{"id":3981,"date":"2015-03-09T14:11:33","date_gmt":"2015-03-09T19:11:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/pilgrimsroadtrip\/?p=3981"},"modified":"2015-03-09T15:43:58","modified_gmt":"2015-03-09T20:43:58","slug":"1-2-me-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/pilgrimsroadtrip\/2015\/03\/1-2-me-you\/","title":{"rendered":"#1, #2, Me, You"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

When my husband came to faith in Jesus, he got the idea that really good Christians didn\u2019t poop. Or pee.<\/p>\n

You have to know he was 18 at the time. He was a member in good standing of his high school\u2019s audio-visual team, student council and chess club. I say this to highlight the fact that he was (and is) a very bright guy. He attended a Unitarian church for a while during his childhood, but had no first-hand experience with evangelicals to that point in his life. In fact, no one ever shared their faith with him. On his own during the fall of 1972, he read a tract, then read the gospel of Matthew in three days\u2019 time. At some point during that process, he surrendered himself to his Savior.<\/p>\n

When he found his way to church sometime after that, he drew some conclusions about what a good Christian was like. Apparently, he picked up the notion that Christians mastered their impurities in such a way that they no longer produced any. Growing in holiness meant fewer trips to the loo, apparently.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s been a lot of push-back in recent years against the evangelicalism of a generation ago. A steady stream of memoirs and blogs tell a story of living in the \u201cfound\u201d fold, then getting lost in an odd inversion of Amazing Grace\u2019s<\/em>\u00a0moment-of-crisis experience of faith \u2013 an experience at the core of the evangelical expression in the big \u201cC\u201d Church. Some of those storytellers find their way back to faith, but rarely return to the churches of their youth. Some never\u00a0return to any church \u2013 or faith.<\/p>\n

For every person who writes a blog post or memoir on the subject, there are thousands more who tell their story of faith with their choices. While there\u2019s been plenty of analysis and angst about people of all ages migrating away from the church over the Big Issues of our day like politics, social change, or unnecessary rigidity, I suspect there are many who fade away because they can\u2019t imagine that the exemplars in their local church ever go to the bathroom.<\/p>\n

I had a similar experience to that of my husband when I first started attending church regularly in the late 1970\u2019s from my own unchurched background. I never really thought about the pee\/poop issue, but I recall some of my first impressions of corporate Christian life included the following observations:<\/p>\n