Why I'm Still A Christian But May Never Have A Church Again: The Testimony Of A Christian Mystic

Many christians today have seen the church of their youth go through massive changes, often for the worse. We’ve seen our church go from lightly poitical, looking to back candidates with character who belive in freedom, to hyper political and willing to back the shadiest of characters. We’ve seen our church go from heartfelt discussions about human rights and holiness to self-righteous certainty in condemnation of other lifestyles, and embrace of hyper-masculinity. As a result, a common trend has emerged in which young christians deconstruct their faith to determine what they believe.

Every generation deconstructs their religion to some extent while growing into their own. We all must determine which of our parents beliefs we own ourselves and which to let go. Occasionally, the church itself does the same which has resulted in several major schisms and alternate denominations splitting off of the larger body. In one case, God Himself did this when He sent us Jesus* and changed the laws of good and evil forever. In our age, christians see a church preaching Jesus on Sunday and living it’s own ego the rest of the week. Being true to ourselves, young people are walking away from the church en masse.

Personally, I’ve been confronted with the evils of the church many times throughout my life. I don’t use the word “evil” lightly here, but the church is meant to present God to us through community. Anytime it departs, in any small way, from holiness the church accepts evil. If these choices are met with repentance then God is glorified but the church I’ve experienced is more likely to double down on dogma than consider it’s own fault.

Important context in the next small story: I have never spoken in tongues. The Bible tells us this is a gift of the Holy Spirit, but it’s not one I’ve been given yet and, honestly, not one I’m particularly interested in… (If you know or look up the gifts of the Spirit, I think you’ll agree it seems the least useful of all.)

When I attended Western Washington University, I also attended a wonderful church in the Assemblies of God denomination. I loved that church and so sought out membership. In reading about the church, I was confronted with the fact that the denomination has a stated belief where christians are filled with the Holy Spirit as evidenced by speaking in tongues. In one of my membership meetings with the head pastor, I confronted this belief, telling him that I am filled with the holy spirit, don’t have this gift, and really have no interest in seeking it. His response was that the church “holds lightly to this doctrine of the denomination.” Obviously, I was unsatisfied and terminated the process of membership. I told the lead pastor that I can’t take part in a church that validates untrue belief. “Holding lightly” is a compromise of character and is therefore ungodly.

Over the following years, I went to dozens of churches irregularly, often enough to make friends in many and have fond memories, but didn’t find a church home for years. In this time, I saw many bigoted messages and sentiments preached and passed these as one-offs. (Since then, I’ve come to believe they were more indicitive of the church as a whole culture.) Some places simply state that sermons preached by women aren’t blessed by God, others that women ought to be silent in church, both beliefs backed by both scripture and hatred. Other sermons centered on christian marriage and the evil of alternate sexuality, against which my big problem is that Jesus enjoyed his relationship with sinners and godly men alike, meaning discussion of personal sins belongs in personal conversations, not at the pulpit. As an example, a hyper-ecoconscious church could state at the pulpit that air travel is a sin but this is contrary to the message of Jesus, promoting the ego of the church over the values of Christ. Any church is welcome to believe such and discuss it in homes and small groups, but the pulpit should always be reserved for the message of Christ, which is love. In a less outlandish example, a church may know about several alcoholics in the membership. One response, even a well meaning response, could be sermons on the evils of alcohol and addiction but I think we all see the ridiculousness of sermons applied in this way. The correct response is personal, loving, heartfelt conversations and accountability within the membership. I can’t repeat enough that the pulpit must be reserved for the message of Christ, which is love and redemption, manifested at the cross. Any other message is useless at best, and I’m being kind in stating it that way.

During those years, I married a wonderful woman and my wife and I found our church home together in a small Fousquare church in Shoreline, Washington. The true reason that church became our church home is that we invited a small group of people into our house who quickly became the best group of friends of our lives. This type of group changes your life forever, and indeed it did with us. Being a wide church community, of course, we also bonded with some members to a lesser degree and there were some people we honestly didn’t get along with, but it felt like a great community in which we could seek God together. Interestingly enough, the Foursquare denomination also holds to the idea that christians must “be filled with the Holy Spirit, evidenced by speaking in tongues” but I wasn’t bothered by it the way I should have been because I loved the people. It was a church led by a God seeking man with traditional christian values that rarely mentioned any hot issues from the pulpit and quickly moved off of them when he did in order to return the the message of salvation in Jesus. My friends and I served there in many capacities, investing massive time and effort because we believed in the ministries and loved the people and two of our group felt the call to become pastors in the foursquare denomination. They went above and beyond the rest of us with almost incomprehensible amounts of work in service of the church to couple with their studies. Eventually, our head pastor felt called away to another pastoral position and Foursquare sent us a new head pastor, as is common in some denominations. Our new pastor came to the position partially as a result of deep connections with higher-ups within the denomination and large success leading a church in a more rural town in Washington. He also shared similar, traditional christian values to our previous leader but had no trouble spouting them at the pulpit. A fair amount of judgement toward alternate lifestyles and some other beliefs probably served him well in leading a more rural population, but many of us found his approach to sermons often abrasive in the suburban setting of Shoreline. This was only the first clue to the fact that we had been given an abusive pastor.

