Managing both a blog and a newsletter has proven unwieldy, so I’ve switched to something new. You can now find my writing at No Trifling Matter, the Substack community where I share reflections about faith and spirituality, oppression and justice, trauma and healing.
I’m also releasing guided meditation recordings. You can follow me on the Insight Timer app or subscribe to the Meditating with Dr. Chanequa podcast on Amazon Music, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or Spotify.
My blog is moving! This will be the last post on this site. Be sure to join my Substack so you won’t miss new posts.
Once in a while, I hear the story of a divorced cishet man who claims to have been caught off-guard when his wife told him she wanted to end their marriage. “I don’t know what went wrong. She just said she was done.”
As a family psychologist, I’ve learned the story is always more complex. On the other side, there’s often a woman who had given up communicating her concerns to her husband because she no longer hoped he could or would change.
In case you haven’t guessed by now, this is an allegory about the church.
I know a few pastors and church leaders who don’t understand why many of us have broken up with the church. Perhaps we haven’t filed divorce papers, but we’ve packed our stuff, moved out, and have limited contact.
The reality is that while we often hear news stories of abusive, exploitative, or power-hungry pastors, most Christian leaders are genuinely trying to do their best in a difficult and undervalued job. It’s hard to keep hearing criticism when you are putting in your best effort.
Unfortunately, what many clergy think of as their “best” has been shaped by theological and doctrinal word views that were crafted for (and by) people in a vastly differently cultural and historical context than we live in today. There has been a seismic shift in the worldview of postmodern Christians.
Postmodern Christians prize relationships over rules, partnership and equality over hierarchy, people over institutions, and individuality over conformity. We see diversity as God’s intention for the world, whether its diversity of culture, sexual orientation, gender expressions, or even religion. To us, diversity is not a threat to Christian unity because we are more comfortable holding the tensions between multiple truths. Yes, we see truth as multilayered, shaped by cultural identities, social locations, and individual experiences.
In many ways, we are the antithesis of the culture of the church, with its emphasis on hierarchical leadership, homogeneous growth models, conformity, exclusion, and social control.
Yet we still believe. We love the church and we believe in its mission. We want to see it thrive. We want to to be a place where all of God’s creation can thrive. We believe the world needs the church. But we also believe that the church must change to meet the needs of a changing world.
Our anger, frustration, disappointment, and heartbreak are birthed in the gap between what we believe the church to be capable of and what we see it doing. Our criticism is our attempt to push the church toward the change we believe is critical and possible. It is the sign that we still hope.
May we never stop criticizing.
In my second year of seminary, I attended a daylong training on pastoral care for intimate partner violence. The facilitator said something that has stuck with me for the past 20 years: “Women who go to their pastors for help with domestic violence are more likely to stay in abusive marriages. And the abuse does not stop.”
Until the 1990s, when the domestic violence awareness movement began to reach the church, Christian responses to survivors of intimate partner violence often focused upon pressuring them to forgive and to assume responsibility for changing their partner’s behavior. They used Christian teachings about suffering and the sanctity of the marital covenant to encourage women to stay with abusive partners. In traditional Christian thinking, divorce is worse than abuse.
The same could be said for how many pastors and Christian leaders think about church membership.
This week, I saw a blog post by Thom Rainer circulating on social media called “Don’t Divorce Christ.” Rainer, the former president and CEO of LifeWay Christian Resources, rebuts what he sees as common reasons that Christians give for not attending church. His rebuttal is largely based upon a traditionalist worldview that elevates allegiance and submission to institutions over the needs of individuals. Indeed, Rainer emphasizes that the church is not about meeting our needs, something I find a bit odd since much of Jesus’s ministry was about meeting people’s needs. Nowhere in Matthew 25 does it say that the designation of sheep and goats will be based upon how many times we signed the pew registration pad.
The way that Rainer addresses critiques of the church is pretty similar to how many pastors used to (and still do) tend to victims of domestic violence: dismissal, silencing, and belittling. His post echoed so many Christian leaders and laypeople who admonish people to remain invested in congregational life even when doing so causes them harm. Divorce, apparently, is worse than abuse.
Ironically, just last week, after seeing another leader’s post complaining about folks leaving church, I shared on Twitter that admonitions for why people should stay in church are remarkably similar to abuse logic:
Stay with him.
Try harder not to piss him off.
Help him change.
Pray more.
Stick with it for the kids.
You can’t survive without him.
It’s God’s will.
