Why Church is the Most Divided Place in America

We explore how the feeling of not belonging in church affects believers and why Christ's original mission was about radical inclusion, not creating more barriers.

• Churches often segregate along racial, socioeconomic, worship style, and theological lines
• Many people feel adrift without mentorship because they don't remind church leaders of themselves 
• Christ's harshest criticism was for those who used religious law to create social hierarchies
• The disciples themselves represent our imperfections - they were jealous, doubtful, and weak in faith
• No human has the power to determine your salvation or acceptance by God
• Jesus specifically came for those who need him most - the outcast, struggling and imperfect
• Building a community for those who feel excluded from traditional church settings

Share in the comments what makes you feel like you don't belong in church, and let's create a space where everyone is welcome regardless of background or struggles.

Transcript

The Segregated Hour of Sunday Church

Speaker 1 0:00

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, like, the church divided, based on socioeconomic along those lines. 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, 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 2:14

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 tried virtually every denomination. But part of the issue was 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. 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 background, that had never built that type of bridge before.

Finding Mentorship When You Don't Fit In

Speaker 1 4:30

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 what are the very specific things one church or denomination believes versus another one. Some people are really focused on that. Some people might call that nitpicky. Other people may call that really central to what they believe faith is about. What they believe faith is about. 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.

Speaker 1 5:38

There are so many people who are just adrift. 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.

Speaker 1 6:25

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 in a, partly just because of the 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.

Creating Space for Christian Outcasts

Speaker 1 7:25

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 like into the Christian family, 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.

Speaker 1 8:38

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 outcast, 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. Like, if you don't have a name tag.

Speaker 1 10:05

Or you 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 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.

Christ's Outreach to the Rejected

Speaker 1 11:12

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.

Speaker 1 12:10

It might have been years ago that somebody side-eyed you at church or questioned your belonging or criticized your faith or your view 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. 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. Not only do I not belong in this building, but I just don't belong in 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, like, 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 like 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 of all kinds of failures.

Speaker 1 14:32

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 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?

The Disciples Were Imperfect Too

Speaker 1 15:47

However you may be different, or however your challenges may be different and separate human judgment, human limitations, human stereotypes from what Christ was clearly demonstrating where he was never thrown off by what humans were saying that he should do or shouldn't do, or here's who he should accept or not accept. People were doing that all the time. I don't know if people realize that. I don't know if anyone's ever said that to you directly. Do you know? I mean, this is biblical. People were always trying to derail Christ from his mission. So, yeah, even people close to him, like even the disciples, right In their varying ways we won't get into those details in this video but in their various ways they required some management, they required some pushback.

Speaker 1 17:11

Jesus had to say, hey, man, like back off that. Or hey, I'm not here for that, or that's not fulfilling what God the Father has sent me to do. God the Father has sent me to do. So like, even like the disciples, like people we look up to and think of as surely they're sinless and are always on God's page, and like, no, they weren't, they weren't sinless, they weren't always on God's page.

Speaker 1 17:41

The power of the narrative of having the disciples there is that the disciples are really just representatives of us. You had disciples that were jealous. You had disciples that wanted to exclude people. You had disciples that were cynical and doubting everything. You had disciples that really just seemed to be weak on faith in general, even though they were watching all these miracles come to pass. So, like this is, we are those people, we are the disciples.

Rising Above Exclusion and Guilt

Speaker 1 18:19

The discipleship continues, but unfortunately for people like you and I, because Christ isn't literally here talking in our ear or fighting our battles for us. Just like in a literal, physical sense, fighting our battles for us. Just like in a literal, physical sense. It's easy for people to circle the wagons and chase us out of town, and millions and millions of people have been run out of town Right by people that don't understand the gospel or never read the gospel or feel like they're supposed to judge who belongs in the Christian family, or here are all the steps you need to take. All that's there, but, believe me, that was all there in the Bible too.

Speaker 1 19:24

But the whole point of that is it doesn't matter what they say. You're not trying to please them. Your salvation doesn't rest on what they think of you. I mean they could pray for you or against you or curse you, it makes no difference. Humans like to think they have more power than they do. Like to think they have more power than they do. They really don't have any power to remove your salvation or somehow, like, cast you out into the darkness.

Speaker 1 20:01

So the good news I have for you today is you're living in this mental or emotional or spiritual place where you're homeless, where you're just kind of drifting shelter to shelter, where you feel vulnerable and confused and nobody you trust is reaching out their hand to you. Or maybe people are reaching out their hand to somehow manipulate you or abuse you or take advantage of your whatever you don't know or your guilt, or take advantage of your whatever you don't know or your guilt. So we're going to just we're going to put an end to that man. We are going to just continue to chop that off at the root. And as we walk through this process, you and I, we're both going to feel more accepted by God, more included, more empowered, more defended, more supported. We're going to come from being low on the totem pole, the runt of the litter. We're going to rise up through, we're going to rise up out of that the mud and muck of guilt and condemnation and cynicism and exclusion, people talking bad about us and gossip. And, yeah, we're going to actually rise up out of that to discover a greater truth, and not just a truth like we pulled out of our ass. We're going to look at a biblical truth and understand that.

Speaker 1 22:14

Wow, this isn't my imagination. Jesus was already demonstrating this. Jesus came for people like me, was already demonstrating this. Jesus came for people like me. You know, when people would confront Jesus about things like that, he would be like hey, you know, if you don't need me, fine, I'm coming for the people that need me. Why are you with the sinners? Why are you with the—because they need me. Okay, if you're, you know, perfected and sinless and blameless and all that great, you don't need me then.

Speaker 1 23:23

So, even in this modern day, I believe that Christ is following through on that mission, where he's coming to people like me, jimmy, like you, and saying, hey, I'm here for you, but, god, I suck at this, or I don't belong in this or I haven't. But hey, man, I'm here for you, but, god, I suck at this, or I don't belong in this or I haven't. But, amen, I'm here for you. That's the whole thing. I am here for you.

Speaker 1 23:35

I know you need my help. I know you need to belong. I know the way that I've constructed you. I know what your needs are. I know what your needs are and I believe Christ is encouraging us to never give up but to just keep pressing on until we really take hold of what it means to dwell in His presence and dwell in the Spirit and have that blessed assurance that perhaps we've never experienced from other human beings over the course of our entire lives. So you know how we do. It's Jimmy James Johnson, guilt-free faith in your corner, no matter what. Let me know what's happening and how I can help.