Holy Misfits: Creating Space for the Church Outsiders

Finding a place to belong in Christian communities can be challenging when churches divide along lines of race, class, worship style, education, and political beliefs. I share my personal journey as someone from an interracial family who struggled to find acceptance in various denominations, highlighting how Sunday remains "the most segregated hour in America."

• The discomfort of not fitting in at church can come from various factors beyond race—including worship styles, theological differences, or personal background
• Finding mentorship in church communities is particularly difficult when you don't remind church leaders of themselves
• Christ's ministry specifically welcomed outsiders while challenging those who used religious law to create social hierarchies
• Religious rejection is not the same as rejection from God, though we often internalize it that way
• Creating spaces for Christian "outsiders" allows us to build authentic community based on Christ's inclusive model
• The spiritual journey often involves periods of doubt, cynicism, and feeling adrift—these experiences don't disqualify you from faith

I invite you to share your own experiences of feeling like an outsider in Christian spaces in the comments below. What has made you feel unwelcome, and what questions do you have about finding your place in faith?

Transcript

Introduction to Not Belonging

Speaker 1 0:00

Hey, what's up? Jimmy James Johnson, here keeping it 100 with you on all things Christian. I wanted to take a break from our usual programming to talk to you about an issue that I think many people can relate to, but it's not often covered in church, or sometimes folks feel embarrassed to discuss it, or it's just not brought up because part of what's assumed in you going to church is that somehow you belong there, somehow you feel comfortable, or you're looking around and seeing your own people, and sometimes it's something as kind of basic as people that look like you or people that drive your kind of cars or live in a neighborhood like yours, and in my mind that's a little unfortunate because I would hate to think that that's. The best we can do is have the church divided based on socioeconomic along those lines. But it can be more subtle than that. You can go to a church where people they worship a certain way, they say certain things, they use certain phrases. There are some churches that are very sedate and everybody's kind of quiet and kind of says their prayers very quietly and kind of under their breath. And then there are churches like I grew up being a member where you get a Black Baptist church that is loud and it's expressive and people are getting caught up in the spirit, right, like we're singing, we're stomping, people are speaking in tongues, some folks are just falling out on the floor. It's kind of like anything goes and, despite what you may think about whether those are legitimate displays of worship, the fact is that there are different things that we all grow to be comfortable with, different things that we all grow to be comfortable with, things that we, when we imagine the environment we want to be in here, are some kind of guardrails that make us feel like we belong there. Because, let's face it, most of us don't want to kind of stick out like a sore thumb. Right, we want to be welcome. We don't want people giving us the side eye and like what the hell's up with this dude?

Speaker 1 2:48

One of the reasons why this guilt-free faith channel exists is because of my own struggles with finding a place to fit in the Christian church, because, for me, as I grew up, we tried a number of different churches in an effort to find out where we would fit. And so we would. We tried virtually every denomination, but part of the issue was because we were an interracial family, a black and white family because we were an interracial family, a black and white family. Part of the reason was because my mom had come from the kind of a more conservative Catholic worship group or demographic, and my dad had grown up kind of more in the local black Baptist church, and so, of course, for my sister and I, who are interracial, it wasn't clear oftentimes like where we would belong Now. Granted, I mean, you may live in a place that's so diverse that this isn't a real issue, but for many places or many cities, as they say, sunday church hour is the most segregated hour in America. And, wow, like, what a statement that really is relative to how Christ was going about town to town, swinging open the door of welcome, of generosity and essentially doing away with a lot of the barriers that were erected by God.

The Segregated Hour in America

Speaker 1 4:29

Like in the Old Testament, this New Testament was to be inclusive and a lot of people didn't like that. There were a lot of people who were extremely aggressive regarding upholding that, and then there were just a lot of people who you know that just kind of puzzled them, or they, why are you spending time with the Gentiles? None of that computed right, because people were coming out of an ethno-religious background that had never built that type of bridge before. So one of the things I want to say about this because obviously I could talk about this for a very long time and perhaps I will you have to leave in the comments what questions or comments you have about not fitting in the Christian church and that, like I said, that could be race, that could be class, that could be education, that could be neighborhood, it could be politics, it could be even down to like what are like the very specific things one church or denomination believes versus another one. Some people are really, you know, focused on that. Some people might call that nitpicky, other people may call that really central to what they believe faith is about.

Speaker 1 5:58

But one thing I want to assure you of is that if you feel like you're alone somehow in your pursuit of God, you're not alone at all. There are so many people who are just adrift. No one's taking them under their wing, just a drift, no one's taking them under their wing. They don't have like a clear path to mentorship, right, because they don't really it's not clear, at least right off the bat, how they belong. Oftentimes people take you under their wing because they see something in you that reminds them of themselves. And so what happens to the person who doesn't have those characteristics that remind those church elders or deacons or whomever Bible study leaders of themselves? You really can get kind of lost and left out.

