Part 1: When Ideologies Fail

On watching myself change to keep my place, and the choices I made when my worldview failed me

For the sake of privacy, all names and identifying details in this post — including those of individuals and the church — have been changed. The events described reflect my personal experiences and perspectives. A note that gun violence, death, and suicidality are discussed in this piece. Please read with care.

I almost didn’t publish this post today. There is a LOT going on in the world right now, and it is all more significant than my retelling of an experience of church abuse. My story does not need to be centered today. But Christian Fundamentalism does.

Fundamentalism has seeped into many churches and overtaken mainstream Christian perspectives on politics. It has colored our views on immigrants and their treatment (regardless of how an immigrant entered our country), on LGBTQIA+ rights and reproductive care. Our beliefs about God should absolutely inform our politics. But remaining committed to ideology when faced with another’s story isn’t standing firm in the faith. A fierce commitment to legalism over love and empathy changes faith into fundamentalism.

I hope those of you reading who identify with a denomination or a church that practices mainstream evangelicalism won’t quit reading quite yet. My intent is not to alienate or to condemn. I know my language is strong - it reflects my personal experience and my own story. There are still parts of my faith that I hold dear which are the product of mainstream evangelicalism. I’ll get into that eventually. What I do want to do in this retelling is to invite you into a story in which my own faith ideology (and my church’s commitment to their ideology) failed me.

When this rupture happened, I was left with a relatively new friend, Rebecca, whose life was in pieces. My church community was torn and hurt, divided. Ideology said she’d had an affair. Pastors told me she was unrepentant and I should distance myself from her. But I was living her story with her. It wasn’t black and white, and she was my friend. I saw what I thought was likely spiritual and emotional abuse in the relationship that had ended with her romantic partner’s death. He was her first Christian spiritual leader, significantly older, and had entrusted her with his deepest held secrets. I saw that the people responsible for handing down discipline were related to the man who had died, their relationship still unresolved. As her story unfolded, her life laid bare before an entire community of hurting people, I was compelled to empathy and love. She was brokenhearted, I was brokenhearted with her. I couldn’t leave her alone.

That’s the power of story. It helps us turn the facts over, spin them around, and see them from a different perspective. The power of story is that it gives us empathy and compassion for the person on the outside. It shows us that they are a living, breathing person, with a heart and a soul and reasons for why their life ended up the way it did. Stories help us see subtleties and compel us to stay with people who are hurting, whose lives are on the line. And life is what’s on the line in our world today, too.

That’s why I felt like the ideology failed me. The strict principles and values I had previously held didn’t have an answer for the question of where God was with people on the outside. Again and again in his ministry, Jesus puts himself in positions to encounter the poor, the marginalized, the oppressed. He upends power structures and social norms. He stands silently and persistently with the accused as their accusers shout condemnation. He lives (and dies) by an ethic of care.

Ultimately, this story is about my recognition that certain ideologies were no longer serving my faith. I was face-to-face with someone who was abandoned by her faith community, and who remained fully broken, fully human. Her story compelled me. So, I abandoned my ideology in favor of compassion and in search of that ethic of care. I’ll get to that part of the story, but to tell the story, I need to start with a bit of my own background.

In 2018, I followed Luke, my then-boyfriend-now-husband, to Utah, for his medical training. While he was in his intern year, I completed a one-year, incredibly demanding trauma nurse practitioner/physician’s assistant fellowship that put me between my patients’ life and death daily. When I finally emerged from my fellowship year, I felt disconnected from faith, community, and creativity - antidotes for the suffering I witnessed. I was fairly desperate to join a church community and to reconnect with my love for leading worship.

We visited a few churches around Christmastime in 2019 and I judged them all based on whether I could see myself leading worship there. We found the downtown campus plant of a larger church in Utah. It was dark and loud, but the preaching seemed solid and the worship team was approachable and earnest. I reached out and scheduled an audition. There were two main worship leaders, Drew and Rebecca. They were so nice to me. They welcomed me and they started inviting me to things right away. I almost never said no. I felt like they were family within a matter of weeks.

