In Defense of Starbucks Church [Part 1]

I have given myself permission to not go to church for 3 months. One Sunday morning in Mexico, I woke up and realized that I was dreading going to church. As I lay there analyzing that feeling (which is what, as an introvert, I feel obligated to do with all my feelings) it dawned on me that I had not wanted to go to church for a long time. I would wake up on Sunday morning and go to church out of habit, but once I got there, I just wanted to leave. This had happened to me at every church I went to over a year, so I do not blame any particular church for not catering to what I wanted to find. Most of the problem lay in the fact that many of my expectations of what church should be were unrealistic. There were parts of me that wanted to find community in church; that wanted to be vulnerable and find love among fellow Christians in spite of my inadequacies and failures. I think that is a reasonable craving, but I have to admit that the environment I found in several churches was not one of acceptance. Unconditional love was preached, the idea of it was held up as ideal, but in practice most of what I found was a watered-down version of grace that only reached to superficial failures like telling white lies and letting dinner burn and leaving your shopping cart in the middle of the parking lot. At first I felt like there was no one in the church who would accept me for who I really was. It was hard to believe that Jesus would accept me when some of his Christians got squirmy when I asked about sin and failure.

Then I realized two things. They didn’t come to me out of the blue one day sitting in the sunshine and listening to the birds. They probably came to me one night when I was running my heart out on the beach and crying about what a sad, sad case I was. I realized that first of all, I am one of the Christians I was complaining about. The very act of not being transparent myself was only exacerbating the problem. By not being real, I was encouraging others to do the same. The second thing I realized was that I didn’t know how to be the person I wanted to be. When I thought of what a Christian should look like, and then held that blueprint over my own sad heart, none of the shapes lined up. I needed to figure out if there was something wrong with me, something wrong with my blueprint, or both. It ended up being a little of both, but that took me a long time to figure out. I’m slow.