When I first used the quote, “Too churchy for the world and too worldly for the church,” some 3 or 4 years ago, I thought I “ate.”
It described with precision where I was mentally and emotionally as it concerned my spiritual state.
That line gave me a sense of empowerment and autonomy. It helped me push back against the world that demanded more worldliness from me than I had; and also against the church that I felt wanted to remove all of the little world I had in me and make me too much like Jesus -yet I did not want that.
What I wanted was to cuss a bit here, make and laugh at some crude jokes a bit there, and also sin a decent amount – not too much to miss heaven, but also just enough to be covered by Grace.
To make this happen, I played some conscience-numbing mental gymnastics until I managed something remarkably wicked: to craft an identity that was the right mix of good and bad to belong to both the world and the church. I had found a way to have my cake and eat it, too -and now being a pseudo-member of both systems, I owed accountability to neither. For a moment, I felt I had won.
So I cussed and prayed, and counselled and played, and no one could tell me anything. I swear I felt that I had hacked the system and won the ultimate freedom -or so I thought. Because when you play with the devil, he cannot really let you win, can he?
You see, there are two things that I had not counted on: the first was that the neutral middle was a grand illusion. It can only lead to one way and that is downwards.
You become emboldened in sin in both your deeds and language. With an absence of anything to regard with sacredness, your life quickly begins to feel empty and meaningless. Because if nothing at all is sacred then what is the point of life? Your internal life becomes chaotic and hollow at the same time -a contradiction to the image of the cool, fearlessly irreverent person that you have crafted for yourself.
Before you know it, you are too far gone you barely recognise yourself. You have no internal anchor to gauge where you really are and you rely on the people around you to tell you what is right or wrong. You look around you and “everyone is doing the same thing.” So, you persist in that way, except that you continue to spiral farther and farther down -until you eventually come to the end of yourself. You simply get…tired.
The second thing that I did not count on was growing in both directions -in faith and in worldliness- so that compromise, whose home was that illusion of a middle neutral ground, was no longer possible.
I became two distinctly different persons who, if they ever met, would never have recognised each other. When I sat with myself and asked myself the question, “Who are you, really?” I had no answer.
Meanwhile I was broken, confused, empty and directionless. The world offered nothing of what it promised. Even worse, its freedom revealed itself in the light of time to actually be slavery.
Eventually, the cognitive dissonance was so unbearable that I had to make a choice: Did I want to live a life of faith or not?
By this time, the two lives had given me a taste of what each had to offer, and choosing to truly follow Jesus was a very easy choice to make. What was hard was walking away fully from the other side -not because it was actually hard, but because only I seemed to see that the whole thing was a scam. Nobody seemed to see what I saw.
I eventually did but it was one of the hardest things I ever had to do. For the first time, I had to make a decision that was mine alone to make and that nobody among the people I was with could understand. Fortunately and Unfortunately for me, my eyes were too open to stay.
So, if you relate with that expression, and truly feel too churchy for the world and too worldly for the church, I just want to put it out there that while it feels empowering at first, eventually you are going to have to choose where exactly it is that you want to be.
That neutral middle ground where you are both world and church is neither neutral nor middle. This statement -this entire post, actually- will only make sense when you personally come face-to-face with this truth, yourself.
It described with precision where I was mentally and emotionally as it concerned my spiritual state.
That line gave me a sense of empowerment and autonomy. It helped me push back against the world that demanded more worldliness from me than I had; and also against the church that I felt wanted to remove all of the little world I had in me and make me too much like Jesus -yet I did not want that.
What I wanted was to cuss a bit here, make and laugh at some crude jokes a bit there, and also sin a decent amount – not too much to miss heaven, but also just enough to be covered by Grace.
To make this happen, I played some conscience-numbing mental gymnastics until I managed something remarkably wicked: to craft an identity that was the right mix of good and bad to belong to both the world and the church. I had found a way to have my cake and eat it, too -and now being a pseudo-member of both systems, I owed accountability to neither. For a moment, I felt I had won.
So I cussed and prayed, and counselled and played, and no one could tell me anything. I swear I felt that I had hacked the system and won the ultimate freedom -or so I thought. Because when you play with the devil, he cannot really let you win, can he?
You see, there are two things that I had not counted on: the first was that the neutral middle was a grand illusion. It can only lead to one way and that is downwards.
You become emboldened in sin in both your deeds and language. With an absence of anything to regard with sacredness, your life quickly begins to feel empty and meaningless. Because if nothing at all is sacred then what is the point of life? Your internal life becomes chaotic and hollow at the same time -a contradiction to the image of the cool, fearlessly irreverent person that you have crafted for yourself.
Before you know it, you are too far gone you barely recognise yourself. You have no internal anchor to gauge where you really are and you rely on the people around you to tell you what is right or wrong. You look around you and “everyone is doing the same thing.” So, you persist in that way, except that you continue to spiral farther and farther down -until you eventually come to the end of yourself. You simply get…tired.
The second thing that I did not count on was growing in both directions -in faith and in worldliness- so that compromise, whose home was that illusion of a middle neutral ground, was no longer possible.
I became two distinctly different persons who, if they ever met, would never have recognised each other. When I sat with myself and asked myself the question, “Who are you, really?” I had no answer.
Meanwhile I was broken, confused, empty and directionless. The world offered nothing of what it promised. Even worse, its freedom revealed itself in the light of time to actually be slavery.
Eventually, the cognitive dissonance was so unbearable that I had to make a choice: Did I want to live a life of faith or not?
By this time, the two lives had given me a taste of what each had to offer, and choosing to truly follow Jesus was a very easy choice to make. What was hard was walking away fully from the other side -not because it was actually hard, but because only I seemed to see that the whole thing was a scam. Nobody seemed to see what I saw.
I eventually did but it was one of the hardest things I ever had to do. For the first time, I had to make a decision that was mine alone to make and that nobody among the people I was with could understand. Fortunately and Unfortunately for me, my eyes were too open to stay.
So, if you relate with that expression, and truly feel too churchy for the world and too worldly for the church, I just want to put it out there that while it feels empowering at first, eventually you are going to have to choose where exactly it is that you want to be.
That neutral middle ground where you are both world and church is neither neutral nor middle. This statement -this entire post, actually- will only make sense when you personally come face-to-face with this truth, yourself.
2 thoughts on “Escaping the trap of compromise”
You have to eventually choose where you want to belong. That’s the truth. No middle ground. Thank you Dr. Anna.
Yes! Thank you, Blessing!