Church history repeats

About 18 years ago, my wife and I were visiting churches in the area to find one where we would feel comfortable for the long term. It’s a tiring process, as it usually involves returning to places you didn’t particularly like, just in case they had a bad week or because you did.

Unless an alarm goes off in the middle of the service, with a siren flashing and the voice of Cecil B DeMille thunders from heaven, “This place is full of shit,” it can be hard to tell at first if a place is bad as it seems on your first impression. There may be friends of yours who worship there, and there are always (insidiously) people who act like they’re your best friends the minute you walk in. They ask how you’ve been, remark how the children have grown, and start reminiscing with you about time time you put paste in Bethany Kovacs’ hair back in Mrs. Bagamerry’s class so that by the time you remember you’ve just met them, you’ve already agreed to be godparents to their children, committed to buying a timeshare with them, and made plans to join them for lunch the next seventeen Mondays afternoons.

One church we visited in Hillsborough was especially saccharine. Everyone was your best friend, the grumpy old lady in the back thought it was adorable the way your daughter got a nosebleed during “Nearer My God to Thee” so bad that you had to call an ambulance that ran over the daffodils out front when it pulled up, and the pastor had a Ward Cleaver voice he used not just for preaching but also for gently reproving the mofo who cut him off on Route 206.

We lasted there about six weeks before I realized I was chewing my own leg off like a trapped coyote to get out of the service.

Three weeks later, our phone rang. It was the pastor, calling to say he missed us, and asking if we would be back on Sunday.

He got my wife, who is direct and to the point.

“No,” she said. “Dave finds you phony.”

He was shocked, and felt hurt. He was lucky he spoke to her. I can be direct, to the point, and descriptive. I would have said something about shitting Hallmark cards on stage and calling them sermons.

The writer of Ecclesiastes, the teacher, describes time as cyclical. The wind blows to the west and then to the east, and then back again. Who can say “Behold, here is something new?” It was here long ago, in the days of your ancestors.

I recently left our church of fifteen years. They were years of increasing frustration with the church’s silence on matters of social justice and its attempt not to alienate the Trumpsters in our midst. They were years of hearing requests for skilled volunteers, offering those skills, and being turned down without explanation. They were years of listening to leaders appoint themselves to positions of leadership with no outward accountability. They were years that ended with “We’re in charge, and we’re sorry that you are bothered by bothersome behavior.”

I left. My wife remains.

The leadership has hired a new interim pastor who just discovered on Wednesday that my wife is maried. This naturally raised questions.

To wit: “Why did your husand leave the church?”

Fellow is lucky he didn’t ask me.