then eventually I stopped. I quit my job as a worship pastor and walked away. I did this because I realized that I was faking it up on stage and I was tired of being insincere. As authentic as I was as a worship leader in years past, I was now doing it for the attention because playing music and watching people sing with me somehow made me feel better about who I was or rather, who I was not. Sundays brought relief to me because I spent the rest of the week beating myself up and talking myself down. As for the music, I didn't actually buy into most of the words I sang and began realizing that many people in the room probably didn't buy into them either. When I realized that I was seeing the congregation as a crowd and myself as a rock star, the green lit exit sign in the back of the auditorium finally caught my attention and I darted for the door. Leaving was quite possibly the first time I had been honest in worship in a while.

The church will radically look different if it begins to become more honest with itself. I totally believe this. I'm quite sure that if it happened for even a moment, you would begin to see radical changes...

Church buildings would empty out because people would be spending their limited amount of spare time in therapist offices and recovery centers, wanting to be known and heard in their new found pain....

Communities would become vulnerable and less formal...

Many pastors would step down from the pulpit and let their messages be relational through conversations with those around them...

Inspiration would begin to emerge naturally because it is less forced and manipulated...

Silence would be longed for instead of something we try to convince people to value...

And most of all, we would stop censoring ourselves because desiring to understand each other would be of second nature.

Honesty reveals darkness and darkness invites light.

The Uncensored Room

For the past year or so, I've quietly pulled myself out of what I would call conventional church. Younger generations may call it the emergent church and older generations may call it something that doesn't look like the church they once knew. It's the church of Sunday sermons, uninspiring music, over-worshipped pastors, and spectatorship. Why have I pulled away? I found myself so sucked into the system of church, that I was becoming a stranger to the outside world- even a segregationist- and this eventually began to bother me. So I left.

Since then, my questions have become irresistible to ask. Questions like...

Was this straight and narrow path of church community in fact more community-less that I thought? Why did it seem as though my unchurched friends who hang out at bars accept and respect each other, while my church friends sit around arguing theology, constantly bickering about whether or not Mark Driscoll is a chauvinist asshole and if Rob Bell is indeed a universalist? Why in all of this bickering am I so lonely? Why am I so filled with fear operating inside of the church, maybe even more than outside of the church? Are we actually worshipping dynamic teaching pastors rather than this entity called God? Does God even exist?

So while the pastor was preaching his Sunday sermon, I quietly opened the back door and stepped out into the fresh air that I have been longing to breathe. This is where I am now and it is here that I want to write my thoughts to those who will listen. These thoughts are unbound and to many, maybe even vulgar (you may have cringed at the word "asshole" that I used in the previous paragraph). I guess that I just don't care about censoring what I see and how I see it anymore and I think that somehow, there is a profoundness that thrives there. I want to witness the profound.

I started this "Between the Waves" blog a while back and I must say that it isn't until now that I actually feel as though I AM finally between the waves. I was on the shore when I started this thing and maybe my previous writings give you a glimpse of that. Many Christians do what I did for so long and fantasize about being in the dangerous waves, even write about it and reading about it from others who have taken the leap. They convince themselves that they are fearless Christians- they do this as they hide behind their favorite podcasts of pastors that they listen to each week, filling themselves up with more and more knowledge- LOTS of speculation and very little experience. My hope is that my writings will encourage you to put down the books, take the leap, risk the safety, and begin to be more honest at this very moment.

So get ready to lose the religion and put your faith on the stand. Get ready to risk becoming an atheist and an agnostic and on the contrary, quite possibly become a deep lover of a mysterious God and of wounded people. Get ready to be offended and pissed off and quite possibly, find a new joy within the conflict. Stuff I say is going to rub you the wrong way and that's ok. Our ugliness is radiant with beauty and we need to reveal what we are indeed so scared of... our ugliness. We live in the dark, calling it light, when most likely, we've only seen specks of light in the distance. Honesty welcomes light and the light is good.

Now, let's turn on the lights...