Inexplicable Grace: Why I’m Still Part of the Church
It is good to question whether or not we should still participate in institutional expressions of Christian faith. Perhaps it would be easier to abandon the church and practice spirituality individually, and wait to see if the church can reimagine itself for the 21st century.
Many have already made up their minds. One source of their disillusionment is the church’s own fears of institutional decline, displayed in its desperate attempts to look more and more appealing and relevant in order to perpetuate the institution. Institutional preservation may be a necessity, but it is not an inspiring reason to get out of bed or off the couch on a weekend.
At eighteen, I experienced a healing from longtime nerve pain and muscle cramps associated with my walking disorder. This unexplainable experience happened without me asking for it.
At the church’s worst, theologians, pastors, and everyday Christians have been complicit in using Christianity to reinforce horrible evils, marginalizing the “least of these” even further. The American church’s failure to deal with racism led one seminary professor I encountered to start holding his own household devotions rather than attend a church.[1]
Paradoxes of Proximity
As a Christian pastor, however, even as I lament the many ways in which it fails in practice, I still find great significance in the church as a place for unfathomable encounters with God and connection with others—experiences of powerful resonance that I can’t always explain. They are the reason I stay part of the church.
What is this resonance? It almost defies definition, but it happens when a person enters a uniquely personal space to encounter God, a space often found paradoxically in proximity to others.[2] Resonance cannot be manufactured by merely making a church service more entertaining or by rolling out emotional appeals or providing times of silence. Resonance is only realized when humans encounter spontaneous activity of the Divine and are connected with other people, many of whom they would never know outside of a faith community.
Letters from the Heart
Throughout my life, I have experienced this kind of resonance a number of times within and because of the church, both as a Christian and as a pastor. First, when I was nine, my mother passed away from a long battle with cancer. The church came together to support and grieve with our family, then the following Christmas, the church ensured that we still had a meaningful, present-filled holiday.
Second, when I was fifteen, dozens of church members wrote letters to me when I went on a Christian retreat, expressing their love for me and reminding me of God’s love. I would never have anticipated so many people caring about me and my spiritual journey.
Third, at eighteen, I experienced a healing from longtime nerve pain and muscle cramps associated with my walking disorder. This unexplainable experience happened without me asking for it. During a time of group prayer for another’s health needs, a jolt like electricity went through my body and all pain and tension ceased, a physical difficulty I had endured for more than two years.
Fourth, I have seen the church walk beside those who are suffering and grieving. Sometimes the journey leads to healing in this life, while at other times the church is there to grieve in solidarity and to continue claiming God’s love in the midst of human loss.[3]
Fifth, the sacraments provide a tangible encounter with the Divine. At the church I serve, I reinstated bringing Communion to homebound members, a practice that had lapsed during the pandemic period when the church lacked a settled pastor. I was sharing the bread and cup with an older congregant when she described how every time she takes the Communion bread she feels a “tingle.” I was shocked to hear such a statement, because this is not a church with a high sacramental theology.
“Join Me in that Hope”
There is a deep, lasting reverberation—a resonance—to be found in all these experiences. Each one of them drew me closer to God but also to other people. I walk with my fellow church members through the joys of life, marriages, childbirths, baptisms, dedications, but I also accompany them through divorce, domestic disputes, job loss, illness, and death.[4] The church’s presence enriches the positive experiences of life and navigates through the difficult times. The potential for a life-changing experience of resonance is waiting to meet whatever circumstances one may face.
If the church (or any religious community) does not provide you with an experience of resonance, then I understand not being part of one. Today’s American church has become increasingly intertwined with political ideologies. I have been in churches that wasted much energy declaring their opposition to particular politicians. Compounding this is the timeless problem of inconsistent faith and hypocrisy. As author Brennan Manning famously said: “The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians who acknowledge Jesus with their lips and walk out the door and deny Him by their lifestyle. That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable.”[5]
But my experiences of connection with God and others in the church have kept me coming back. I am hoping against hope that the 21st century church can be an experiential community for the future, a place that more and more people can turn to for a mysterious experience of eternal resonance, and I invite you to join me in that hope.
The Rev. Slade Hogan ’22 S.T.M. is pastor of the Community Church of Milton (N.H.), a congregation affiliated with the American Baptist Churches and the United Church of Christ. He is a priest ordained in the Communion of Evangelical Episcopal Churches (CEEC), which is committed to ecumenical ancient-future Christian practices and to blending evangelical, charismatic, and liturgical church traditions. Besides his Yale degree, he has a B.A. from Oral Roberts University, an M.Div. from Asbury Theological Seminary, and is currently a Ph. D. student in theology at Oral Roberts.
[1] Even from my childhood, I could tell the church was far from ideal. Growing up in Alabama, I learned early that a legacy of racism was not merely past history. Sitting in a service one morning in a rural church, I heard the old man in the pew next to mine muttering about politics, ending his rant with a racial epithet. Even in a church building in the 2000s, he felt comfortable openly expressing his racist sentiments. This experience stamped my understanding of Christianity in contemporary America. If this worshiper was willing to express such thoughts out loud, how many other people believed them without saying it?
[2] See Andrew Root and Blair Bertrand, When Church Stops Working: A Future for Your Congregation Beyond More Money, Programs, and Innovation (Brazos Press, 2023), pp. 31-37. I would recommend to other Christian leaders all of Andrew Root’s six-volume Ministry in a Secular Age series (Baker Academic, 2023). When Church Stops Working is an attempt to distill the series into a readable single book for both laity and clergy.
[3] Stephen Seamands, in Follow the Healer: Biblical and Theological Foundations for Healing Ministry (Zondervan Reflective, 2023), posits that healing occurs in a number of ways—through supernatural means, medical care, the body’s natural processes, enduring suffering, and victorious dying. See p. 38. In When Church Stops Working, authors Root and Bertrand recount the story of a couple who clung to the promise that “Nothing can separate us from God’s love” in the wake of their own family loss and how that resonant phrase helped the congregation cope with a later tragic death in its midst. See pp. 141-51.
[4] John H. Westerhoff III and William H. Willimon, in Liturgy and Learning through the Life Cycle (Seabury Press, 1980), provide a holistic approach to this for pastors. Churches and Christian leaders should be ready to speak to all of life’s stages, whether positive or negative.
[5] Manning’s words became widely known through the DC Talk song, “What If I Stumble?”, track 3 on Jesus Freak (ForeFront Records,1995). His voice recording of the quote above is heard at the beginning of the song.