Becoming Church Celibate

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.

Be sure to subscribe to this blog so you’ll be notified next week when I continue the story of my church wilderness journey!