How did I get here?

An apt question for one who feels lost, as I do. Some days I wake up and think I’ve wandered into someone else’s daydream: simple home, working with your spouse, healthy child, and no responsibilities outside of work and home life. The normalcy of it is my nightmare. I’ve woken up a few times, confused, because I wasn’t back in my old house near Radford’s campus. I get frustrated that all the Kroger’s here are of the K-mart variety and I start crying when I remember that I’ll never get to go to the same places to pick up my groceries again. The town, though not small, seems eerily quiet for the lack of boisterous college students throwing a darty in their front yard. 

How did I get here? 

My first trip to church camp took place when I was in the third grade. I went for one week, every summer, until I just about graduated high school, if I remember correctly. It was so much fun. I have nothing but positive memories from that time. I remember catching crawdaddies in the creek and running complex races that traversed the entire camp. I remember swimming during free time and cleaning up the dining hall (the only building with air conditioning) after meals. I remember listening to Bible teaching and sitting out in the big field all alone, just looking at the stars. I know that church camp has some weird connotations and many people have had negative experiences with camps like this, but mine was wholesome and good.

It was at this church camp, in fact, where I first felt and started to explore a calling to vocational ministry. At the time, all that I knew to call it was “missionary”, but I knew, from about the time that I was fourteen years old, that I wanted to spend my life telling others about Jesus. I wanted to teach them the Bible and help them live out the truths found in it. I wanted to make the lives of others meaningful, joyful, and worth living.

According to my parents, I started going to church when I was less than a week old. Family lore holds that my Great-Grandmother Collins held me in the pew filled with my parents, sister, and Grandmother. When I’m in a season of difficulty, I can imagine the sanctuary at the Red Bank Cumberland Presbyterian Church with gratitude. I don’t remember a Sunday or a Wednesday where I wasn’t there or didn’t wish that I was. I basically got involved in any way that was available to me. As I grew up, I got to be a part of the youth group and that is where many of my happiest memories are centered. We went on mission trips and did fundraisers together. We studied the Cumberland Presbyterian Confession of Faith in addition to other Bible studies. We had lock-ins and Halloween parties and did all the things that teens generally like to do. From my memory, it was a really great group of people who I really loved and wanted to spend all of my time with. 

It was among this group of people that I started to explore and exercise some of my desires and giftings in ministry. I got to teach some lessons on Wednesday evenings for our youth group. I got to give some devotionals when we were on trips. I remember jumping into Bible discussions with “analogies” to help everyone understand what our youth pastor was teaching. When the youth group had the chance to run Sunday Worship for the whole church, I got to give the teaching. The other kids in the group, the adults in charge of us, and the church at large was hugely supportive of these efforts on my part. When I was fourteen and said that I wanted to do vocational ministry they all basically said, “That checks out” and gave me as much support and as many opportunities to do that as they possibly could.

And then I graduated from high school. I moved to Murfreesboro to pursue a degree that I was excited about, that I could use to do ministry, but I didn’t have any friends. And I couldn’t drive home an hour and a half every Sunday, just for church. For one year, I was involved in the local Cumberland Presbyterian church. But, at the end of that year, I got placed as a Young Life Leader and my friends were all going to another church. There weren’t a lot of college students at the CP church and I really wanted to be around people my own age, like I had been when I was involved in my youth group. So, I started going to church with my Young Life Leader friends. It was a Baptist church. It was a mega-church. And I think that it might have been the first step down the road of how I got here.

I never learned much from New Vision and I never really got involved. Honestly, I was too busy with my studies and the community of Young Life Leaders. I don’t think that was a bad thing at all, but going to that church introduced me to Baptist theology for the first time. The neo-fundamentalism of this Baptist mega-church made me question a lot of what I learned growing up. It was in college where I first had my doubts about being a woman in ministry. It was among people and involved in a organization whose mission I love that I started to wonder if the church I grew up in had it all wrong. I started to doubt whether a community that had loved and supported me since before I was born was really Biblically based, simply because they dared support and even ordain women for ministry.

