I come from Joy Choir, van rides through the countryside, and vacation Bible school (VBS) every summer, where the days and the weeks felt long and wide, and there was nothing more than being a kid with Kool-Aid red lips and cookies around your finger. The church basement, also known as the Fellowship Hall, had doors opened for kickball, dodgeball, shaving cream in tubs, and water balloons on a hot summer day.
I come from fried chicken, potato salad, and baked beans at the park on potluck Sunday, where the kids ran wild, and the parents conversed in lawn chairs. I come from church attendance boards and white envelopes that you marked every week to say whether you’d read the Bible or not, “not” usually being the case. I come from pianos in every Sunday school classroom, with teachers equipped to play. Ms. Pam and Ms. Patsy faithfully loved and taught, then Mr. Ray, and onto Charlotte in middle school.
The Southern Baptist liturgy was The Baptist Hymnal, “When the Roll is Called up Yonder,” “Onward Christian Soldiers,” and “Blessed Assurance,” a choir special or a solo, the sermon, and never to be failed, the altar call with “Just As I Am” playing. Through the years, the liturgy changed to include praise songs sung by praise teams, but the order of worship mostly stayed the same.
Up until the last ten years or so, at least in my Southern Baptist world, Southern Baptists were not people of Advent. Our calendars were for Easter, Christmas, and VBS. This meant cantatas and kids. Christmas was the time for sandy milk gallon jugs of candlelight to light the way on our little church hill, church plays for kids like me to dress up like angels, and bundling up to sing Christmas carols.
I left the way of childhood things and moved into the adult world, where Christmas meant lists of things to buy and people to please, and me often saying I hated Christmas. That is until I found other Christians online who celebrated something called Advent at Christmastime. Advent was for people like me, waiting in the darkness, weary, wandering, and wanting the Savior to come soon. Advent taught me to slow down, saving me from commercial Christmas and restoring my joy in the baby who came so many years ago.
Advent reminds me of the grand biblical narrative, and it’s all told in roughly 25 days. I appreciate Abraham, who often got it wrong, but his faith credited him with righteousness. I’ve thought a lot about Abraham because, in this season of leaving church to find another church, I’ve felt that call to go, and I remember that he, like me, did not know where he was going, only that he was promised a land, a nation, and a great name. Knowing that Abraham doesn’t see the promised land himself, I often hold tight to the things I’m given, fearful that God will promise me something not meant for me but for my children’s children’s children. After following the Lord for at least 30 years, if not more, some days, it feels like I’m only now learning to walk in faith.
This is my first Advent season without a church home, and I hope it is my last. I’m not sure I’m ready to talk publicly about why I left, but I feel I owe you something of why, even if it will have to be small. I left because I found I was no longer Southern Baptist. I know that most Southern Baptists are just like the ones who taught me as a girl, who don’t know too much about the SBC (Southern Baptist Convention) as an entity, but me, I cared and read too much. I learned about the scandals, abuse, and good ole boys club. And it wasn’t just that, but it was how the preaching no longer matched the living. In the South, this is known as talking out the side of your mouth. I needed the living to match the preaching. What was preached on Sunday was not what was shared on Twitter on Monday, if you know what I mean.
I needed to know that women would not be mistreated, and very personally, I wanted to know that I wouldn’t be blackballed for saying something doctrinally or opinionally different on Facebook. Also, I wanted a safe place for my kids to question whatever unconventional things they brought up. I needed to be loved right where I am because I was living in the goodness of God while at school at Friends, but I was watching so many people caught up in legalist faith and Christian nationalism on Sunday. I think a lot about my time at Friends because my Southern Baptist friends wrote letters of recommendation for me. However, it seems my time there took me down a different path, where faith is ecumenical, orthodoxy is generous, and God’s love is indeed as wide as Ephesians said it was.
I left thinking I didn’t want to attend another Southern Baptist church. We are still searching for a new church home, and oddly, we sat down in another Southern Baptist church this morning. When we first started our search, we began with one list, only to have to restart the search, expand the list, and recognize our family limitations. Even though I may not be Southern Baptist, I am not just me when it comes to church. I am my husband and three kids, too. Like me, until I started writing on the internet, Southern Baptist is all they’ve ever known, and sometimes, my teenagers still drive themselves right back down the road to the only church they’ve ever known.
Several months ago, my son asked me what type of church was my favorite, and I said I didn’t know. I know what I like and why, and I want Jesus to be the center, but I am not sure about a type. Instead, I turned the question around and asked him his favorite. Southern Baptist because it’s all I’ve ever known, he said.
As I sat in this Southern Baptist sanctuary this morning, I realized that we’d spent Easter there, and now, at least one Advent service. I thought about how I’d been in a Southern Baptist building the week before, albeit an unusual one, both celebrating Advent, which has become the new custom in recent years. The Holy Spirit’s wind and fire hit me.
You are here because this reminds you of home, and where do people go for Christmas? They go home. Your liturgy is the Baptist liturgy of sending people to the mission field and long, exegetical sermons. You are changed, not Southern Baptist, but I am still here.
He seemed to say to my heart that God is not Southern Baptist, but he’s not not Southern Baptist either. He is here, and he’s there, and he’s in the life and light of every believer. The Southern Baptist church made me who I am.
As the church commissioned several new missionaries, I thought about my professor from Friends, an ordained Baptist minister, who taught me about liturgy, community, formation, and the mission of God. Of how, had he not started as a Baptist, the mission of God probably wouldn’t be his favorite subject. We Baptists love missions, and listening to the missionaries’ testimonies hit something true in the call of my own heart, and tears streamed down my face as I heard what the Holy Spirit said to my heart. We were meant to be here on this day in 2023, and their stories matched the work of God in me, whether I’m Southern Baptist or not. Today, our tent is here in this megachurch, and who knows, maybe this will be where we eventually land.
God is not Southern Baptist, Anglican, Methodist, or Catholic. He’s God. We call ourselves Christians because we are meant to be little Christs and the word Christian has been perverted by us, not the world, by our abuses, by our lack of centering on Jesus instead of our doctrines, our denominations, our titles. Is God Christian? I don’t know if God needs a title for himself. However, it is the God of Jesus that I follow, the God of Jesus that seeks after me when I am lost, the God of Jesus who goes after my lost child, the God of Jesus who meets me today in a Southern Baptist church, a denomination once called home.
My "from" denomination is the PCA, and I am so thankful for it! Now our home is St. John's Anglican in Chelsea... come and see!
Love this! And love you! ❤️ we are always growing and our focus is on knowing God and sharing Him accurately according to scripture as the Holy Spirit teaches us. I am incredibly thankful for the teachers/preachers at our church (SBC) who have made me question all I’ve ever been taught and check it with scripture. I’ve realized I’ve been taught incorrectly but some things I was taught correctly were twisted in my own fleshly mind or even by Satan himself to cause me not to treasure Jesus above all! I’m thankful that the leaders of our church do not preach to satisfy the SBC but to be true to scripture. Wish you lived closer! ❤️