I think a person who have never eaten venison properly prepared, seasoned and cooked can not really understand the taste of it. He or she has no experiential "hook" allowing a connection to the taste of well-prepared venison. In a like manner folks like me who were not raised in the American church cannot "taste" the experience people have enjoyed or hated of being raised in church.
Oh, I "got" the notion that people raised in an ugly church were hurt by it. I counseled a young lady whose father was a deacon in a church, and began abusing her sexually when she was six, claiming that God gave him that right because he was a deacon. Ugly. Wrong. I could connect, at least a little, with that hurt. I understood the gulf of despair living in folks raised in rule-based congregations as they read the Good News Jesus brought and realized they never experienced it as good news. Just rules, often silly rules. (The proper way to dress, the deference that must be shown to large givers, narrow visions of morality and propriety for instance.)
I didn't "get" the disconnect between my life experience in faith and my friends and colleagues life experience in church. I'm not sure I really get it today.
I wonder, from time to time, why people keep coming to worship when they do not now and never have at any time experience God. I keep involved, I keep encouraging my faith, because God has made Godself known to me at several points in my life. I cannot deny what happened and I can find no better explanation for what happened. In the words of the hymn, "He touched me."
Well, if I'm having a problem, my church friends who have not been touched by God have the same problem. I must seem very, very strange to them. The disconnect between my life experience and how it affected my pastoral leadership and the life experience of most folks attending church where I was pastor was huge. I am just now "getting" it.
What do you think about all this? Leave a comment, if you would. Or is it just too weird?
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