Departure

I'm making this blog to document my process of leaving the church, and to talk through my fundamental evangelical christian upbringing.
I plan to write about:
Specific experiences I've had in churches in my childhood and adulthood.
Damaging things I subconsciously learned in church and evangelical christian culture that I'm trying to work through.
What caused my view of church and modern fundamental evangelical christianity to begin to change and how it has continued to change over time.
What ultimately motivated me to make the decision to discontinue attending church.
Things I'd like to communicate to church staff and church members everywhere.
Things I'm realizing since leaving the church and how that is changing my perspective.

It has now been approximately one month since I've attended church. This is the first time in my life that I've made the conscious choice to not pursue attending church. I don't feel any desire or obligation to attend church whatsoever, despite the fact that my personal faith is as strong as ever. I've been surprisingly very at peace with it. I will make a separate post about the specific incident that precipitated this decision, but here I'd just like to offer a brief introduction.

I began attending church with my family in Colorado Springs around the age of 5 or 6. We tried out a few places before settling on a church home at a Christian & Missionary Alliance church affectionately known as "the barn". It was here that we stayed until the church split and eventually dissolved several years later. A small chunk of the remaining members opted to continue meeting as a home church for years until that also dissolved, after I had moved away from home.

I got married at the age of 17 to a boy I had met at church many years earlier in middle school youth group. We were separated just over a year later. We briefly reconciled, and permanently re-separated less than a year after that. During this time, everything I thought I knew began to all blur into a murky grey for me. I questioned a lot of what I had previously accepted and began to study and develop a more individualized understanding that would become the foundation of my growing personal faith.
I subsequently met and cohabited with what would become my second husband and the father of my child. Years later immediately after our daughter was born, our marriage rapidly disintegrated. Nothing could have prepared me. It was the last thing on earth I would have ever believed could happen. Similarly to my first divorce, no amount of prayer or pastoral counseling or advice or marriage seminars or platitudes could resolve the irreconcilable differences that had become glaringly apparent. I clung desperately to the remaining shreds of relationship until I had strangled every last glimmer of hope out of it. I had a brief spiritual epiphany toward the tail end of the relationship, then was plunged into the harsh desolate wasteland of single motherhood. It was during those last few years that I began regularly attending church again for the first time since living at home with my parents. I needed support. I wanted to be around people who valued the same things as I did.

I tried several churches around town, finally settling on a "family integrated" church I hoped would accept us. I attended for almost two years before no longer being welcome for reasons I will expound upon in a later post.
I then began to attend a local church being lead by one of the assistant pastors from my childhood church back in Colorado Springs. His rational approach and rejection of legalism drew me in and I felt at home. I attended for over 2 1/2 years before abruptly making some discoveries that were hurtful and deeply disappointing. Unable to reconcile, hostilities only increased until it became apparent that I had to discontinue what had become an unhealthy relationship with church and modern evangelical christian culture as a whole.

In the month since ditching church, I have made many, many shocking realizations about patterns in my thinking I had been previously unaware of. They were made to seem normal and natural and true within the church culture, but the further I remove myself from it, the more strange and damaging much of it seems. I will give specific examples of these insights in future posts. It has been incredibly eye opening and I fully intend to continue my journey into the unknown realm intentionally free of "churchianity".

Hopefully this blog will give me somewhere to organize my thoughts and experiences so that my current partner will get an intellectual break from my constant venting and ranting and analyzing and monologuing about breakthroughs. Haha.