* * *
I suppose the story begins on Sunday, June 12, 2011. That was graduation Sunday at Fair Oaks Church, the place I had been almost every Sunday from the week of my birth. I stood in front of the church body in my graduation cap and gown and told the congregation that I had just graduated from Berean Christian High School and would be attending UC Berkeley in the fall. What I did not tell them is that I would not be returning to Fair Oaks out of my own volition. That afternoon, I posted a status on Facebook saying, "Sayonara, Fair Oaks."
Of course, that was not the day that I left "the church", meaning the institution. That day did, however, represent a departure from what had characterized the entirety my life until that point. For the first time, I felt the freedom to look directly at a community, a building, a set of doctrine, and say, "This place isn't for me." And indeed it was not. I had outgrown Fair Oaks' ideology. Steeped in it for eighteen years, I knew that flavor of Christianity intimately, and I knew that it would not be able to address some of the thoughts and ideas I had. I had begun considering the idea of the compatibility of evolution with biblical creationism, for instance, and I could already provide myself with the answers that Fair Oaks would give me. Needless to say, I was curious to see what other flavors of Christianity were out there. Closing the Fair Oaks chapter of my life seemed like a logical step to reach that goal.
On the recommendation of a friend, I decided to attend First Presbyterian Church of Berkeley the second Sunday after I moved into my dorm. In the midst of the madness that was moving out of my childhood home, attempting to make new connections, and adjusting to life as a modestly independent adult, Sunday church was the one familiar and comforting thing to me. I couldn't tell you what occurred during that service, other than that my eyes were wet because it felt good to be home, so to speak. And so I continued attending First Pres on Sunday evenings and their Wednesday weeknight college group, Fellowship of College and University Students (FoCUS).
* * *
Reason 1: I was jaded about the music.
Alpha Gamma Omega, the Christian fraternity, hosted what they called "Refuge" on Tuesday evenings, which was a worship night at the fraternity house. During my first semester of college, I attended two or three weeks of Refuge and then never came back. It may have been because no one talked to me, but more likely it was the music itself that drove me away. I distinctly remember leaving after the final time I attended feeling completely frustrated at the music. Maybe it was that I had finally had enough of the worship nights led by one person with a guitar and an accompanist on a cajón. Maybe it was that we were singing the same goddamn songs we had been singing for years. Maybe it was the vacuity of the song lyrics. Maybe it was that singing at such events is basically compulsory. (If you don't sing, people assume something is wrong with you. To avoid this inference, you parrot the words back, devoid of emotion.)
This distaste for church music only grew as time passed. I found myself spending less time singing and more time journaling during the music portions of the First Pres services and FoCUS gatherings. Of course, journaling (or some other diverting activity) was only possible when I had my notebook and pen with me. During Spring Break of my freshman year at Berkeley, some high school friends and I got together, and it turned into an impromptu worship music session. I had expected us to actually hang out like normal people, so, naturally, I was not carrying my journal with me. I had no other option but to sing the lyrics to songs I hated. By the end of it, I was furious. Is this really the best way for us to be spending our limited time together? I thought.
Perhaps I should take a step back: how did I come to hate worship music as early as my freshman year of college? Just two years earlier, I was an aspiring worship leader at my Christian high school and at my church. What happened?
