In which I am definitely not ranting about yet another church!

So yes, I have recently left yet another church. Prior to this I had not been part of a church for years. On leaving this latest church, I told myself that I was not going to rant on my blog.  However, to be clear, I definitely did want to rant.  Part of the reason why I wanted to rant is because unfortunately I have now developed that habit of ranting, which I acknowledge is a bad habit.  And yet I was considering it just a few minutes ago, and I realised that there was more to it than that. Ranting is partly about trying to make sense of the whole thing, and also how I may have contributed to the whole thing, and crucially, how I could behave differently next time (although I do deeply hope that there will not be a next time!) So here, still not ranting too much, I am going to try to pull out a few insights about this latest church experience…

Firstly, and I mean this sincerely, this church was lovely! I mean the interaction between the members of the congregation. It was all love, kindness, no mean-spiritedness which to me was  incredible. I genuinely loved the congregation, and I continue to do so. Even though I have now left the church, something within me still strongly feels that this is my church, these are my people. Actually, it is because of this that I stayed so long in the church even after observing so many things…

Red flags?  This whole blog is obviously about relationships. Because of my beliefs and behaviours about relationships there are certain things that I just don’t experience, and I can’t truly identify with. One of these things is the issue of romantic relationship red flags. Because I do my “two-year thing”, I am pretty confident that I will be able to trust that a man genuinely has outstanding character before I romantically go near him. (And by the way, this church experience truly reinforced the validity of my “two-year thing”, as all these church experiences invariably do!)  So when I am reading yet another article about “red flags” in relationships, I can’t usually identify with the mentality of people who would stay in a relationship, despite these red flags. I always think that if I observed just a single one of these red flags, I would just get out of there!  Well after this particular church experience, I think I can definitely start to understand why people don’t “just get out of there”.

So yes in this church, there were red flags – countless red flags. However, this is the situation I was in (and again this is so similar to the kind of situation that someone might be in when trying to consider a romantic relationship!)
1. As written above, I had not been part of a church for years! If I am honest, I was really lonely for some loving church interaction – and that’s “loving” in a Christian church sense, not a romantic sense.  It’s something that people have emphasised endlessly regarding this pandemic, that those lowkey but friendly interactions we have with people every day, such as just saying “hi” to people you pass on the street, smiling at a stranger etc are extremely important for our mental health, being social creatures. Being locked up inside because of Covid robbed us collectively of all that. Well church generally is great for that kind of interaction, not just on that most superficial level, but getting a little deeper where you are able to actually get to know people, where they know your name, a little about you. And after being cooped up inside for a year and a half, like everyone else I was more than ready to go out there and meet people!   So that initial yearning was significant enough to make me overlook certain obvious red flags.

2. Blaming my parents!  Additionally, my parents were very aware that I had not been to church for years. I think my parents think that not going to church means that I am about to fall off the edge of Christian faith, so they were both encouraging me to “find a church Tosin!”. Additionally, my Dad also has this belief which I completely disagree with that a bad church is better than no church.  I think he means “within reason” because I know that there are some churches which are so bad that they cannot reasonably be considered true churches.  So I had decided to finally heed their advice after so many years and I had already planned to go to another church that weekend so when I came across people advertising this particular church which I have now just left which was literally on my doorstep  (or rather the building itself was a minute away, plus 1-5 extra mins to get up the stairs), I thought that I might as well give it a try.

3. No church is perfect:  Well I knew that no church is perfect. Regarding romantic relationships, I have already decided that while I would love to be married to an amazing guy, I am happy with productive singleness too. This means that I am comparing every individual man I meet not against what any other potential man might “realistically” be like, but rather against what an amazing single life could look like. So I don’t have to consider the fact that other men are also likely to be deeply flawed, I don’t have to be “realistic” about what men generally are like when evaluating a man. However, concerning churches, because I had at that point agreed to go back to church, I felt like I was committed to going to a church.  So if I was not in this church then I would take myself to another.  So this meant I was mentally comparing what I was seeing in this church to what I knew I was likely to see in other churches. And while I knew that there were so many red flags here, I was sure that there would equally be plenty of red flags in any other church I went to – so I might as well stay here. Or in other words, I had mentally accepted that all churches would be kinda bad, and this particular church was actually on the better side of what I expected because of the loveliness of the congregation. Actually, all these red flags came largely from one person. With everyone else, you could say “Well, no-one’s perfect.” But people were genuinely lovely.  Wow, it was a revelation to have such a nurturing church, and so profound that I wanted to stay close to the church.

So then, the most pertinent aspect of the red flags issue is this:  When you are observing a red flag, if you expect the church or potential husband to be outstanding, then you can take each red flag as a sign to make your exit. However, when you have already accepted, as I had, that you are not expecting that much, then you might have resigned yourself to being “realistic”, as I did, and you start asking yourself, as I did, not whether this church is outstanding, but rather the point at which tolerable becomes intolerable, or merely dodgy becomes outright unacceptable. Because all of this was happening in my head, it is not as if there was anything definitive that happened that finally caused me to leave. I just came to a point of saying “enough”, not so much to the church itself, as to all the excuses I was making within myself.  I knew it was so inconsistent with everything I have said over so many years, and the standards I have insisted on to remain in that church. And moving forward, I’ve realised that I have to insist on an outstanding church, as I do insist on an outstanding husband. Actually I realised that a very long time ago. But the question was always how to implement it, that is, how to ensure that a church was truly excellent before throwing myself into it.  Now I still do not have the conclusive  answer to that question. However, I hope that this is the last time that I will ever have to rant like this over a church again!

So to apply all this to a relationship then, if, like me, you have decided that a spouse must be excellent, then you might well leave on seeing any significant red flag. However, if you are mentally resigned to the fact that “Well, no-one is perfect, and it is not actually likely to be that good”, then you might not know whether each red flag is a “well no-one’s perfect, and I actually was not expecting it to be amazing anyway” red flag or rather a “run away from there as fast as you can” red flag.  Perhaps what all of this shows me, yet again, is that as far as I am concerned, whether we are talking about a husband, or a church, he/it has to resoundingly outstanding, otherwise sooner rather than later I will leave. And if I am eventually destined to leave, I would much rather leave sooner rather than waste further time by staying there only to finally leave later.