c. 2003 Religion News Service

(Tom Ehrich is a writer and computer consultant, managing large-scale database implementations. An Episcopal priest, he lives in Durham, N.C.)

(UNDATED) Outside Blockbuster, we run into friends from school. Boys edge inside. Parents chat on the sidewalk.

“Is your son going to youth group tomorrow night?” our friend asks. Her expression is hopeful. No, I reply, he is going to a birthday party.

“What about Sunday School?” I ask. If her son will be there, I will feel more enthusiastic about going to church tomorrow morning.

“No, I don’t think so,” she replies. “We aren’t too good about that.” She pauses. “It’s a long story.” She looks sad.

I know that sadness. Not its exact content, I’m sure, but the feeling, the wistful longing, the sense of having lost something.

I went to church with my family every Sunday as a child. I found worship boring, but I loved riding together, walking in together, sitting together.

I couldn’t give that to my older children, because I was the pastor, arriving early and staying late, always separated from them. By the time I left church employment and could worship with my family, they had been burned in a hundred small ways and had lost the desire.

Now I feel simply lost. I don’t know what to do. I want my youngest son to know about God, but I am not convinced that Sunday worship is the pathway. I want to sit in a pew with my wife, share a hymnal, join our voices in grand old hymns, chat with friends, feel part of something, and feel drawn into servanthood. We try here and there, sometimes for long stretches. But it doesn’t click. It becomes easier and more natural to stay home. No blaming, just sadness.

The more I live inside the Gospels in my writing, the less I want to focus my faith on the institutional church. I have this sense that Jesus tried to give us something, but his gift was stolen long ago by the proud and power-hungry. He tried to set in motion a community unlike any other, but the early practitioners couldn’t bear it, so they gave us something less.

Jesus took people like us and bound them to one another _ male and female, Jew and Greek, good and bad, whole and broken, stranger and stranger _ in a circle, a household, a mutuality and oneness that bear little resemblance to the hierarchical, power-centered, change-resistant, judgmental institution that emerged.

I see clergy trying their hardest _ giving up their lives, financial security, peace of mind _ trying to breathe life into inherited structures. I see laity trying hard, devoting weary evenings and hopeful Sundays to chores, while putting real needs on hold.

I see people who want to make sense of their lives being sidetracked into passions that are stale and unworthy of God. Even if believers could find perfect vision on the hot-button religious issues of the day, would they see anything as gracious as the sight of Jesus weeping before the tomb of Lazarus? Even if they could convince others of their right opinion, would they have given a fragment of living bread?

I don’t know what to do with these feelings and observations. I write about them, but I know I am not being entirely accurate or fair. I know that church works sometimes. I know that any human endeavor has stretches of going through the motions. I know that, for all its frailty, the church does touch some lives deeply. I know I don’t have a better plan.

But I can’t shake the sadness. I can’t shake the every-Sunday quandary about church attendance. Nor should I. For I believe the way forward lies in the sadness, in not just going along, in wanting more, even if I don’t know what I want.

So I write, and you read. Some of you nod your heads and say I know that sadness. Some are puzzled for religion doesn’t wear this face for you. Some disagree. All any of us can do is see what we see, ask what we ask, accept that others are having different experiences, and not slide along, forfeiting the elusive more in exchange for the easy less, when we sense that God has something better for us.

DEA END EHRICH