It’s bullshit…abusive, manipulating, gaslighting bullshit. And if I had a friend who gave me those reasons for why they stayed in a harmful relationship, I’d tell them the same. I’d still be their friend, I would listen to their concerns, and I would do what you’re supposed to when someone’s in an abusive situation: emphasize their need for safety and healing, and the abuser’s need for accountability and repentance. Without those, reconciliation isn’t even on the table for discussion. Instead, we grieve the death of relationship.
Sometimes, breaking relationship is a holy act. That includes relationship with the church.
We are not reconciled to the oppressors who whet their howl on our grief. We are not reconciled.”
Gloria Anzaldúa
Like many Christians, I have learned to view the spiritual journey as a dichotomy between two places: the wilderness and the promised land. The wilderness – where the Israelites were lost for four decades – is the site of suffering and struggle, loss and loneliness, deprivation and depression.
The promised land, in contrast, is the land of plenty and provision, of joy and justice. In the promised land, all of our needs will be met. Our bodies, our finances, our relationships will all be healthy and secure. The church will be a vibrant community of diverse people who live in ecstatic union with one another and with the Divine. All of our actions will be directed by the Holy Spirit. It’s going to be glorious. Of course we want to live there! We desperately search for the church or spiritual movement that can point us to the signs of the promised land.
Our view of the promised land is highly romanticized, even in Scripture. In reality, the land that was promised to the Israelites was inhabited land; it was someone else’s home. Arriving there meant that the Israelites were committing land theft and that the land would always be contested. That part of the story – and not the part about YHWH promising the land – is similar to what it means to live in the United States, this land that was stolen from Native Americans, that was forcibly cultivated by kidnapped Africans, and that White Christian nationalists want to reclaim as belonging only to them. Indeed, as the US backtracks on civil rights for women, Black people and other people of color, immigrants, LGTBQIA+ persons, disabled persons, and laborers, I am increasingly convinced that the Christian quest for the promised land is misguided. For those of who refuse to say “Peace, peace” when there is no peace, there is no promised land. There is only wilderness.
There is no promised land. There is only wilderness.
A few years ago, I stopped searching for the church of the promised land. I decided to do instead what my ancestors did – learn to find God, community, and myself in the wilderness. And I have. In fact, I have encountered God more in the wilderness than in the institutional church. It has not been easy. It requires me to acknowledge and release the chains that keep me bound to the pseudo-promised land, to risk going into unfamiliar territory, and to free my theological imaginations so I can recognize when God shows up in unexpected ways.
Encountering God in the wilderness has meant not just deconstructing our faith but also decolonizing it, learning how the poisons of White supremacy, patriarchy, heterosexism, and capitalism have infiltrated my ideas about who God is and what God wants in the world. It has required me to find new forms of spiritual community.
It is hard to find community in the wild. Church in the wild does not gather weekly at fixed places and times. There is no liturgy and there are no staff to ensure and shape community gatherings. There are no sermons or rehearsed songs.
The wilderness journey is highly individualized. We may be headed to the same destination and our paths may cross from time to time, but we may not be taking the same roads or traveling at the same place. Wilderness people are always on the move. Sometimes we only stay together for little while – perhaps even building something beautiful for a time – before we take off again, following Spirit wherever they lead us.
Wilderness people are always on the move.
I agonized over the difficulty of finding stable community in the wilderness until I learned to look for it differently: in online meetings, meditation groups, conferences, walks or meals with friends, artist gatherings and exhibits, group texts, Twitter threads, and living room conversations among spiritual sojourners. Some of these happen only once; others can be more often with a little intentionality. What has been stable is not the people, place, or time, but the Spirit that forms the through line of our journeys. And for now, that is enough.
This is the second post in a series about my spiritual journey. I encourage you to read the first, Confessions of a Church Misfit.
I really didn’t expect to stay away from church for so long, but see what had happened was…well, first let me take you back a bit.
I grew up in an old-school Black Baptist church in Atlanta that – in the way of our tradition – didn’t put much stock in creeds. The only time our church did anything creedal was every month at our baptism and communion service, when we’d recite the Baptist Covenant.
I recall saying it for the first time at my baptism when I was 14 years old (which was when I learned that I wasn’t already baptized). The part that really stuck with me was the end: “We moreover engage that when we remove from this place we will, as soon as possible, unite with some other church where we can carry out the spirit of this covenant and the principles of God’s Word.”
