Church people can suck

A Bible verse - a good one, too - really pissed me off last week. It’s probably at this point that I should warn you that this isn’t going to be funny, as I attempt for most of my posts to be. It’s going to be long, emotional, messy, and I hope cathartic and redemptive, because I have needed catharsis and redemption from this for almost a decade. It’s about how people, even - OK, especially - church people can suck really hard, but God doesn’t. (Also note that this is my point of view of how events played out. I’m sure there are other parts of the story I’ll never know.)

It started two Sundays ago, when the pastor in the church I currently attend preached on Acts 2:42. It’s the part about the brand new church that formed after Jesus’ resurrection and ascent into heaven: “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.” I could feel the rage building inside me as the pastor talked. It wasn’t because of him or anything he said. It was because of a former preacher who used that verse to betray me and a whole group of people who had worked so hard to bring Christ’s love to a diverse community of people who had become like my family. 

I started attending Rivercity Community Church not long after graduating from college around 2005. It sat just off the West 39th Street Corridor in Kansas City, Mo., near the hipster hub of Westport and eclectic Midtown area. It was a scrappy little church that had recently inherited a 100-plus-year-old building from a congregation of elderly people that was literally dying out. Their church for more than a century (see photos below) had been Roanoke Christian Church, and they gave the building to Rivercity. Just gave it to us. Rivercity was meeting in a nearby coffee shop and growing, and those elderly parishioners gave us the beautiful gift of a building to better serve our community. Local news stories chronicled the generosity. 

I went to Rivercity initially because I had an aunt who was a member and spoke highly of it. I joined her and immediately felt welcome. The church was a beautiful mixture: young, single, people like me; young families; older families and singles; empty nesters; addicts; recovering addicts; artists; and even a few folks who called themselves “Roanoke Remnants,” the older ones from Roanoke who stuck around after their church dissolved and they’d given us the building. (My favorite was Betty.) We had regular, free Wednesday night meals open to everyone, including the homeless. We hosted AA meetings and drug recovery groups. We reached several students from the Kansas City Art Institute, a place where few Christians feared to trod. We helped addicts get sober and employed, single moms get the cars they needed and brought the hope of Jesus to a group of “hopeless” people it seemed no one had cared about reaching before. I was young and so energized to be part of something so meaningful. We weren’t huge - on the biggest Sundays we’d have about 100 people in attendance - but it was enough. 

I also found my people at Rivercity. My husband. My lifelong friends. Nearly all of the people with whom I have the most meaningful relationships today came through that church. 

But nothing can be that blissful forever, I guess. About five years after I started attending, the young, single people married and had families, and they started leaving, looking for better children’s programs. The older families decided to attend churches closer to their suburban homes. There were disagreements about the roles of two different pastors. And while the work we were doing was amazing, it also could be mentally and physically draining. We soon got to the point where the remaining members of Rivercity were having difficulty financially supporting the church. The building had many maintenance issues we couldn’t afford to address. We were concerned about paying for the pastor’s health insurance. By this point I was on the church’s leadership team, and as one of the people who oversaw the budget, I was stressed. I gave as much of my meager income as I could to help keep Rivercity afloat, but it became apparent that was unsustainable. 

Through it all, as I felt like my world was crashing down around me, our pastor would tell me, “The good news is, Jesus is still risen.” I thought it was so trite and that he didn’t get the depth of our problems. It turned out I was the one who didn’t get it. More on that later. 

But then, the cavalry arrived. Our deus ex machina. Or so it seemed. Gary (name changed to protect his privacy) was a pastor who had worked with some of our pastors previously and occasionally filled in as pastor at Rivercity. He’d recently left a lead pastor role at a large church in the suburbs. I’d heard there might have been something scandalous about his departure, but I chalked it up as rumor and flung myself at the light at the end of the tunnel he provided. He came to us and basically promised to rescue Rivercity. He said he had many wealthy, suburban supporters who had the money we needed to fix the building, pay the pastor and fund outreach. 

