Your Christianity Is Only as Real as You Are
By
• October 6, 2016
“Every time a clergy person pulls a punch, the laypeople wonder, ‘Are these really the only problems our pastor has?'”
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But I also have heard that, afterward, many of the newly saved often wonder what it was all about. Was it the emotion of the moment? The length of the service? The heat? The power lifters for the Lord? Was it really life-changing?
I’ve met lots of people who have been saved and they pretty much keep their original personalities, for better or worse. I don’t believe that one single moment does it for most of us, even if there is a great musical sound track like this song that goes with it.
Just as I Am
Just as I am, without one plea,but that thy blood was shed for me,
and that thou bid me come to thee,
O Lamb of God, I come, I come.
Just as I am, and waiting not
To rid my soul of one dark blot,
To thee whose blood can cleanse each spot,
—“O Lamb of God, I Come, I Come” by Charlotte Elliott, 1789-1871
Old hymns are like sausage: better to consume them and move on without undue reflection. I love “Just as I Am.” But like many old hymns I love, I can’t think about it too much. And again, like sausage, I prefer to ignore the blood part of that hymn and stick with the yummy first bite, “Just as I am.” I really connect with that part.
Many people associate this hymn with altar calls and revivals when, at the end of big emotional rallies, the preacher calls people to come forward and “get saved.” In a packed stadium, rivers of people leave their seats and flow down front to receive Jesus as Lord and Savior, and this is the hymn they would always sing.
Billy Graham, the most famous revival preacher of modern times, always wanted this hymn sung during his crusades’ altar calls because he believed that this hymn brought him to faith.
So given my skepticism of the events that are so synonymous with this song, I am surprised to love this old revival hymn as much as I do. Whenever I sing it, my heart gets full at the idea that God loves me “just as I am,” which I take to mean God loves everyone that way: the saved, the unsaved, the selfish, the selfless, the many religious people, and the Nones. We really are all loved, and we don’t have to join any group to get that.
I’m in religious community for other reasons, including getting to hear and in some cases accidentally memorize old hymns that I am not sure I believe, but they seem to believe in me. Especially when I get to verse three, which seems to contradict the first two verses.
Just as I am, though tossed about
with many a conflict, many a doubt,
fightings and fears within, without,
O Lamb of God, I come, I come.
“Just as I Am” was written by someone during a period of doubt. Charlotte Elliott wrote the hymn in England in 1836, and it was included in a book called The Invalid’s Hymnbook.
Charlotte Elliott was part of a large, vital family who had a great passion for ministry. But she was beset by a series of health crises that left her, at the young age of thirty, a complete invalid. Essentially she could only spend her time in bed or lying on a sofa. Her brother, a clergyman, committed his life to establishing St. Mary’s Hall, a school designed to give the daughters of poor clergymen a good education for a nominal fee. The family regularly sponsored bazaars, fairs, and fund-raising events for the benefit of the school. On the eve of a particularly big fund-raising bazaar, Charlotte experienced something like a dark night of the soul. She went to bed, and she felt worthless. She thought, “I’m an invalid. Everybody in this family, everybody in my community, is working for something good, and I can’t do anything.” She decided that life was not worth living, and she began to doubt that there was a God or a purpose for her life. She was up all night in total despair.
The next day was the big bazaar, and her family and friends would be buzzing with activity. And she lay on a sofa in the drawing room, at a distance, watching all the good work happen. That was when the text of this hymn came to her, and she just started to write, as if she were taking dictation. All of a sudden, out of this place of pro- found doubt and despair, she wrote a hymn about a God who loved her, just as she was, without one plea.
Today a book with a title like The Invalid’s Hymnbook could never be published. It would be considered offensive in a world in which no one wants to be considered sick.
But that so-called invalid’s hymnbook ended up bringing healing for everybody, because who among us isn’t in need of healing? And who among us isn’t in need of real community—warts, doubts, and all?
Really Searching
I’m a big proponent of serious efforts to find a religious community. So when the host of a Canadian radio show asked me off air how he might find a church like the ones I was discussing on air, I was surprised. He had access to bright and engaging religious figures through his work. He of all people should be able to find a church. “Have you visited any churches lately?” I asked.“Yes, quite recently,” he said, “and I couldn’t find one.”
“Well, how many did you visit?” I asked, predicting a small number.
“Twenty-one,” he said.
“Twenty-one?” I gasped. “Well, how recently?” Was this a professional grudge holder against religion who joined and left churches for every adult year of his life?
“Over the last two years,” he said.
“You mean to tell me you have spent the last two years trying out all twenty-one churches in your town?”