I really took that “as soon as possible” seriously. So did my grandmother. When I left home in 1994 to attend to graduate school in Miami, she told me that I needed to find a new church immediately. And when I called her on Sunday afternoons, she asked if I’d been to service.
For three decades, I became a church serial monogamist who was constantly in a rebound relationship. I’d leave one church and immediately join another one, trying to carry out my commitments to the Baptist Covenant and to my grandmother.
One time, I joined a church after attending only one worship service. Then a few weeks into the new members’ class, I opened the religion section of the Sunday paper to see the pastor’s photo under a headline about Black churches becoming part of the Southern Baptist Convention. I didn’t even know such a thing existed, but I had no intention of being part of it.
Every other time, my leaving was more gradual, coming after long periods of discomfort and spiritual undernourishment. What was stable was that every time I left, I joined somewhere else quickly. I couldn’t bear not having an answer to my grandmother’s question, “Have you found a new church home yet?” As the firstborn grandchild, I had an exaggerated sense of responsibility and a need to please.
When I left my ministry position in January 2017, I realized it was time to stop doing church on the rebound. Instead, I opted to be church celibate, refraining from attending church for an extended period. Since Lent was coming up, I decided my spiritual practice would be giving up church without feeling guilty about it. The first part of that was hard, but it was the second part that was the real discipline. It meant being mindful of my own anxiety and shame about staying home on Sundays. It also meant being unapologetic when I explained to other people – including my mom, my seminary colleagues, and my ministry friends – that I wasn’t going to church on Sunday, that I didn’t have a church home and I wasn’t looking for one.
For the forty days of Lent, I stopped paying attention to how organized Christianity told me to experience God and I started paying attention to how I felt God’s presence. Sundays became a genuine day of Sabbath rest as my family stayed in bed a little longer instead of rushing off to serve in church. We gathered at the kitchen table for breakfast and stayed there talking for hours afterward. We gardened and took walks and sat outside, developing new appreciation for God’s creation. Sometimes we read and discussed Scripture together. But mostly, we rested.
Then the forty days ended but the practice of church celibacy did not. I was only beginning to detoxify my relationship with God and the church. I was still discerning what God was saying to me beyond the noise of church polity and doctrine. After decades of contorting myself to fit in church, I needed more time to discover my authentic spirituality.
Before we knew it, forty days turned into three years. In the meantime, our relationship with God never faltered. We missed Christian community at times, but we also learned to appreciate the community that surrounded us daily, from our family’s prayer calls to the spiritual conversations that we hosted with friends.
Church celibacy affirmed what I’d long believed: church is not where God lives. God lives in us – in humanity and in creation and in the love that we share for one another. Church is meant to be a gathering of people who come together to point each other to the God within us. A healthy, vibrant church community can be a powerful sharpener of our faith. But it is not faith itself.
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It’s been six years since I left church. Six years since I stopped attending in-person worship services at a local congregation. Six years since I’ve held a ministry position (official or otherwise). Six years since I’ve had a congregation that I could call home.
This is not the way I thought my life would turn out when I graduated from seminary. It certainly wasn’t what I expected when I walked away from my career as a psychology professor in order to attend seminary. Since hearing my call to ministry 20 years ago, I always imagined myself as bivocational, actually trivocational, combining an academic position with congregational ministry and community engagement. This is what I told every district superintendent as we jointly discerned my path toward ordination in the United Methodist Church, even as they wrestled with the idea of an elder having a primary appointment in a seminary. It’s what I’ve told every dean. Indeed, in my nearly two decades (yikes!) as a seminary professor, I have intentionally chosen to work at institutions that valued my commitments to parish ministry and to social justice. Still here I am, living in denominational and congregational exile for six years now.
Still here I am, living in denominational and congregational exile for six years now.
In January 2017, I left the new UMC multicultural church plant that I’d served for two years as discipleship pastor. I hadn’t planned to leave. I hadn’t even been thinking about it. I’d simply been doing what I thought was my job. I’d signed onto the church’s launch team after a conversation with the senior pastor at my favorite coffee shop. He told me about his vision for a multicultural church. I told him about all the ways that I’d seen such churches fail, how most of them were multiracial but culturally White. He asked me to come on board as discipleship pastor and to use my expertise on racism and racial justice to keep the church accountable to the vision of genuine multiculturalism. After some thought and prayer, my partner and I decided to give it a try.
