The Plight of Homeless Christians

In 1977 I was homeless. So, disgusted with city-life, I high-tailed it for the mountains and pitched my tiny orange tent in Cottonwood Lake Campground. I dropped out and spent my days hiking, trout fishing, and reading Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings.” Waking as the tent heated from the morning sun and falling asleep with a billion stars shining as my nightlight was freedom defined.

Occasionally my camp-mate and I drove his Plymouth Belvedere to my cousin’s house on Trout Creek. There we sat in stiff wooden chairs around her kitchen table and ate and talked and laughed with incense burning and Pink Floyd playing in the background. Inside her walls lived a different kind of freedom: the freedom of belonging. Her screen door slammed shut on a fearsome loneliness. The summer wore on. We visited my cousin’s home, our home away from homelessness, more frequently.

I was a young, immature, follower of Christ in 1977. I knew less than nothing about God and life. I had no idea that what we were doing around my cousin’s kitchen table was oddly church-like. We sang no hymns, passed no offering plate, and followed no liturgy. We broke bread; we gave thanks; we encouraged one another; we loved one another. We had a sacred fellowship. And God was there, though not invoked, yet gentle, invisible, insistent. God surfaced in nearly every conversation, hung around in every corner.

Everyone needs a place to belong: a community to talk, laugh, cry, and encounter God with.

In 2008 I became a homeless Christian, without a gathered Christian community to encounter God with. At first, like in the summer of 1977, the freedom was exhilarating. Did you know people sleep in, read the comics, and freely hang out in coffee shops on Sunday mornings? Suddenly Sundays became Sabbath, relaxed and unpressurized.

Eventually though, reading the funnies, or even the Bible, in my boxers lost its appeal. I missed the intellectual, social, and spiritual stimulation present in a gathered Christian community. I yearned for encountering God in music, sermons, ancient and modern rites, and most of all, other people. I did not miss, however, the politics, the griping, or the massive weight of trying to speak honestly for God.

While homeless, my spiritual life resembled a slowly receding tide, leaving bleached, empty shells of faith on the beach. My faith became a distant, powerless belief system rather than a vibrant way of life. Now months later, surrounded by a grace-filled Christian community, God is rebuilding my soul.

I am not the only one to experience spiritual homelessness. Disgusted with the real and perceived hypocrisy, ritual, dogma, judgementalism, and general irrelevance of what we now call church, many followers of Christ have dropped out and pitched a tent in their own backyards hoping for the best. Researchers claim only about 20% of Americans attend church. While three quarters of American adults call themselves Christian.

A sizable majority of Christians are homeless, without a gathered community to belong to. You may be one.

The problem is God designed life to be lived with-in a caring, serving, worshiping community called church. Unlike bowling, Christianity is not an individualistic sport. God most often shows up in the spaces (interactions) between people and the more distant those spaces the smaller the interaction and the easier it is to lose sight of God. God loves us as individuals but calls us to live in community. “Let’s see how inventive we can be in encouraging one another, not avoiding worshiping together as some do but spurring each other on . . . .” Hebrews 10:24-25, The Message.

This question is not whether one “can be a Christian while never ‘going’ to church.” Church is a family, if often a dysfunctional one. You may go to your family’s house, but you don’t “go to” family. You are family. You are the church. In Christ we have been adopted and are a part of a family whether we are estranged—homeless—or not. And just as being estranged from our biological families has far-reaching effects, so too, does being estranged from our spiritual families. The plight of homeless Christians is serious and debilitating to us as individuals and to us as the church.

Often it is not laziness or apostasy that keeps us homeless. Very real fear, pain, and past disappointments keep many of us from belonging to a faith family. Jesus knows our pain and estrangement. The Prodigal Son is not just a story about forgiveness, but also about coming home to God and family, pouty older brother and all. Reconnecting is a fearful prospect, I know. But know also that God is waiting for your return and will kill the fatted calf when you do. We might even put on some Pink Floyd.

