I’m sitting in a room with five thousand other adult leaders and youth. The lights are spinning, the music surrounds us, and the youth beside me leans over and shouts, “I can’t hear myself think!” I nod and shout back, “That’s the point!”
I mean that in the kindest way possible. Part of the point of the atmosphere that you find at these big Christian conferences is focus your attention on the stage, to make it difficult to be engaged with anything other than the worship being put up by the people in front of you. Now, my youth group doesn’t stand at events like this. They don’t clap or dance or sing along. Then again, they’re not on their phones, so that’s something. But are they engaged? Are they wrapped up in the atmosphere? Do they get caught up in the emotion of these songs, of the performers, of the speakers?
No. No, they don’t. From our conversations, they take away reasoned lessons from what they glean from the speakers and appreciate, on a music theory level, what the band is doing on stage. They choose their breakout sessions based on the things they don’t want to do (Christian yoga) and they sit awkwardly through the altar call as hundreds of other youth swarm forward.
And I don’t understand that.
When I was their age, I was caught up in this hook, line, and sinker. Worship music was were my soul felt alive. Didn’t matter if it was contemporary or choral or instrumental. If it was music for Jesus, it was music I liked, music that I wanted to make. If I had been a teenager at this conference, I would have been one of the ones in the first couple of rows, right up by the stage, singing along with every song whether I knew the words or not. I would have looked up and to the left to stop myself from crying when the songs or the message stirred up an excess of emotions in me and I certainly would have gone up for the altar call to rededicate my life to Christ.
Because, see, worship was the only place that it was okay for me to have emotions when I was a teenager. I didn’t want to be branded as one of those moody teenage girls, or a dramatic teenage girl, or a hyper teenage girl, and so I sat on the edges of social life and read my books and did my school work. There were always more books to read and I enjoyed my time with them much more than I enjoyed my time with other people.
Part of that, too, was born out of fear. I was deeply afraid of being noticed by a man who wasn’t my future husband. I wore baggy t-shirts and loose-fitting jeans and my hair up in a bun always. I didn’t wear makeup or style my hair with any kind of regularity until I was in my late twenties. I avoided being alone with people of the opposite gender. I certainly didn’t laugh at boys’ jokes or smile or flirt or do anything to lead anyone on. God had a husband planned for me and that husband would see through the walls that I had put up to the beautiful person I truly was but until then, I needed to be a part of the background. Otherwise, bad things would happen.
But in worship, I could feel anything I wanted to feel with repercussions. I could bring my tears before the Lord. I could bring joy. I could bring my brain in and pick apart sermons and absorb scripture and ponder the hymn texts as I sang. It was the one place that I could bring my full self, was supposed to bring my full self. It was supposed to be safe. And I was usually in the choir, so that robe kept my chastity in place.
Now, I don’t want to paint too pure of a picture of myself. I wasn’t just the quiet book girl in oversized clothes. I had friends from the variety of organizations I was in and I was a leader and a force to be reckoned with when I needed to be. Somewhere along the way, female empowerment made its way to me, probably because I come from a line of strong women. I was busy filling up a resume that would easily get me into college, overachieving all over the place. And there were times that I was a bossy, petulant little shit and times that I was overly dramatic and times that my wanna-be goth self took over, flaking black polish coating fingernails kept short. Still, I never really knew what to do with my feelings, except when I was given permission to feel them.
So of course I went up for an altar call when I was in 6th grade. It was the first one I’d been around for, and I’m a people pleaser and a rule follower, so I went up to the front and I prayed that sinner’s prayer and I won my ticket to evangelical heaven. People acted like it was a big thing but I just felt like I was doing what I was supposed to. At the first big youth event I went to with an altar call, I went up again to rededicate my life to Jesus. No idea what any of that meant, but it seemed like the thing to do.
