Being Mad at the Church

It’s Sunday again and so that means church is on my mind. Church is on my mind a lot, not just on Sundays, but I was thinking about it just now and so I decided to write about it. I really want to find a church because right now I feel very angry at the church and I don’t want that anger to stay. People at church just seem like phonies.  

            I began going to church in high school and it was easy to see then. So many people that claimed to be Christians would be mean to me or ignore me or worse yet be my friend at church, but not at school.  I was on the Fellowship of Christian Athletes board at my high school and even the people there would typically ignore me. I attended the Bible studies all year and rather than sit with me someone would ask if a seat was taken and when I said no they would take the seat and move to a different table and so I sat alone while the other tables overflowed.

            My husband had a similar experience at Christian school and so he doesn’t even want to go to church because some of the meanest people he has ever met have been from that Christian school. Yes all of this happened among kids over a decade ago, but those kids have now grown up and some of them are leading the church and I am treated roughly the same way.

            And yet even that is not what makes me so angry. My anger stems from a boyfriend I had after high school. He was the worship leader of my youth group and twice my age. He had been flirting with me and complimenting me since I was about 16, but was smart enough to wait until I was 18 to ask me out. I had known him for years and he was the worship leader and so of course I was thrilled to be asked out by him.  I had terrible self-esteem and so pretty much anyone could have asked me out and I would not have said no. I had never had a boyfriend before. I had never even held hands with anyone and so I was excited.

            It took me a while to realize that he was the biggest phony of all. He was, and probably still is, an alcoholic. The church knew it when they hired him, but they wanted to make him an example of God’s redemption. He then had an affair with his best-friend’s wife, but after a short time the church still took him back because God forgives again and again. And again they gave him to the youth group.

            The church turned their back on me because I left him for another man. I found someone who wasn’t an alcoholic and who wouldn’t make me feel worthless. I tried to warn the church, but the pastor hung up on him because the word of a known adulterer and alcoholic was worth more than the teenager who had been on overseas missions, was in the choir, worker in the nursery, and on the Missions board.

            He ended up getting married. He married someone even younger than me. When they started dating he was 40 something and she was still a teenager. The thing is how could the church not think this is wrong?  I am only 28, that is over 10 years younger than he was when we started dating, and I can’t even imagine dating an 18 year old. We would have nothing in common. It is disgusting to think about. He was a vile individual and the church put him in leadership that gave him the platform to prey on girls. He and his wife divorced a year after their marriage began. I don’t know the details of their marriage at all. Sometimes I have thought about contacting his ex just so I would know. I want to know if he was as horrible to her as he was to me. I want to know if the church could have protected her because I had warned them. I don’t know. Maybe she just realized she was too good for him. I just don’t know.

            I know all churches are not like the one I attended. I know that there are pastors who would take the complaint of a young woman seriously. I know there are churches that want to protect their youth, but there are too many that are more concerned with appearance. They wanted so badly for him to be a redemption story, but the story they got was not the one they wanted. He is no longer at that church, but he still plays music at other churches and it sickens me to think about.

            We all sin and to God sin is equal, but it doesn’t seem that way to me. To think that pastors or worship leaders could be that vile makes me not want to go to church. I wish I could find a good local church that would make me feel that the church is not full of phonies and that they really want to live out what they believe. But unfortunately, like I stated in an earlier post, finding a church that will accept us at all is a challenge.