Shortly after I joined the team, COVID hit and the church re-consolidated to one partially online campus in Sandy. There was a ton of work to be done as we built a campus online. Suddenly, the equipment really mattered, and so did our skill. What had once felt easy to shape in a physical room filled with people now felt abstract and clunky. We drilled down into our musical skill, perfecting harmonies, transitions, camera angles, sounds.

Before long, I was spending most of my free time at the church or working on things for the worship team. I volunteered for anything and everything they would let me do. If I had to work, I’d reschedule my shift. The church is where I wanted to be. My friendships with Drew and with Rebecca were deep and sustaining. They saw my voice and my worship leading as skills in their infancy. They nurtured me, encouraged me to blossom and to own my craft. They capitalized on my skill and let me write and record harmonies for the team to rehearse with. For the first time in quite some time, I felt like I belonged somewhere creative, outside the walls of the hospital where I was constantly encountering death and dying.

The pastoral leadership team was eager to reopen the doors of the church as soon as it was legal. In my work at the hospital, I was regularly seeing patients with COVID. Not only that, but my team and the hospital at large were struggling to source our personal protective equipment. I was given an N-95 mask to last a week, and I carried it everywhere with me during my 12 to 24-hour shifts. By the end of the week, it was crumpled and ill-fitting. It was better than nothing, but certainly not the armor I was hoping for against a virus we still knew little about. I was hearing of patients on ECMO and was watching the medical ICU we shared beds with perform CPR on patients with suspected or confirmed COVID, terrified. The hospital was in emergency mode.

But at church, it was a different story. Church leadership rolled their eyes at mask mandates. Messaging implied that closing churches was at best an attack of the devil, and at worst, religious persecution. When the doors of the church finally opened, people were not required to wear masks. There was some extra spacing between rows and people, but I was terrified each week that I’d learn we were superspreaders, or that someone’s immunocompromised sister or elderly grandmother would die because we wouldn’t enforce masking and distancing recommendations. I feared that not everyone could worship in our building because we refused to keep it safe. I met with the pastor and begged him to require masks. I shared my experience in the hospital, shared my concern for the vulnerable in our midst - the very real concern that we could be responsible for someone’s death. He told me that the church was a hospital, too, and he had to be a hospital for everyone. He had to keep the church accessible to the crowd that hated masks, too.

I had a major internal struggle. I could stop serving, stay home - probably what I should have done. But I was too afraid that the team would move on without me. I felt like my belonging was contingent upon my active, continued presence. That meant deferring to what the leadership team said was right, regardless of what my internal compass was telling me. So, I did. I was desperate to belong.

In the early summer of 2020, we hosted a parking lot worship night. Around this time, our image and performance standard began to crystallize. The worship night was meant to be big, loud, magnetic. We wanted to draw people from all over to our outdoor church. And it happened. The parking lot was full. The music was professional-level. After the event, we re-recorded several of the songs to use for the future. We were building a brand.

By the late fall of 2020/spring of 2021, we were beginning to write music together. We dreamed that we would be able to produce and release songs as a team, and that felt like a real possibility. A core group began to emerge, and we served nearly weekly together. One Sunday, at the last service, the pastor scrapped the sermon and we sang spontaneously. We’d learned to flow together, to follow each other, to gauge what the audience wanted and what the pastor wanted. We’d learned how to set the stage for people to receive a sermon and how to move an audience from one place to the next. When Old Church Basement was released in April of 2021, the core team had a watch party. We dreamed about incorporating those songs into our sets and went to work to make it happen. The Maverick City/Elevation Worship style was our pocket.

I began to take on additional administrative responsibilities, too - helping plan worship sets, writing onboarding and orientation protocols and documents for the team. I started meeting with some of the women on the team, too, loosely mentoring them. Later, I learned that the lead pastors had required that staff members begin recording what was shared during their team check-ins so that the pastoral staff could be made aware of any issues or major things going on in peoples’ lives. But I was always under the impression that what I shared during check-in meetings was confidential. What was billed as “transparency” was actually a major violation of confidence.