Because these people who were talking about salvation, they were so passionate about it. They had these testimonies that moved your heart. They told me stories and I loved stories. We sang songs that meant something and I loved songs. It was the one place I was allowed to feel emotion and I got swept up in it. And because I felt something, it had to mean something. It had to mean something.
Fast forward a decade and a half and I’m sitting with my arms crossed and my feet up on the railing of the bleachers in front of us, mimicking my youth, because I am actively trying not to feel what I used to feel. My forearms are a shield over my heart. “You’re not going to get me this time,” I tell the music and the passion and the emotionalism. “I know what I know and you can’t change that.” It’s so hard to be anchored in this moment, so hard to stop myself from being whirled around and caught up in a storm of emotional manipulation and theology and hermeneutics that I don’t believe in anymore. The teenager in me wants to be blown away again. I’m Dorothy. Take me to Oz.
But no. We’re not doing this. I haven’t worked through years of undoing what the purity movement did to me just to buy back into this shame. I haven’t studied and read and struggled with my Bible for someone else to force-feed me a questionable reading. I have not wrestled with God for someone to throw away my hard-won understanding.
Because, see, the kingdom of God is something we know already. We’ve seen it in Jesus. We have seen him live a redeemed life, a life that cared for the lost and the least, that challenged those who had more than they could ever need, that brought new life in every sense of the word, that ended because of the evils of empire and human hatred, but that refused to stay defeated. Jesus, in rising from the dead and breathing the Spirit on the disciples, spread this new and redeemed life throughout the world, giving us all the power to do as he did: to live life abundantly now and to free others to do the same. We do not have to wait until the next life for this, don’t have to pray a prayer and win a ticket. We know how to do this now.
And the glory of God is not something that we have to wait until we die to see. It’s here. It’s here in this good creation (God, I have to believe that creation was good, is good), in all the beauty and wonder that surround us. It’s here in the joy of our good relationships with each other, in the peace that we find in our lives, in the sustaining we receive when we think that it would be better to just be done. You have to train your eyes to see it, sometimes, but the glory of God radiates all around us. We live in such a beautiful world with such beautiful people. We don’t have to wait for the next one.
The pain of this world, though, the evils of this world, they can’t just be blamed on my personal sin. It’s not enough for me to turn away from hurting others and myself, though that is something that I have to do, daily. It’s not enough for me to achieve personal salvation. Jesus wasn’t nailed to the cross because I wore a low-cut shirt and he didn’t rise from the dead so I could learn to be more modest. It is so much bigger than all of that. There is so much more to do. We Christians are the hands and feet of Christ. We are part of how God is working in the world. I don’t want to stop the growth of God’s freedom in this world because I’m too busy worrying about sexual purity to love my neighbor or feed the hungry or give clean water to the thirsty or welcome the stranger or give clothes and shelter to those who need it or visit those who are sick or in prison. And the evils of this world, the things that cause hatred and hunger and poverty, these things are systemic and insidious and it will take all of us to deal with them, no matter what prayers you’ve prayed or what you believe.
So no, I’m not going to believe like this. I’m not going to sing only songs that are about me and God. I’m not going to pray prayers that don’t go beyond myself. I’m not going to participate in spectacle that’s only designed to save souls. I’m not going to let myself get swept up in praise if praise only stays in this auditorium. I know why I did before. I know now how the deep parts of me, the compounded trauma and shame, gravitated to the safe place they saw, the place of belonging they imagined. I get it. But I don’t believe like this anymore.
On the way out of the auditorium, ears still ringing, I explained to my youth why the music was so loud. “They want you to be swept up in the moment, to really be present here,” I explained. “It’s too much,” he said. I nodded and thought about it. “We can get you earplugs for tomorrow, if you want,” I offered. “Nah,” he said. “I’ll be okay.”
And somehow, I think he will.
Because he’s not me. He isn’t where I was. He doesn’t find his deepest longings met in worship that doesn’t, that can’t, extend beyond the sanctuary. He’s not going to buy the house built on sand.
That’s good.
God knows there’ll be floods.
