We—the Church—Are Being Re-formed

EVERYWHERE I GO I’m having the same conversation: Young and old alike seem to be streaming out of the church. On Oct. 17, the Pew Research Center released an update on America’s changing religious landscape. According to Pew, “The share of U.S. adults who are white born-again or evangelical Protestants now stands at 16 percent, down from 19 percent a decade ago.” Christians are attending church at the same rate as a decade ago, but fewer people are identifying as Christian.

Church-attendance rates among affiliated Christians haven’t risen as the dispassionate have left. It seems passion for church is dimming even among the affiliated. In conversations across America, I hear the same mantra: “Church hurts too much.”

I get it.

I haven’t had a home church since December 2015. On that last Sunday, amid the river of hashtagged lives that has flowed across social media since Trayvon Martin’s murderer was set free in 2013, a pastor rose to the stage. White, male, and hip, he stood in the heart of empire—Washington, D.C.—and flipped through sacred texts written by brown, colonized, and serially enslaved people, landing on the book of Acts. He read a passage from the book that chronicles how the Holy Spirit moved through the earliest church to destroy hierarchies of human belonging imposed by empire. He read the passage and never came back to it. Later, hundreds of people swayed to three chords, inspired by the Bible’s teaching on how to overcome conflict at a workplace.

Salty tears baptized my face as I walked away from church—not the church, just church: the ritual, the dance, the theater.

Less than a year later, Donald Trump won the Oval Office with white evangelical support. Three years later—after children have been locked in cages and died, the river of hashtagged lives has flowed across social media with more impunity, Native American lands have been consumed for oil drilling and fracking, and women have lost much access to health care—white Christians are still Trump’s strongest base of support.

Trump’s presidency, and the church’s complicity in it, has revealed an ethical bankruptcy. How does a faith born of brown, Indigenous, colonized, serially enslaved people now find the locus of authority, the definers of boundaries and meaning, in the hallowed halls of empire—white, Western empire? White Western empire killed Jesus. How did those empowered by empire become the definer of this brown colonized man?

Although I have not had a home church since 2015, I have gone to church a lot in the years since. My most potent times of worship and communion have happened while locked arm in arm with Jesus followers as we prepared ourselves to present our bodies as living sacrifices on the front lines of the fight to protect God’s image: in Ferguson, Charlottesville, South Africa, Brazil, Australia, Seattle, Chicago.

And in D.C., a small group of friends without a church are becoming church for each other, as we break bread, drink wine, and consider the implications of brown Jesus together.

We—the church—are being re-formed. And it is good.