From the beginning, my family were all in. I spent my Friday mornings in leadership team meetings before heading off to do my academic research and writing. On Sundays, my family showed up at the church’s meeting place (a high school) at 7am, my seven-year-old joining the other kids in the school’s gym in the hours before and after worship as the adults transformed the auditorium and lobby into a sanctuary and children’s church area. I envisioned the kids forming deep friendships over the years, as deep (or more) as the adults would develop. Every Sunday, I got up on the stage to share the church’s vision and to connect it to current events. I talked about race and gender and justice and why it mattered in the life of the church.
Then one Sunday in fall 2016, after I’d been gone for two weeks of academic and ministry conferences, I was shocked when, during our weekly review of the order of service, the pastor turned to the outreach pastor and told him to do the welcome and vision statement that I normally did. I figured that they must be doing something special that they’d discussed at Friday’s leadership team meeting. When the moment came, though, there was nothing unique about it.
As it continued over the next few weeks, I realized that not only was I being sidelined, but that the church was becoming exactly what I’d feared: a White-centering church focused upon numerical growth rather than discipleship. Despite our early conversations about being willing to stay small so that we could focus on deep, justice-oriented discipleship, the pastor started mentioning local megachurches and their pastors as our ministerial role models, churches that no one in our area would associate with justice or multiculturalism. The language of racial justice was being replaced by the more saccharin language of “diversity” and “unity.” The music was straight out of CCM. As much as I love “Oceans,” a true multicultural church needs more than Hillsong and Gungor.
As much as I love “Oceans,” a true multicultural church needs more than Hillsong and Gungor.
It was not turning out the way that I’d hoped. But I wasn’t giving up. Even after the trauma of the 2016 presidential election – and my husband’s suspicion that the pastor’s wife might have voted for Trump – I thought I could course-correct.
That’s what I was trying to do one Friday morning in early January 2017 when the pastor talked about making changes to our worship service. In keeping with my role, I said that the discussion needed to address the revolving door of Black families in our ministry. African and African-American families would come for a few months, and then disappear. They’d often be replaced by other Black families, so we always had Black people in worship, just never the same Black people for more than a few months.
“If we’re going to be true to our vision, we need to have a conversation about why this is happening and what we’re going to do about it,” I said.
Our youth pastor, a young White male, cosigned my comment: “I’m glad you brought that up because I’ve noticed it too.”
The pastor shocked us both when he looked at us and said, “What I encourage all of you to do is to pray about your commitment to this church and whether this is the place that God wants you to be. And if not, you are free to leave.”
What the unholy fuck kind of response was that?! I fumed internally as the meeting wrapped up and I headed back home. Who said anything about leaving? No one said anything about leaving! No one’s even thinking about leaving!
It would be two more years before the viral video moment in which a young Black boy would look utterly dejected while saying, “I’m tired of this church,” into the microphone in a church sanctuary. As I drove home that day, I felt the portent of that boy’s fatigue.
I was tired of this church in all its versions – the historically Black version, the White progressive version, the evangelical megachurch version, even the not-that-kind-of-evangelical social justice version. I had tried all of these spaces and no matter how much I tried to fit into them, they always found some way to tell me that I was an outlier, an interloper, a misfit.
I was tired of this church in all its versions – the historically Black version, the White progressive version, the evangelical megachurch version, even the not-that-kind-of-evangelical social justice version.
“I am so tired of trying to fit!” I screamed in my car as I waited at a traffic light.
That’s when it came, the voice that was not my own saying, “Who told you that you had to fit?”
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It’s been over a year since I’ve done anything with this blog. That means I’ve got a book coming! After finishing up last year’s Lenten challenge, I devoted my energy to turning it into a book. I’m happy to announce that Sacred Self-Care: Daily Practices for Nurturing Our Whole Selves will be out August 15th! I’m looking forward to sharing the book cover with you soon.
I loved writing this. It was a chance to rethink the content I’ve put out for the Lenten challenge over the past few years. The book is not the same as the Instagram/Facebook challenge. The broad themes are the same, but the daily practices and topics are different and the focus is bigger than Lent. There are scriptures grounding each daily practice. And I’ve added a weekly review practice each Sunday that includes hymns, questions for reflection, and a benediction.
I am so proud of this book. It’s more than a devotional. It’s a theology of self-care, written in a devotional format that invites readers to practice and reflect on what it truly means to care for ourselves and why we must do it.
It’s out for review by endorsers now and I’m looking forward to sharing it with you in just a few months.
I forgot about margin.
