For The Young Man Coming To Church For The First Time: Part One – Making It Through the Door

So You’re Here. Finally.

So you have finally braved the front door of the church for the first time in your life. And you figure that despite best impressions you still look a little apprehensive. We get it. It would be like one of us from church going into a bookies’ shop/TAB for the first time. What do we do? What’s the drill here? Do I look like I am out of place? Will I get asked to leave?

Sure you may have gone to Mass or an Easter Service the odd time with your grandmother fifteen years ago when you were small, but that doesn’t really count. You had no clue as to what was going on. Besides, since she passed, you have had zero interaction with Christians. You are a tradie, not a university student, so even the life of the Christian Union passed you by. No walk up evangelism for you. No one asking you to read Mark’s Gospel with them at lunchtime.  Lunchtime – or smoko – as you’d call it – was for trash talking, bragging about sexual conquests and pornographic jokes.

But somehow, you have spent a bit of time on YouTube checking out Christianity. Christianity and conspiracy theories, sometimes a mix of both.  That’s what the algorithm does. Some of it seems to make sense. Some of it seems plain crazy. So your understanding of what we are on about might be a bit all over the place right from the start. That’s kinda funny. You come into church knowing pretty much next to nothing, but even the stuff you think you do know might be wrong.

In your online trawl, you came across a bloke called Jordan Peterson. He seemed to lean into what it means to be a bloke in this modern world, in a way that in your final years of school you were told not to do. And despite his appearances he’s not afraid. He doesn’t back down in interviews when people accuse him of stuff.  He even uses the Bible. He talks about Jesus a fair bit too. He’s a bit ranty, but he tells you to get your life in order and start by making your bed.  You think about your bed. The mess it is. What’s under it. Who’s been in it. Why you increasingly feel you don’t want to get out of it.

And soon, as you watch over the next few months, you think he might be onto something. We get that too. We think he’s onto something – just not the thing!  But you watch him on Youtube almost every night now. You notice you’re watching him more than you are watching porn, except perhaps on weekends.

And you watch. And you watch.  Some interviewers – women mostly – are calling him out for his toxic masculinity (a buzz term, as you are coming to find out, for anything that looks like your mates and you on a Saturday night).  He’s also being described as a hard right winger, and you are not fully sure what that means, but you hear the word Nazi thrown around.

But to be honest you’ve heard that word used of you once or twice when you expressed an admiration for Donald Trump once. It was your sister’s boyfriend who you get on okay with, but who works at the top-end of town in a big accounting firm.  Your sister – she was so like the rest of the family until she went to uni. Something changed about her there. She still rings you on your birthday but you don’t have the relationship you once had. You sense that she kinda despises you – in a sisterly way of course. Or if not you, maybe what you represent to her. So she loves you but kinda despises who you are at the same time. Not who you have become. You were always this. It’s her that’s become something else.

And besides, this Jordan Peterson seems a long way away from the neo-Nazi bikie gang members that used to do the concreting at the building site you were on that time during your apprenticeship. I mean he dresses a bit “gay” as your workmates would say, in a suit that has two different coloured sides. Like one of those court jesters.  His shoes are bright and clean and his hair is slicked back. No stubble in sight.  And he uses some words that you have never heard, he’s well groomed and his hands look soft. He’s as far from what you think might be toxic.

But whatever he is, or was, something about what he was saying was a bit of a gateway drug to doing more digging about Christianity.  That bit about tidying your room even kicked it off. In fact one day that’s what you did. Cleaned it all out. Sprayed whatever that was on the wall. Your mum was worried something had happened. She thought you might be disposing of evidence or something.

You’re About To Land The Plane

So by the time you’re getting in the door this morning,  you’ve have circled Christianity for some time, like a plane wanting to land on a runway but unable to. And if you are honest with yourself, the plane has felt like it was running out of fuel. Your plane. Your life.  How can it feel like at 25 that you’ve peaked already? Where are the good times you were somehow promised, even though you are not sure who it ever was that was promising them to you?

You’ve felt that despite all the stuff on offer in the world out there, there’s something missing. Something lacking. And not just something. “Someone”. It can’t be a woman. You’ve had enough of them IRL and online. That doesn’t seem to be the trick.

And you’ve done some stuff that was exciting and horny at the time, but you’ve woken up a few mornings feeling sick with yourself and a vague sense of guilt that you can’t put your finger on. You wonder too if one of those women might just come back at you with an accusation.  You look at other relationships that seem happy, and you wonder whether that’s the exception that proves the rule.

Despite all of the exploration, you’d put this church thing off because you remember the book  book your uncle kept quoting called “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything”, written by some dead guy called Christopher something. It’s a pretty brutal take down of organised religion, but your uncle swears by it. Your uncle swears about religion too. Even more so when he’s had a few.

He’s a bit of a reader, especially about things he’s angry about. You ask the odd question, but he’s fairly angry about it.  Mind you, he’s fairly angry about everything since his partner left him – his third partner in the last ten years – so you feel sorry for him too. It seems for a bloke who has avoided religion all his life, that others things have been poisoning everything in his life nonetheless.

But you’re here now at church and you’ve made it through the door. You’d spent a few hours – days actually – this past week, googling churches in your local area, and you went to their websites to have a look. No one cold-calls these days. The first thing that hit you as you looked on their sites was just how polished it all was. Lots of shiny happy people, families mostly, with young kids. Plenty of multi-racial pictures. And everyone having coffee. To be honest they looked like stock image photos. Everyone looks a bit soft. No one looked a lot like you. Or even a little bit like you.

There were a few pictures of what looked like a smallish music concert – more Taylor Swift than Fifty Cent. You didn’t pay too much attention to the words on the webpages and the dropdown menus – they seemed more for insiders anyway. And then there was an employees page with the people in charge. All neat, smiley, buttoned down. Except one bloke, who was involved in something called “missions” who was wearing a Carhartt jacket and a beanie. He had a bit of stubble too. Wonder what his thing is? What’s “mission”? Sounds weird.

But in the end you went to the “directions” pages and you made your choice from that. What was close? What was convenient? Could I drive there on a Sunday morning, or more preferably – given you might be a bit hung over – a Sunday afternoon? And you found one that would take you past another of the ones you researched, but the webpage was a little less fancy. There were some pictures of people that were a bit more chill.

And then you turned up early, the drive took less time than normal, I guess it’s Sunday.  So you circled the block, then parked. Almost turned the car back on and went home, but you decided to cross the long stretch of tarmac to the front door. It’s all in now.

You’re In The Door

It was a bit weird being smiled at and welcomed by a man on the door. Was he hitting on you? Don’t laugh. An older friend of mine who is now a pastor was from a working class background too. And the first couple of weeks of being in church he wondered if the men being so friendly to him were simply chatting him up. Nope. Not at all. Despite what people say about church being unfriendly, try walking cold into any other collective volunteer organisation and seeing the reception you get. Usually it’s “crickets”.

You wandered in to the next door. These places seem to have three sets of doors before you even get in, so you’re running the gauntlet of people, all of whom seem to be smiling at you and the odd one handing you a bit of paper. You keep your head down. the room’s a bit darker than you thought it would be, and a bit less churchy, although there’s some stuff you’ve seen in there from movies that looks kinda religious.

As luck would have it there’s a row of seats at the back that look fairly empty. You sidle into it and sit down. and try to make yourself as indistinct as possible in the midst of all of the laughter, the chatting, and the scurrying up and down the space down the middle between the seats. It all feels like a family reunion. Someone elses’ family reunion. You keep your eyes down and make yourself as invisible as possible, but you can sense someone walking between a row of seats near you, and that they are planning to come over and talk…