The catch was that we had to turn it all over to him. He would lead the new church, and he would rename it REACH. I don’t even remember what the acronym stood for now. Before I had been part of a 4-member leadership team. Now I was one of 12 people. I remember our first meeting. Gary took out his iPad and took notes on it. I’d never seen an iPad before, as it had just been invented. He showed us all the things it could do. I found it odd to see a pastor bragging about his shiny, new tech in the first meeting about transforming a church. He talked about how he wanted the focus of this new church be small groups, but he called them 2:42s, as in Acts 2:42. He was convinced the church should be decentralized house churches, and we shouldn’t worry about the building so much. 

For as much as he didn’t want us to be concerned over the church building, he soon asked for REACH to take over ownership of it, since they would be funding the repairs. It had previously been agreed upon by everyone at Rivercity that the building could never be sold. Even as our financial difficulties became insurmountable, we knew we could not sell the building because it had so generously been gifted to us. So as one of the three remaining members of Rivercity’s leadership team, my signature was required on the deed that gave the building to Gary and REACH. I signed it. 

Initially, I was so glad I had done so. Gary and REACH started making the repairs the building needed - HVAC, roofing, new doors. But then things started to get strange. Gary built out the church hall in the basement - where I’d attended Wednesday night dinners, the wedding receptions of my friends and set up for AA meetings - into a classroom and office space for a sort-of seminary he created and from which he profited. Then he started building apartments on the top floor for his son and his son’s friends. He said it would make a nice revenue stream. Then he said he was getting several complaints from his wealthy suburban supporters (who had deigned to come into the city on Sundays for his little project) that the church needed a parking lot. Never mind that it was built in a residential neighborhood before cars were invented, so there was no place for such a thing. We’d never had an issue parking on the streets before.  

Gary’s distaste for Rivercity and the needy people it had previously served seemed to grow. He wanted to reach college students, not addicts. He wanted to continue to bring in people from the suburbs, not from Midtown. When his “2:42s” did not meet these expectations, he informed us that he was going to sell the building and move the church into one of the wealthiest suburbs in the metro area. 

I was appalled, devastated and shocked. Did he not understand the building couldn’t be sold? It was a gift. To profit from it would be like taking blood money. And Rivercity was meant to reach the people of the city: the diversity of backgrounds, socioeconomic status, beliefs and ethnicities that only an urban area can provide. When I signed that deed over, I had no intention of being part of a ministry that served white soccer families with five other churches in a two-mile radius they could choose from. 

But Gary sold the building anyway. He essentially sold all that was left of Rivercity with it. It remains one of the greatest betrayals I have ever experienced. I realize that makes me pretty privileged, but it hurt so much that even nine years later my eyes filled up with angry tears in a different church when a different pastor who has probably never met Gary preached a sermon about Gary’s favorite verse. 

As they were preparing for the sale, Gary and some of his REACH cronies piled “a bunch of junk” into a room, and said people could take whatever they wanted. What wasn’t taken would be thrown out. I sifted through and saw some albums I’d never seen before. They looked old. I pulled them out and found they were scrapbooks of Rivercity’s century-old predecessor, Roanoke Christian Church. They contained 100-year-old photos of Sunday School classes, notes on how many people accepted Jesus at that year’s revival, weddings and funerals and so much more. I snatched them out of the “junk” pile. The generations of Roanoke Christian Church members who had served this corner of Kansas City and entrusted people like me with their ministry’s future did not deserve for their memories to be discarded like the broken chairs they sat alongside. The albums have been lovingly kept in my closet ever since.

I did not follow Gary and REACH to the suburbs. Few people from Rivercity did. We had been hurt too much. Gary’s church there failed in a few years, which I admit to having some schadenfreude about. I was put off of church entirely for a while. After pouring my heart, soul and income into Rivercity, I wondered how God could let me down so tremendously. I fully understood how so many people are put off of Christianity by the actions of people who claim to be Christians. 