Skittish Trout

It was just a wide spot in the stream where the mountain valley flattened out to pool and drink the icy water. Tall, snow-covered peaks reflected in its placid surface. Narrow shadows hung suspended in its middle: brook trout facing upstream and feeding on anything drifting through their territory. I had to crawl through the grass as I approached the pool so as not to send the trout flying for cover in the undercut banks. Even then, the shadow of my fly rod arching across the water panicked them. Skittish trout, they’re called. So attuned to hawks and fishermen and other predators are they, that any movement from above is perceived as a threat. And rightly so.

I have a friend who calls herself a skittish trout. She grew up in a guilt-based, authoritarian religion and church. Any question, doubt, comment, or difficulty she had with her childhood faith and church was met with anger and derision. Intellectual abuse, she called it. Not that she didn’t have faith, she just wondered. As soon as she was old enough, she fled organized religion. And today anytime even a shadow of that old-time religion falls across her life she flies for the safety of the cutbank, peering out, yet still wondering.

In the process of starting a church, I’ve discovered large pools of skittish trout. Unfortunately, stories similar to my friend’s abound. Church splits, pastoral infidelity and dishonesty, harsh judgementalism, cold cliquishness, unbending dogma, rampant self-righteousness, cookie cutter lifestyles and answers, authoritarian leadership, political partisanship, powerless people, and ample—but common—human failings in what is supposed a divine institution are just a few of the shadows that the church and her people cast across the pool of modern life.

Almost all of us have, or have heard, a similar story. The scars and their impact vary. I started following Christ at age fifteen and began looking for a church to attend. Even I knew that was the way of things, but I was naive about the dress code. My hair flowed below my shoulders and my jeans were ratty. It was the 1970s. At the end of the sermon, I tramped forward in response to the “altar call.” I knelt to pray and a pastor (At least I think he was a pastor. To me he looked, acted, and smelled like one) approached and asked me if I wanted to become a Christian.

I proudly told him how just days earlier I had become a Christian at a church camp. He frowned at me and shook his head.

“You need to get your hair cut before you can become a Christian, son,” he said as if this truth saddened him deeply.

I was young and stupid and argued with him. “Jesus had long hair. Haven’t you seen those pictures of him?”

Not impressed with my theological acumen he simply offered, “I have a pair of scissors in the back. I can get them, cut your hair, and then you can pray and become a Christian.”

I decided to look for another church.

Since then I have been in three churches where the pastors have had affairs, and within most of the churches I have been a part, have seen and heard things that come straight from the gates of hell not the streets of heaven, and have made my own sad mistakes as a person and a pastor (proving the adage that if I find the perfect church I had better not join it because I’ll ruin it).

Two things:

One, apparently not being a skittish trout but maybe a stupid one, I have yet to fly for the cutbank and hide. Sometimes I feel like a singed moth circling the flame. I’m not sure why I don’t fly. Probably because God keeps blocking the escape route. Probably also because with each scar the church and I have left on one another, there are equal—and more—marks of grace and life this crazy body called the church has bestowed on me. That she has allowed me to seek my calling and share my thoughts, ideas, and life through her may be the least of them. And when I parade before my eyes the faces of friends I have made, and how they have enriched my life, in this human/divine community, I am humbled and grateful.

Two, dealing with people’s souls is dangerous and delicate. So too, I’ve discovered, is this starting and being a church, and mysterious. We’re not selling widgets or snake oil. We’re attempting to touch God and, through rugged and calloused human hands, places in ourselves God hid in our deepest reaches, places we’ve hidden even from ourselves. Hanging out a sign reading, “Got God?” does not do anyone, especially the Creator of our souls, justice. This, sharing our souls, spiritual journeys, and lives, is not marketing. It cannot be shrink wrapped into some tidy package. It’s messy, alive, sensitive, unpredictable, sometimes ugly, often beautiful. Tread softly.

I wish finding God and ourselves and living in a Christ community with truth and grace could be written up in a book or produced in a program or bulleted in a three point outline, or contained in a church building (and sometimes God even works through these things). But alas we and God and life are deeper and messier than that.

And none of this is new. Even the first two humans hid from God after they discovered their bare, naked distance from and need for Him. We have been flying from God ever since. Skittish trout indeed. Fear not, however, God is no predator, but is a patient, persistent angler.