Struggling to Find Mentorship

Speaker 1 6:59

Fortunately for me, after many, many years of drifting about and not finding my place, I did find a mentor who was a close friend of the family, who, of course, having known me from birth, understood a lot about me and where I was coming from and could see things in me that he could relate to, things that he wanted to nurture and just kind of was like in a partly just because of our relationship with my family was willing to make that investment in somebody that you know a lot of people in the church would not have made. I'm not an easy Christian to invest in. I have a lot of faith issues. I have a lot of cynicism. You know I've spent a lot of time in and out of God's.

Speaker 1 7:59

I don't want to say his good graces, because I think part of what he's trying to tell us is that we're never out of his good graces but for us, when we don't feel full of faith or when we don't feel like we're believers or we're not doing the things and checking the boxes. We feel out of favor. We feel like we're on the outside looking in, and I don't want you to feel like that. This is the day for that to end. And what do I mean by end? I don't mean like that. You'll never feel that or never experience that, but what's going to end today is this kind of pit that you may feel of I'm never going to belong. I'm never going to find somebody that will accept me into the Christian family. I'm never going to find people that will unconditionally take me where I'm at, whether I'm an atheist, whether I'm a wild gunslinging sinner, whether I'm a drug addict, a thief.

Creating Space for Christian Outsiders

Speaker 1 9:12

Look, there are people, people like myself and other people that this channel is going to gather into the group, who are in your exact same circumstance. And, like I said, as one of those people, I know that God can provide a space for you. Just like as I'm kind of learning what my space is. So what I'm envisioning for this channel is that you and I we're creating a space for one another, a special space, a special arrangement where people that are outcasts, people that don't they don't have a convenient label that they can just, you know, write here's my name tag, I'm so-and-so, I'm Christian, I'm this, I'm this, I'm this, oh, okay, yeah, have a seat here. We know where you belong.

Speaker 1 10:24

If you don't have a name tag, or you don't have a name tag, people understand you've come to the right place, because I can assure you that a lot of people that Christ ran into were—and they were lost and they weren't even expecting you know a Messiah to come along. They weren't expecting something dramatic to come along and intervene and show them that kind of love and forgiveness. So think how, you know, caught off guard, those people were People that had never benefited from the acceptance I'd never benefited from the acceptance not only of Jews or Christians, but even like within their own communities, like the tax collector, like the prostitute. Nobody was reaching out to them and being like hey, it's okay, we accept you. We all have our faults and flaws, so it's all good. You know what I mean.

Speaker 1 11:46

But we don't hear a lot about that, or we kind of hear about it, because it's something people are supposed to say. But let's face it, man, there are some things that are acceptable to say in your church or your Bible study, and there are a lot of things that aren't and, depending on your tolerance for conflict or your degree of frustration or despair, you may or may not speak up. In that circumstance you may go home and vow never to go to the church again because you don't want to suffer like that rejection and that pain and that sense of on the outside looking in. And so for some of you, like that might have been years ago that you had that bad experience. It might have been years ago that somebody side-eyed you at church or questioned your belonging or criticized your faith or your view and that can cripple you in terms of your relationship with God. Because we have a tendency to internalize that. We have a tendency to think, oh well, they must be kind of speaking on God's behalf.

Christ's Example of Radical Inclusion

Speaker 1 13:15

If all these good church people aren't accepting me and rolling out the red carpet for me, maybe that's a sign that I really don't belong in the church, like not only do I not belong in this building, but like I just don't belong in, like the Christian family or whatever they want to call it. And what I want to say to you is like let's just kind of nip that in the bud right now, because any type of prejudice like that, any type of discrimination, any kind of that intolerance. That's not from God, man, that's just not. That's not the way Christ treated people. In fact, really, the only people that Christ was really furious with were the people that prided themselves on fulfilling the law. That's when he has to go and say, hey, how dare you people set yourself up at the top of this social hierarchy under the guise of you're following the law, you're following the ritual, you're following, and Christ is like that's not the spirit of what this is all about. And so Christ went around and walked that spirit out, and that included reaching out even to people like you and me, living on the edge, living on the edge of belief, living on the edge of sin, living on the edge, living on the edge of belief, living on the edge of sin, living on the edge of all kinds of failures.

Breaking Free from Religious Rejection

Speaker 1 15:05

What's your failure, or what are people telling you your failure is? Is it divorce? Is it people saying you're not a good parent? Is it people saying you're not successful, or you're some kind of bum or a loser, or you can never follow through with anything? Or maybe you're crippled by health situations and people are saying why don't you get better? Or why are you faking? Or why haven't you found an answer to this? The rest of us are limping along. Why aren't you doing that? Maybe you feel like it's kind of more like your Christian performance, like, oh, do I not pray enough? Am I not praying for the right things? Am I being selfish? Should I be accepting more of God's love and walking without guilt, or is this guilt thing? What's keeping me in line thing? What's like keeping me in line? So, and indeed share, share in the comments. What's your situation? What do you feel like you're falling down on and what have other so-called Christians told you in response to? However, you may be different, or however your challenges may be different.