The Inter-Evangelical

All my life, church has been a plural noun.

     There has never been one church with one pastor and one clique—a place for comfort and consistency of culture. Before I was ten, I had attended small churches with names like Hope Evangelical Free Church in College Station, Texas and big churches with names like Chestnut Ridge Church in Morgantown, West Virginia. By twenty, I’d attended churches like First Baptist Church of Fort Mill, South Carolina and Gospel Community Church of Charleston, SC. I’d visited churches like C3 Church in New York City, New York; The Belonging in Nashville, Tennessee; and Kings Harbor Church in Los Angeles, California. No matter what city or state, I’ve always experienced church in a plural way. To my deepest dismay, however, I’ve struggled to reconcile to each other the churches that are so dear to me.  When I look for unity, I find only division and disagreement. To my deepest burden, my “plural noun” church seems to be a definition held only by me. I am a sort of “Inter-Evangelical,” valuing reconciliation of evangelical church cultures in a world that does not.

     So where did Inter-Evangelicalism begin for me? It began with a move from Texas to West Virginia when I was nine. My parents were working with a small evangelical church in Texas with no more than a hundred members when they received a phone call from an old friend in West Virginia who needed help staffing his growing church. All of a sudden, we uprooted, moved, and re-rooted in a new church. This wasn’t my first new church by far, but it was the first starkly different church culture I’d experienced. It was big, loud, and trendy. It was a mega-church. I liked it. It had far fewer old people! There was a middle school ministry I could thrive in, and an office section large enough to play church tag in! I’d found a new home.

     It was when this home became short lived that I began to consider there was a church culture problem. By the time I was fifteen, we were moving again—this time to South Carolina. Something had gone wrong between my parents and the church staff at the mega-church. I was sad. I missed my friends and the loud music. Little did I know, our new church would continue the story.

     I became invested in the church quickly, attending every youth event, Sunday Bible study, and Sunday Service. My parents loved it, and all appeared that it could be well again until all my friends from school were going to a different church in the town. Soon, my friends wanted me to join them at their church, so I said no problem. I went to small group Bible Studies with them, and Sunday activities and Bible Study as well at my Dad's church. I just did double-church. I thought my plan was foolproof.

     Very quickly, however, I found myself in a church office at my Dad's church, being prompted to make a decision. I was to decide whether I would invest deeply in my Dad's church or the other. Fairly convinced by the man in front of me's arguments, I said yes, I'd stay. So, I invested heavily in my Dad's church while attempting to keep my friendships at the other church. After some time, I was admitted to a pastoral training program at my Dad's church, and all was going well—I had affiliation with both churches.

     That’s when I was dismayed again. My Dad didn’t like the other church as much as I did. Though they were both the same denomination, he had lots of concerns about the other church's beliefs. I attempted to wager with him for some time over that issue, but my attempts became clearly vain as larger issues arose. Chiefly, he didn’t like the Bible the other church used. Many of them used a Study Bible that was a different theological flavor than my Dad liked. I didn’t think it was that big of a deal at first, but I soon found my Dad's stance to be very strong. Disgruntled, I stuck with his preferred study bible and stopped going to the other church as much.

     This blew over in time as I went off to college and continued in his church’s pastor in training program. It was an honor after all—no one else had ever been allowed in the program as young as I was. I really had a team behind me. The pastor's advice to me was correct. I'm glad I stayed at that church, despite missing my friends. Unfortunately for me though, I continued to evade the boxes that church had for me. After my freshman year, I began contemplating a decision that my Dad’s church didn’t like at all.

     I wanted to go to an Australian Church's Pastoral Leadership College. Not knowing that my Dad's church wouldn’t approve, I boldly walked into the church office and asked a pastor there for a reference. The pastor's response was, in short, letting me go from the church's program. I was devastated, cut off, and confused. Determined not to lose hope, I left that summer for a mission trip with some other church planters.

     That summer I worked with six different church plants in Miami to spread the gospel and was amazed that they seemed to get along! I think it may have been because they were all a part of the same convention, though. A question began to grow in my head. Why couldn’t church cultures blend? Why couldn’t everybody get along? Why did my own Dad and home church have such polarizing opinions too?

     As I continued in college as a Christian Studies major, these questions began to be answered. People really care about their home cultures, and sometimes they only tolerate being around those with the same cultures. Contrary to what I read in the Bible growing up, some church leaders don’t like wide varieties of diversity and creation/ideation the same way God does.

    My journey continued in my upper classman years with a transfer from a private Christian School to a public liberal arts school. With this transfer, I found much more diversity! However, I found far fewer strong Christians. It seemed it was a trade off. More than that, I was studying Communication and Jewish Studies, not Christian Studies. I liked it, and I began working for a church plant there, which I really liked. After some time, though, I missed my friends at my old school and decided to go back.

     I’m back now, and I’m majoring in Christian Studies and Communication so I can know theology and bridge the gaps wrong theology creates between people. I’ve found that interdisciplinary me is not about my major though, it’s about our faith. I’m here to bridge the faith cultures. I’m here to make church a plural noun again—big enough for large and small, theology and relationship, white and black, blue carpet and red carpet.