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| A group of people kneeling in prayer at the altar, at the Asbury revival. Image source. |
My posts on the Asbury revival:
February 13 Blogaround
"There is no one to help me into the pool when the water is stirred": What people do with "revival"
Does God Use Miracles To Take Sides?
The Logistics of a Revival
Why I Don't Want to be at a "Revival"
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So I've written a bunch of posts about the Asbury revival, which happened in February. My overall perspective on it is, I think to some extent it really is from God, but also I'm HIGHLY SUSPICIOUS of anyone in evangelical Christian culture who says it's inherently a good thing, and we want it to happen everywhere. And anyone who tries to tell us their opinion on "this is what it means."
Anyway, this post is about why I don't want to be at a "revival."
So, I've seen photos from the Asbury revival. A crowd of people raising their hands, singing- man, the energy in that room must have been incredible. A bunch of students kneeling at the front, right there at the stage. Wow, yeah, I used to do things like that, and part of me misses it.
But then I pull myself back and say, no, I can't be doing things like that. This is not a safe environment for me to express my feelings about God. If these people knew what I really believed, they would say I'm not a real Christian. I can't be so open and honest about how I feel about God, I can't let them see that, they are not safe.
When I was evangelical... I was so devoted to God, so overtaken with obsession for him, so passionate, and I showed it during the worship music time at church services or Christian events. Dancing, shouting, raising my hands, kneeling. I showed everyone how I felt about God. I always heard Christians say "when you worship, it's just you and God, you shouldn't care what other people think" and I really bought into that.
And the whole time, I also bought into a Christian ideology where we judged other Christians and labelled them as "not real Christians." If they didn't believe in hell. If they interpreted a key bible verse differently than we did. If they accepted LGBTQ people. If they didn't "put God first."
I've heard other ex-evangelicals say, it's the ones who are the most devoted to following Jesus, who take it the most seriously, who end up following Him right out of the church and rebelling against the entire ideology.
I was fiercely passionate about God when I was evangelical, and I would say I still am now. And at every step along the way.
I didn't turn away from God; instead, I discovered that my God had been a monster all along, and I couldn't in good conscience obey him any more... But there was a better God there, once I'd hacked through the cardboard cut-out of a God I used to worship. A better God. A queer God, for lack of a better term. I use the term "queer" here because it encapsulates something very important about the difference between my Christianity now and my Christianity back then. One was about beating yourself down to stay within the rigid rules that God put you in. The other is about the amazing beauty of human creativity and the diversity of human experience, the joy that we find in discovering ourselves and our world, where God is alive everywhere, in every person- in Them we live and move and have our being. I suspect the best way to find out which side of this divide a particular person or church is on is to ask them their position on LGBTQ inclusion.
(Okay maybe I'm being a little naive there, thinking that churches that accept gay couples are perfect utopias... It's possible to accept gay couples and still have a lot of harmful anti-self and/or patriarchal ideology.)
Anyway, my point is, I worshiped in front of all these evangelical people, and then, as I followed what they said Jesus told us to do, I changed my beliefs into the sorts of beliefs that people who get branded "fake Christians" have.
Maybe it was when I stopped believing in hell. Maybe that's the first time I crossed the line into "evangelicals would say I'm not a real Christian."
It's only directly happened to me a few times- Christians saying I'm not a real Christian, I'm rejecting God because I just want to sin, etc. I'm not really bothered by those specific times. The thing that actually hurts is how I spent so many years in a Christian culture where it was totally normal to say "so-and-so is not a real Christian because they believe the wrong thing about XYZ"- that was normal, that was what we did. I don't remember anyone ever challenging it. We knew all the right answers about what God wanted and the correct way to read the bible, and, well, we're not arrogant, we're just telling the truth!
That's the culture I was in, when I let everyone see how much I love God, and then I became the kind of Christian who's a "fake Christian" and I feel so bad that I let them see how much I love God. People are too polite to say it to me directly, but I know. I know. I used to be evangelical, so I know.
I know I'm a "false teacher" now.
So I see the photos of the Asbury revival, and part of me wants to experience that, but part of me says, no, these people are not safe, I can't show them how I really feel about God. The pull of the light side and the pull of the dark side, so to say. The question of "which side is which?" is left as an exercise for the reader.
But, wait, I have one caveat: I would worship with queer Christians.
If it's a group of queer Christians... we've all been through some shit, we know what's what, and we still choose to follow Jesus. That is a totally different situation than a worship service at your average church. I could worship with queer Christians, because I know they don't judge me like that. Even if some of them judged me, some others would surely step up and say, no, we are not the arbiters of who is and who is not a "real Christian."
Yes, I could worship with queer Christians.
But with a group of conservative/evangelical Christians... no, I shouldn't do that. I'm not safe there. If they knew what I believed, they would say I'm not a real Christian. People like that don't get to see how I feel about God.
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Related:
"You Weren't There, the Night Jesus Found Me"
The Christianity of GCN Conference
The things I've never let myself say about worship
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Also a few videos I need to share here:
This Chinese song is how I feel about God:
Also, God is a girl.
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