I was considering calling this post, “So You Want To Be Misty Edwards.” I say this because I recently discovered that my favorite worship song this past year – and actually the only worship I listened to all year – “You Won’t Relent,” is written by Misty Edwards, a high-profile worship leader, worship music singer on many different projects (I think a lot of Vineyard’s stuff), and key IHOP-er. (That’s International House of Prayer, not pancakes, a charismatic-ish organization that has provided 24/7 prayer and worship every single day since 1999.) I was sort of shocked to discover that she had written this song, because – yes – I didn’t know that women could or did write worship music, and had long gotten the impression that contemporary worship music had always been something of a boy’s club.
I wondered if it was too late to grow up to be Misty Edwards, and was surprised that I even wanted to be Misty Edwards. I say this, by the way, not from the pew, but from behind the microphone on Sunday mornings and afternoons, during the seven years in high school and college I served as a vocalist on the worship team both for the church services at two major evangelical churches in California college towns (UCC in Davis and First Pres in Berkeley) and various youth and college fellowships throughout the week. (Going only by the latter, I’ve sung in worship teams in large group settings for a total of ten years.) Though, I couldn’t say something from behind a pew lately. I haven’t attended church regularly since May 2010, despite the fact that weirdly I still appear in photos on several church websites, including one I only attended for two months in 2011, though I suppose it’s not that weird, as since the age of probably fourteen, I’ve never been involved in less than three ministries at any given time. That’s another thing I could have called this post, “How I Became A Twenty-Something Statistic of Evangelical Disaffection.” Believe me, I was as surprised as you might be.
I think I want to be Misty Edwards, or have had moods in the past day during which I sort of wanted to be Misty Edwards, because I think leading worship might be one of the things I’m the best at, that comes most effortlessly to me, if not naturally, then certainly after a decade of experience. During a very tumultuous and surreal coming of age towards the end of college, singing worship music of various kinds and in various settings (I’m a classically trained chorister and have performed gospel as well as “four chord wonders” backed by electric guitar) was one of the few ways of relaxing and feeling good that I could engage in without feeling guilty – after all, I was doing it for God, not myself. In fact, leaving the church has meant leaving music-making to a large extent as well. I keep getting together with guitarist guys I know to try and write music, but such efforts have been as spotty and inconsistent as my church attendance. I don’t even sing in the shower anymore. I don’t know why this doesn’t bother me more, but it sort of makes sense: I sing in choirs, I sing in bands – I sing with other people for other people. I don’t sing alone, so recently I rarely sing at all. I guess I’m saying that when I left the church, I lost a big piece of my life and self-understanding too: I was not a passive consumer of evangelical Christian spirituality or culture, and I didn’t leave because I got bored, or wanted to have lots of sex with lots of men, and leaving wasn’t easy or without personal consequences. So why did I leave? Why can’t I go back? I’m trying to find some understanding for myself by writing these words, and I think part of the reason is that I left the church for matters of conscience. I left the church because I had to: I couldn’t have the parts of being a Christian in Christian community of the evangelical flavor that felt good and worthwhile without having the parts that made me furious, alienated, sad, and profoundly disgusted.
For a long time, I simply felt an almost physical force keeping me away from going into a sanctuary. There were actually Sundays when I still lived in Berkeley when I’d walk to First Pres, hesitate outside of the narthex for ten minutes, fully intending to go in, and then turn around and go read a book in Starbucks instead. One time during Advent in 2010, I attended a service at Christ Church, a Presbyterian church down the street from me that quite a few of my friends had attended in college, and I felt so disconnected from what should have been the most familiar rhetoric and actions of my life that I became increasingly internally agitated. When I got up for communion, I clipped my hip on the edge of a pew, and without thinking, slapped the cross-embossed pew, hard, in “revenge.” I slapped the pew! With a cross on it! (“Bad pew!” said various people unprompted when I told this story, and pointed, as though at, I dunno, an invisible dog.) I hunched into my peacoat, cheeks red, and took communion in great embarrassment and consternation at my uncharacteristically and fruitlessly (my hand being the only injured party) violent outburst. I feel like this might have been the low point for me in my relationship to organized religion.
