I've been writing a lot about the spiritual abuse I was subject to in the very conservative evangelical Christian community I was a member of for several years. The church was filled with many watchful eyes, ever on the hunt for a sin to condemn. The ultimate prize in our community was winning a lost soul over to the Lord, so rather than rejoice in worship together, there was a huge incentive in seeing each other's perceived faults.
I have not, of my own volition, attended church except for funerals and special occasions in about eight years. Like a lot of LGBTQ people, the Church's anti-gay bigotry, no matter how adorned with flowery love-the-sinner-hate-the-sin rhetoric, made the church a hostile, unsafe place for me. I became an easy target for the sin hunters in one congregation, so I found another. That church espoused a kinder, gentler bigotry, but I insinuated from the casually homophobic jokes told from the pulpit that I shouldn't drop my guard too much.
This time I wasn't ready to go. I wouldn't give up my home without a fight, so I reached out to my senior pastor, who'd also become a close friend by this point, via email and told him, "Pastor, I am queer. That means different things for different people. What that means for me is that gender has little to do with how I experience love and attraction. I'm happy to talk to you about it, but I know where the church's doctrine stands. I don't need counsel, I need home."
He didn't respond. For months, my pastor and friend didn't respond. My best guess as to what happened is that he didn't know what to say. He didn't know how to approach my coming out to him and reconcile his love for me with his duties as a pastor. He got afraid and did nothing. I wrote again, and clearly told him I was disappointed. He offered to have breakfast with me, and this time it was me who didn't follow up. I had a hard time finding a good meeting time because of a busy season at work, and it was weeks before I wrote him back. He didn't respond again. I don't know why.
I feel like it's easy to write about the hurt I experienced at the hands of the institution of the Church. It's easy as a queer person to commiserate with other queer people about being let down in one of the places that should have been guaranteed to hold us in all our complexity.
But that's not my whole story. Part of my story is that, even when I stopped believing in Bible as the literal, inerrant word of God, I still took heed to Paul's admonition to the Hebrews to "forsake not the assembling of yourselves together” (Hebrews 10:25). I still felt moved in an otherworldly way by the power that sweeps a room where hundreds of people are gathered with their hearts and minds turned to one purpose, lifting their voices in music, a drumbeat pulsating through our collective body. I still laugh at jokes that only a Bible nerd can truly appreciate, like when someone is acting like a rascal and you shake your head and say "Oh brother, that's not the Fruit of the Spirit."
If I never step foot in a church again, I am so culturally Christian, I don't feel I can ever fully renounce the Church. Nor can I, with integrity, separate myself from the emotional and spiritual wounds I inflicted on myself and others in the name of righteousness. I, too, have been a sin hunter, though I used the information I gathered primarily to determine who was worthy of my friendship, and who might lead me astray.
I actually long to walk into a church and be fully embraced, for all of who I am. There are LGBTQ-affirming churches in Minneapolis, but many of them are perfectly polite Lutheran congregations. They are not spaces that feel like home. There will be no mass of people praying in tongues. The choir will not raise the roof with harmonies that make you want to cry, run, and jump all at the same time. Their relationship with the Spirit moving doesn't feel deeply connected to how I believe my ancestors worshipped whomever and whatever they worshipped on the shores of Africa. Those spaces are not home.
One place I go when I long for that type of home is YouTube. I'm completely serious. I find songs and sermons I remember from my youth, and I go to church all by my lonesome. And invariably, I run across this gem:
For 30 years, whenever I see this clip from The Color Purple, I bawl my eyes out. Shug Avery and the gang are hanging out at the local jook joint, drinking and sinning in the eyes of God. At a sweaty, dusty little church house down the road, Shug's father who has shunned her for decades is ready to preach, but before he does, the choir begins a selection. A young woman we might assume believe is Shug's daughter, whom her father took from her, steps up to sing the solo.
"Speak, Lord. Speak to me."
Right then something awakens in Shug. Her spirit is stirred and she sings along. She sings along and starts a march to the church house, and all those seen as sinners follow. What lives in her is so powerful that her voice drowns out the young soloist who tries her best to compete, though our gestures of worship are not meant to be competitive. The so-called sinners have drawn upon a more pure worship and it cannot be ignored.
The sinners press on. They hoot and hum and signify. They, too, were likely brought up in church, and they all march toward this symbol of home. At the song's climax, they burst into the church as Shug belts out, "Maybe God is trying to tell you something."
She is pleading before her heavenly Father to hear her prayer. She is pleading before her biological father to love her in spite of himself, and she runs to him, wraps him in her embrace and doesn't let go. She prays for him to see her as whole, as God’s. "See Daddy, sinners have soul, too."
After years and years of degrading his daughter, believing that resisting her love and desire for love was resisting temptation altogether, he reciprocates and hugs her back. The look of surprise and delight and triumph that takes over her face wrenches tears out of me every single time.
The sinner's prayers were answered. And the sinners marched deeper into church and joined the other worshippers. I may relate to Shug a little bit.
I was talking to a lesbian friend about the pull I was feeling back into a spiritual practice, of longing to return to that space despite having outgrown its core doctrines. She has also been returning to the worship practices of her youth. I told her I'd been listening to “God Is Trying to Tell You Something” on repeat, that Spirit had been gently pulling my face to its light. Within seconds, a huge bolt of lightning sketched its way across the gray and stormy sky.
“Gently??” she exclaimed as we laughed at Creation’s utter lack of subtlety.
And then we walked into a church that was unfamiliar to us. I wanted to hold her hand, to feel the comfort of our love in this unfamiliar space which was very quiet and very white. I didn't know if this was a church where queers could hold hands and be okay. On our own we could each probably pass as straight, but sitting together there was no chance. I felt visible, but not sin-hunted.
A couple days before, a friend from my old evangelical days called me out of the blue to tell me about her business. I hadn't spoken to her in a decade. At the end of the call she asked to pray with me. I almost said no. I usually say no, but this time I accepted the gesture as an act of love.
She asked me when I last felt at home in a church and if I wanted that. She prayed for me to find home again. She prayed for me to have the courage to return to that church house, and accept the love that waited there for me. Then she prayed that the pastor had had time to change, that he would recognize me as the person he loved who was no different than I had been before. She prayed for him to be patient, curious, and seeking ways to stay in a relationship with me. I nearly wept. This is not the prayer she’d have prayed 10 years ago. She’d have prayed to cover my sins, not for the Lord to have softened my pastor’s heart.
I'm going to that church a week from today. I'm going with my lesbian friend, and when I need to feel the comfort and presence of her love, I'm going to squeeze her hand. We will get stares and I'll try my best not to care. She asked if I think the pastor will call my name out from the pulpit if he recognizes me in the crowd. Probably.
Then I will hug him, tell him that I love him and miss him. I will tell him that we need to talk, that I need to tell him something.