The Realness Of Being Fake

I read an article the other day. The article was about young adults who grew up going to church, but now they are in their 20s and they don’t go anymore. Catchy, right? The article went further than just saying that a bunch of twentysomethings are leaving the church. It said that a bunch of twentysomethings are leaving their faith.

I liked the article. I am not saying that I like the fact that many people my age are choosing not to have faith in God. I like that the article was written.

I am a twentysomething myself. Twenty-five, actually. So I am exactly a mid-twentysomething. I can relate to many things that were said in the article by the twentysomethings who no longer have faith in God. I mean, I still have faith and all, but I understand how they feel.

Mainly the article equates that the absence of faith in these young adults is due to a lack of discipleship in many churches. Other factors are explained such as: The Church is very good at instructing children and teenagers on what the right answers are, but does little to engage on applying the answers to everyday life.

Still, sometimes today I get tired of going to church. I grew up in the Bible Belt. I grew up going to a traditional, southern, conservative church. I know all about church. I love the Church as a whole. I love the sense of community and family that it promotes. But as I said earlier, sometimes I get tired of going to church.

In the article, a girl is interviewed about how she grew up in a Christian home (just like myself), she was very involved in her youth group (just like myself), and she attended a Christian club at her high school (I helped start one at my school). And to sum up the rest of her story, she lost her faith because due to a lack of fellowship with other believers after she moved. I have been there. Feeling disconnected. Sometimes it feels like I am there now. It’s hard not to feel disconnected when you are the only single guy in a couples Bible study class.

I feel I can read people pretty well. I am not saying that people are easy to understand. People are quite difficult. Christians are the hardest people to read though. There is not that much transparency in the Church. I know this because I am a Christian and being transparent is one thing I struggle the most with. I think this whole transparency issue, a lack of authenticity, is what caused me to stray away from the Church for a few years. I grew up seeing people put on their Sunday Church masks and I grew up learning how to put on my own. I grew up learning the difference between what’s right and what’s wrong, but I never learned why. I grew up being taught that the Church was supposed to be a community of believers experiencing life together (not just on Sundays), but I didn’t have that many people disciple me Monday thru Saturday.

To be honest, that’s one thing that still bothers me. When church gets to be about how many people we can get in the seats, or how many people can we get saved/baptized, or how many hands we can shake on Sunday mornings. (Honestly, I get annoyed by those hand-shakers who shake my hand every Sunday, but don’t even know my name.) When I look at the New Testament church, I see a family. People eating with each other, people encouraging each other during difficult times, people being REAL with each other. No masks of self-righteousness. No fakers. No phonies. Okay, maybe there were some churches that dealt with self-righteousness, but that’s not what church was intended to be.

Deep down, my desire is to just be real. I want to be the same on Sunday as I am on Friday night. I don’t want to pretend to be more spiritual than I am, or pretend like I have all the answers. I don’t want to pretend like everything is going great, when I feel just like giving up. I want to be transparent. I want to go to Bible Studies and Sunday school classes where I can wrestle over issues with others instead of another teacher telling me what’s right and what’s wrong. I want engagement. I want to engage.

I wanted to share this story from my high school years. I went through 3 youth pastors when I was a teenager. I remember when my parents split up that the youth pastor at that time didn’t even talk with me about it. I don’t have some grudge against him or anything. I am just stating that I felt overlooked. There was no connection, no engagement, and it really affected me negatively for awhile. There are so many people in the Church who are hurting and yet most of the time no one even knows about it. I’m not saying that pastors should deeply engage everyone. We would need many more pastors. I am saying that maybe I could help others if I took off my mask a little more and invested in others outside of church. Maybe we could all be a little more real. Then we wouldn’t be afraid to let down our guard and invest in each other any day of the week.