Faith Thoughts: Round 2

23 and 30 August 2015

I worry that growing up in the South, in the Bible belt has done me a disservice. I worry that growing up at the end of the 20th Century and beginning of the 21st Century has harmed my understanding of God and faith.

Like Rondell said, I’ve grown up with a familiarity of church. I was raised in the church because my mom was adamant that I be baptized as an infant. Rev. Scott Johnson refused until/unless he knew my parents were going to raise me in the church. I was there with my momma pretty much anytime the doors were open (and still am when I go home to visit). Around second or third grade, I felt so convicted that I crawled over some older congregants to join my momma in the line for communion (normally we passed trays around, but this Sunday, it was done more like we do it at Mosaic). I waited until my daddy was home to make my public proclamation of faith on father’s day that year (he worked out of town as a union insulator) and that equated to joining the church in the Cumberland Presbyterian tradition. I had gone through the membership class with Reverend Harper at that time and that was that.

No mentoring, no guidance, just a camp or retreat each season if I was lucky. I don’t blame anyone; I just find it interesting. A couple of years later, I watched as my church crumbled. I called out adults on their promise that they make and that I had joined in making as a member when one is baptized to help raise one another up in the faith. My relationship with the church changed after that, and it has never been the same since. Summer between my junior and senior year of high school, I participated in a scholarship program called Tennessee’s Junior Miss. Our first activity was to convince people to donate blood for a blood drive at the mall. While walking around chatting with people, a man who was there on a pitstop during a summer mission trip asked me if I knew where I would end up when I died. I assured him that I did, but that was more because I am an introvert and don’t like small talk nor do I like to be challenged than it was a sure and true answer, but I went with it because I was raised in the south, I took communion, I had joined the church—sure I was going to heaven when I died. It left me a bit uneasy, and I just kept it to myself and moved forward.

I went to college and took a required religion class on the Old Testament. It shook me, and my church family didn’t know what to do with me as I began to question and challenge the tradition I was raised in. As I continued in college, church became a chore, a routine, rather than an act of worship or community, so I stopped going somewhere during my sophomore year. I studied abroad and saw the women in Ghana own their faith in a way I had never experienced before; I watched the military families on base in Stuttgart get excited about setting up a Bible school experience for their children and decided that when I got home it was time to go church shopping. I wasn’t sure what that meant, and I tried out a church here or there when I felt so compelled, but nothing felt right and nothing stuck. Finally, I ended up at a sister church to my home church where I knew and valued the youth minister that I grew up seeing lead camps and retreats. I stayed there for a while and helped with youth group, and it was better, but it still wasn’t right.

During my victory lap at college, I was trying to figure out where to work. I found out about MTR and through a whirlwind experience came to interview. I left the weekend realizing that I needed a work community that saw the relationship between faith and vocation (I blame Maryville College a bit for this), and luckily, I was offered a spot in the Class of 2013 to see what that meant. It was challenging during that year because I was still shaky in faith, and Memphis just shook my foundations a bit more. I church shopped and landed on Fellowship for a while, but I didn’t feel like I belonged. Going from a church of 100 to a church of however big Fellowship is could only be described a major culture shock. I stopped attending during my first year post-residency and would try to find a church whenever guilt from the MTR community got the best of me. Luckily, my best friend Milazzo was faithful and would ask about it and invite me to services with her and then Emily and I became close during my first year out of residency as she was my learning coach at school and had been Milazzo’s mentor the year before. At the end of first semester last year or beginning of second semester, we were talking about church and she was about to start church hunting since she had moved to the neighborhood. I told her about visiting Mosaic a couple of times and said we should try it together. It is because of Emily that I am still around and that I took a leap.

Now, I am still struggling. I don’t know about membership because I still don’t know where I stand in general and that’s a bit daunting. It’s been hard starting this school year having a student I have known for two years get confused when I apologized for a delayed response because of church, saying I didn’t realize you were the church type and having another student question my faith in class. I just don’t know where to go from here in terms of membership, in terms of a discipleship group, etc.

6 September 2015

Last week in church, the pastor mentioned that millennials need meaning and purpose. I had never really thought about it in that context, but I guess there’s a lot of truth to that. I think part of the reason I’m struggling is because I don’t want to just own something because I can. I want it to have meaning. I want to wrestle with it, but that is difficult in our society. We live in such an instant gratification world that the idea of wrestling makes you seem non-compliant, insubordinate, etc. So I don’t know where I am supposed to go from here. I don’t know where a pastor would want me to be in terms of membership, etc. I don’t know where someone would want me to be in terms of a discipleship group, etc. I just don’t know how my struggling with faith fits in everything else.