I grew up in a safe church environment. God was easy to contain. He could be left at bedtime prayer time, at mealtime prayer, and at church, right where he could most easily be confined, so that the rest our lives could be lived without His intrusions.
That may sound like a less-than-generous interpretation, but looking back on it, that’s exactly how I treated Him. Then the lockdowns came. And that no longer remained an option. Welcome to the next daily installment of this true story, which you can find posted here each afternoon.
Chapter 11: This Isn’t How I Grew Up
This isn’t the church environment I grew up in. The church environment I grew up in was very safe. Nothing unexpected ever happened in church. I remember there was a time when one of the members of the choir used a Polaroid to capture the bald spot of the pastor from the choir loft to convince him that he was starting to go bald. The following Sunday he shared the Polaroid with the congregation and laughed at himself a little. It was so spontaneous and out of place for our church that it sticks in my memory.
Another time, communion was going longer than expected and we ran out of communion songs to sing. The pastor announced from the front as he distributed communion to turn to a hymn number and what verses to sing. It too was so spontaneous and out of place for our congregation that it sticks in my memory. I remember when another pastor announced that he would start giving the sermon from memory while standing among us, rather than at the lectern (at our eye level) or in the pulpit (up above us). Those were the two places from which the sermon was usually given. That change, too, was so spontaneous and out of place for our congregation that it sticks in my memory.
Things seldom happened that were not expected. Sometimes at a baptism, a baby might cry, a baby might coo, a baby might do nothing. Usually a baby cried. This was an example of spontaneity. Sometimes our organist would put a little different oomph into the song. That was an example of spontaneity. It was a very safe environment. Nothing unexpected ever happened in the church. We put God in a nice, safe box where He belonged, unable to do anything too out of the ordinary. And the teaching of our church, teaching that had grown stale in the five hundred years since Martin Luther, had become teaching that encouraged us to see God in a box. Luther never seemed to see God in a box. Luther seemed to know God intimately and personally. Luther saw God as unpredictable, scary, real, and mighty. Luther knew the spiritual. Luther knew good and evil. Luther was passionate and unpredictable, partly because he knew a God that was passionate and unpredictable.
Luther even cites Paul in I Corinthians “The unspiritual man does not receive the gifts of the Spirit of God, because they are spiritually discerned.” (1 Corinthians 2:14) For many years that was me. I was the unspiritual man. God was all around me. He was always walking with me. He was always knocking on my heart. He was always encouraging me, guiding me, leading me. But I could not see it happening.
No offense to those who seek to experience God the way I grew up, but it appears that not even Martin Luther would go to a Lutheran church today. I grew up in a church home that had such wonderful and good people, but God had been stripped from it in a lot of ways, likely without any single person being involved in that happening, and long before anyone I ever knew was even born. It was a congregation of men and women who loved God and who upheld traditions that were passed on to them. They were truly wonderful people and not for a moment to blame. Over time, many churches simply lost a lot of prayerful connection with God. I am grateful for the loving, close-knit, warm, God-loving congregation I grew up in. At the same time, I see that what has become of the views of Luther and other reformers like him. I see how that has helped pave the way for so many Christians to become atheists or practitioners of other spiritual disciplines that touch upon the spiritual. Christianity does not have a monopoly on the spiritual. Christianity has a monopoly on the truth about the spiritual, however, and that is an aspect of Christianity that is withheld from many Christians.
I do not know what that is supposed to look like exactly. I just know that Luther was a deeply spiritual man with a deep relationship with the Lord. I know that I was taught contemporary Lutheran views as a child and young adult, and that those views in many ways missed the mark on accurately describing what Luther had to say about God. I was left with a theological foundation, but an empty relationship with God. Many like me are left with the same. I am not looking for signs and wonders to know that God is real. I am not looking to be entertained by God. I am not looking for God to make me feel special. Though truthfully, all those things exist and abundantly. All I am looking for is a relationship with God.
