not really indicative of my day on sunday, just a good song.
i am the arts director at a smallish church in palmdale, california, on the outskirts of LA county.
i don’t belong in church; most of it doesn’t make sense to me. sure, i grew up in a quaint smalltown reformed church and sure, i went to colorado christian university, but for some reason (read: many reasons) i balk at being called a “christian.” it is my suspicion that perhaps others here might share this sentiment, but in any case and despite my animosity, i now find myself employed by this monster.
more accurately, i suppose, i should say that it is BECAUSE of my animosity that i now work for a church.
HISTORY LESSON #1
in college my mind was opened, a tabula rosa, welcoming to new ideas, and i saw things as i had never seen them before. being part of a church wasn’t mandatory at CCU, but highly encouraged. i didn’t see the point, frankly, with chapel services twice a week. “but i’m open-minded now,” i said. “if you can provide a convincing argument, i’ll have no problem changing my mind.”
no one ever convinced me.
so i disconnected, and found church with my fellow like-minded college students.
this worked well… until i graduated.
i hadn’t thought of THIS. where was my connection now? where was my community? everything i had was tied to the school that had just given me a piece of paper and booted me and my new degree-havin-behind out the front door.
so, i was left floundering in time and space with no center of gravity (because that is what community is, is it not?). my wife had a friend who was a youth pastor at a church in littleton, colorado, and so we thought we’d try to connect with them. the church was fine. Just fine. Ok, boring. With terrible music. But the people were wonderful people. And so we stayed, and we started an offshoot group of ragtag twentysomethings who all felt like they had no home. we sat in a circle on the floor of youth pastor’s living room and bitched until the proverbial cows came home about how much the church sucks and about how hypocritical and full of bullshit everything was.
it felt good. REAL good.
finally i felt like i had a venue in which i could be completely honest, open, searching, about all the questions i had and all the discontinuity that i saw. perhaps most importantly, i discovered i wasn’t the only one who felt this way. there was an undertow, a current running beneath the surface that wasn’t my imagination. it was passionate and strong, and it STILL CARED. truly, it cared, because apathy doesn’t manifest itself by spending hours and hours deconstructing why the thing it doesn’t care about is the way it is.
so i realized that i still cared. and i tend to have some activist blood flowing in my veins, so then i realized i need to DO something. stop the bitching and DO something, forgoodnesssake.
so now i work for a church.
i don’t belong here, but maybe that’s the reason i AM here.
the_DIALOGUE