During this same time, and for several years previously, I became borderline obsessed with yoga and commonly said that yoga taught me more about a life with Christ than the church ever had. I fell in love with yoga when my wife and I started a regular practice at LA Fitness and I realized I was more comfortable in my body than I ever had been. As a teenage football player, I was insanely athletic and took pride in that. I held many records in my high school’s weight room, could run 40 yards in about 5 seconds, and do several hundred pushups with no pause, but through yoga I learned that I had never been able to sit comfortably on the ground or tie my shoes without a chair nearby. Yoga redefined fitness from capability on the field to comfort in my body and it didn’t take me long to realize it was also teaching me comfort in my soul. Most of us are introduced to yoga through the practice of poses, and I’m no exception, but then I learned of the yogic path to enlightenment, of which the first practice is non-harm, and we begin with practicing non-harm towards ourselves. Through this practice I realized that when Jesus tells us, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” He gives us equal ability to love ourselves as anyone else. The church often passes the message that we ought to bankrupt ourselves in service to others, but yoga taught me that I have nothing to give others unless I’m healthy to begin with, and I mean healthy in both body and soul. I began actively following the path of yoga, leading directly into meditation where we practice thankfulness, loving-kindness, and compassion, and met the belief that I was commanded to do so in 1 Thesselonians, “Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances.” Practice of meditation leads directly to a practice of mindfulness, where we pay deep attention to exactly the present moment. I knew from the church that I ought to pray continually but yoga gave me an actionable path to it through mindfulness. I knew that I ought to give thanks in all circumstances and rejoice always but yoga gave me a lifestyle of thankfulness where there is no place to go but absolute joy. I realized that these practices, esoteric in the church and actionable in yoga, were bringing me into union with the Holy Spirit. The goal of the path to enlightenment in yoga is to quiet your ego completely until all that is left is connection to the divine and, more recently, this has become the great passion of my life. The cross of Christ is the source of my value to God and I can present it to the world only through the constant practice of quieting my own ego.

I’ve mentioned a common sentiment from many churches that we ought to bankrupt ourselves in service to others, which was certainly present at our Shoreline church. I think most christians aren’t bothered by this because our pastors often lead the way at the cost of themselves and their families. It’s easy to follow this leadership as christians look forward to heaven, knowing service in this life leads to unending joy in the next. Truly, this is often enacted in a perfectly well meaning way but some churches pull on this in totally destructive and abusive ways turning the good intentions of members into free labor, in order to build the brand and membership and serve the ego of head pastors. I don’t know which of these defined our new pastor as I saw his lack of character, almost immeditaly began pulling back from my own service, and warned my friends of what I saw. They saw the same signs to different degrees and, over time, we all left that church. My friends who had began the path to pastoral leadership felt the change the deepest as they not only lost this church community but also realized their dreams of career in service to the church ended abrupty, the day he arrived in our church. They continued working with him and truly attempted to continue following the call of God and I don’t even know how to describe the cost to them and their families as they continued in God’s service to the church community they loved while watching it evolve under bigotted leadership. Eventually, our new pastor turned his dogma of hatred on them and their families in turn and, since he has connections high within the denomination, he ended their paths to pastorship completely. This group of friends is as close as ever. Though we now live across the globe from each other, our love is deep and the moments when we see each other feel better than ever. The story of this community of friends shows a common pattern in that we all still follow Christ but none of us go to church and none really have any intent of finding another church. Personally, I believe the modern christian church has failed terribly at both showing God’s love and repenting of its sin. On the whole, it is a hellish institution, driven by dogma and ego.

Ego has become one of the major themes of my life. Yoga teaches me that my connection to the divine comes through the quieting of my own ego. Christianity, through the incredible writing of C.S. Lewis, teaches me the same. Mindfulness practices are a method of finding union with the divine in every moment of every day. C.S. Lewis interprets heaven and hell differently than any other christian philosopher I know (admittedly a small sample size of philosophers). Christians must deal with the difficulties of believing that a perfect, loving, all-powerful, all-knowing God sends souls to hell. Lewis gives a wonderful interpretation, to which I agree, where heaven and hell are the same place. He says that both are simply eternity in the presence of God. The question is about the person in the presence of God. Is God’s presence heaven or hell, to you? I don’t care for discussion of the afterlife at all, as it is always a question to be solved tomorrow, or anytime before death. I’m much more interested in questions of how to live today and this moment. Through mindfulness, I find I have access to union with the Holy Spirit. Mindfulness is the method of direct connection to God. By Lewis’ definition then, mindfulness is heaven on earth. I may have no interest in the impact of my actions today on the afterlife, but nothing could be more interesting than the eternal joy of heaven in this moment, and every moment.

