Open the Doors and See all the People

By Kathy Deters

One of my earliest memories of the concept of church was a nursery rhyme my grandmother shared with me. I have a faint, sweet recollection of her clasping my hands together, with four fingers pointed inward, and my index fingers pointing toward heaven. “Here’s the church and here’s the steeple. Open the doors and see all the people.” As I unfolded my hands in hers, I could see all the little fingers that had been inside that tight little church, active, happy and together.

As the years progressed, my understanding of what it meant to be a member of a church was influenced heavily by current events. Like many in Gen X, I remember Tammy Faye’s mascara-ridden pleas for more money and Jim’s subsequent mea culpa’s for abusing the power and, worse yet, the trust that had been placed in him by his followers. Though their scandal was probably the most well-known of our generation, it certainly was not the only one. Looking back, it seems like the nightly news of my youth was one long expose on the dangers of corrupt church leaders. While overwrought, money-hungry TV evangelists seem to have gone by the wayside, a new spectacle has emerged in recent years: the politician bent on twisting and bending the scripture until it’s nearly unrecognizable in order to gain access to his or her office of choice.

So to me, it’s no surprise that in recent years churches have seen a general decline in membership, attendance and participation. It would be easy to blame a population that’s distracted by its smart phones or Kardashians. It would be easy, yes; but it wouldn’t be accurate. The fact is, a generation that grew up trying to understand Jimmy Swaggart now finds itself trying to explain Westboro Baptist Church to our own children.

A few corrupt church leaders taught me that not all church leaders were to be trusted and, in my adolescent mind, that led me to not trust any church leaders. Or churches, for that matter. But in spite of my skepticism about church in general, I continued to attend because, well, for lack of a better way to put it, my parents made me. I wasn’t the rebellious type to call out my Sunday school teachers in class or defiantly jump up mid-sermon with my own rebuttal (despite having seen “Footloose” once or twice), but worse than that, I just sort of…tuned out.

In the midst of my deliberate disconnect from the church, there were times that I questioned God’s existence, in large part because church and God were so intertwined for me that I could not differentiate one from the other. I had friends who simply abandoned the concept of Christ, and really the possibility of any higher power. But others, like me, eventually found ourselves needing to believe in God, and looking for that faith outside the church. We were no longer content to believe that we were to attend church because our parents expected it. We were no longer content to believe that we were to attend church to avoid hell. We were no longer content to believe that we attended church so God would show us favor.

No, after being lost in the desert of disillusionment for a bit, we stumbled upon a realization: God exists everywhere. He exists in the compassionate group of employees who take joy in collecting toys at Christmas for a charity in need. He exists in a suburban cul-de-sac that rallies to provide food and comfort to a neighbor who receives a difficult medical diagnosis. He exists in a group of teens who dedicate a Sunday afternoon to sort cans for a local food pantry. If we are witnessing a decline in churches across the nation, perhaps it is not because we have lost our collective faith in God, but rather because we have found it elsewhere.

In today’s society, church is no longer the place we go because we need someone to speak to God on our behalf. Hopefully by now most of us understand that we don’t need a middle man for that. We can pray sitting in our desk, sitting in our car, sitting by a hospital bed or sitting by our child’s bed at night.

So if the church is no longer our moral compass, our voice to God or even our social obligation, what purpose does it serve in today’s world? I can sum it up in two words: Fan club. We no longer live in a world where tuned-out people attend church out of fear, shame or punishment. We live in a world where fully engaged people attend church because they choose to do so.

When we moved to St. Louis just after the birth of my first daughter, I felt the need to belong to a church more for the ceremonial trappings than any deep spiritual fulfillment. I wanted a place where I could have my children baptized, watch them perform in a Christmas pageant and take their pictures on Easter morning.

As we began visiting various churches, however, I realized that it was not a decision to be taken lightly. Many, it seemed, were preoccupied with deciding what groups they should either rehabilitate or flat out exclude. It was as a new parent that I truly appreciated the important role that a church would play in my children’s life. “Haters gonna hate,” as they say, but if my children see them doing it at church they’re either going to assume that all Christians are haters and it’s right to hate, or that all Christians are haters and therefore can’t be trusted. Either way, not the values I wanted to share with my impressionable young family.

During a visit to my hometown, I happened to bump into the pastor from the church that I had attended as a teenager, and now found myself asking for his counsel: Where could I find a church in St. Louis that was just like the one that I had attended growing up in Jefferson City?

So he suggested a church to me in St. Louis, and we visited together as a family. Funny, really; so many churches struggling to change to keep up with a changing world, but what appealed to me about this church was that it felt so much like the church that I had belonged to as a little girl. Years later, I found myself needing that place where I had once “tuned out.”

But I wasn’t a little girl, and this wasn’t that church. I was a woman with a family of her own. We joined the church, and soon after I faced challenges, difficult choices, heartbreak and loss. Through it all, I felt God’s quiet strength and presence. And at church, I found others who felt it, too. We were a group of diverse people that represented a range of ages, backgrounds, upbringings, economic statuses, you name it, but we were unified by one thing: We were God’s ultimate fan club.

We rejoiced in one another’s joys; we suffered together through one another’s sorrows. We looked for ways to reach out to others beyond the doors of our church, not so we could amass power, influence and money to construct a sparkling mega-church, but in hopes that others would know the warmth, love, joy and acceptance that existed within the doors of our humble church home.

I still have weak days, yes; there are some days when the concept of a God seems preposterous, and other days when I’m certain God is out there, he’s just not interested in me. Unlike generations past, I no longer look to my church to assure me that God exists because it says so. I look to my church to inspire a greater sense of strength and peace in me, because I see it burning in so many members of my church family. Those who open the church’s doors today do so because they know they will be surrounded by others who understand what it means to find comfort, strength and belonging inside the hands of God.