Finding a church

Jack and I started looking for a regular church right after we got married.  We had a tentative list of qualities we wanted: thoughtful and scholarly sermons, a small Bible study group we could join, diversity in age and background, as well as other young married couples.

Conspicuously absent from my list was “women.”  I didn’t realize how I craved mentors.  Whenever I joined a new church, I would immediately sniff out an older, educated and often, well, unusual Christian woman and attach myself to her.

My first mentor was a missionary that I found in Russia.  She was over six feet tall, single, and fluent in Russian despite having begun studying at age 40.  I lived with her for a few months during my first year of being a Christian, and we spent many evenings at her kitchen table as she listened patiently to my stories and questions.

When I came back to the states, I began tagging along with a half Native American woman with long silver hair.  She had finished her PhD in her early 40’s, then she and her husband had two kids.  They had a sign outside their front door that said “Welcome to the home of Dr. and Mr. Bentley.”  She home-schooled her boys, teaching them Greek, Latin, and how electrical circuits work.  They practiced “attachment parenting,” which meant all four of them slept in one bed.  Even though I found that a little creepy, I loved her brazenness.  Some part of me thought, “all this, and you’re a Christian?  Then maybe I can break the mold too.”

When I got married two years later, I thought that I had lost my chance of breaking any mold.  I worried that I had married because I feared independence.  My life story was looking too similar to others: I had been a good Christian college student, then I had a good Christian wedding where we sang “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing,” and it would only be a matter of time before I learned to cook and had babies.  And even though I loved the song “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing” and wanted to learn how to cook, I was terrified of becoming invisible amidst all the other Christian wives who cooked and sang and went to church.

So, with all this insecurity about being newly married, Jack and I tagged along with two old Intervarsity friends to their church.  During the “meet and greet” time, I turned away from Jack to the person next to me, who smiled and introduced herself.  She was in her 40’s and wore hiking boots and no makeup.  She had been going to this church for nearly a decade.  I was stunned… a functional member of a church who didn’t have to fight to stand out?  In fact, it didn’t seem to occur to her that she wasn’t “typical.”  She was just herself, friendly and smiley and wearing hiking boots to church.  I asked what she did, and she told me she was a professor.  I nearly proposed.

Instead, I blurted out, “I really want to go back to school!  But I have to pick something to study first, and I don’t know how to do that.”  She empathized.  She used to be an engineer, after all, before getting her master’s in Communications.

After church we met the associate pastor, another single woman in her 40’s, who, I later learned, will listen and not judge even if you bitch and moan about her church for an hour.  Jack immediately liked Andrea too, but I was fascinated.  I could not comprehend how these women learned to be so comfortable in their own skin, without measuring themselves against others.

When Jack and I got home that day we talked about how much we liked the church.  The pastor referenced two outside sources in his sermon!  And did you see all the young married couples!  And we already have friends there!  I didn’t say, “I met women I actually admire!”, but I think that was why I went back, and back, and back.  As someone who is swayed by the tide of others’ expectations, I’m startled by women who live without apology.

I’m speaking at my church’s women’s retreat in a couple weeks.  My talk, ironically, is about being comfortable in your own skin and not living in the tide of others’ expectations.  I feel simultaneously very qualified and not at all qualified on this topic.  Let me know if you want to come.  You have to be a woman, but it doesn’t matter if you’re a typical one or not.