This is a weird place for me. I’ve been a member of a church since birth and for the first time I am not. I was born into an SBC church in the heart of the south. I grew up in that church and was present as often as the doors were open. Though my dad was never involved with my church life, it was central to my family as my mother and grandparents were always plugged in.
As I grew, I got plugged in too. Drama, Sunday school, Wednesday night. I was always there. In my teen years, I joined the tech team and that’s when things really ramped up. I got there early. I left late. I was always there.
As an adult, married to Janeway, we moved from the SBC to a PCA church and I became less plugged in. When we joined several years before COVID, married but with no kids, I found it hard to plug into the community. I never offered my skills as a techy due to the burnout I experienced when I was a tech intern at my previous church during college. And I just never quite felt like I fit in.
On top of that we started with the other scary word. Deconstruction. Janeway and I have always had a marriage of equals, and even though I would speak in complimentarian platitudes, our real lives never matched what I said. We always split things pretty evenly.
So deconstruction really started there. There was some addiction recovery work that probably kicked it off for me, but that’s a talk for another time. Really, our marriage was the catalyst.
I’m a man who is bad at finances. My neurodivergence makes it hard for me to stay organized and to keep up with paperwork oriented tasks. But Janeway is gifted in those areas so she just handled them. When I would hear someone say “as the man you should step up and do X”, often times my internal response was “she is more qualified. Why would I put in so much effort when she can handle it?”
It sounds silly and simple, but that made me start to question. If this formula they are giving doesn’t work for me, then what about other things that are being said.
Over the next few years we, together, began to learn more about the bible. We learned about people that mostly weren’t talked about. The women of the bible. At the same time the book “The Great Sex Rescue” (GSR) was released. I read it and realized a lot of the harmful messages I was taught in the church. I was in an “Every Young Man’s Battle” class when I was in youth group. I was told I couldn’t handle my sexual desires. I was told my wife was my way out. But because of what I learned in recovery, I found those messages to be false too.
Not too long after, Janeway asked me to read “She Deserves Better”. Reading that was another breakthrough for me. As a man who was raised in purity culture, I saw my story. I saw where I had tried dating girls in high school from church and was always turned down. I thought something was wrong with me. And it’s possible there were other factors, but a big one was that when I was being taught that women were stumbling blocks and to turn my eyes, the girls were being taught that we boys couldn’t control themselves and they needed to be gatekeepers. Another message that wasn’t true that caused harm.
So as I’m learning this, we are becoming more aware of how the evangelical church treats women. It essentially silences half of the congregation based on their gender. I also learned more about hell from the BEMA podcast and from the book “Love Wins”. So the last straws for me in the PCA were a sermon on hell that I walked out of with my 6 year old and a Sunday school on women’s roles in the church that essentially pigeon holed women into women’s ministry, children’s ministry, and hospitality. I just couldn’t keep attending a church that puts people down for reasons out of their control.
So we officially left our church. And though we have found a new place we love, we haven’t joined. So I’m now an “unchurched millennial”. It feels strange. Unchurched has always felt like a dirty word and as someone who has been churched all my life, it feels like I’m floating in the ocean on a raft. It’s a different feel, but I’m getting used to it.