Tuesday, October 25, 2005
No room for error
I was raised in a fairly conservative church. Not by "worship style", but by lifestyle practise. Movies were frowned on (though I went on occasion). Oddly enough, being seen at the movie theatre was a problem for attenders, but going to it to see the Corrie Ten Boom movie was fine. The day the city's churches arranged a viewing on a Sunday afternoon I was afraid of who would see me there...it was hard to get used to the idea that the people I was afraid of running into were all with me in that "place of sin"! Drinking was frowned on, but some of the children of the church founders got drunk frequently. Dancing was not permitted, and I turned down a high school modelling job because it involved doing a country dance with a guy and I would have been embarrassed for the church members to see that. Plus, the outfit sucked that they wanted me to wear. Sex outside marriage was an absolute no-no, but a married prominent church member was having a sexual affair with a married woman inside the church. Years earlier a teen friend had become pregnant and a quick wedding was planned. That was set up in disaster, and much later a divorce occurred. It was not a perfect place, yet it preached against the sin of "the world" like it was barking at the front doors. It was within as well as without.
I grew up with restraints. I grew up uptight. I grew up with a feeling of superiority created by being in a group who believed they were right and those outside the group were wrong. Yeah, I knew I was a nerd, but I was a "right" nerd.
I'm reading part of a book "Blue Like Jazz". Let me quote some of what Donald Miller says there.
"The real issue in the Christian community was that it was conditional. You were loved, but if you had questions, questions about whether the Bible was true or whether America was a good country or whether last week's sermon was good, you were not so loved. You were loved in word, but there was, without question, a social commodity that was being withheld from you until you shaped up. By towing the party line you earned social dollars; by being yourself you did not. If you wanted to be valued, you became a clone. They are broad generalizations, and they are unfair, but that's what I was thinking..."
"...we had ethics, we had rules and laws and principles to judge each other against. There was love in Christian community, but it was conditional love. Sure, we called it unconditional, but it wasn't. There were bad people in the world and good people in the world. We were raised to believe this. If people were bad, we treated them as though they were either evil or charity: If they were bad and rich, they were evil. If they were bad and poor, they were charity. Christianity was always right; we were always looking down on everybody else. And I hated this. I hated it with a passion. Everything in my soul told me it was wrong. It felt, to me, as wrong as sin. I wanted to love everybody... I wanted people to like each other. Hatred seemed, to me, the product of ignorance. I was tired of Biblical ethic being used as a tool with which to judge people rather than heal them."
I grew up with restraints. I grew up uptight. I grew up with a feeling of superiority created by being in a group who believed they were right and those outside the group were wrong. Yeah, I knew I was a nerd, but I was a "right" nerd.
I'm reading part of a book "Blue Like Jazz". Let me quote some of what Donald Miller says there.
"The real issue in the Christian community was that it was conditional. You were loved, but if you had questions, questions about whether the Bible was true or whether America was a good country or whether last week's sermon was good, you were not so loved. You were loved in word, but there was, without question, a social commodity that was being withheld from you until you shaped up. By towing the party line you earned social dollars; by being yourself you did not. If you wanted to be valued, you became a clone. They are broad generalizations, and they are unfair, but that's what I was thinking..."
"...we had ethics, we had rules and laws and principles to judge each other against. There was love in Christian community, but it was conditional love. Sure, we called it unconditional, but it wasn't. There were bad people in the world and good people in the world. We were raised to believe this. If people were bad, we treated them as though they were either evil or charity: If they were bad and rich, they were evil. If they were bad and poor, they were charity. Christianity was always right; we were always looking down on everybody else. And I hated this. I hated it with a passion. Everything in my soul told me it was wrong. It felt, to me, as wrong as sin. I wanted to love everybody... I wanted people to like each other. Hatred seemed, to me, the product of ignorance. I was tired of Biblical ethic being used as a tool with which to judge people rather than heal them."
// posted by Annette @ 10:28 p.m. 