Rediscovering Jesus
In the last few months I found myself returning to church officially after years of testing the waters. I experienced a wide section of the Christian denominational spectrum in my childhood that included Mennonite, Baptist, Charismatic Pentecostal, and others. For the most part my experience with religion was interwoven with familial conflict that spiraled into some fairly traumatic moments that left me with quite a bit of anxiety surrounding religious environments. I stepped away from religion and considered myself an atheist for some time.
In my adulthood, my main link to Christianity was through my conservative family. I am about as politically distant from them as one can get. From the few sermons I've attended at their church, I got the impression that they spend more of their time trying to bend the Bible around their worldview rather than the other way around. What they did take from the Bible was not Jesus' message of love but an indulgence in apocalyptic timelines and a fantastical version of history.
The last sermon I attended was about the modern state of Israel, in which the pastor justified its existence as a step in God's plan for the end times. This brought out anger in me that I didn't know I cared enough to feel. How could he say that the genocidal imperialist project called Israel is not only justified but an act of a loving God? I did not return after that. But despite not considering myself Christian, I knew that belief was not in line with Christianity.
I picked up Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. The book confirmed that what I had been hearing was not the teaching of Christ but a modern, corrupted version of it. That made me question what Christianity really was when stripped of its evangelical fundamentalist lens. I studied the history, read the Bible, and considered how the first Christians lived in the book of Acts—with whom Christ existed in living memory. They shared all their belongings and refused to submit to the state—which sorta sounds like Communism to me.
I got the impression that the dominant tradition of Christianity fell off in 380 AD when Theodosius made it the official religion of the Roman Empire—the point where it became the dominant, state-sanctioned faith and started being used to justify violence and inequality rather than confront it. Looking for some modern movement that retained at least some of what the early church practiced and believed, I discovered, or perhaps re-discovered, the Anabaptist movement. I read The Naked Anabaptist and I felt that the tradition was actually a return to Jesus after more than a thousand years, with Jesus and his teachings of love and non-violence at the center.
In the process, my journey stopped being an attempt to prove myself right and became a desire to be part of what I had discovered. I found a Mennonite church and it all clicked for me. For the first time since attending Sunday school with my grandma (also a Mennonite, and ex-Amish), I felt comfortable in a church setting and was surrounded by loving Christian people rather than the holy pissing contest that I was used to.
I am proud to be a Christian now and I aim to be a follower of Christ rather than just studying Him. When I think back to attending Sunday school at my Grandma's church and the rest of my life following that, I feel like I've always been drawn to Christ, I've just long been away from a place where He was present.