As far as I can tell, there was not a single triggering event. Perhaps it began with my constant critiquing of multiple worship leaders' song selection and musical styles in the latter years of high school: Eric in front of the Fair Oaks congregation, Jonathan in front of the high school student body, and both Cory and Brent in front of the Fair Oaks youth group. These four worship leaders and the worship bands they assembled all had something in common: mediocrity. Perhaps I primed myself to look for shortcomings in future worship leaders, which I continued to do at First Pres and FoCUS. The fact is that I have never in my life heard a worship band that actually produced good music.1
Why does it seem that no worship band can produce good music? I have a few theories based on my experiences:
1. The songs are generally lacking in artistic merit and technical depth. Anyone who knows the basic chords on a guitar can play nearly any worship song. Vocal harmonies are rarely penned and are left to the backup singers' interpretations, which, given the elementary chord structure, usually turn out to be a third-interval deviation from the melody. All the songs are generally written for the same basic instrumentation (see point #4 below). And finally: the lyrics. Rarely will worship song lyrics contain hallmarks of good songwriting: wit, allegory, catchiness, emotion, to name a few. Examples:
"Oh Christ
Be the center of our lives
Be the place we fix our eyes
Be the center of our lives
You're the center of the universe
Everything was made in you
Jesus
Breath of every living thing
Everyone was made for you
You hold everything together
You hold everything together"
"You make beautiful things
You make beautiful things out of dust
You make beautiful things
You make beautiful things out of us
All this pain
I wonder if I'll ever find my way
I wonder if my life could really change
At all"
Barf.
Worship music songwriters tend to selectively understand that lyrics should not follow normal speech patterns. That songs repeat so many lines demonstrates at least some understanding of this concept (but why are the most inane lines always the ones chosen to be repeated?); the rampant plebeian language and absence of precise vocabulary demonstrate a lack of understanding of this concept.
2. The performers are almost never the songwriters. A successful singer-songwriter usually believes the words that he or she writes and sings, and that manifests in their performance. There are also many successful singers who do not write their songs but owe their success to their ability to internalize, reinterpret, apply to themselves, and then deliver the lyrics they are given. In my experience, members of worship bands rarely subject the words they sing to this level of attention. As a result, the songs are rarely delivered with conviction, or even energy. Worship bands merely parrot the words and expect their congregations to do the same.
3. Worship bands practice together maybe once a week in advance of their performances. Worship bands are usually comprised of middle-aged adults who only have time to devote one evening per week to practice. They are not compensated for their participation, and their livelihoods do not depend on the performance given. For these people, playing in the worship band is usually a hobby. In short, the performers face no risk of consequences, regardless of the quality of the performance. (This is further amplified by the fact that the focus is supposed to be on "the message" of the songs, and congregation members who critique the musicianship of the worship band are accused of having an inappropriate attitude. Sometimes these critics' faiths are called into question.) By contrast, professional musicians devote substantially more time practicing both on their own and with the rest of the group because music is their career. Unsurprisingly, more practice time and internalization of the performance risk tend to be correlated with better performance.
4. The instrumentation structure is almost always the same. The focus is always on the vocals and the acoustic guitar, as if worship songs were designed to be sung by white guys with guitarsTM. The next addition to a worship band is percussion, which, before the addition of a bass guitar, is usually a cajón or a djembe.2 Add in the following order: female backup singer, bass guitar, second female backup singer, second guitar (sometimes electric), piano/keyboard, third guitar (if the second was not electric, this one definitely is), third female backup singer. Exceedingly rare, but not unprecedented, are the appearances of a violin, a cello, a flute, or even a mandolin. But the effect of this predictable band composition is that all songs performed will cultivate the same sound. Never will a heavier song feature additional percussion such as timpani; never will a horn section provide a fuller sound; and, most tragic of all, never will a harp be heard.3
5. They desecrate Christmas carols. I'm sorry, but "Joy to the World" and "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing" were never EVER meant to be performed by a musical group containing an electric guitar, an electric bass guitar, and a drum set.
I think once I became aware of these characteristics of worship bands, I could no longer ignore them. Worship sessions frequently became internal brooding sessions for me as I critiqued the shortcomings of whichever band stood in front of me. Needless to say, the prospect of avoiding worship music certainly made the decision to stop going to church easier. The music was not missed after I stopped attending.
* * *
Reason 2: My interpretations of the Bible were too wayward.
