A couple of years ago, I would say, “I don’t go to church every week” as a way of being inviting and relatable and reasonable. Nowadays, when I say “I don’t go to church every week,” it’s a confession coloured by a healthy yearning and a conviction to change some things in my life.
I have recently learned that I am one who struggles with some of the symptoms of Pathogical Demand Avoidance. Those symptoms include viewing even one’s own desires as a demand and subconciously resisting them. Praise from others, deadlines, and cultural or societal expectation can also be interpreted as demands. While I’d never want to diminish the struggles of folk with this and other forms of executive dysfunction, I would say that our cultural moment is marked by demand avoidance (“coz look what happened in the last 400 years when we conformed to hierarchy! Who is a demander that has been found to be trustworthy in recent history? That’s your truth but don’t you dare assert it upon me…”).
Informed by this context, even as a child I knew that it was weird that we met with our church family four times a week: Wednesday night church service, Friday night prayer meeting, Saturday day and/or night social gathering or outreach, and Sunday afternoon and evening church services. Acknowledging God’s grace to give good gifts even amongst the murky intentions of people, I had a really beautiful childhood there. The Scripture that dances in me today is Scripture that we communally sang every time we met together. To be known and loved by a community of adults whom I still call Aunty and Uncle is a particularly treasured gift for me as a Pākehā who otherwise would not have had a taste of strong, vibrant community. Even so, the church made high demands, prioritising meetings even over family kaupapa. The function of frequently meeting was openly spoken about: “we’ll keep you too busy to get into trouble.” The consequences of not attending in these ways was communally experienced and enacted: anyone who stopped participating in the rhythms of the church would be neither spoken to nor spoken of again.
Informed then by this context, I have a grace for myself in my later identification as “Christian-but-not-that-type-of-Christian.” Going to church weekly felt like a demand to be avoided, especially because I had had no real teaching on why it might be a really good thing to do. I hadn’t heard of spiritual disciplines; I’d never understood what Lent was meant to be about. I only knew that I’d do well to rebel against any “spirit of condemnation” by rejecting the need to go to church with any regularity. I was all along “shopping” for a church, and while I was aware enough to know that I should use a tone of self-regarding cyncism when I used that phrase, I didn’t actually know why shopping for a church isn’t the healthiest paradigm to work from. This resistance to weekly church attendance was also externally motivated. I felt the radicalness of what it would mean to my friends if I went to church every week. I feared that I would be seen as tall-poppy-righteous, and that my friendship and my faith would be seen as unattainable or, worse, undesirable. I imagined my life was offering a holy critique of religiosity and stingy or cringey church-going and that I was therefore role-modelling a supremely Christian way to be in the world. This was all a problematic reversal of John 17:14-18—I was of the Church but not in it.
Looking back, I can see from this vantage point the providential ways God was preparing me to be able to receive the attending of a local church as a blessing in my life. One way is that I was postured as a student. I had come away from the beautiful learning context of the Venn Fellowship convicted that I needed to learn Te Reo Māori. For six months before my Te Reo course started, I was commuting to Ngāruawāhia High School to work as a teacher aide. I was learning so much about tikanga Māori and tikanga Waikato there that some days I delighted that I was “getting paid to do all this learning!” To self-conciously enrol at a Māori university as Pākehā postured me further as a grateful guest and a lucky learner. For at least 12 months, I wasn’t able to flex my “here’s what I want, here’s what would make me comfortable” muscle. Precisely because of the Māoriness of my learning contexts, I was beginning to feel more acutely my Pākehā rootlessness, and how little tradition I had inherited. A deeper desire for community was developing.
Picture me during relationship-building time at Te Wānanga Takiura’s full immersion Māori language course. A respected Pākehā Christian friend I had made at wānanga was herself attending the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Upon hearing that I was looking for a church, she suggested I come along one Sunday. She told me that Te Reo Māori was the main language used in the liturgical prayer. Someone else suggested the same whare karakia to me. Two weeks later when Matua Alistair Reese said, “Hey Lillian, have you heard of the Church of Holy Sepulchre?”, I was determined that it would be my home church. As I walked through the doors for the first time the next Sunday, I had a honey-I’m-home pep in my step.
These days, I am locatable amongst the loving embrace of the people of Te Ana Tapu, The Church of the Holy Sepulchre. For six years I have been woven into the kisses and kitchen and kupu of shared liturgy. I confess that I’ve still clocked my Demand Avoidance rearing its head in this context. I’ve realised that when I feel too consistent in attendance and therefore too relied-upon—a type of demand—I’ll subconciously start planning a trip away to this or that kaupapa the next weekend: “sorry I can’t be at church next week.” “Or the next,” is sometimes needed for good measure. I’m so grateful for both my learning about the effects of ADHD, and the teaching I’ve been under about our fragmented and individualist cultural moment, because I am impacted by both realities. I want to manage well with deep grace any symptoms of having a lower baseline of dopamine. In part, that means I need a variety-filled life; but I don’t want this variety to come at the cost of deep and rich church community which is developed often by simple consistency, and by saying No to other kaupapa. I want to live counter-culturally to the narrative that says that my own untrained whims and wants are an acceptable guide for how I spend my weekends. I want to live counter-culturally to an individualist worldview that panics me into believing that if I’m not here and there at all these important events and meetings, then no-one is, and things will collapse. I am learning to desire the fruits of faithful weekly engagement at church.
Our Dad was a bassist and wrote and sang his own songs. Amongst our inheritance of his songs is a gorgeously bluesy one that features this verse: “Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity.” I want to behold that goodness more. And I’m growing to understand that I need to be around and in it to behold it. I suspect there’ll be fruits to share that I don’t even know how to put language to right now.
See you at church on Sunday? Yes please!