There was so much more to God and somehow it was absent in the larger church body of my childhood, a church that I was deeply involved in, well into my twenties, serving as a regional and national leader in the youth group and becoming a missionary sent by the Lutheran church into the mission field. I wanted more God and what I got instead was the Godhead strangled out of me as I tried to follow unspiritual and contorted ways of finding Him. We are spiritual beings and we serve a spiritual God, who is so much bigger than any of this world. He is so much bigger than any of the things we have to fear in this world. He is so much bigger than our greatest fears. I learned so quickly how little faith so many pastors had in what a big and awesome God we serve.
Then I saw something that I would never have believed unless I saw it with my own eyes and lived through it. In a period of less than one week, the mainstream theological opinion became, “If you do anything but close all the church doors this Sunday, you are putting God to the test, just like satan did.” Suddenly it was demonic to even go to church. That’s what happened to the church of my childhood and many churches like that one.
Chapter 12: The Ides of March 2020
When the Ides of March 2020 came and the lockdowns went into effect, every church that remotely resembled the one I grew up in, all closed their doors. For many months and for many miles around, that was the case. They stayed closed too.
The only one I knew of that did not close its doors was very far from my home. It would eventually become my congregation and the pastor of the congregation would become a spiritual mentor to me. He made time, answered questions, mentioned books I might appreciate, and gave very hard hitting sermons.
In that congregation, they did things that I used to make fun of. It was out of ignorance that I did that. Left with no other choice, I sat in the sanctuary week after week, watching a different environment than what I grew up in, taking notes, and asking questions of the pastor afterwards.
Slowly I grew, and generously, that pastor made time to help me grow. Sometimes daily, for the next several years, I would experience growth in my relationship with God that was unlike anything I ever imagined. I was left in utter desperation when I found almost all sanctuaries closed to me.
Until that point in my life, I had been eager to worship many things: books, theologians, theories, my own mind, my own feelings, my own wants, money, work, family, technology, and a host of other things. Now I was hungry to be close to God. The man who pastored my newfound congregation was hungry as well, and had spent a lifetime learning an intimacy with God that was unlike anything I had ever seen in a pastor — and as a former missionary, I had known many pastors. That was before I strayed almost as far away from God as one can get.
The pastor’s name, my bishop’s name, was Gabriel Abdelaziz. That was the church I attended on Sunday mornings. Sometimes, on Sunday nights, I would find myself in the King City church as well, on my way home to San Francisco. In both churches I was being fed. To both churches, I would drive quite a ways and arrive after hours of anticipation and prayer in the car, expectantly knowing that God would give me another glimpse of Himself in that service. Each service I grew closer and more intimate with God. While I was never in physical or mortal danger in these churches, I can tell you that it was often very uncomfortable, unfamiliar, and challenging.
It did not even feel safe in the conventional definition of the word. The more I gave up my conventional definitions and sought God’s definitions, the more I understood that I was always in safe hands with God, but that his definition of safety was nothing like the ones that I knew.
-Allan Stevo
This is a selection from my forthcoming book, “The Amtrak Vignettes.” A neat story began with the writing of “The Amtrak Vignettes” in October 2023. Every day until that story comes to an end, I intend to share a part of it here. It is a part of my faith journey as a Christian, a faith journey that has been deepened since the Ides of March 2020. Some of it gets pretty wild and nothing that a “reasonable” person would find himself in the midst of. Few will be scared off by it. Instead, many will grow deeper in their faith. I know that, because I know my readers well, and I know that few come here expecting me to give a milquetoast version of anything. Come here to be challenged. Stay here to have your life changed. That, I believe, is what will come of this work. You can support that work by signing up below.
When the water runs out we see who's swimming nekkid. Maybe that's not the best analogy, but it's the one that comes to mind when I think of the vast majority of churches and temples and their leadership and what I saw of them in 2020— and then, even worse in many ways, what I saw of them with the jabs roll out in 2021-2022. Somehow, though, from the time I was kid, I knew they were not at all what they claimed to be.
May your spiritual journey be blessed.
Your childhood and young adult experience is similar to mine. My break from religion, however, came when George W said God spoke to him about starting the Iraq War. Huh? That was so far from my understanding of God but maybe it was just my opinion? Just about everyone I knew went along with it while I protested, and that's when religion became meaningless to me. I'm 66 now so may be too late to try again but I'm open to reading more again.