More recently, I’ve had to walk out of sermons at two churches I tried out with friends in 2011, and breathe with my head between my knees in the ladies room, feeling deeply panicked and surreal, though most recently, I instead walked up to the pastor afterward and argued theology with him for about ten minutes, much to his surprise and perhaps incomprehension, as I didn’t really make an impact. I got the impression when I talked to the pastor, the way he talked to me (calling my point of view “western” and “individualistic”) and unloaded more Bible verses on me than I could answer back with, that to him I was a type: the liberal young San Francisco skeptic, maybe unchurched, but seeking, and reading the Bible for her own, on her own, needing to be shown the light, which explained my idiosyncratic and probably secular way of interpreting the Bible. What?! I found myself thinking afterward: perfect church attendance, church choir, bell choir, Sunday school, youth groups, mission trips, Vacation Bible School, teaching Vacation Bible School, Christian camp at Mission Springs and Mount Hermon every year, watching kids in the church nursery, leading kids’ youth groups, Bible study, worship team, Urbana, college fellowship, leader in college fellowship, Bible study leader, years of faithful daily quiet time and Bible reading, having actually read every book in the Bible, Stephen Minister, being the designated prayer person for the prayer room after services, joining a Christian journal at Cal, being Editor in Chief of that Christian journal, studying Christianity and theological developments in the middle ages for freaking my major, and I come off as the great unwashed hipster girl dilettante now?!
The answer is: yes, yes, that’s how I come off now. I was on the inside of the evangelical Christian experience, and I am now outside of it. I am still the girl who did all those many, many Christian things, but now there’s an addition to my worldview that has accompanied the loss of my lived experience in the evangelical cocoon: the ability to look at all the things I did and saw from the perspective of a person who no longer does them. I can name now things I took for granted then, both the positive and negative. Having accepted that reality about myself right now, I am no longer afraid of entering a church, and I can also tell you bluntly why I was so overwhelmed by negative feelings at the sight of one these past two years. I’ll make a list:
1. Have you ever noticed that a church service consists mostly of men standing in front of you telling and singing to you about things like they know more about life and God than you do while you remain seated? I didn’t notice that. Has it ever occurred to you that no matter how many times an evangelical church talks about equality and freedom and power for believers, that the rigid and often masculinist hierarchy and form of the service directly contradicts this message?
2. Have you noticed how most of these men are white and all of them are straight, even when the congregation isn’t mostly white?
3. Have you noticed that no matter how many times an evangelical church talks about feeling connected to God, having a personal relationship with him, and avoiding legalism, that at the end of the day they will legislate their actions (and yours) according to a literal interpretation of a Bible verse? As in, they will answer any question if you get right down to it, with a quote from the Bible, as though this automatically means something and settles it? I don’t have relationships where I point to a founding document about our relationship to settle what I or the other person in that relationship can and can’t do. I also don’t have relationships with invisible people that I talk to in my head and hear from ultimately through ancient texts written over thousands of years in languages I don’t read. Other than Jesus, apparently.
4. Speaking of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, and going along with the last point, I’ve often gotten the message that it’s “not my will, but your will, God, be done,” and that all our priorities and decisions and even thoughts, feelings, and gut reactions and perceptions should be turned over to God’s ultimate veto. This was the second biggest factor in me leaving. It’s the most central idea of the evangelical ideology and way of life, and it simply doesn’t make sense. I’m not even talking about whether God exists or not (I tend to think he does) or whether God’s ideas about your life ultimately trump yours (I believe they do, and thankfully so) or whether it would be good to seek out God’s understanding (I feel like that’s what I’m doing…), I’m saying how do you freaking claim to know God’s will in every instance, and how is not knowing willful defiance of his authority that necessitates gratuitous and indulgent self-hatred? Evangelical Christians don’t claim to hear voices in their head proclaiming to be God, or only on rare occasions, and we’re encouraged to question such occasions with scripture and in community. So really what they’re saying is that your priorities and thoughts and feelings and perceptions should take a backseat to a Bible verse or to a very rigid organization of value and ethics animated and supported by a series of Bible verses. That is what they’re saying! Which, to me, sounds like a very ineffective and dangerous way to go about living one’s life, and furthermore is not a personal relationship with a Living God, let along a living person! Or if it is, it’s an abusive personal relationship!
