Brandi is struggling with church and why we do it, and I wrote this comment, which I’ll repost here because I think it’s highly relevant to my main consumer of this site: me.
I’m glad that you’ve made the choice to stick it out. Twice, I’ve become overwhelmed and left churches to start anew, for exactly the reasons you’ve alluded to here [although unlike you, I've never been on staff; but I did get asked to be the youth director once when I was in college, but anyway]. I find in the results of this that the problem lies, well, with me: how I balance my life, how I react when challenged by others, etc. Unlike you, I’m still single, so I don’t even have the marriage relationship to remind me that these rough patches are worth trucking through. I envy you that.
I am currently between church congregations for a number of reasons. One, which seems quite silly, is that my overwork at work and at my previous congregation got me to a point where I was overwhelmed and ultimately depressed, and I gave up the thing I could afford financially to give up. Sad, but true.
And yet while I’ve been out of a congregation for more than a year now, I find myself yearning for corporate worship and study. I find that I don’t challenge myself—rightly or wrongly!—in solitude. I find that small groups can often end up having herd mentalities, and I need something bigger than that so I don’t get into those mentalities.
And … in the course of writing this, I think I just talked myself into going to the local megachurch on Sunday. Heh.
I want to expand on that last point a little bit. I’ve long resisted large congregations, thinking they should plant. Part of this comes from my reading of Dunbar’s number and my desire to know and be known by a community of believers. But as I wrote that about small groups, I realized that my need for community can be met at that level while my need for larger corporate worship and accountability can be met by a larger congregation. You know, as long as I don’t buy into herd mentalities and “us v. them” thinking.
I’ve resisted visiting Asbury UMC, Madison’s large Methodist congregation, for all those reasons. But sitting here, I feel this tug on my heart that all that is just flippin’ silly. So… okay, God.
One plus of a church that size is that there’s a possibility you can fly under the radar and not get signed up to do everything. Getting back into a church community will be good for you and I’m hoping the best for you in this.