Well, I brought one of them to youth group; it was Brian Ward who converted him. Brian Ward was such a popular youth pastor that teenagers from churches all over the county showed up to “the Planet” at Grace Bible Church on Wednesday nights to sit on the floor and listen to him play guitar and talk about Jesus. Brian was allergic to Christianese, so it never occurred to him to talk about his walk with the Lord or about how he felt led to do this or that because something was laid on his heart. A Georgia Bulldogs fan with a thick Atlanta accent, Brian wore weathered baseball caps and T-shirts, sang like Eddie Vedder, and cussed from time to time. We suspected he got into trouble with our parents a lot, which only elevated his mystique. When we teased Brian about losing his hair, he reminded us of an obscure story from the Bible in which God sent two female bears to maul forty-two youths who dared tease the prophet Elisha for his baldness. “Two female bears,” he’d say. “It’s in the Bible, I swear. Look it up.”
It was Brian’s idea to call our Wednesday night meetings the Planet and to move them from the church sanctuary to a downtown storefront so we wouldn’t feel like we were going to church. It was his idea to include students in leadership, in the band, and in important decisions about the future of the youth group. He watched the same TV shows we watched and laughed at the same parts we laughed at. His wife, Carrie, was pretty, sweet, and sensible, and I knew their little house by the river as well as I knew the homes of my best friends.
Brian managed to make church appealing without resorting to the desperate, strained strategies of other area youth pastors who tried to make Christianity “relevant to the youth.” He knew you couldn’t string up a volleyball net, crank up some Christian rock music, and expect jocks and band nerds, Goths and cheerleaders, hicks and churchy kids to put aside their differences and enjoy one another in the spirit of Jesus, and he only barely masked his disdain for youth leaders desperate enough to try. Instead, he outfitted our downtown storefront with La-Z-Boy armchairs in one corner, a foosball table in the other, video games in a side room, a giant stage in the back, and basketball goals and a volleyball net in the parking lot, and we counted it a success to have seventy or so teenagers together in the same space for three hours each week, with or without any Breakfast Club moments. Brian had achieved the raison d’être of every teenager past, present, and future: he was cool without trying to be. We adored him.
Even the back-row boys liked Brian, though they pretended not to as they shoved their hands in their pockets during worship and picked at the carpet during the lesson. Brian went fishing and bowling with them, shared inside jokes with them, and many years later, would officiate their weddings. With all the time Brian spent ministering to the back-row boys, you’d think more of them would move closer to the front of the room during worship to join those of us who were on fire for God.
“It’s not my job to change people,” Brian told me when I pestered him about it, “just love people.”
I figured this meant he was playing some sort of long game, working his way into their lives before recruiting them to the revival. It never occurred to me that there were probably times when Brian was just loving me too.
I remember very little about church outside of youth group from those days, except that on Sunday mornings I got to see the boys from the youth group in their nice collared shirts and they got to see me in skirts. (By then I’d dropped the Laura Ingalls Wilder act and put on some lipstick.) We sat together in the back four rows of the Grace Bible Church sanctuary—a windowless, domed building that from the outside looked like a planetarium. Grace Bible Church was the largest nondenominational Bible church in town and had recently emerged from the worship wars of the ’90s with a few minor flesh wounds and a compromise that left our congregation of around two hundred singing from the hymnbook for part of the service and an overhead projector for the other. Our pastor was an old family friend who had attended seminary with my father. The two had gone to get their physical for the draft together, and though neither had their number called, they recalled the event like old war buddies. Pastor Doug was a more scholarly, exegetical preacher than Pastor George and was a St. Louis Cardinals baseball fan, of all things. Our bulletins included detailed outlines of his sermons, often with subheadings beginning with the same letter: Salvation, Sanctification, Significance. I filled out every blank space, sometimes guessing at the next point (Service!) while the back-row boys blew spitballs at my head.
Not a lot of kids go to youth group to mellow out their religiosity, but Brian’s relational style helped temper my crusader complex. He saw I had a knack for teaching and leading in a church setting, and on more than one occasion invited me to give the lesson (a privilege unheard of for a young woman in that context). He also convinced me not to ruin the Super Bowl party with an altar call at halftime and to relax and enjoy my friends on all those bumpy, open-windowed van rides to concerts and youth retreats that left my hair in tangles and my mind flitting from one cute boy to the next.
One such trip brought me back to Alabama each year for a weekend service project at Camp Maxwell in Haleyville. Camp Maxwell hosted underprivileged kids during the summer, but every spring invited privileged kids from youth groups around the Southeast to pour concrete, dig up stumps, and rupture water mains for Jesus. All the girls bought new overalls for the occasion. In the evenings, we gathered in an open-air meetinghouse to worship, shiver, and listen to fire and brimstone sermons from men whose theology Brian gently corrected for us on the van ride home.
