Unchurched: Six Months On

It's been about six months since I laid down my membership in my Quaker meeting. I haven't been to worship on a Sunday since, not in a Quaker meeting or anyplace else. I miss it. I really enjoyed the Vespers service at the Festival of Faith & Writing for giving me a chance to worship, and I'm looking forward to next Saturday's bat mitzvah for the same reason. But I'm not feeling led to go to weekly worship, despite missing it. I thought I would. I left my Quaker meeting with an optimistic sense that I was going to find a new religious community, and imagined myself visiting around on Sunday mornings for awhile until something clicked.

And then I didn't do that.

"I'm just not ready to date yet," I said. And this feels true. It's a big commitment to join a community, and there's a lot of work to be done. Getting to know people, learning the norms, taking the risk that you'll invest your time and energy and it won't work out. Once in a conversation with some friends, I said that if my relationship with Raider ended, I'd probably just choose to be single. I love my relationship with Raider, it's the foundation for everything else in my life, but let's not kid ourselves: it has taken a lot of work. I sometimes doubt I'd be willing to take on that work again.

Maybe I'm not willing to take on the work of joining a religious community, either, even though I know that the payoff can make it worthwhile.

Also, I'm still a Quaker. This felt very clear to me when I was at the FLGBTQC midwinter gathering. So, it's not that I'm completely uncommitted and ready to be snapped up by any attractive faith that comes along. I'm a Quaker without a monthly meeting, and that feels different. It has held me back from visiting congregations that I might like but never feel I could commit fully to.

I've also been lukewarm about the obvious churches I might visit, the Unitarian Universalists and the United Church of Christ. One of my points of friction with my monthly meeting was our tendency to be talky, self-satisfied, affluent liberals, and I can't see the UU or the UCC improving much on that.

At the Festival of Faith & Writing, I had the opportunity to get to know a friend-of-a-friend, and listening to her talk about her church, I got excited for the first time. She is part of a United Methodist congregation in Brighton, Michigan (about 40 minutes from where I live) that decided to be a "missional" church. Their mission statement is "transformed by God to transform the world," and they try to do this by taking concrete action in their community and in the world. They feed the homeless in Detroit and house them in Brighton; they support a local dental clinic for low-income people, and a hospital in Haiti. They do work projects locally, in Appalachia, in North Dakota, and sometimes in the Czech Republic, where they also financially support a sister church. They throw a birthday party every month at a long-term care facility. Look at this list!

Quakers think of ourselves as activists, but in my experience our activism tends toward writing letters, writing "minutes" that we send to legislators and organizations, and demonstrating. It's not that I think a faithful witness like maintaining a weekly vigil for peace for over a decade of war is something to be derided. But I have often longed to be able to do something more concrete. I have always admired the Baby Pantry my friend Julie's church maintains, for instance. I hoped that when my monthly meeting built a meetinghouse, we'd be able to do something like that, something that would let us, on a regular basis, do something concrete and good for a real person standing in front of us.

But the meetinghouse we built doesn't have enough storage space to do that kind of thing (I was, for years, a big booster of the building project. But I remember the moment that changed for me, when I came to feel that we were spending too much money to build a building that would be too small for our needs as soon as we moved in. I know that many people love that meetinghouse, and it is a beautiful little building to worship in. But some of the doors that I hoped would open once we stopped renting space weren't able to open because of space constraints).

Anyway, I found myself seriously attracted to Suzy's church. It felt restful to imagine a church where, perhaps, I wouldn't be asked to do a lot of thinking and talking so much as I would be invited to show up to make sandwiches, to celebrate a birthday, to hammer a nail, to get some diapers or a new crib to a foster family. Perhaps part of what I was attracted to was Suzy's undiluted enthusiasm for the projects her church does. Sure, you'd expect that of her--she's the Director of Missions and Outreach. And she seems like a pretty enthusiastic person in general. I expect that many other people who meet her like her as much as I did. But it also made me aware of one reason I haven't gone church-shopping. After 20 years of practicing the Quakerly endurance test of sitting still, I am strongly drawn to the idea of specific action.

Hmmm. This isn't what I meant to talk about. I was going to talk about the many secular, familial, personal, and professional opportunities that have opened up. Laying down my membership cleared my calendar and settled my mind. But I will save that for another day.