Lately, evangelical Christianity has felt like too many dissonant musical notes strung together. I keep waiting for the resolution in the music. And I’m struggling to stay in the room.
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As a ten-year-old, I knelt by my bed to “ask Jesus into my heart.” Another fifth-grade friend had told me the day before while we pumped our gangly legs on the blue swing set in the backyard that she hoped she’d see me in heaven. If I wanted to be sure to go there, I needed to pray and ask Jesus into my heart. “Do you want to do it right now?” she pleaded. Shaking my head, I told her I’d think about it. I did, and decided I would rather spend eternity in heaven than in hell. Easy-peasy.
In When We Were on Fire, Addie Zierman recounts her evangelical youth culture upbringing. I could have been reading my own memoir as I flew through the pages. To be a Christian teenager in the 90′s was WWJD, See You at the Pole, “dating Jesus,” Teen Mania, True Love Waits, going to the Christian concerts of Michael W. Smith, Steven Curtis Chapman, Newsboys, Petra and D.C. Talk. It was secret public school prayer meetings, youth group mission trips and camps, Christian T-shirts and worship to six kids strumming guitars in the public park.
It meant doing communion with chips and juice on a sidewalk behind the science building before school and slipping homemade gospel tracts into every student’s locker. And it was having your heart smashed by boys who said God told them to break up with you. But life was a battle and we were going to win (so we couldn’t be held back by petty things like love and romance.)
I sometimes miss those days when Holy Spirit fire flooded my veins. When I wanted to live “sold out and radical” for Jesus and “soar, soar, soar” for Him. I miss crying to worship songs and shouting out victory praise choruses, stretching my arms to the sky. I miss knowing without a doubt that God had a radical life planned for me.
The fire didn’t dissipate right away. Instead, after burning hot and wild, it sank to coals, glowing with a more steady heat. But the poker of Life couldn’t leave it alone. Jobs, relationships, disappointments, shame and questions jabbed, poked and prodded once steadily burning coals.
Over the years, I have often heard this illustration about church attendance: You need to stay in community; otherwise you will be like an ember taken out of the fire. Alone in the cold, your flame will eventually extinguish.
I fear that is happening to me now. I have become an expert church hopper. We visited 13 churches in the past two years after moving from Chicago to Colorado. We really have tried to make many of them work, jumping into small groups, church potlucks, newcomer’s luncheons and homeless outreaches. But after so many months, I am ready to admit that perhaps it is not the church that’s deficient. Maybe it’s me …
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