“Well, I live in a very small town, and there are twenty-one churches.”
“It doesn’t sound like you live in a very small town,” I said, because at some point I wanted to be right about something. “Because small towns don’t have twenty-one churches. One thing I am sure of is that you do not, in fact, live in a small town.”
“I guess not,” he said, giving me that one point. It was the only sloppy thinking I could catch him on. I actually felt pretty awful about my assumptions, especially after he described a thoughtful journey, with observations of what he had learned along the way. He pointed out what was beautiful about one style of worship, and where somewhere else he heard a particularly well-crafted sermon. He had looked into denominations and visited websites. This guy clearly wanted to find a church. He was willing to put that effort into it. He went to visit all twenty-one churches in his town. But why couldn’t he find one? Were his standards too lofty? Or was something else going on?
Finally, I asked him, “What was so wrong with them? They don’t sound too bad to me. No church has it all. Couldn’t you even find one that you liked?”
“Oh, it wasn’t that,” he said. “I liked a lot about all of them. It’s just that they wouldn’t like me. I’ve done bad things in my life. I don’t belong with those people.”
“Didn’t they say God loves you despite all that?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said. “They all say that. But I don’t think I believe it. I can’t love everybody. And if they knew me, or what I think, they wouldn’t want me there.”
He gave me a lot to think about. Somewhere
along the way, he learned that churches are places anyone can visit, but
only incognito. If they knew who you really were, they’d kick you out.
He was looking for a church that was real. He was looking for a church
where he could be real. Real churches are out there. They’re all over
the place. But I could also see why he hadn’t found one yet. Sometimes
in religious communities, we save the real stuff for the insiders—or
even worse—we just don’t deal with it. Either way, the outsiders leave
feeling as if they’d never fit in.
These executives had nightmarish tales of deals gone bad, deception, plant closings, firings without cause, prejudice, and greed. They talked about agonizing decisions that would never be 100 percent right and how hard it was to live with the realization that people were being hurt by choices they made. No matter how they tried to live their values, life was a lot messier than they had been prepared for.
Finally the professor stopped taking notes and asked them, “Why didn’t you say all this when Pastor John was in the room with us?”
There was an awkward silence until one of them said, “Oh, he’s such a wonderful man. It would just break his heart.”
They weren’t worried about Pastor John’s wrath or even his push back. They saw him as a sweet, naive man whose view of the world was simplistic, almost childlike. They weren’t worried about Pastor John being disappointed in them. They were worried that Pastor John would be disappointed by life, and that he was far too tender to take it.
Now, I can tell you that clergy are not easily shocked.
But clergy, like most people, are afraid to tell the truth about themselves in church. So instead they pretend to tell the truth, with trifling little stories that pretend to be revelatory (“Now when I say I like chocolate, I mean I really like chocolate …”) but are not really (“Sometimes I think I am a chocoholic!”). Unless the pastor is obese, in which case he won’t be talking about food but football instead, or some other such harmless pleasure that really isn’t his issue.
Heaven forbid an obese pastor talk about food addiction. Someone at church might actually think they could talk to such a pastor.
Every time a clergy person pulls a punch, an angel in heaven yawns, and the laypeople wonder, “Are these really the only problems our pastor has?”
I can picture the angels up there sighing, “She has all these people there on a Sunday listening to God’s word that we are saved and loved no matter what, and then she acts like it barely applies to her. No wonder they don’t think it applies to them.”
Over time, clergy learn to tell a story in which they are the heroes, or they are the ones who step away from sin, or they sin but in a manner so inconsequential it makes the congregation think they live on Sesame Street. It makes the church seem less real.
Particularly when the Bible passages can seem so harsh. “Get behind me, Satan!” Jesus yells to his best friend and disciple, Peter.
And then the preacher begins to preach with some inane anecdote that wouldn’t wake Satan up from a nap.
“My mother always made the most delicious cookies, and we couldn’t help but steal one or two before they had cooled … I know, we were wicked … Tee hee hee.”
And the congregation titters along.
But somewhere out there in church someone is hurting. Someone is grappling with a bigger decision than whether or not to steal a cookie, or even whether to eat one. Someone has put everything else aside to get there that morning.
They deserve more than a charming anecdote meant to draw them closer to the warm fuzzy preacher with warm fuzzy faults. (What are the odds? We both are obsessed with American Idol?)
As for the person obsessed with porn, he’s out of luck that week, and the next. Never mind that clergy use porn as much as the next guy. I know this because clergy write about it anonymously, in clergy magazines, almost always after the fact. There is one evangelical leadership journal that seems to have a two-year cycle of clergy sins, written by anonymous sinners, after the fact. If it’s spring of an even numbered year, it’s clergy gambling addiction season. The winter will bring Internet porn. Other years bring marriage problems due to overwork, plagiarism, or clergy mental illness.
