Church Bollocks II
I suppose I owe my twitter and facebook friends an explanation for my random, generalised anti-Christian exclamations of late. I won’t go into it all too much as I’ve got to take responsibility for some things. I understand that churches usually have a large body of people who are comfortable and busy and just aren’t able to give the bare minimum of the time of day to newcomers – some of them are even so snowed under that all they can manage is a grunt when you’re introduced to them or try to strike up a conversation. I get that. I understand that people come to church with many different needs and can be pretty high maintenance to talk to: mental illness, intellectual disability, child protection issues – it makes sense that you should kind of ghettoise these people all together up the back with the new people who have arrived with young kids. That way you can ignore everyone at once. What really hurts is when people try to solve you like you’re a problem, when people try to “minister” to you, when people discuss you in a committee to try and decide what should be done about you. What really hurts is when people talk down to you and give you helpful advice on how to raise your kids and how to make friends. What really hurts is when those people then try to sign you up to the music and sunday school roster.
And they wonder why the pews seem to get a little emptier every year.
Sounds like a pretty poisonous atmosphere, and very insular.
Yes it’s made me all bitter and twisted because it brings back memories of churches past.
Yup
been banging my head against a relgious wall this week too. Have had moments when I thought “maybe its me”. Sounds pretty awful mate. Maybe its time to try something more pentecostal :)
I wish I could say something nice and comforting, Matt, but I can’t. Sometimes the Church isn’t a helpful place to look for God, but He is not the same as his people.
I know I was being sarcastic but I really do understand that people get comfortable and when an outsider comes along they are not interested, especially if they have noisy kids. I also non-sarcastically understand that Christians can get in a trap of feeling like they must be “ministering” to people which means they might offer friendship which is not genuine – I think sometimes the command to love your neighbour is misinterpreted as “pretend to be friends with your neighbour but keep them at arms length so you won’t be hurt yourself”. It is just hard to be on the receiving end of that and thinking “what’s wrong with me?”. But yeah, we went to the Bapos and I won’t go into the problems I have with “you will feel happy and ecstatically connected with god: NOW, and then I will tell you what god is thinking” worship but apart from that I could tell we were going to have the same problems of being the outsiders in need of charity and kindness but not actually worth getting to know.