5. What Christians who advocate this are doing is called gaslighting, a way in which another person undermines another person’s beliefs and feelings about themselves and the world by presenting false information, thus making them think they’re crazy, which is a kind of emotional abuse, most notoriously defined this past year in an essay from a man named Yashar Ali that went viral called “A Message to Women from a Man: You Are Not Crazy.” I want to reiterate this definition, and its origin, from the essay:
The term comes from the 1944 MGM film, Gaslight, starring Ingrid Bergman. Bergman’s husband in the film, played by Charles Boyer, wants to get his hands on her jewelry. He realizes he can accomplish this by having her certified as insane and hauled off to a mental institution. To pull off this task, he intentionally sets the gaslights in their home to flicker off and on, and every time Bergman’s character reacts to it, he tells her she’s just seeing things. In this setting, a gaslighter is someone who presents false information to alter the victim’s perception of him or herself.
In this case, pastors or congregants parroting pastors, are presenting the false information that the will of God is directly accessible at all times, and that a legalistic lens through which to view all human experience is a spiritual and noble and grand thing, and that if you happen to perceive things differently, it’s as a result of your sinfulness. If God doesn’t make sense – or really, if the evangelical church’s version of God doesn’t make sense – then it’s your fault, and is a failing not even or only of understanding, but of character. In fact, the vast majority of evangelical Christian rhetoric revolves around your existential at-fault-ness, your ontological suckitude, as it were. A very common prayer I have heard is, “Oh Lord, please let us not forget how broken we are before you, and how we aren’t right, except for your help, please let us know we are dependent on you, that we are the worst of sinners before you.” This is a very common prayer! People murmur piously when this prayer is prayed in front of them! I was one of those people!
6. On a related note, have you ever noticed how self-deprecation is NOT one of the Fruits of the Spirit? This isn’t just sarcasm: take a look at the fruits of the Spirit, the virtues of a soul being redeemed by God outlined in Galations 5. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Not even humility: not even humility, is on this list of virtues. Elsewhere, Paul also discusses what he thinks appropriate for Christian contemplation: “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable – if anything is excellent or praiseworthy – think about such things” (Philippians 4:8). Whatever is true! If anything is excellent or praiseworthy! I mean, the quality of a Christian, someone redeemed by Christ, is that although they were in their sinful state as scarlet, now they are white as snow! (Isaiah 1:18 – this is the deal even in the Old Testament!) Right now! Otherwise what is this so-called power of your so-called God? I’ve also often heard this weird little idea batted around by evangelicals that some people need to hear less grace, that some Christians are afflicted with believing too much in grace. They need more “truth.” (About how they suck!) Too much grace! Oh freaking really?! This is an ugly thing to say, a mean and arrogant thing to say! Grace is the truth! Grace is the truth. Evangelicals are mostly Protestant – have you never heard of sola gratia? By God’s grace you are saved? That. Is. The. Religion.
You may note that I am throwing around Bible verses like that automatically means something, which was one of my earlier complaints. I apologize, my inner Bible trivia nerd is getting the best of me. I did win so many ring pops in a Scripture memorizing contest as a small child when visiting a church in Granite Bay, beating out everyone else, which I dutifully felt like a sinner about though, that I felt dizzy with triumph and sugar poisoning for the rest of the day. Also, I’m trying to point out that there are perfectly adequate hermeneutics that look enough like common evangelical-speak in the way they approach scripture that can advocate for the unconditional saved state of a Christian (a person determined not by you, but by God) and thus require a worshipful focus on things like love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control and talking about true, noble, right, pure, admirable, excellent, and praiseworthy things like Portlandia. As opposed to the puny, snotty, naughty character of humanity. Oh, and also! I can totally talk about scripture however I want, and emphasize whatever message I get out of it, and pay less attention to things I don’t find helpful! What are you going to do about it if my theology doesn’t take into account every single verse on everything all the time? Shun me at Bible study? Guess what, I don’t go to Bible study! Muahaha.
7. And this brings me to the main reason why I found evangelical life unbearable: the evangelical Christian God is a bully and a narcissist. Apparently, we only exist to give God glory, and that is the only point of us (never mind God calling us “good”). Furthermore, we need to understand that sin is bad because it offends God’s sensibilities, because it offends his ego. It is a personal affront to his power and his authority. If we don’t fall in line, we will be sent to hell, because God freaking feels like it. Sin isn’t wrong because it’s bad, but rather because God doesn’t want you to do things he tells you not to, because it hurts his feelings. God is more offended than the victim of another person’s wrongdoing. Everything is always about him. I’m writing this in an air of angry and incredulous disbelief, but very similar statements to the ones I just wrote are preached on Sundays with complete seriousness, and accepted as such.
