Leaving

If you’re a Christian-nerd who keeps track of these things, you’ll know that two big-name pastors have left their big-name churches recently. Bill Hybels, Willow Creek megachurch pastor, retired to the now-familiar refrain of accusations of improper conduct with women in his church. And just weeks ago, Nadia Bolz-Weber passed off her church, the House for All Sinners and Saints (HFASS, pronounced “half-ass”), with one of the most moving sermons of all time. If you have 15 minutes, listen to it.

I, too, am engaged in the spiritual practice and litmus test of “leaving.” If I believed in the separation between church and life, I might think it was too grand a thing to compare my networks and workplaces and family to the churches of Bill Hybels and Nadia Bolz-Weber. But I don’t. I believe that each of us founds a church around us, whether we acknowledge our pastorship of that church or not.

Like all pastors, we are responsible to God for the ways we treat others, our environment, and the worship practices we engage in (i.e. eating, sleeping, drinking booze with friends). Saying goodbye to people and to places here in Indianapolis makes me evaluate how I did here. Who remembers me and how?  Did I take care of the buildings and greenery around me? Are the paths I walked (and drove and biked) well-traveled, well-explored, and blessed because a steward of the Creator walked (and drove and biked) those paths?

I feel sadness but no shame in admitting that the answers to those questions are ambivalent. I did not treat the building I lived in well (there are pieces of cat food stuck between a couple floor boards, for instance), but I did help along some amazing grape tomatoes, several spider plants, and succulents. Some of my students wrote me beautiful good-bye letters about the ways I impacted them, leaving me with the knowledge that they will remember me well. Others will remember me as absent. Others as contentious.

No one wants to leave the way Hybels has left, with disorder and pain in his wake. Everyone wants to leave like Bolz-Weber has, with humility and in peace. The knowledge that all people are both sinner and saint (already saints, yet still sinners, as HFASS proclaims) teaches us that no leaving is so simple. Some people from Hybels church will miss the good he did while folks at Bolz-Weber’s church won’t miss the bad she did.

I’m a little bit scared to pack up the truck tonight and not just because a 10-hour drive with two angsty cats awaits me tomorrow. The church around me—its people, its places, its smells—is not perfect, but it is familiar. That which is unfamiliar awaits.

Leaving is always a challenge and not just for the truths it tells me about myself. Leaving is a challenge because it is a spiritual practice that upends every facet of life. Like the Exodus, I will leave that which enslaved me in this particular place. But like the Exile I will also leave the beautiful patterns and traditions of life here that brought me comfort and stability.

I will miss my house church most of all and some distance after them, The Donut Shop on Keystone. I’ll miss the ripening of my tomatoes and the easy commutes of Indianapolis traffic. I’ll miss winter snowstorms and working alongside my sister. I’ll miss Tuesday mornings with my mother and having my dad pick me up at the airport with only a moment’s notice. I’ll miss all the hidden nooks and crannies of Indianapolis that I never bothered to explore.

But that’s only half the story, in more ways than one. In the first, there is plenty I won’t miss, but no one needs me to write a blog post about my individual biases against Indiana. The other half of the practice of leaving is the practice of arriving. To North Carolina we go, wondering about the church that will be built around us there and praying, hoping, wishing that we will see the blessings as that church emerges.