Childhood Church

Thinking back to my first remembered experiences of church and of God, my overall impression is "rules." There were some great people in my little country church, and had it not been for them, I probably would have gone off the deep end long ago. But still, the overall impression of what God and church was all about was that I was to behave and follow the rules.

At first I did pretty well with this. I sat relatively still during the sermons (thanks to the raisins and drawing paper my mother provided). I listened to the flannel graph stories in Sunday School, and other than that day when I shifted the car out of park (on a hill) while waiting for mom to come out of the church, I generally did what I was told. But then came the day in my 4th grade Sunday School class when I bucked the system. I asked a question. It's not that questions were completely forbidden, but I asked one of those questions; I asked why creation and evolution couldn't both be true. Without really understanding what I had done wrong, I found myself getting kicked out of Sunday School and being sent to my mother's classroom. This began a pattern of questioning and being kicked out. Fortunately for me, most of the time I was intercepted by a wise pastor who often took me for walks and patiently answered my questions. Unfortunately, I learned that everything has an answer, and when that pastor moved on, I learned that it was better to just not ask the questions.

Still, there were great people who loved me. Jr. high was a traumatic time as my parents fought and discussed splitting up and my older brother decided to use me as an outlet for his frustrations. I spent hours at the church and playing basketball and volleyball in the church's recreation center. The church gave me a place to belong when I didn't have any other safe place to go. Playing their game seemed a small price to pay for such love and security.

There was one phrase that stands out to me from my childhood church: To know Him and make Him known. That was a phrase that was introduced to us as an early form of a mission statement. It was scuplted in big letters and placed on the wall at the front of the church. I spent many hours looking at that phrase and wondering if I really knew Jesus - or if anyone in my church did, for that matter. I think that wondering led me to even more of those secretly harbored questions, the biggest being "What does it mean to really know Jesus?"