Always anonymous, the clergy have been delivered from such sin by the time they write their pieces, but still there is no name attached. The byline says it all. You cannot be known.
So instead, clergy make jokes in sermons about their weakness for donuts or their fave football team and hope that someone can read between the lines and see that they are human, too.
Instead they think, “I could never tell my pastor that. It would break his heart.”
Clergy, please tell the truth about yourself. Be real and love me just as I am. Let me change and let me change you. Don’t dumb down the message. Respect my God-given brain. Don’t lower your expectations of me. Tell me what people have done before, over time and in community, to get to know God so I can try it, too. Don’t tell me it doesn’t matter but don’t scare me into it either. Show me. Love me. Welcome me.
It’s not like I was sitting around celebrating my own life when suddenly I noticed that I was missing the rigorous study of a ten-thousand-year-old book that appears to accept slavery, animal sacrifice, and wife abuse. No, I never thought to myself, if only I had more of that in my life. But when I look back, I can see that I did want a tradition larger than myself, and I’ve been blessed by a weird book read by weird people through the ages.
No, most of my yearnings show up in retrospect, after they have been met and filled in the most surprising ways. I am shocked to discover the phrase “the eyes of the heart enlightened” (Ephesians 1:18) in the middle of a letter by the apostle Paul, whom I had thought of as a violent sexist thug. Even after his conversion, I objected to many of his ideas, like the notion that celibacy is considered a higher calling than marriage, which is to him basically a dumping ground for lust. I hated Paul’s sexual ethic and had avoided reading his letters, but then when I first saw the words “the eyes of the heart enlightened,” I thought, they are too beautiful not to have come from God.
When you look for a community of faith, you look with “the eyes of the heart enlightened.” That beautiful phrase implies that there are different ways of looking, and in this beautiful way you look with the eyes of the heart, eyes that are enlightened. I presume those eyes are wide open to reality but accepting of the real life they see in front of them, and able to see the beauty in broken things.
Religious community is a broken thing because people are broken things. Both can be beautiful, or they can just look broken. It depends which eyes you use to see.
Showing up is key, and then showing up as our real selves and allowing other people to be their real selves.
Excerpted from Tired of Apologizing for a Church I Don’t Belong To by Lillian Daniel. Used with permission from FaithWords, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Order this book from Amazon.com »
Lillian Daniel is an editor at large for The Christian Century magazine and a contributing editor to Leadership Journal. She has taught at Chicago Theological Seminary, the University of Chicago Divinity School and at her alma mater, Yale Divinity School. After leading three churches, Lillian is currently devoting herself full time to writing, speaking and procrastinating.
“It would break the poor pastor’s heart”
An ethics professor asked a city minister to assemble a group of thoughtful businesspeople for interviews on the subject of business ethics. So the pastor gathered a small group at church and the professor asked them how their religious faith impacted their lives in the office and the business decisions they made. The pastor encouraged the group to share those difficult gray area stories but people stuck to the obvious. They talked superficially about not stealing office supplies or the importance of being a good mentor. It was only after the pastor left the room that the real stories started flowing.These executives had nightmarish tales of deals gone bad, deception, plant closings, firings without cause, prejudice, and greed. They talked about agonizing decisions that would never be 100 percent right and how hard it was to live with the realization that people were being hurt by choices they made. No matter how they tried to live their values, life was a lot messier than they had been prepared for.
Finally the professor stopped taking notes and asked them, “Why didn’t you say all this when Pastor John was in the room with us?”
There was an awkward silence until one of them said, “Oh, he’s such a wonderful man. It would just break his heart.”
They weren’t worried about Pastor John’s wrath or even his push back. They saw him as a sweet, naive man whose view of the world was simplistic, almost childlike. They weren’t worried about Pastor John being disappointed in them. They were worried that Pastor John would be disappointed by life, and that he was far too tender to take it.
Now, I can tell you that clergy are not easily shocked.
But clergy, like most people, are afraid to tell the truth about themselves in church. So instead they pretend to tell the truth, with trifling little stories that pretend to be revelatory (“Now when I say I like chocolate, I mean I really like chocolate …”) but are not really (“Sometimes I think I am a chocoholic!”). Unless the pastor is obese, in which case he won’t be talking about food but football instead, or some other such harmless pleasure that really isn’t his issue.
Heaven forbid an obese pastor talk about food addiction. Someone at church might actually think they could talk to such a pastor.