It was at these gatherings that the Grace Bible Church youth group came to collectively appreciate our own exceptionalism, which we set out to prove each year by taking home the coveted Flush Valve Award. The Flush Valve Award looked exactly as it sounds, like a toilet flush valve mounted to a slab of pinewood, and was awarded to whichever youth group accumulated the most points over the weekend for victories in sports, games, Bible quizzes, and the all-important talent show. Most of these activities were easy wins for the Grace Bible Church contingency on account of our diversity. We boasted musicians, athletes, Bible nerds, and drama geeks in equal measure. One year, we earned a standing ovation at the talent show when we pulled off a miniature production of Stomp, with members of the high school drum line hammering away at empty garbage cans.
Our weakness lay in the games department. Now understand, games in the context of a Christian youth group means something entirely different than the same word in any other context. I suspect that in the late ’90s alone, youth group games were responsible for millions of mono breakouts, thousands of broken bones, dozens of stomach pumps, and countless hours of therapy, for they typically involved placing insecure, hormonally charged teenagers in as physically awkward and borderline dangerous a situation as possible, preferably in the company of food, in a misguided effort to “break the ice” that invariably resulted in someone either throwing up or getting an erection.
There were trust falls and relay races and high-stakes, high-speed versions of Duck-Duck-Goose, musical chairs, dodgeball, and (until it was banned because I think it actually killed some people) Red Rover. We played sardines (cram twenty-five youths into the same dark hiding space for an hour), Suck-and-Blow (pass the credit card around the circle using only the suction from your mouths), and Two-Buck Chuck (chug a half gallon of milk without throwing up and win two dollars). There was the one where you had to bob for Snickers bars in a toilet bowl filled with lemonade, the one where you had to eat a banana with a pair of panty hose over your head, and the one where you tossed cheese puffs at your partner’s shaving cream–covered face. It was a perpetual circus of delight for us introverts, obviously.
I recently exchanged youth group war stories with some of my readers on Twitter, and their accounts were chilling:
“I’ve seen people drink milkshakes made from happy meals.”
“I once saw peanut butter licked from a dude’s armpit.”
“We took the smallest middle-schoolers and duct-taped them to the wall. Th
e team whose person stayed on the wall the longest won.”
“Steal the bacon with petroleum jelly and watermelons. Three students with concussions and one youth leader with a nipple ring ripped out.”
“Three words: strobe light volleyball.”
“I had to eat an onion like an apple once. I don’t remember why.”14
Lucky for the Grace Bible Church youth group, Brian struggled with moderate anxiety and therefore hated youth group games as much as we did, so our exposure to them came primarily through youth events like the one at Camp Maxwell where we watched in horror as otherwise normal teenagers tried to pull gum off the bottom of a dirty tennis shoe with their teeth.
On the chilly night in question, the game that stood between the Grace Bible Church youth group and the Flush Valve Award was, of course, Chubby Bunny. Chubby Bunny is a game in which several “volunteers” cram as many marshmallows as they can into their mouths and attempt to say “chubby bunny” without throwing up or choking to death. The person who can do this with the most marshmallows in his or her mouth wins the game.
Now, the youth group of Grace Bible Church hated Chubby Bunny. We were too cool for Chubby Bunny. We saw right through the insidious ruse that was Chubby Bunny. But we needed someone to play Chubby Bunny on our behalf if we were to successfully win the Flush Valve Award and put these other youth groups in their place.
As the competition sent their delegates to the stage to the sound of cheers, we sat quietly in our five rows of wooden pews, moving sawdust around with our shoes.
“We need a volunteer from Grace Bible Church!” someone with far too many rubber bracelets on his arm shouted into the microphone.
Names were whispered. Eye contact was averted. Brian looked as scared as the rest of us.
Then, from the back, came a steady, certain voice.
“I’ll do it.”
We all turned.
Mike was a back-row boy if there ever was one. Tall and redheaded, he had a smart mouth and daredevil spirit and tended to divide his time between detention and the ER. When Mike didn’t like something, he let you know it, and Mike wasn’t too fond of church or school or Camp Maxwell. However, his eyes always betrayed a soft twinkle and he had such a wry, on-point wit that even we Bible nerds liked him. I know I wasn’t the only girl who enjoyed drawing a smile out of his stubborn lips, across that freckled face, that strong jaw, and those wide cheeks . . . cheeks made for Chubby Bunny.
Without another word, Mike strode down the aisle and took his place between a girl in baggy overalls from Birmingham and a terrified junior high kid from Huntsville. They made him wear a trash bag like a bib. He was our Katniss Everdeen, our volunteer for tribute. We won the Flush Valve Award for the third straight year.
So this is how a girl who went to school prepared to die for her faith ended up shrieking with delight as back-row Mike shoved marshmallows into his face in pursuit of the Flush Valve Award. I attribute any trace of social acumen in my life to Brian Ward and my days in the Grace Bible Church youth group. At a time when most of my peers were struggling to find an identity, I knew exactly who I was: the church girl, the girl who always had a place in her youth group family, the girl on fire for God. I’m not sure I can ever calculate the value of that community, that sense of belonging and of being loved.