At the beginning of the year, I had decided that margin was my theme for the year. I needed to live with more margin, instead of having my days so full of activity that I ran from one obligation to the next without stopping. “At the beginning of the year” makes it seem far away when it was just two months ago. But in less than two months, I had forgotten.
Yesterday I finished a five-day silent meditation retreat. This retreat was virtual, so I spent five days at home, isolated in a twelve-by-twelve foot room each day. I emerged only to cook, eat, go for walks outside, shower, use the bathroom, and go to bed. For five days, I remained in silence while my partner and son went about their daily routine. From 9:30am to 9:30pm each day, we alternated between sitting and walking meditation, mindful eating, and purposeful activity. No texting, no social media, no television, no music, just silence.
It was a horrible time to take a retreat. It was the midterm period, the point where the workload reaches a fever pitch as faculty and students limp toward the end of the academic year. The days before the retreat were frenzied as I tried to make enough progress at home and at work to take the time off. By the start of the retreat, I was physically and mentally exhausted. When the facilitators asked us to reflect on why we were there, my first thought was that I shouldn’t be. What had possessed me to register for five days of meditation during the busiest phase of the academic year?
What had possessed me to register for five days of meditation during the busiest phase of the academic year?
Then I remembered: it was precisely because it was the busiest phase of the year that I had chosen this particular retreat. I knew that I would be frantic. I knew that the demands coming from students and colleagues would be overwhelming. I knew that my self-care disciplines would be struggling under the weight of an endless to-do list. I knew that there would be too much to do and too many people who needed me to stop.
And I knew that was precisely why I needed to stop: to remind myself once again that I am ultimately indispensable to myself and my family. I needed to withdraw from the activity of the world and behold that world continuing to spin on its axis.
So for five days I remained in silence, in stillness, and in solitude, observing the workings of my own mind and body. And somewhere along the way I remembered my intent to live with margin.
I can’t believe Ash Wednesday is tomorrow. It feels like I just took my Christmas decorations down. Oh, maybe it’s because the church calendar is weird. We spend about 4 weeks anticipating the birth of Jesus, another 6 weeks celebrating the Epiphany, and then 6 weeks anticipating Jesus’s execution and resurrection. It’s a pretty fast transition from celebration to mourning back to celebration again.
I’m not sure what it means that the church spends six weeks anticipating mourning. I’m tempted to look at the psychological literature on anticipatory grief, because this just doesn’t seem healthy. Plus, we’ve been doing so much actual grieving for two years now. This year, Lent begins just a few weeks before the second anniversary of the COVID-19 pandemic in the US (it’s past the anniversary for Asia and parts of Europe). It seems that we’re on the verge of reopening and recovering, but we’ve lost and given up a lot in these two years. This Lent finds us grieving not just the losses of the pandemic but the Russian assault on Ukraine. Add in global economic meltdown, supply chain issues, the continuing climate crisis, the housing crisis. Personally, I need to experience resurrection now, not just anticipate it six weeks from now.
So once again, I’ll be hosting the Resurrecting Self-Care challenge this year. I’m moving the challenge to Facebook this year so that we can experience it in community. We’ll be able to talk about our daily practices together, including our lessons and our failures. And I’ll be adding some new elements, including a few Facebook live sessions. So join us at https://www.facebook.com/groups/selfcarejourney.
I don’t really do New Year’s resolutions. Like a lot of people, I spend the last few days of December and first few days of January reflecting about what has happened in the past year and what I want to happen in the upcoming year. I review the goals that I set for myself at the beginning of the academic year, and make adjustments. But I don’t really do resolutions in the traditional sense. In 2020, I did a vision board for the first time. You know how that turned out. Thanks, COVID-19.
This year I’m eschewing both resolutions and vision boards. Instead, I’ll stick to the same commitment that I’ve made to myself for the past five years: strengthening my commitment to my self-care rule of life.
Since 2015, I’ve been using a rule of life as the structure for my self-care disciplines. I’ve been teaching students in my spiritual formation classes to do the same. In 2022, I’m inviting my readers, friends, and colleagues to join me. On Saturday, January 15, I’ll be hosting a 2.5 hour virtual workshop, Self-Care as a Way of Life. In it, I’ll teach participants what self-care is about (hint: it’s not spa days) and how we can use it to enhance our health and well-being. Then I’ll walk you through the steps to develop your own self-care rule of life.
So if you’re ready to level up your self-care for 2022, come join me. The cost is $35. Space is limited, so reserve your spot now. And be sure to share with friends who might be interested.
Dr. Chanequa's Musings 
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