No Longer Quivering
After going through some old links in a bookmarks folder I have been revisiting many people that NLQ has quoted extensively in the past. I was looking for links to a pretty terrible book review site we used to follow and checking up on what the many child-collection by adoption blogs were up to.
The bad reviews site is gone, which is good because the review had opinions like thinking that poor sappy fundamentalist hero-child Elsie Dinsmore was too rebellious and needed more beating. Terrible ideas wiped away from the web, whew!
Most of the mega-adopters have added at least one more child and are planning more adoptions in the near future, even the overwhelmed ones. No surprise there. Adeye Salem is still trying to hook up adopters with adoptees and fund-raise now that she totally abandoned her plan to have an orphanage in Africa.
One of the blogs I haven’t visited in awhile is Smartter Each Day by Jessica Smartt. One of her recent posts that provoked both laughter and anger is titled People Need to Stop Dating Churches and Get Married to One.
I groaned openly reading this one. The author was trying to make a case that being married and making that ’till death do us part’ promise needs to happen when we join a church too. We need to commit no matter how we feel.
Sure, everyone has seen church-hoppers, people who will come to a church a few weeks or month, proceed to find something they don’t like before hopping on over to another church. During my years in fundytown those folks reputations proceeded them, I’d even heard pastors tell parishioners ‘Oh don’t pay any mind to so-in-so because they are a CHURCH HOPPER and won’t be here much longer’ indicating that they weren’t worthy of consideration or listening to their point of view.
Sounds like an ecclesiastical bunny to me, that term. I always watched with amusement with the perpetual church hoppers attempts to take over other churches. A lot of the people hopping, not marrying the church, had more to do with their desire to run that particular church and when things did not go their way quickly they moved on. Most of the time it was a blessing to see them go.
Here’s a couple of screencaps on Jessica’s thoughts on staying in a church no matter what:
Churches form and reform all the time, the members ebb and flow away for a wide variety of reasons. As long as people have preferences there will be that tension push-pull of church membership.
What she never touches on is why many people walk away from church or even leave religion altogether to becomes ‘Dones’. Many times it involves abuse, spiritual abuse, either from the pulpit or the other members. It takes many insidious forms, like prayer gossip, or having people who are supposed to be like family, sisters and brothers in Christ say and do the most mind-boggling judgemental actions towards you. Spiritual abuse drives people away, hurting and broken, that’s a fact and it’s not something as simple are disagreeing on what color to paint the church nursery.
As long as the spiritual abuse continues unabated the church in America will continue to dwindle to a pale shadow of itself. Telling people who have suffered at the hands of churches and members to stay no matter what is akin to telling a woman being beating routinely to stay with her abusive husband.
Don’t judge others for leaving.
Don’t marry a known abuser!
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