[A quick note: in the original post, I included the first name of the pastor at RICC. A friend suggested that it might be taken as a personal attack, which is not my intention at all. But safer to remove his name, so it is now gone. I do not usually edit Roblog posts so much, but it's important to me to get this one right. January 5th, 2023]
If you are looking for actual instructions for leaving a church, I am sorry. This is not a how-to guide. It's really more of a memoir. And honestly, it isn't even really part one, at least chronologically speaking. It's a chapter out of the middle of my story. The most important chapter, I think. But I am completely unwilling to "Episode 4" you on this, to discourage readers from starting with the prequels.
The easiest way to leave a church is to move your home to someplace far away. I've done this a few times. It hurts, but everybody both gets it and gets over it quickly. Generally there are no hard feelings. If you are a 45 minute drive away, people are happily surprised when you show up at your old church, and they don't expect you to attend regularly. All the more so if you leave the country.
Another way to leave a church is to storm out. I sort of tried this many years ago, and the regret has colored my view of church ever since. I wasn't happy with a major leadership decision and found myself unable to focus on God whenever the aforementioned leader was leading the service. Which happened most Sundays. I didn't cause much of a storm, really. I simply took my services elsewhere. (Sorry. I didn't mean for the pun-ishment to spillover onto you, my dear reader.)
In 2022 I explored a new way to leave a church. I left the church I had been with for 10 years after serving in many capacities, giving a number of sermons (around a dozen, I think), and making and saying goodbye to many friends. But it was clear that it was time for me to go.
I should admit from the start that this is a difficult subject for me to write about. I have made a lot of progress on the road of forgiveness, but I am still on the journey. I know that I was not rejected as a person, but because of my ideas. Both popular psychology and the Bible agree that I should not take it personally.
But it hurt like hell. And I was mad as hell. I felt betrayed and belittled. Not only did I not want to be at RICC, I could not imagine being there at all.
You know what I hate? Online recipes. I Google a recipe for roasted pumpkin because I have a pumpkin and I want to know what temperature to set my oven at. But first I have to read paragraph after paragraph about how wonderful fall is, and how plentiful pumpkins are, and how easy they are to cook, and how they brighten your dinner table, and how the author's mother taught them to cook this simple, comforting, hearty food and it warms the cockles of the author's heart to share the secret with us. The hope that we will teach this recipe to our children is expressed. The whole thing is lovely. Touching. Almost cinematic. Cut to the chase, please. What oven temperature do I need?
I am skipping right to the solution to my problem. (Well, it would have been a bit more of a skip without the pumpkin recipe rant, I know. But those darn recipes, am I right?) The problem itself will have to wait for another post. Part 2 is already in the works, but it meanders even worse than part 1.
Early in July, just a few months after I had left RICC, my friend Tim came back to Korea to take care of some business. (He had moved to Vietnam long before any of this went down.) He was attending RICC that morning, and asked me to join him for lunch. So I went back to RICC for the church service that morning. Afterwards we talked, and he got a sense for how disturbed I was*. He suggested a meeting between me and RICC's pastor, offering to mediate. We did just that a few days later. It was a raw conversation.
*What he said was, "I have never seen you so angry, Rob. You must do something about this."
(In hindsight, as I'm writing this, it is striking that this meeting did not seem to be such a big deal for the pastor. He was not defensive, and apologized for how he had handled my situation. But there was no move towards reconciliation, other than expressing hope that it would happen. He seemed very sad through the whole process. Sad and reluctant, but ultimately ready to make the sacrifice for his church.)
At the end of that meeting, Tim suggested that I should attend RICC and pray every week in person for the pastor. I knew that anger was consuming me, and that I had not been able to dispose of it properly on my own. Tim's idea felt Holy Spirit-led to me, and so I committed to it, with no idea of how long it would last.
