"It Was a Really Easy Yes"
By Emily Parr
Good morning!
So Dave asked me to share a little bit about our family and why we're here at Maitland Pres. For the sake of context, I've been in churches my whole life. I grew up in an evangelical Christian school. I was all in. I led Bible studies. I read the books in the Christian bookstores, signed the purity pledges, listened to Christian music, went on missions trips, all the things.
In this subculture, I learned one story about the world, and how to be a woman, how to read the Bible, how to vote. This narrative started to crumble pretty much as soon as I entered adulthood and left my bubble. Tt just didn't hold up in my life. And meeting people with different experiences showed me new perspectives that I had never learned or thought of before.
The more I learned, the more I saw that this one narrative I'd accepted was not only limited, but harmful to lots of people. I've often heard this process described as deconstruction, and I definitely relate to that.
I also think of it as pruning, and I think of when our family moved into our house, there were these huge overgrown azalea bushes that were covered with pink and red flowers on the outside, but underneath it was just a jumbled mess of bare leggy branches.
My very practical husband was like, "Let's just rip them all out." And I said "No, no, no, it's still alive." So, I went out there and started the long process of pulling these branches apart, cutting off the dead ones, finding the little spots that had leaves starting to sprout, and cutting those branches down, and I was left with these little scrappy things that looked terrible.
But they grew back healthier over time, and the next season I cut them back some more because it's an ongoing long-term process. My faith journey has required and will continue to require a similar process. Tt has been important to me in this to not uproot my faith in Jesus, even while I've watched others, who I grew up with and love, completely walk away from it.
Thankfully, I've been in this together with my husband, Josh, who has had to go through a journey of his own. For several years, we didn't know what to do next, how to continue to grow. We continued to be part of the same kinds of churches that we always had, even though we felt increasingly disconnected.
There were times when we'd show up on Sunday with heavy hearts and lots of questions about things happening in the world and our church community is the main place that I wanted to be able to process those things and figure out what do we do, and it just was becoming clear that we were not going to get that in the spaces we had always been in.
So I didn't know where to start.
I just knew we were looking for something different., we visited Maitland Pres with the intention of continuing to visit other churches, but we just kept coming back here and never left.
We found that this church, in fact, is different in almost every way from what we were used to, which was a good thing.
So some of the things that stood out were:
This was the first church I've ever been a part of that would even consider a woman for the role of pastor. That's pretty cool.
It's a church that not only isn't afraid of difficult conversations, but proactively makes space and plans events and invites us all to be part of those conversations.
This church believes in fixing what's actually broken, which involves naming out loud what is false and hurtful and what God actually values. This Untitled Open-Ended Bible study has been such a gift to me to be able to reread God's Word with fresh eyes and continue that long process of pulling apart branch by branch, and seeing it in a new way.
This church is giving our kids a different environment than what Josh and I experienced growing up and a different perspective on the world, and we trust that they come here on Sundays and can talk with Vanessa and Daryl and the other leaders and adults here and really learn how to love like Jesus. And you guys have loved on our kids so well, and we really, we really are thankful for that.
So that is why once we came here and we met with Dave and Megan, and they shared about the church's story and heard our story, it didn't take long for us to commit to membership and giving to this church.
It was a really easy yes.
If Maitland Pres means something to you, pledge your support for our ministry to continue next year. Click the button below and make your commitment today!
Comments