Typically, churches take two approaches. COnservative churches might say: “My way or the highway.” and liberal churches might say “Any way is just plain dandy.” But a church that wants to be both truthful in its beliefs and open might say something like: “This is the way we think it is. Let’s talk.”

Unlike the previous two, the third way is engaging. I’m glad your church exists, David, but I’m sorry that it has to.

I too, have left the church. A hiatus. A good thing, really. Sometimes we need to refocus and get a breather. We become frustrated at the failures we see in the church and the people that are in it. If you asked me, I could rattle off ten complaints I have had with churches I’ve attended, not even theological ones, but personal ones. Stories of being ignored, or looked down upon, kicked out of youth group, not being given priviliges I thought we owed to me. The church has, from time to time, been more of a place of pain than a place to worship God.

Yet, to abandon the church completely is nearly unthinkable. It’s full of people that I care about. The book of James warns to not talk poorly about our brothers and sisters in Christ or the church. What is it saying if we refuse their company? If we spend too much time complaining about the Church what does it say to unbelievers. I’ve had those conversations where non-believers express disgust at the Church and I nod my head in agreement and express my own dislike. I leave feeling sickened at myself. Aren’t I supposed to declare the healing nature of Christ? Yet, how can I do while tearing down the best tool God has to accomplish His will? I’m afraid that when those conversations end the other party leaves thinking: “See, even he cannot stand his own religion.”

I go to church with a bunch of imperfect with whom I disagree upon nearly everything. I attend a very liberal Mennonite Church. I certainly could choose a more comfortable place to worship God. Yet, I wonder if that is what God wants from me?

Shouldn’t I dare to step outside of my comfort zone? Engage those with whom I differ from? Learn from them? Teach them? Ask questions and answer them?

The best place for a Christian to be, me thinks, is an uncomfortable place. I like God moving me and I like knowing that not everyone is the same. I feel at peace knowing that God has it in control and that I don’t need to be right.

I just wish I could teach the Church that (and those damn people that go there every week!).

I used to care deeply about church, maybe in a similar way that you do now. That was during all my years growing up and then through college - almost eight years ago now. I saw the church as the source of God’s movement and work in the world, and trusted in it fully. This had to do with my own faith, my own trust in the Bible, and probably a lot to do with the lives I had seen touched & changed in the congregation I grew up attending. And my pain in giving up the church - being ripped away from it, it felt to me at the time - during my years of working through coming out of the closet at college - was deep and visceral, and I cried a lot for it.

I view things quite differently now. Maybe being an outsider without so much invested in the church gives me an advantage in certain respects in seeing it. It’s a human organization like any other, with all the sames faults and tendencies that all groups of humans have, nothing more, nothing less. It touches and accesses a transformative core, a place where the divine enters the world and changes everything & everyone, but it in no way encompasses, holds, bottles up, controls, or even really understands that core. It has some stories that help guide it back again & again to that core, and it had some stories that get in the way. It’s never reached anything like perfection of love & unity, and it never will.

I don’t have answers to your four questions, although they’re very good ones that I hope people in the church keep asking and working through. To tell the truth, I’m personally very split in my relation to the church and efforts to make it a better place. Part of me harbors dreams of a return to it, and part of me feels a little wickedly gleeful at hints of its demise. Just to be honest.

Many might find it strange, but in losing the church I’m not sure I lost even the slightest bit of my relationship to God. My spiritual life feels deeper, fuller, more real now than it did while I was in the church - although of course a lot of that simply has to do with another eight years of life and probably would have happened within the church had it been possible for me to stay. New languages, new ways of knowing God, new scriptures come when they’re needed.

The church isn’t the Kingdom of God. Maybe you should give up on the church. Why not? Did Jesus really care all that much about such things when he was here those couple years? Your eyes are open and you can see the Kingdom of God around you, in your church, at church with the queers, in an AA meeting. Maybe it’s better not to care whether the church lives or dies, thrives or shrivels, and instead just watch for the Kingdom of God, and reach out to participate in it wherever & whenever you can? It could be a shorter path to the unity you long for.