Telling someone you’re a pastor’s kid is never easy. Following the statement, there’s often a lull in the conversation, occasionally followed by the comment, “I thought pastors didn’t have kids” (that would be Catholic priests, they’re different). And from there, it’s even harder to explain your own complicated relationship with religion.
I grew up completely enshrined in the church. The house I called home for the first 12 years of my life was only a block away from the church my dad had pastored; the house I now call home is less than 300 feet away from the church. As a kid, I spent more hours at church than I could count, and attended so many funerals in my childhood that I named all the fish in the town funeral home’s aquarium. I went to church camp and did Bible quizzing. I was pushed to be the model pastor’s child–full of grace and faith–always ready to lend a helping hand to anyone at the drop of a hat. I followed everything blindly, taking every word as law.
Until one day, I stopped.
I began the questioning in my teenage years. I wasn’t so blindly willing to follow everything. I was no longer willing to accept that someone loving who they loved was wrong, or that the migrant and the refugee weren’t exactly who we were meant to care for. Slowly but surely, my eyes were opened to the wider world, and to the pain that so many in the church were inflicting. I wasn’t seeing the God I had been raised with and had come to believe in and connect with. The God I had been raised with was meant to be full of love, hope, and reckless abandon. During my years of the most intense questioning, I was still asked to put on a happy face, to be the idealized girl my parent’s church congregation still wanted me to be. I was asked to tamp my opinions down, to keep politics outside, even as I felt these ideals encroaching on my life and my body.
All of this would culminate in my parent's church no longer being a place I could so easily call home, but rather, a place where I was uncomfortably squeezed into a version of myself that now feels much too small. And this isn’t to say that I’ve left my faith behind, or that my relationship with my parents is broken (they’re some of my favorite people in the world), but rather it is to say that my faith looks different than I ever imagined. That I am so much different than I ever imagined. In high school, I began attending a different church with some of my friends, one where the pastors proudly marched in Pride, where I saw the refugee and the outcast being seen, valued, and cared for. It was here that I realized the church wasn’t just a building. It wasn’t just the things that had harmed or disillusioned me. There was still goodness. There was still love.
Now, my church isn’t confined to four walls and a steeple. It’s people in community action, it’s the actual real and true embodiment of loving your neighbor–every neighbor. It’s the synthesis of so many faiths, the urge to learn and grow and do better. It’s an attempt to embody all of the messages I was taught, against so many of the harmful systems that the church has continued to uphold. When people ask me about my faith now, I always say it’s complicated. There’s no easy way to explain it, no short sentence that encapsulates everything that’s changed for me and everything I continue to hold close. But if I were to try I would say this, my faith is so vastly different from what I ever imagined it would be, but at the core of it remains a steadfast belief in enduring love and a God that values the lesser and the least of these. Faith is a hard thing. It’s deeply personal. To have questions and to discover things for yourself is painful and confusing, but also rewarding. This is not meant to be some pro or anti-religion piece, but rather to say that it's okay to explore, okay to be different, and it’s okay to follow your heart, wherever that may lead you. Maybe, in that exploration, you find something even truer than before.
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