It never even occurred to me that such a fire could be washed out.
FIVE
Enough
Most of us come to the church by a means the church does not allow.
—Flannery O’Connor
I’VE NEVER MET ANYONE MORE EXCITED ABOUT HIS baptism than Andrew.
“Just thirteen more days!” the nineteen-year-old sang, as though he were counting down to a graduation day or a wedding. “You wanna come?”
“All the way from Tennessee?” I balked, passing him the larger half of a brownie I’d just split for us. “It’s a bit of a drive to St. Louis.”
We were sitting at a round foldout table in the deserted basement of a Methodist church in Columbia, Missouri, skipping out on the afternoon session of the conference we were attending in favor of acting as the self-appointed food critics for the pastry items left over from lunch. (If the Baptists have the corner on homemade chili—which they do—then Methodists have it on pastries. I’ve never encountered a Methodist lemon bar I didn’t like.) We’d found each other after my presentation earlier that morning, when Andrew—a dimpled, sandy-haired college student and faithful reader of my blog—seized me in the auditorium with a giant bear hug and a fit of boyish laughter. “It’s okay,” I’d assured the perplexed onlookers. “We know each other from the Internet.”
“I honestly never thought I’d get baptized,” Andrew confessed as he studied his half of the brownie. “I didn’t think I’d ever be good enough.”
“What sort of church did you grow up in?” I asked.
In response, Andrew pulled out his smartphone, scrolled through his pictures for a moment, found what he was looking for, and then handed his phone to me. On the cracked screen was a picture of the editorial page of a church newsletter. As I zoomed in closer, I could see the article was about same-sex relationships, which the author described as sickening. To the left of the headline, a silver-haired man in a suit and tie looked back at me with eyes that looked familiar.
“That’s my dad,” Andrew said. “He’s a pastor, and he published this right after I came out.”
My heart sank. For every teenager like me who knew only love and acceptance growing up in church, there were teenagers like Andrew who felt like strangers in the pews, strangers even in their own homes.
The sixth of seven children, Andrew grew up in a small, fundamentalist Presbyterian church in the South where his father served as pastor. There was much Andrew loved about his tight-knit faith community—its emphasis on Scripture, its commitment to evangelism, its familylike atmosphere—but as Andrew approached his teenage years, he found himself at odds with some of the church’s more legalistic teachings, particularly his father’s ban on contemporary Christian music and insistence that only the King James version of the Bible be used in church and in study. While his father emphasized reverence, righteousness, and self-control, Andrew had always displayed a tender, open spirit and an emotional connection to God. He scribbled endlessly in his prayer journal during his father’s sermons, conversing with God as with a close friend. Though he occasionally rebelled (the first time Andrew saw a movie in a theater, he was eighteen years old, and he snuck out with friends to catch The Hunger Games), Andrew loved Jesus deeply, passionately.
Which made his secret all the heavier.
About the time his friends started talking about girls, Andrew started noticing boys. Having been raised to believe that sexual orientation was a choice and that same-sex relationships were an abomination, Andrew feared his impulses were a result of sin, sin he begged God to purge him of night after night and day after day.
A 2012 entry from Andrew’s prayer journal reads:
I’m so scared. I don’t want to be an outcast . . . Do you care what I’m going through, God? Why did you make me this way? What are you trying to teach me, God? I lift my hands to you. I’m in your hands . . . Give me faith! Please! I can’t hold on much longer.
But no amount of prayer or Bible study or self-discipline could change Andrew’s orientation. Finally, after struggling with bouts of depression and despair, Andrew came to terms with his sexuality. He left home to attend college in St. Louis and he found a new church that accepted him as he was. His new faith community even arranged for him to be baptized, an experience Andrew had longed for since childhood.
“I was always denied baptism and communion growing up,” Andrew said. “My dad told me I wasn’t manifesting enough fruits of the Spirit in my life. He wanted me to wait until I was good enough, holy enough.”
Andrew formally came out to his family on the Thanksgiving break of his freshman year. It didn’t go well. Now Andrew lives in his dorm room, cut off from his
family and working to pay for his education on his own. The last time he spoke with his father, Andrew was told he was going to hell.
But Andrew wasn’t alone during that difficult Thanksgiving break. A whole team of people from his new church had committed to pray for him for those four days. Andrew knew he had their support through every painful moment.
“No church is perfect,” he said. “But they’ve been good to me.”
That’s when I understood why Andrew had invited me to his baptism. I was part of the only family he had. Andrew’s adoption into God’s family had been far more tumultuous and painful than my own, but he wanted me to be a part of it simply because I was among those who would not turn him away, simply because I loved him as he was. Sometimes the church must be a refuge even to its own refugees.
Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church Page 4