My husband and I had our first child not long afterward. While I was burnt out on it, I wanted my children to grow up in church, so we church shopped. One had a smoke machine, and the worship band played Goo Goo Dolls songs. Another was promising for a while, but then the pastor ranted one day about how he might be arrested for refusing to officiate gay weddings and he hoped the congregation would stand behind him. We pretended the baby needed both of us to change his diaper and slipped out the back. 

We eventually found ourselves at a large, suburban church. I liked it because it seemed to be everything Rivercity wanted to be if it had had money: ministries for addicts and artists, a focus on helping the poor and vulnerable. But I think what really drew me to it was the anonymity I could enjoy there. The large numbers of people meant I could go unnoticed. Like a scorned lover, I was too hurt to allow myself to be in a true relationship with a church or the people in it. My heart had hardened. I still longed for the feeling of church and to hear God’s word, but I wanted only to be a consumer. I had nothing left in me to contribute. And so I have remained the past nine years, letting only a couple people at the new church into my life and joining nothing. 

With my resentment newly stirred by the Acts 2:42 sermon on Sunday, it simmered all week. On Friday, I had lunch scheduled with a woman I’ve worked with by phone and email a few times since I started a new job a couple months ago. We had decided to finally meet in person. She was a good deal younger than me and excited about getting married in a couple of months. I asked her where she was getting married. She started describing the church she attended and loved and where it was located. I stopped her. It was THE church. Roanoke, Rivercity, REACH, right there at 40th and Wyoming. Part of it will always feel like MY church. 

I almost wept at the connection. The church Gary sold the building to is still there, and from her account, it is thriving. They’ve taken out the apartments he built on the upper floor and remodeled it into a children’s ministry space to accommodate all the families who attend. She made it sound like the new church, City Life, is carrying on Rivercity’s mission, (And maybe Roanoke’s, too), given that its very name shares members’ intent to reach the people of the city. I told her about the century-old scrapbooks I had, and how I wasn’t sure what to do with them, but I knew I wanted to keep them safe. Through her, they’re now headed back to their rightful home. 

A lot of people claim to hear God tell them explicit things. I’ve never experienced that, but I hear him through circumstances. I don’t think it was any coincidence that my week started with the scab getting torn off my unhealed wound with an Acts 2:42 sermon and that it ended with the news that the spirit of God’s work through Rivercity carries on with a new group of people in the very same building. Because a peace is dawning on me now that I never thought possible. Although I don’t know where Gary is now or if he has any idea how much he hurt me, I might finally be able to forgive him. Perhaps most importantly, the hardened “church people” shell around my heart has gotten a few cracks. Maybe some pieces will start to fall away, and I can learn to let people in. I hope to try again to serve others and learn more about God in a cocoon of support, the likes of which I hadn’t experienced before or since Rivercity. 

I doubt few people read this whole thing, but my message is this: God didn’t send his son Jesus to die so we would be burdened with pain and anger. He also didn’t create a church - like we see in Acts 2:42 - so we could blow it off because some people in it or leading it suck. He intended us to be in community. The church is made of humans, and we are a sinful, selfish bunch by nature (which circles back to why we need Jesus, but I digress). But together, we can do amazing things for our fellow humans and bring a little of God’s kingdom down to earth. Don’t let people who have done human things keep you from that. Because as my Rivercity pastor always used to remind me, “Don’t worry, Jesus is still risen.” 

Now check out some of the cool photos from the history books below. (Click on them to see bigger versions.) I've got you, Roanoke, don't worry.

Apparently the church expanded its basement but the top half went unfinished for about 20 years.

The church hall in the basement Gary decided to turn into class/office space.

Yeah, neither of those designs happened.

There's my favorite "Roanoke Remnant," Betty, the secretary! Roanoke was very progressive; it had a female pastor from 1977-1981 and, obviously, many women on its Board of Directors.