Outside the Walls

I turned thirty this summer, and when people asked me what I was excited for this decade, I kept responding, “I’m excited to stop packing all my stuff into a U-Haul every year.” 

I spent my twenties constantly on the move, geographically, denominationally, and vocationally. I graduated from Calvin and then moved to Guatemala as a volunteer with World Renew. I was a worship leader at a Christian Reformed Church in Grand Rapids, went to a Presbyterian (PCUSA) seminary in New Jersey, and moved to Virginia, where I’m on staff at a United Church of Christ.

It was a strange decade. As I felt a clearer and clearer call to ministry, it also became increasingly clear that the Christian Reformed Church, the denomination I grew up in and considered home, wasn’t somewhere I could stay. 

I know some people find a deep sense of belonging in institutions, whether that be universities, seminaries, or denominations. I felt that growing up in the CRC, where I could trace my family back through generations of Calvin professors and CRC missionaries. I knew all the inside jokes, the weird historical tidbits, and picked up a little more of the correct pronunciation of “Ere zij God” at Christmas every year. And I felt that same sense of belonging at Calvin, for many of the same reasons. It was secure and easy and familiar, and in many ways a real gift.

I resigned my CRC membership back in 2022, and with it, most of my optimism about institutions. The CRC hadn’t just been a place for me to make all my jokes about square inches. It was where I’d learned about God and about welcome, that faith and reason and science don’t need to contradict each other, that God calls us not just to belief but to faithful action. My worldview and sense of calling were deeply formed by the CRC. Leaving a place that was home—and knowing that many people who loved me growing up would now believe that my faith is misguided, or flat-out wrong—left me with a lot of grief.

Over the past several years, I’ve noticed in myself a temptation to replace my experience of belonging in the CRC with belonging in another institution, to search for another place I feel wholly at home. And I’ve noticed, too, a tendency to idealize my past experience of the CRC, to forget the grief of LGBTQ+ folks and their families who were excluded for decades from the place I felt such belonging. I loved, and chose to leave, the CRC. Many others have been, and continue to be, kicked out.

I honestly don’t know that institutions are places we are meant to seek belonging, at least not an uncomplicated belonging. Sometimes we feel so at home that we stop setting new places at our tables. Sometimes we feel so comfortable that we start thinking the welcome and the table are ours, to generously include and reluctantly exclude people as we will, when the welcome and the table are, and have always been, God’s.

Right now, I’m on staff at a United Church of Christ congregation, so I’ve been taking some classes in UCC history and polity this year. (One of the traditions that “united” to form the UCC was the German Reformed Church, so yes, we did get to read the Heidelberg Catechism, sans footnote.) There’s a single line in the UCC Basis of Union, written in 1943 as an early agreement between the Evangelical and Reformed Church and the Congregational Christian Churches—who eventually united to form the UCC in 1957—that caught my attention, and that I’ve kept thinking about.

“Believing that denominations exist not for themselves but as parts of that Church, within which each denomination is to live and labor and, if need be, die; … [we] do now declare ourselves to be one body” (emphasis mine).

As I’m trying to navigate my changing relationships with institutions, it’s comforting to remember that denominations (and universities, and seminaries, and all our favorite institutions) were never supposed to be ends unto themselves. Institutions have their place—they provide training and community, safeguard against abuse, and help multiply the impact of our work and advocacy. But I’m not called to find a new institution to love; I’m called to continue a life of loving God and my neighbor. Sometimes institutions help us in that work, and sometimes we’re better off holding a picnic outside the walls, or a protest outside the gates.

In January, I became a member of the church I’ve been working at. Unlike the churches I’ve joined before, this church doesn’t ask you to respond to a list of questions. Instead, you write up and share a faith journey statement (which my spouse, who grew up Baptist, kept jokingly referring to as my “testimony,” though I suppose he wasn’t too far off). 

After the service, someone came up to me and said, “Bethany, I already knew we loved having you here, and that you fit in so well to our church, but I didn’t know why until today. So many of us have had to start over in new places, too. We know what it’s like to leave somewhere we’d loved.”

I am so grateful to have found a place to land. I’m discerning whether or not to begin the ordination process in the UCC, which genuinely feels like a good fit for me in a lot of unexpected ways, though I think my days of being an evangelist for human institutions are over. 

But stories of belonging and leaving don’t come with tidy threads to tuck in, which I suppose I’ve always known. I’ve carried the grief of leaving the CRC as a burden, but I am coming to see that it might also be a gift. I’ve realized that God’s table and God’s welcome have never been found exclusively within the walls of my favorite institutions. In fact, some of my favorite picnics have been outside.

Header photo by Leyla M on Unsplash
Picnic photo by Elena Popova on Unsplash