I Left Religion, not Faith

I L E F T R E L I G I O N NOT FAITH

STORY BY MEL BURDICK PHOTO BY KEITH BULLARD DESIGN BY STEPHANY FIGUEROA

When I was a child, Saturday was my favorite day of the week because I got to go someplace absolutely magical. A place where I didn’t have to worry about homework or chores, a place where I could dress up in my best clothes, a place where I learned about my best friend in the whole wide world: I got to go to church.

To my young, impressionable mind, there was nothing more incredible than this crazy powerful Being in the sky who could split seas and raise the dead, who somehow cared about every individual human on earth. I came to love the all mighty Existence that created light with a mere word, and yet knew my name long before I was born. I would listen with avid fascination

to the most amazing stories, belt out the wrong words to songs of praise because He knew what I meant even if no one else did, and then settle down to color and act out the stories I’d just learned with Bible figurines while the pastor spoke of things I had yet to understand in my innocence. Sometimes I would listen, counting how many times he said a certain word in hopes of snagging a coveted prize after the service, and other times, I would lay on the hard floor between pews and take a nap because what was the Sabbath but a day of rest?

Then I grew up. I was no longer allowed to play or draw during the sermon. I was warned to sit still and pay attention, forced to listen to lectures on morality and sin, on right and wrong, like the pastor had any right to tell me what’s wrong in the eyes of God. Church stopped being a place of wonder and became a prison of white and black, obedience and sin, life and death. A place where one man was lauded for knowing God’s Word better than anyone else, with no room for argument, correction, or even discussion.

I stopped looking forward to it. I stopped welcoming the Sabbath as a time of excitement and wonder because instead it filled me with dread, anxiety and irritation; church was no longer a place of awesome power and majesty, no longer a place to spend time with the One who knows me best. At some point I realized that the moment I stepped through the doors to take my place in the uniform pews facing a raised stage and a single pristine podium, I became nothing more than a voiceless, faceless doll. A tiny piece of a vast congregation.

We form these congregations, these gatherings of multitudes, searching for others like us. We build organizations to foster fellowship in faith, but in the process, we neglect the very thing for which we came together. We abandon faith and instead embrace religion, a construct that feigns spiritually while silently endorsing a form of slavery that we blatantly ignore even as we preach equality.

We tie ourselves to old rules and laws that no longer apply and pretend it makes up for turning a blind eye on the suffering minorities we claim to care for.

I don’t go to church anymore. Not because I stopped believing ― nothing could be further from the truth! ― but because my faith and my expression thereof were stifled by the very people who spoke of all-encompassing love and acceptance. My relationship with my best friend was strangled by the tenants of ‘religion,’ by man-made laws that claimed foundation in God’s Word yet catered to the whims of His people.

But I don’t need church to be faithful. And neither do you. God created the seventh day to be one of rest and holiness, to spend time with Him and recover from the stress of life, not to be a day of pomp and ceremony, of acts and masquerades.

God doesn’t want a puppet; He wants to be your friend. If you don’t want to go to church, if you don’t feel welcomed or blessed by your attendance, then don’t go. He won’t love you any less for being true to yourself.

Mel Burdick is a senior communication major at Andrews University with a passion for the written word. Their free time is spent watching movies and playing video games with their friends, reading as many books as they can get their hands on, and of course, writing about anything and everything that catches their interest. You can find them on Twitter @LKheios, on Discord as Loki’s Kheios#1938, or you can just email them at the_kheios_factor@yahoo.com. And if you ask, they’ll be more than happy to share their AO3, where they share most of their current works.

WE TIE OURSELVES TO OLD RULES AND LAWS...