Therefore, finding union with the Holy Spirit, and heaven in this moment is the only thing that matters to me. I didn’t learn to seek the Holy Spirit in this way in the church, though some christian writers have an integral part in my story, I learned the path to the Holy Spirit in yoga. Yoga teaches there are three parts to our psyche that must be quieted in order for us to find connection to the divine. They are: our interpretation of the senses, our ego, and our deep discernments. Obviously, everything we’ve ever learned is a result of our senses bringing information into our minds, the outermost layer. Some of that information becomes deeply important to us and we adopt that information into our ego. Beneath our ego is another level where we decide what is good and evil, and all other manners of discerning important information. As an example, when we are children, the most fortunate of us experience deep love from our mothers and we adopt into our ego the value that familial love is one of the most important experiences in life. This defines every relationship for the rest of our existence, as we measure our ability to give and recieve love against that of our mothers, which is the deepest level of discernment. Rather than being unique, these discernments determine everything about who we are and what we value.

These layers must all be quiet in order for us to see through our own psyche into the Holy Spirit within us. Interpretation of the senses is relatively easy to achieve with daily practice of focus meditations. I (and almost all people) find that, at first, I was able to quiet my interpretation of the senses for mere seconds before losing it and sending my attention to some perception. However, daily practice of focus meditation is the key and through weeks of daily practice, we all develop the ability to quiet the senses for dozens of minutes at a time, with the attunement that it’s really a constant draw of attention and bringing it back. Ego is much more difficult and, in yoga, I have learned that my ego is my true enemy. Everything I have come to believe is important in life closes me off to what God shows me is important. So I’m fully on board to use every tool to quiet my ego. I become aware of my ego through mindfulness. Mindfulness is developed through constant practice of focus meditations, and bringing that practice into every experience of every day. Eventually, I found myself feeling the need to respond to an experience but, rather than responding, I would consider why I feel the need to respond. Then I’m able to see the deeper part of myself that drives me away from God, repent of it, and consider the response God wants of me. Through the grace of God, my ego becomes quieter over time, and I become happier as I seek more of God and less of me. Deep discernments are the most difficult piece and I admit to have only begun on the path of finding and quieting my deep discernments. I see the same practices of meditation as being the path, but I also learned the most fantastic thing recently from the great christian writer Ozwald Chambers. “God never gives us discernment so that we may criticize, but that we may intercede.” We feel deep need to share with others the path to right action, especially when they violate our ideas of right action. This feeling is always misplaced. Our impulse is good, but our need to share is criticism. These impulses are to be shared with God and not man, as we pray for our discernments and those who offended us. We can’t stop these discernments as they are the deepest part of our internalized experiences, however, when we learn to pay attention to them, we learn to share them with God. God’s purpose of these discernments is not to change others but to change us. Others will change when we become enlightened, or they won’t. It’s God’s business to change others and our part in it is to be godly.

Being godly is our purpose in life. In yoga we call godliness enlightenment. Both of these descriptions lead to the same need which is the need to let go completely of ego. Only through this process is God glorified. Only when I am certain my worth is not in goodness can I become godly. This is the death of ourselves and only in this death of everything we thought important can we become enlightened. I have no clue what is important, but I have absolute faith in God’s perfect plan. Marcus Aurelius put this idea into the beautiful words, “Come quick, O death, lest perchance I, too, should forget myself.” He probably meant physical death and, if that’s my future, then I pray God’s will be done, but I believe this much more deeply in that the death of my ego and discernments are the only way the Holy Spirit is glorified in me. In that sense, death cannot come soon enough. I pray in every moment of every day for the death of everything I hold dear so that I may see clearly what God holds dear.

Footnote:
*Before Jesus, God’s presence on Earth was bound to the holy of holies, the innermost sanctum of the tabernacle of the Jews. Only the high priest was allowed into the presence of God, once each year, and he wore a rope and suit of bells to allow others to extract his dead body, should God strike him down, without entering themselves. At the death of Jesus, the veil to the holy of holies, the barrier separating the presence of God from the world, tore itself down. My interpretation is that God, in absolute perfection, created humans and our unique feature is the choice of good and evil. In our imperfection, we are separated from Him. Being loving, He hates this separation and, being just, He cannot simply forgive our evil. Jesus, in His perfection, was never separated from God but He took the just punishment of our imperfection and became separated from God, resultingly suffering sin and death. Many christians point to this moment as the pivotal moment in history, and they’re not wrong, but I prefer three days later when Jesus overcame death, symbolizing that He rose above the consequences of imperfection and separation from God, breaking the pattern and allowing us, the imperfect, to come back into relationship with God. Previously, God was separated from us, so the only physical place with his presence in the world was devoid of humans. Afterwards, the veil is torn, Jesus gives us relationship with God, and every human gains a Holy Spirit, allowing us direct connection with the divine.