During my second semester of college, I wrestled with three major issues: the realization of my non-heterosexuality, the trauma experienced while pledging my fraternity, and the concept of "trusting God". Over the course of this entire semester, none of the messages that I heard at church were relevant to any of these topics; instead, I was left to figure these issues out on my own.
So that is what I did. I spent hours poring over the six Bible passages that allude to homosexuality--the "clobber passages"--to seek their true meaning and their relevance to me. I learned that the texts are not as straightforward as they might appear. I discovered that with appropriate contextualization, conditioning, and examination of the original Greek, I could arrive at an interpretation of the texts that did not negate the compatibility of Christianity with same-sex relationships. What, I thought, might this mean for the rest of the Bible?
It meant, for instance, that my notions from high school about the concept of God-ordained evolution might be possible.4 It meant that the recommendation against women holding church leadership positions was not applicable. It meant that sex before marriage might not actually be forbidden.
Gradually I became a deconstructionist with respect to biblical text. Sermons that did not provide context behind the passage in question--such as the original audience of the passage, the contemporary cultural significance of the passage, the author's motivations for writing, and the original language of the text--were suddenly incomplete and inadequate.
In high school, I had first heard of extra-biblical writings such as the Apocrypha and the Gnostic gospels. In my second and third years of college, I began considering these texts again: why were these not included in the Bible? I no longer accepted the answer that "God, in all his infinite wisdom and power, ensured that the appropriate texts were placed in the Bible." No--as I came to learn, the canonization of the Bible happened gradually throughout the first millennium, and included those texts which were commonly in circulation at the time and which presented a (relatively) consistent message. In other words, random dudes decided what comprised and did not comprise "the Bible". The discovery of the haphazardness of the Biblical text selection process shook my trust in the Bible.
I let myself conduct more thought experiments: How do we know that even the canonized texts were not doctored? The earliest New Testament manuscripts available, for instance, are dated approximately 90 AD, decades after the reported events were supposed to have occurred. And how do we know the Catholic Church in the 1400's did not alter the text just as commoners were learning to read for themselves? Such questions further destabilized the Bible's authority for me.
While I wrestled with these questions of Biblical exegesis, the church continued on with "business-as-usual". The themes, content, and style of the sermons remained relatively unchanged; at First Pres, the sermons were unbelievably academic and dry. They certainly were not meeting me where I was at the time, and I couldn't help but wonder if they were instructive to anyone at all. I could no longer accept a sermon as true if the basics of the explicated biblical text were not made clear--and they were not. I felt as though the church could not keep up with me and the questions I was asking.
* * *
Reason 3: The church does not have a patent on social justice.
Berkeley was the first time in five years that I had substantially interacted with non-Christians. It surprised me to discover that there existed plenty of secular people who were good people with good intentions. There were secular people volunteering with community organizations and serving food to the homeless without the prompting of religious conviction (or compulsion, perhaps more accurately). The narrative I had been fed and had repeated was that non-Christians who performed philanthropic work harbored some insincere ulterior motive. I slowly began to realize that the church did not hold a monopoly on charity, that the church was not essential to inspire acting like a decent human being. This realization later evolved into the thought: What impact does the church have on the world that normal, civilized society does not? What do I need the church for?
* * *
Reason 4: I let myself have autonomy.
Another item that began fraying my ties with the church was the therapy I underwent during the latter half of my sophomore year. Although I was seeing a Christian therapist, the techniques I practiced uprooted some of the fundamental beliefs I had about myself. For the first time in my life, I asked for help without fear of being perceived as selfish;5 I credited myself for my accomplishments instead of rerouting all praise to God; I granted myself grace for my mistakes rather than accepting all the responsibility.6 These changes in behavior were at odds with what I had been taught growing up in the church. The church neither supported nor disapproved of my changing thought patterns; it was entirely silent on the issue. Once again, the church did not come alongside me and left me alone in this endeavor.