I stayed in that place for a long time. And, since we’re being honest with one another, I didn’t just stay there. I went further. I started to think that the Cumberland Presbyterian church, and any church that ordained women, was full of heresy. I got so embroiled in the misogynist theology running rampant and ruining lives in the Southern Baptist Church that I really considered that people who thought women could lead churches were heretics. But, I’m getting ahead of myself.

I didn’t get into the heresy-name-calling game until a few years later. When I became a member of Valley Bible Church in Radford, Virginia.

This is where the story gets a little murky for me. I’m fresh out of that hell-hole and I’m still processing a lot. So, I might change my mind about some things later, but I know that I’ll never change my mind about the misogyny and the abuse I endured, so I’ll try to stay focused on those things. 

Valley Bible Church (VBC) was founded as an Evangelical Free Church. It was late in my membership there that the church chose to join the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) because their values were basically aligned and there was a lot to gain from joining the organization. As to their values being aligned, at least in their view of women, they were in lock-step. They may have thought they gained a lot and probably still do. I’d say that churches that join the SBC gain nothing and lose their souls.

I’ve written about some of the myriad problems that I had at VBC already. I’m sure that I’ll write about some more. I’m not going to say much about them today other than that I was fed a steady diet of doubt about not only my value as a woman, but also my ability to do effective ministry, especially after I had my daughter. There was a subtle undertone that the best way to live your life was to be a stay-at-home mom who homeschools her more than three children and I am the antithesis to that lifestyle. You can imagine the impact that would have on a person’s psyche. VBC is a tangential, but important tie to my experience in Young Life as the Area Directors that I’ve served under have all been elders, members, or regular attenders there. (As a side note, many people on staff with Young Life in this part of the country attend churches that subscribe to reformed theology, which is far too certain of its own righteousness to be healthy.)

When I moved to Radford, I not only got involved at VBC, but also Young Life. With the two so intertwined in this area, I don’t know how the theology wouldn’t seep over. And, as I mentioned above, many staff people in this part of the USA attend reformed churches and ascribe to the theology themselves. A key feature of reformed theology is “male headship”, which sounds so silly out of its white-SBC-evangelical context. Basically, it means that the men are in charge and, if women try to be, then they’re witches. Ok, that last part is a bit of an exaggeration, but if you read about the historical treatment of witches and who they tended to be, you’ll realize that I’m actually not that far off the mark.

It was after a few years in this context that I came up for air and realized that people who ordain women are not heretics. In fact, Christians who disagree with me on a number of issues are simply brothers and sisters I disagree with, not heretics. This was when I started to push back against the misogynist theology at VBC and also in Young Life. But the problem with women like me is that we weren’t brainwashed into the female-degrading theology from our youth. We have a background full of support and, *gasp*, different ideas. We are strong willed and dare to have opinions that differ from the men who are “over” us. What we’re really trying to do is listen to the Holy Spirit and trust his voice and invite others to do the same, but it’s never painted that way. It’s painted as if we are the problem, not the oppressive systems we rail against.

And I really think that’s how I got here. I got enmeshed in a theological framework that affirmed the existence and importance of the Holy Spirit, but didn’t want to trust or listen to his voice. When someone had a prophetic word or just wanted to ask some questions about anything, doubt was immediately cast on them (me). In this kind of environment, there’s no room for curiosity, no room for asking questions because that would give the impression that you aren’t dead certain about what you believe. If you allow just anyone, and especially a woman, to ask you questions about your theology or raise concerns about your secondary beliefs, then are you even reformed? Do you even know what you believe?

According to the culture that I got trapped in, no. And that’s how I ended up sitting across from my boss at the long conference table watching him talk out of both sides of his mouth. I got here because some man thought that he knew what was best for me. He thought that a course of action completely inconsistent with my personality and out of line with the circumstances was what I needed because it was what he would have needed. He was so certain. He was so sure. And he was dead wrong.
And now I’m here. Living a normal, soul-crushing life. I think I know how I got here, but the question now is, when will I get out?