I’d love to say I stayed a member at established churches because of some thoughtful theological reasons. Mostly, it’s for practical reasons: we didn’t live in the same place long enough to start any churches like the emerging church friends I admired. Then, when we whipped from Brazil to the U.S. to Chile to Texas, established churches were our instant family. Interestingly, the churches that looked most like us were the most different from our worldview. My comfort zone is probably more in line with missionary-established churches in South America, with their amazing racial and socioeconomic diversity, than in the upper-class suburban white churches we found.
People asked us the two times we came back from South America if we were glad to be home. I remember staring blankly at someone–home is the church where I grew up where women can teach and questions are asked or the communities in Brazil and Chile that loved and welcomed us immediately. Rich white churches in the middle of suburbia that didn’t know what to do with us took a while to feel like home.
But they did, in time. And it’s not as if I made it easy. My precious church in the American South has no idea how much I judged them; it breaks my heart to think back on it. I saw women who were content to be silent, who let the men eat first at small group while the women stayed behind to chat, then cleaned up. I saw young mothers who stayed at home with three or four tiny children. I saw a sea of white people in the midst of a black neighborhood and the largest population of Hispanic immigrants in the region.
They saw a girl come in who wore professional clothes when the young moms were lucky to have brushed their teeth before our weekly women’s Bible studies; they wondered if I was one of those “feminists” they’d been warned about (I was). Some of them pitied me for having to work and support a husband who was in school when it should have been him supporting me at home with babies (a Bible class teacher told me that once). They assumed I couldn’t have children (they asked me how long I’d been struggling with infertility–I was 25). We were in the midst of a serious culture clash–I felt left out; they felt unsure. Praise the Lord for the older women who took us all under their wings.