Every time a clergy person pulls a punch, an angel in heaven yawns, and the laypeople wonder, “Are these really the only problems our pastor has?”
I can picture the angels up there sighing, “She has all these people there on a Sunday listening to God’s word that we are saved and loved no matter what, and then she acts like it barely applies to her. No wonder they don’t think it applies to them.”
Over time, clergy learn to tell a story in which they are the heroes, or they are the ones who step away from sin, or they sin but in a manner so inconsequential it makes the congregation think they live on Sesame Street. It makes the church seem less real.
Particularly when the Bible passages can seem so harsh. “Get behind me, Satan!” Jesus yells to his best friend and disciple, Peter.
And then the preacher begins to preach with some inane anecdote that wouldn’t wake Satan up from a nap.
“My mother always made the most delicious cookies, and we couldn’t help but steal one or two before they had cooled … I know, we were wicked … Tee hee hee.”
And the congregation titters along.
But somewhere out there in church someone is hurting. Someone is grappling with a bigger decision than whether or not to steal a cookie, or even whether to eat one. Someone has put everything else aside to get there that morning.
They deserve more than a charming anecdote meant to draw them closer to the warm fuzzy preacher with warm fuzzy faults. (What are the odds? We both are obsessed with American Idol?)
As for the person obsessed with porn, he’s out of luck that week, and the next. Never mind that clergy use porn as much as the next guy. I know this because clergy write about it anonymously, in clergy magazines, almost always after the fact. There is one evangelical leadership journal that seems to have a two-year cycle of clergy sins, written by anonymous sinners, after the fact. If it’s spring of an even numbered year, it’s clergy gambling addiction season. The winter will bring Internet porn. Other years bring marriage problems due to overwork, plagiarism, or clergy mental illness.
Always anonymous, the clergy have been delivered from such sin by the time they write their pieces, but still there is no name attached. The byline says it all. You cannot be known.
So instead, clergy make jokes in sermons about their weakness for donuts or their fave football team and hope that someone can read between the lines and see that they are human, too.
Instead they think, “I could never tell my pastor that. It would break his heart.”
Clergy, please tell the truth about yourself. Be real and love me just as I am. Let me change and let me change you. Don’t dumb down the message. Respect my God-given brain. Don’t lower your expectations of me. Tell me what people have done before, over time and in community, to get to know God so I can try it, too. Don’t tell me it doesn’t matter but don’t scare me into it either. Show me. Love me. Welcome me.
With the Eyes of the Heart Enlightened
When I think of my deepest yearnings for real encounters with faith, real encounters with goodness and evil, real encounters with scripture, of being prompted by the Holy Spirit, I didn’t feel them that way at the time.It’s not like I was sitting around celebrating my own life when suddenly I noticed that I was missing the rigorous study of a ten-thousand-year-old book that appears to accept slavery, animal sacrifice, and wife abuse. No, I never thought to myself, if only I had more of that in my life. But when I look back, I can see that I did want a tradition larger than myself, and I’ve been blessed by a weird book read by weird people through the ages.
No, most of my yearnings show up in retrospect, after they have been met and filled in the most surprising ways. I am shocked to discover the phrase “the eyes of the heart enlightened” (Ephesians 1:18) in the middle of a letter by the apostle Paul, whom I had thought of as a violent sexist thug. Even after his conversion, I objected to many of his ideas, like the notion that celibacy is considered a higher calling than marriage, which is to him basically a dumping ground for lust. I hated Paul’s sexual ethic and had avoided reading his letters, but then when I first saw the words “the eyes of the heart enlightened,” I thought, they are too beautiful not to have come from God.
When you look for a community of faith, you look with “the eyes of the heart enlightened.” That beautiful phrase implies that there are different ways of looking, and in this beautiful way you look with the eyes of the heart, eyes that are enlightened. I presume those eyes are wide open to reality but accepting of the real life they see in front of them, and able to see the beauty in broken things.
Religious community is a broken thing because people are broken things. Both can be beautiful, or they can just look broken. It depends which eyes you use to see.
Showing up is key, and then showing up as our real selves and allowing other people to be their real selves.
Excerpted from Tired of Apologizing for a Church I Don’t Belong To by Lillian Daniel. Used with permission from FaithWords, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Order this book from Amazon.com »
Lillian Daniel is an editor at large for The Christian Century magazine and a contributing editor to Leadership Journal. She has taught at Chicago Theological Seminary, the University of Chicago Divinity School and at her alma mater, Yale Divinity School. After leading three churches, Lillian is currently devoting herself full time to writing, speaking and procrastinating.
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