So I resumed both attending RICC and praying with the pastor before the service. I had used to pray like this for him before our falling out, and considered it a good thing for both of us and the church. I would pray for his sermon preparation, and that the message he delivered would draw the congregation closer to God. I can't speak for him, but my pre-service prayers took on a new meaning and purpose for me, this time around: my topics were pretty much the same, and I still wanted God to use the pastor to reach the people. The difference was that there was anger in my heart towards him. I thought this would make it hard for me to pray for him, but it really didn't. Instead, I found that God's love moved through me in my prayers for him, and perforated the anger in my heart. Over the next few weeks, prayer not only softened my anger, but wore it away.
Before praying regularly for the pastor, I was having trouble being in any church service, anywhere. I thought that I could just shake the dust off of my sandals and leave RICC behind. But sitting in other services at other churches, my mind kept going back. The anger in my heart was an anchor with an elastic chain that kept pulling my head back to all the things that frustrated me about RICC. It wasn't every moment, but it happened a lot.
I am no spring chicken. I know that forgiveness is an important, if not the most important aspect of Christianity. Maybe even the whole world. And I thought I was working on it. I had met the pastor (once), and told him that I forgave him, and meant it. I really did.
Or at least I thought I did. Maybe I just intended to forgive him. Or maybe I just forgave what I could but there was still a lot left to forgive. I am absolutely sure that I forgave him for the style and method in which he dropped me like a diseased turd, even if I didn't forgive him for the act of dropping me. At some level I must have known that it would be a process, and that it would not happen overnight. But there was always that anger in my heart, whispering to me, like an addiction. "Go on, pick me up! It will feel good, and you can put me back down any time."
The funny thing is, that when I started attending again, and praying for him before the service, the forgiveness started to flow. I could not hold onto my grudge while I was praying for him. I did pick it up again from time to time, but always to find that it had gotten lighter.
As we continued, I found that I did not need to pick up my grudge as often as before. I sometimes looked around during the week to find that I wasn't carrying it at all. Of course, there were also times when I would suddenly feel my grudge jump onto my back, like the proverbial monkey. But at least it was no longer a gorilla.
"Time heals all wounds," they say. They never add, "But be sure to wash the wound with a disinfectant, and keep it bandaged," but we all know that's part of it. And sometimes a wound requires a trip to the emergency room, and stitches, and vitamin E gel to reduce scarring. Emotional wounds also require more than just the passage of time. Like an untreated flesh wound, they tend to fester. If you're lucky, the pain will fade into the background noise of the world. Or maybe that is not lucky? Maybe too much of that "noise" in the background makes one unable to hear the truth being whispered all the time by God. At any rate, neither type of wound heals without care, no matter how much time one gives it.
Over the course of a few weeks of forcing myself to go to RICC, it became easier. By mid-September, I found myself in a mental space which I had not predicted: I was tolerating RICC with very little effort. I wasn't happy with the worship service, or the preaching, or the music really*, but the idea of returning weekly didn't make me want to break something or scream. For the first time since February, I had an actual choice of whether or not to attend. Until September, the thought of attending RICC was almost totally repugnant to me, even though there were people there who I love. Instead, attending RICC became, in my mind, just another kind of work towards God's kingdom. But not the only work, and not work to which God was direct-from-the-burning-bush calling me.
*It has always been so loud. I can't hear the people around me singing, only the people on the stage. I have brought it up in the past, but never really pushed hard. With the people running sound, it did not feel like my place to offer strong criticism (and my apologies for doing it here, brother), and the few times I brought it up with the pastor did not produce results. I see parallels to the bigger picture of the attitude of RICCs leadership as well. But that is for another post. On my last Sunday I put in ear plugs, so I could at least hear myself singing. Instant mood improvement.
This story is not finished, but this was an important piece right out of the middle of it. I heard once on a Christian radio station in Kansas, that forgiveness is such an important part of being a Christian that it might be worth it in the end even if everything else about Christianity is wrong. It felt true to me, and my experience in 2022 has definitely given evidence to this claim:
Forgiveness is the foundation.
(Thanks to Nelson Townsend for helping me clean up the anger/anchor paragraph and the emergency room suggestion!)
(Thank you also to my friend who is still running sound at RICC. I rewrote that paragraph in a more sensitive way after he approached me with gentleness and grace.)
