Do I belong in church?
and other musings for a Sunday afternoon
Robertson Wesley United Church. A Wiki commons image.
Note: A shorter version of this piece was also published in Round the Table
It’s Sunday and I’m thinking about church. If you’ve known me in my adult life, you may think this is strange. I’ve had an aversion to structured religion since my late teens/early twenties. It wasn’t always like that. I grew up going to the Gaetz United Memorial Church in Red Deer. I participated in the youth events, went to Sunday school, and for a period I felt religion very deeply.
As I got older, I became more aware of the harm the “church” had done so many people. The harm to Indigenous communities, LGBTQ+ people, women and children. The idea of worshiping a male figure for whom wars had been forged, that expressed that women should be subservient, and under whose roof so many young boys, nuns, and women had been assaulted was repellant.
By this, I mean the idea of church in general, and (to my knowledge) not the church where I was raised. In fact, I have held some level of gratitude for having been raised in a church that led the way in allowing women to become ministers and marrying queer couples far before it was the norm. Albeit, the family story goes that my parents picked our church because they had the best daycare in town … probably more joke than truth because they had been married in that church nearly a decade before they had kids.
