The End of the World

so many of the
spiritual answers sounded to me like empty promises

We were sitting on the beach at Rockaway, circled around a fire, faces glowing, backs to the dark. One of the elders from my church was there. I’d been avoiding him all night. I knew he wanted to talk. Suspected he’d been assigned to the task.

He walked over. “How are you doing, Eric?” he asked. I told him about the new job, my freelance writing, how I felt about our chances in the next day’s competition. “I meant spiritually,” he said.

Suddenly, everything felt eerily familiar. I’d been there before: cornered in a Meridian parking lot, told by my sister that her pastor was asking questions, contacted by an old friend, confronted by my grandmother. At first, I thought it was a conspiracy. I wish it were. That would have been much simpler.

I’d worked for almost 5 years on the staff of a local church. But I felt like a foreigner. I didn’t fit in. So I resigned my position. And then I stopped attending.

That’s when the questions started: was I in conflict with the pastor, was I depressed, did I have some hideous unconfessed sin . . .

Now — looking back — I can see why people asked those questions. They wanted it to be my problem, not theirs. I wish I could have articulated what was happening. But at the time, I only knew that I wasn’t satisfied. I didn’t know why, and I didn’t know how to fix it.

I wish that I could have told them how frustrated I was with church. I wish that I could have told them that so many of the spiritual answers sounded to me like empty promises, patronizing platitudes. I wish that I could have pointed out that many of the practices of church speak to a culture that no longer exists. I wish that I could have told them that church as we know it and practice it is already dead.

But I couldn’t say any of those things because I didn’t know why I was unhappy.

I was desperate for Truth. I wanted to understand reality and learn to live spiritually. I wanted to know God. I wanted to be fully myself rather than just playing a series of parts. I wanted to integrate faith and vocation with community rather than continuing a kind of compartmentalized existence. And I couldn’t find a way to fit all this stuff into church. The box was far too small.

So I left.

But not completely.

I’m still hanging around, watching and waiting for others to exhibit some of the same symptoms — not just people who hate church but those who desperately want something bigger, something that transcends our limited notion of what it means to have faith.

Why do I care? Because if church really is dead, then there’s got to be something better. And I’m not smart enough to figure it out on my own.