I don’t care if God is the God of the universe, I don’t want to be part of a religion that bases human life around assuaging someone’s ego, as though that’s the best and most righteous thing you could be doing with your time. I don’t want my religion to be co-dependence. And this version of Christianity particularly angers me because from what I know of God, he doesn’t seem that way to me. I feel the presence of God both as a loving comforting assurance of my value and as a continual challenge to broaden my spirit’s limits, to understand more, to acknowledge new things that I didn’t know or want to admit and then show me how necessary and good and interesting and compelling the truth always was, not to lead me back to the point of desperation and knock me down again just to show he can, and how useless I am without him. I think that God cares about how we treat ourselves and others because he cares about his creation, and loves us, not because he’s so concerned with how our actions reflect upon him. Why would that matter to him? He’s God! Who would he have to impress? I’d like to be more like him, actually.
The most revealing and surprising thing I’ve learned since leaving the church is that God, embodied in Jesus and elsewhere in human history, hasn’t seemed to change all that much: I’m the one who changed. I spent so many years in the church trying to be worthy of my salvation, to act like it had really happened, that I was really saved, and I heard so many messages that reinforced my feelings of deficiency, and drove me to work harder and harder. What I couldn’t admit to myself is that God wanted me, that God loved me, and that I could only come to him and know him as myself. The problem was, I didn’t know who that was, and going to church every week wasn’t helping me figure that out, wasn’t helping me be closer to God, or even genuinely closer to other people, so I stopped going. I’ve also found that knowing myself and letting yourself be known is less about coming up with the right adjectives or experiences for one’s identity, and more about listening to what you’re really saying and thinking and feeling, and being less afraid of telling others directly what that is, spending less energy trying to out-guess their reactions and calculating your self-representation to your idea of their expectations. I don’t know how good I am at that yet, but I do know where I’m going and where I’ve been more consistently, and lose less days to an internal frenzy of anxiety and confusion and shame.
I like the lyrics of Misty Edward’s “You Won’t Relent”: “You won’t relent until you have it all: my heart is yours – come be the fire inside of me, come be the flame upon my heart” interspersed with the “love is as strong as death” passage in Song of Solomon. But I don’t want to be Misty Edwards. I watched a testimony she recorded for IHOP’s Onething conference, in which she had a nightmare that led her into the epicenter of a nuclear blast in the middle of a warzone, and she saw the Lord in the form of a man, or the angel of the Lord running to her. She asked God how he could be there in this place, that if he were causing all the bloodshed, then what was evil? He pointed at a Buddhist monk, calmly tilling a beautiful garden, in a space the bloodshed couldn’t touch, and said something like, “In those days, I will call what is evil good, and what is good evil, and woe to those who are offended!” She told him she wasn’t offended, and he told her, in response, to praise his name.
I think this dream is a perfect illustration, among many other things (it’s kind of a huge dream), of the crazy version of God we are expected to praise in the evangelical faith tradition: a bellicose, frightening and even kind of evil deity, who is capricious and jealous and bloody-minded, and feels compelled to dictate morality in ways that don’t make sense, just so long as he can be acknowledged as the only person who can dictate it. But Misty doesn’t seem like a prophet: she seems like a medium. Mediums are instruments that gods and demons speak through. I like to think that prophets can hear what they’re saying, and remember who they are, even and often grumbling about the difficulty the call to prophesy causes them.
I had a dream a few weeks before Christmas that I and a few others were meeting in a church to have an encounter with the angel Gabriel. He was awesome to behold, raiments of blue and green and gold, phasing in and out of the form of man and the form of man carved in living stone, with a sword, more the angel of strength and less of annunciation, though considering the timing, maybe I had just had more pastel impressions of Gabriel meeting with Mary before and he was always like that: he did have to tell her not to be afraid. We had all met together to receive an object of great power from Gabriel that the church had stolen, and we were to divide the power among all people. I don’t know what it was. I woke up.
Other Contributors
Cliff
John Montague
Grace
Darren
Laura
Lue-Yee Tsang