During this period of time, I was struggling at work. I had experienced some major patient losses. I was an anxious, exhausted mess, swapping nights and days and 24-hour shifts. I had started therapy to deal with some of the post-traumatic symptoms I was experiencing. I was looking for a way out. My role on the worship team, and the familial relationships I had found at church were a major bright spot. I was loosely tracking my hours volunteering, exceeding 25-30 each week without trying. I had planned with Rebecca and Drew to send an email to the lead pastors, asking them to consider bringing me on staff part-time to help bring their vision to life.

One night shift, I was paged to a level 1 trauma for a patient who was shot in the head, execution style, by a gang. This wasn’t out of the ordinary for our service, but I was particularly shaken by this case. The injury was fatal. There was nothing we could do for the patient, but I was tasked with keeping their heart beating until their mother could come and say goodbye. I couldn’t let her see her child the way they looked when they came into the ER. I picked pieces of brain matter off of the pillow and wiped their face as clean as I could. The nurses and I bound their wounds and changed the sheets so that they would be presentable for their mother. The loss was senseless, and I could make no meaning out of it. I felt so defeated. That night, running between the ER and the ICU, I decided I was done. I went to therapy that week, and finally admitted, sobbing, to my therapist that I didn’t think I could keep going. I called my boss from the parking lot, and he cried, too. He gave me an emergency leave of absence for a month, effective immediately. He allowed me to use all my PTO to take some time off to decide whether my leave would be temporary with a return to work in the summer, or if I needed to look for something different. It felt like a lifeline.

I spent my month of leave at the church writing, recording harmonies, and practicing my vocals in the auditorium. I had started to lead some more songs, but was largely constrained to backup vocals. One Sunday, when Rebecca was gone, and I was leading in her stead with Drew, the lead pastor came up to me, unprompted, and told me that I needed to let go of my nerves and just sing. As I led worship that day, I watched him turn around from his place in the front row to watch the congregation. I felt him evaluating the success or failure of my leadership in the way that people responded to the songs that I led. We didn’t talk about it, but I wasn’t asked to lead a song for a while after that. I could tell that I didn’t quite match the vision that he had for the worship team. My major skill is in blending. I couldn’t belt high notes. I got nervous. My voice would shake. I went back to singing background vocals until Rebecca was fired and they needed another female lead. When that finally happened, I was excited to be singing more lead vocals, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I wasn’t what they wanted.

As I gained distance from my trauma job, I began to find myself again in that month of leave, little by little. Slowly, I began wrestling with the ideas of belonging and conformity (though I know I could not have named them). But even then, I could sense that my belonging was contingent. If I wanted to belong, really belong, I needed to conform to the brand of the church, contribute to their image of worship, affirm the pastoral staff vocally during their praying and preaching. I needed to buy in. But I couldn’t. It felt like we were building a brand around a single personality, hearing catchy but inflammatory hot-takes on a Sunday rather than digging into the gospel.

During this time, I remember asking quite a few questions about racism, theology, care for the vulnerable, and politics. I quickly realized that questions were perceived as an affront to leadership. So, I stayed quiet in public, but behind closed doors, I pestered Drew and Rebecca with questions. We discussed, we dug in, we read together. It was fulfilling and real. That worked for a while. I hoped desperately that things would one day be different, that I could be an agent of change in this church. But in the early summer of 2021, things fell apart. I reached a breaking point, a place where I finally felt like I couldn’t authentically be myself and still belong. I would have to sacrifice too much. And so, I left.

I’ll unpack more of the story surrounding the decision to leave in my next few entries. But for today, I hope you take this with you: there are spaces in which you won’t be asked to give yourself up for the sake of belonging. There are communities in which your authentic self is celebrated. I urge you to find those people and worship in those spaces. I hope you know that I celebrate your presence here. I picture you, my reader, sitting across my kitchen table with one of my husband’s lattes, sipping and sharing. I am so thankful you felt it worthwhile to read these words. Your story is worth hearing and sharing, too. You belong here.