2
The Church

The door handle is the handshake of the building.

—Juhani Pallasmaa, Finnish architect

There has to be a handle here somewhere.

The doors of the Abbey were as daunting as the enormous cross that I had avoided in order to get to them.

The cross is a simple but imposing symbol that acts as a boundary between the safety and solace of the Abbey grounds and the world beyond. Passing the cross feels as though one has left the one world to enter another, wholly other.

As I stood at its doors, I could feel the peace of the Abbey all around me, but I was not at peace. Far from it. I was an island of internal chaos in the midst of the absolutely maddeningly calm sea surrounding me.

The past few months—perhaps years, were I to be completely honest with myself—had given me ever-increasing anxiety about the church. Houses of worship had ceased to be places of peace, becoming conduits of doubt, pain, and an endless array of unanswered questions. I had long since lost my ability to push down the feelings, put on a happy face, and pretend as though everything was alright.

Were I not the pastor, it is uncertain whether I would have gone to church at all. But what is a pastor to do whenever their call to ministry and spiritual crises comes into conflict? If a parishioner steps away, a few may notice. If a pastor steps away, everyone notices. And worse, there is little hope of returning to pastoral ministry once one leaves. Memories run long, and pastors who question the status quo can leave the congregants who trusted them feeling betrayed.

If I outed my doubts, I was out of a job. But worse, I wasn't certain that I could find a way back to faith or the church if I left. I had seen how merciless Christians can be to those who struggle and walk away. They are shunned, marginalized, and ostracized. I knew that if I left the church, I was on my own … perhaps forever.

Was it possible to have a relationship with Christ without his church?

The questions crushed me, and rather than face them, I did what I had always done and pushed them aside, hoping they would stay out of the way just a moment longer.

So here I stood, about to enter this place that was supposed to bring me peace, and dare I hope, answers. Only one thing was standing in the way of whatever was to be: my fear … and these monstrously daunting old-world architecture doors, which weren't doing a blessed thing to ease my anxiety.

Where the heck is the handle?

I stood staring at the doors for what seemed like an eternity.

How can there be no handle?

I looked around to see if anyone was watching.

No, I was alone.

I looked to the right and left of the doors to see if there was a handicap-accessible button to press. Nothing.

I waved my hands in front of the doors, wondering if there was a motion sensor or camera. I must have looked insane; I certainly felt a bit insane.

Still nothing but silence.

I half wondered if I needed to wait until the last light of Durin's Day.1

I stifled a nervous laugh.

This is a bit too on the nose, I thought.

Just another in a long line of places professing to provide welcome to weary travelers and safety to wary wanderers, offering nothing to either in the end.

This was looking to be another in a long string of disappointments from religious institutions.

Had I come all this way for nothing?

I sat down, cross-legged in front of the door, put my head in my hands, and wept. Were anyone watching in that moment, it must have been quite the sight. The feelings of exclusion from this Abbey, a place of hope, too closely mirrored my feelings about the church.

I felt utterly abandoned, and it was overwhelming.

This disconnected feeling wasn't new, though. I had been struggling with it for quite a while. The promises made to me by the church didn't match up to my experiences in it … at all.

I had grown up hearing that God is love and that those who were “red, yellow, black, and white” were precious in God's sight.2 I had been raised to believe that we were to care for the poor and those in need. I had been taught from an early age that God accepts us as we are and that nothing could stand in the way of that radical love.

This kind of selfless, self-sacrificing love was the foundation of Christianity, I had been told. And I bought into it. I had become convinced that Christians were to be the Good Samaritan of the story, not the robbers. I was certain that Christians were supposed to be the Prodigal Son's father, celebrating those on the margins without question or qualm. I had come to believe that when Jesus said “Love your neighbor,” there was no limit to who was my neighbor and how far I needed to go to love them.

I grew up believing the things I was taught about Christian compassion, forgiveness, and my responsibility to help the harmed and oppressed. As an adult, I worked hard to live them out in every way that could.

This is the way of Christ, which also meant it was the only way for a Christian to live … or, so I was told.

I was shocked as an adult to discover a church that was largely unrecognizable when compared to the one I had been taught to expect as a child. Rather than a church that saw itself as the hands and feet of Jesus in this world, I discovered a church that largely failed to love like Jesus. I was dismayed to find congregations filled with people who disliked diversity, turned their backs on the poor, and created walls around God's love to keep out others. I couldn't reconcile the disconnect between what was and what was supposed to be.

How could the church dismiss from the table the very people with whom Jesus regularly shared meals?

I no longer recognized the church, but I held out hope that the Abbey would somehow reconnect me to it. Looking up at the doors once again, I noticed rows of beautiful stained-glass windows. They must be magnificent from the inside, if only I could get there.

While their presence didn't surprise me, my reaction to them did. I felt sadness and regret for the church. For centuries, stained-glass windows have been used to tell the story of God to people who were unable to read it for themselves. For centuries, the church's most compelling stories were reflected in the windows that surrounded its worship spaces.

But today, the most compelling story the church is telling is one of exclusion, bigotry, hatred, and harm. Ask a non-Christian about the church's story and they are more likely to mention sex scandals and political alliances than they are compassion, Christ, or the cross.

The church has lost its way.

It has forgotten its story.

My eyes, now open to all of the harm that the church had done, could not look away from it. How could I serve another day in a system that was desperately (but, hopefully, not irreparably) broken? How could I serve another day in a system that had desperately (but, hopefully, not irreparably) broken me?

I prayed that on the other side of these doors, I could find hope. I desperately wanted to believe that things could be different, that the church could be different … that I could be different.

If there was hope for me, then there was hope for the church.

If I could reconnect with Christ, then so could the church.

There was a feeling in my gut that said, “To advance you must retreat. To move forward you must go back.” For reasons I couldn't quite explain, I needed to get closer to Christ, which meant I needed to get closer to the roots of the church.

I was convinced that, were I to go back in time far enough, I would eventually land upon an era when the church wasn't a complete and utter embarrassment.

But how far must I go?

Though my questions about the Bible were growing, I desperately wanted to trust that its hopeful tone about the early days of the church were honest, that they were pure. I desperately needed to believe that all hope was not lost.

The Early Church

In the Bible, there is a two-volume book written by a first-century doctor by the name of Luke. The Gospel of Luke is volume I; the Acts of the Apostles is volume II. Luke is working to compile eyewitness accounts of the life of Jesus and the Early Church to convince a Roman officer by the name of Theophilus to not leave his childhood faith behind. Luke says that he wants his reader to “be certain of the truth of everything you were taught.”3

Theophilus is not Luke's only reader, though. Sitting outside of the Abbey, I found myself reading over Theophilus's shoulder, hoping to find something to cling to as well. I longed to have my childhood faith back and believe that there was reason for hope. I needed to believe that there was a time when the church didn't act so insufferable and irredeemably broken.

And there it was—late in the second chapter of Luke's second volume—a glimmer of hope. Almost as an aside, Luke gives a few words about the Early Church:

• All the believers devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching, and to fellowship, and to sharing in meals (including the Lord's Supper), and to prayer. A deep sense of awe came over them all, and the apostles performed many miraculous signs and wonders. And all the believers met together in one place and shared everything they...