At Home Outside Evangelicalism

“Where do you go to church?” she asked.

I remember the chill of the water as I stood there, waist-deep in the pool while our kids splashed around us, wishing there was a way to not answer her question. To be fair, I had asked her the same one just a few moments before. I’m always tremendously interested in where people go to church (and almost everyone here in the Mid-South goes to church, I’ve found), what doctrines they subscribe to, and whether or not they love their church. If I’m being completely honest here, part of me is also always looking for the “right” church. My question is always meant to do two things: (1) help me assess where a person stands in relation to the church, and (2) potentially help me in my own church search.

I took a breath and answered her.

“We don’t really have a church,” I said. “We’re sort of visiting a church, but we’re not members anywhere.”

I saw her eyes widen, her mouth form a round shape that expressed surprise. Lest she feel pressured to come up with some kind of “appropriate” response, I launched into my usual “My family is very interdenominational and my husband was an MK, so we just haven’t found a church that’s a good fit for us” speech. As if that explains why I’m not at home in any church building these days.

I used to think I was an evangelical, and maybe I actually was. Or maybe I simply didn’t yet understand enough about church history and politics, about misogyny and complementarianism. Maybe I was young and naive. Maybe I hadn’t been hurt by the church yet. Maybe I still thought of the church as an extension of Jesus, the way Acts 2 describes it.

If you go by the foundational definition, “of, relating to, or being in agreement with the Christian gospel especially as it is presented in the four Gospels,” then sure, of course, definitely I’m an evangelical. But so are my Catholic friends. It’s the other definitions that make me cringe. The “Protestant,” definition. The “of, adhering to, or marked by fundamentalism” definition.

The interdenominational aspect of my faith formation is a factor, that’s true. I was baptized in the Lutheran church at age seven. I spent my high school years in a Church of Christ (where I ignored all the stuff that made no sense to my teen mind, like the ban on instruments during worship and dancing anywhere). I discovered nondenominational evangelicalism with its rock band-style worship and casual atmosphere in my mid-twenties. I’ve spent many a Sunday in the Methodist church of my paternal grandparents and the Presbyterian church of my maternal ones. I’ve been to my share of Catholic masses.

Now, the closest I feel to being at home in a church-ish place is in the chapel at St. Columba, an Episcopal retreat center near my home, where I worship with a group of ladies from a variety of churches, mostly Episcopal but also Methodist, Catholic, and Presbyterian. Often, the services are from the Book of Common Prayer, and the words we speak together, in unison, bring me a deep and unexplainable comfort. As time passes, I am drawn more and more to liturgical practices, and away from the evangelicalism that is mostly devoid of them.

I can pinpoint the day when evangelicalism first began to put a bad taste in my mouth, though, and it had nothing to do with liturgy. It was when I had my first run-in with complementarianism, at a church in Northern Virginia, when it was made clear that my husband could serve as a small group leader but I could not. This kind of line in the sand, I felt, left no room for the way both my husband and I are wired. I never went back to that church.

Since then, I’ve heard pastors make jokes at the expense of their wives from the pulpit, I’ve watched as Beth Moore and Aimee Byrd have been maligned by evangelical church leadership, and I’ve seen 80 percent of the “evangelical vote” put a bigot and a womanizer in the White House. I’ve met white evangelical Christians whose racist roots run deep. I’ve been shut out socially because I avoided church membership and the level of commitment it entailed and because I work full-time. I’ve begun to see the evangelical small group ministry machine as a hamster wheel I don’t want to be on–I’d rather build my own relationships without the help of a sign-up process and a steady stream of ice breaker questions, assigned reading, and service projects. I’ve grown suspicious of churches without any accountability for pastoral leadership–without any denominational governance or even an elder board, where the pastor is simply “accountable to God.” I’ve watched how those pastors behave and listened to what they say on Sundays–and what they don’t say.

I belong to a “secular” homeschool group that is comprised of people of a variety of faiths, but which was started by a group of Mormon families because the other local homeschool groups, led by evangelical Christians, told them they weren’t welcome. They started a group that has no religious affiliation so that any homeschooling family will feel welcome, no matter what their faith background.

I edit Christian books for a living, and a recent situation with a pushy evangelical pastor author inspired an acquisitions editor to say to me, “You know how pastors are. They’re all the kings of their own little kingdoms, and they just expect everyone to do whatever they say.”

Ahhhhhh, I thought. Yes. That says so much. And therein lies the problem–they’re not supposed to have kingdoms, are they?

Even my bookshelves have changed. Where once there were a lot of the latest evangelical new releases, now there are church history and theology books, there are Henri Nouwen and Richard Rohr, Joan Chittister and Barbara Brown Taylor and Phyllis Tickle, Monsignor Ronald Knox and St. Francis De Sales, Dorothy L. Sayers and the CCC. These books don’t all fully align, but I find I like it that way. I am pushed and pulled, driven to question and pray by what’s on my bookshelves.

I am at home in prayer, at home in the pages of Scripture. I am at home out in creation, at home in that little Episcopal retreat center in the middle of the woods. I am at home in my “domestic monastery,” in my daily study and worship time with the two little girls I am raising to know Christ. I’m just not at home in any church building at the moment. There’s a gulf there, one I hope to someday cross again, but for now, I’m content to simply be at home with Christ in the world he created and building relationships with my motley crowd of friends from many different churches, loving and being loved by them.

Harmony Harkema has loved the written word for as long as she can remember. A former English teacher turned editor, she has spent the past nine years in the publishing industry. A writer herself in the fringe hours of her working-and-homeschooling mom life, Harmony also has a heart for leading and coaching aspiring writers. Harmony lives in Memphis with her husband and two small daughters. She blogs at harmonyharkema.com.

Photograph © Daniel McCullough, used with permission