Unchristian Community
I’m happy and thriving. It’s not all doom out here. But I still get the craving.
It’s been a minute. There are a lot of things I’m skipping to write about because it’s (1) taken me too long to figure out how to write about them to a public audience in a permanent platform and (2) I haven’t had the time nor energy to sit down and write.
But at 1:53 in the morning, I am compelled to write by an IG reel I stumbled upon on the internet. It’s of a group of 90+ people at a Brooklyn House show singing Natasha Bedingfield’s Unwritten at the top of their lungs.
It sends me back to the days I was an active Christian church youth leader during praise and worship. I guess the most appealing element of my church’s youth service at the time for outsiders and unbelievers was that our praise and worship was not boring. We can rock out loud, jump, dance, and headbang (which became a problem when it started becoming performative & disruptive). We knew how to have fun. Christianity was no longer for the boring! And the video almost sums up how it felt, especially the ones we had during summer retreats with barely any sound system available. Except it was not a pop song, and we’re connecting to God spiritually rather than each other. And sometimes sobbing, like, hard.
The other day, I was talking to an old Church friend who has also left the Church about our time there. “I thought the Holy Spirit was moving me, turns out I just love live music. 😭” she shared. I’m glad we can be casual and poke fun at it now. It was impossibly heavy to talk about the elephant in the room which is us backsliding1 at one point.
Lately, I’ve been thinking more and more about the time I left the Church2. It no longer affects me as much as it did before, but there’s just too much to unpack in my experience. I’m a woman of context, so in an ideal world, I would want to take everyone through it chronologically—living double lives, going thru the shame of leaving, isolating myself from the life I’ve lived for close to 2 decades, the anger, the healing that up to now I still process, and where my faith is at at all of those points. And so I speak in riddles and metaphors when I do share my experience. It takes so much from me to speak about it, even now when my heart is lighter.
But one thing I’ve never denied and been vocal about after leaving the church is that I miss having a community.3 One that is separate from school, work, and home. One that is not tied to a single hobby I will for sure outgrow in a year. Where membership is as inclusive as it gets. Where we can expect to see pretty much the same faces, but not be confined to a group or clique the way we pick ours from a large group of people. Where we can have other lives we don’t necessarily have to involve everybody in the community in and still come together to celebrate our wins and mourn our losses. Where we’re not required to buy a drink or a meal as payment for the real estate we will be occupying for that session the way we do in parties or bars.
Every time I would say I miss having a Church community, I don’t mean I miss the Church. I literally feel zero desire to come back to Church, or at least to a traditional or mega one in the Philippines. In this political climate, with the level of cognitive dissonance in most Filipino Christians, and their attitude of pacifying any and all conflict, I won’t be surprised if someone tries to drive out the evil spirit in me when I speak up or disagree with the majority on a controversial topic. There are very few absolutes in Christianity, but so many unspoken arbitrary rules in the Filipino Christian Church I don’t fuck with. So, no, thank you.
But I miss having a community similar to that. I honestly haven’t found anything that compared. Not a highschool batch or a college block full of convenient friendships. Not the local indie scene. Not a youth-led organization joined mostly by rich kids or aspirationals. Not parties nor bars. Perhaps the closest one I’ve gone to is a queer dance community? But I’m no dancer. Or the cause for good governance? But my heart is too weak to handle the heartbreaks.
I’m still hungry for a community like the Church, but no longer a religious one. I know others who have also backslid mourn the same way. They say grief with a toxic parent is complex—where you’re mourning and angry at the same time and you have a hell of a time reconciling both. I'm fortunate enough to never have experienced it myself and I doubt it would come close. But it’s the closest depiction I could think of to what it feels like to leave the Church, know it’s the right decision for you, and still miss the community.
Leaving the Church of our own volition
For those who aren’t Christian or just aren’t familiar—there’s a difference when you say church, which means the building, and Church, which means the community or Body of Christ.
The knee-jerk reaction when a Christian hears this, at least in the past when I wasn’t as vocal about my criticisms against Filipino Christian churches and my religious trauma, is to evangelize me—invite me to a church they promise will be different, or a small, unintimidating Bible study with just a few people I will for sure love, or at the least a 1-on-1 date with the same sex which translates to an intrusive heart-to-heart. I hated all of them because I know these tactics and have done them myself during my time as a youth leader, trying to constantly find someone to invite. I know people mean well. But if you’re getting the urge and think it’s the Holy Spirit giving you a nudge to reach out to me, please don’t do it. I will ignore you respectfully.