* * *
All of these simultaneous factors converged at some point during my sophomore or junior year of college, after which I stopped attending church on Sunday. Strangely enough, I did not miss it. And, as an added bonus, I discovered why people value weekends so much--you get to sleep in for two days. That life change alone was so substantial that I knew returning to church would be a tough sell.
Even though I no longer attended Sunday church services, I continued to attend FoCUS on Wednesdays until my senior year. The sermons there were at least halfway relevant because they were targeted toward ambitious Berkeley students. But at the beginning of my senior year, the FoCUS pastor left, leaving the intern and a student leadership team to run FoCUS. Although I had been involved with FoCUS for three years, I was not asked to join the student leadership team, which was instead comprised of sophomores. In addition, as I glanced around the meeting room during that first week of FoCUS my senior year, I could count on only one hand the faces that I knew. I did not feel part of the FoCUS community any longer. That day reminded me of what I had always known deep down: that the primary reason for my FoCUS attendance was the people rather than the spiritual content. If I no longer belonged to the community, I had little reason to attend. Consequently, I never went back to FoCUS after that first week of my senior year.
* * *
I still believed for a while after I stopped going to church. However, "still believing" can encompass a wide range of ideology. What was spiritually important to me had shifted so much that my conversations with other Christians became difficult. We were no longer speaking the same language because our priorities were so different, especially when it came to topics related to the Bible.
As an example, I was part of a "triplet" prayer group in my fraternity my senior year. Each week we met and shared items for which we wanted prayer. One week, I shared that I had been experiencing high anxiety over my desire for a relationship. It was difficult for me to talk to them about it because we did not hold the same basic values--the other two guys both believed that homosexuality is a sin. How could I bring someone into my world to share in my struggles when we disagreed on my humanity?
To this day, whenever anyone mentions that they do not approve of the "homosexual lifestyle" because of the Bible, my reaction is approximately this:
* * *
I tried church again a few times near the end of my Berkeley stint. During the fall of my senior year, I went to a Catholic mass for the first time with a fraternity brother. And at the beginning of my final semester of grad school, a friend of mine from high school and his fiancée invited me to attend an Episcopal church with them. While the music at these two churches was not so infuriating (standard liturgy that has withstood the test of centuries certainly helps), the homilies were once again scarcely relevant to the questions I wanted to explore. In addition, the Scriptures preached seemed to be accepted at face value, with insufficient screen time given to exploring the contexts of the texts.
But, fundamentally, it was still church. By this point, that in itself had become enough of a disqualifying factor. The doctrine and the music may have been different, but it was still too closely related to the church I had purposely left.
The church as an institution had become obsolete for me.
* * *
Sometimes I found myself thinking about the future of my church attendance: would I ever go back? What would it take to get me to go back? I kept checking as my years of church absenteeism added up, and my feelings about each of the aforementioned topics remained static. Would I ever make peace with these issues? What would I do if I raised kids and wanted them to have a Christian upbringing? Would I have to attend church alongside them in spite of these issues?
1It's worth asking myself: Had I been worship leader at Berean or at Fair Oaks, would I have been an exception? Answer: Absolutely not. Perhaps I was saved from disgrace by not being selected for worship leader.
2Why do smaller-scale worship sessions' percussion instruments have to be foreign or "exotic"?
3Okay, so maybe I think worship bands should aspire to sound like Florence + the Machine's first three albums. Sue me.
4That the creation stories in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 differ led me to begin exploring this question my senior year of high school. Seriously, look them up. It's laughable that people present the Biblical creation story as history when two conflicting accounts are separated in the text by only one chapter.
5This was an especially toxic mindset that still plagues me to this day. I frequently used Philippians 2:3-4 to defend my own abasement.
6That was the flavor of Christianity I grew up with. You could not take any credit for your accomplishments, since God was the one who endowed you with the enabling ability. Meanwhile, you were required to accept responsibility for all the mistakes you committed. In other words, you absorbed all the negative and none of the positive.
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