Yesterday I went to the library, and came home with the book "Quitting Church" by Julia Duin. Duin is a long-time religion reporter for various publications, and a regular contributor at the "Get Religion" blog, which I have been reading for years. (It is a blog about how the press covers religious news, usually poorly.) But until lately I had not known she had published books.
In this post I am going to write about my own background and how I ended up quitting church. In some followup posts I will discuss my experiences and thoughts about some of the topics she explores in the book.
My parents were church-going Christians, so I was brought up in church from the beginning. We mostly attended Christian Church/Church of Christ congregations, which my father had grown up in. After high school I went to Cincinnati Bible College, one of their schools, and graduated in 1972 with a degree in Christian Education.
For seven years I was part of a group of students and former students from the Bible college who operated a store-front mission church in a slum about a mile down the hill from the campus. We did not have a pastor; all we could have afforded would have been a part-time student preacher--we all were or had been students, so we divided up the duties and did them ourselves. I preached several times a month, led singing, served on the provisional board, was treasurer for a while.
Over my lifetime, I have been part of 15 other churches. About half were Christian Church congregations. Of the rest, two were mainline Protestant--a Disciples of Christ church, and a rural United Church of Christ (the locals paid very little attention to the denomination--the part-time preacher who served them and two other small churches every Sunday was usually a Methodist student minister). Of the rest, one was part of the discipling movement for a while, one was an independent church, one was an Assemblies of God church.
And one was the Vineyard Community Church in Cincinnati, Ohio--the only mega-church I have been part of, and also the best church I have ever seen. They didn't get to be a mega-church because of a spectacular preacher; Steve Sjogren was good, but not earth-shaking in the pulpit. But he and the others who started that church stumbled on a new idea--they called it "Servant Evangelism" in the beginning, later shifted to the term "Kindness Outreach." I have concluded the reason for their success was that they gave ordinary people things to do to express their faith outside the church doors, all week long. Most Saturdays they had some kind of outreach going on somewhere in the city--and you didn't have to be ordained or take Bible college classes to do it! They grew to a peak of 7,000 people; they also planted around 3 dozen other churches. For a while they were running 7 services each weekend--their building was built to accommodate about 600. When they did build a new building, they cut back to only three services--they chose to spend more of their budget on outreach rather than a bigger building. I might still be there, but we had to move to another city to be available to care for elderly parents.
For most of my adult life, another factor in church life has been small groups. I have been involved in them most of the time since my late 20s. Some were okay. A few were very good. The worst I have been in were led by either preachers or professors; I concluded the skill set needed for those is not conducive for good small group work.
Of the groups that I have been in over the years, the best were those that did more than just study the Bible and discuss. One of my early groups--and one of the best--made a choice: we were all young couples, some with kids, others without. But we all moved our residences at times. A few had been stuck moving without help in the past. But we made a custom to pitch in whenever someone moved...we would change our meeting to Saturday, show up in the morning to load the truck, and go over to the new place to unload. The ladies in the group would bring food for lunch, and help with packing and unpacking. One major thing I learned from that group is that you get to know people a lot better when you do other things with them besides Bible study! There is something about working together that builds stronger relationships. Sadly, most churches don't do much of that.
Sadly, the move to Indianapolis in 2006 was what started me out the back door of the church. We visited an assortment of churches--most of the Vineyards in the city, and a few others--and never felt at home. Part of it seems to be the local culture; Indianapolis is a very different city from Cincinnati, going back to the early settlers. Some of it was that so many churches were trying to grow to mega-church status, but they couldn't make it happen. And some of the problems seem to relate to other items Duin wrote about in her book; I just was not so much exposed to them until leaving the Cincinnati Vineyard.
So by the spring of 2009, I left the organized church. We looked for a house church, but Indianapolis is not prime territory for those. George Barna wrote some years ago that the Midwest is the last stronghold of the traditional church, and I am afraid he was right. I still have fellowship with other Christians; there was a group I fell into that year that met regularly, just not even as formal as a house church. Some of the original group have moved away; others of us still get together at times. And I have made other Christian friends online. We are part of the group variously called "Nones" or "Dones" by some writers. Some of us prefer to call ourselves " free-range Christians," hence the title of this post.
That is a summary of my journey. I will have another post or two related to Duin's book in the coming days.
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