Evangelical Girls Feel So High School

What my church got wrong about belonging

In 1986, my family joined a giant megachurch, hoping to find belonging and community in the city we’d moved to a year before. Membership in the “family of God” was supposed to mean we bore one another burdens, which could include help during times of trouble but also offer camaraderie and support through the struggles that came with being evangelical Christians in a secular world. I was eleven years old and still grieving our recent move.

My young, blizzard- and bankruptcy-surviving parents acutely understood the pain and danger of going through life without a social safety net. They believed they’d find one in the church. But the church was a painful journey through social rejection from the start for me, and this pain was accepted rather than left. I internalized a covert message that suffering for belonging was my worth.

Before we joined, we toured the campus in a scene I wrote about in my memoir, A Well-Trained Wife. A glossy tour guide walked us through ten city blocks of church property. I vividly remember him saying, “Folks, kids meet their spouses at church, raise their families here, and graduate to our Senior Citizens building. You can attend cradle to grave six days a week and never have to leave.”

Joining was easy. Belonging turned out to be an entirely different matter.

I was 23 when my husband decided we’d leave First Baptist in pursuit of higher piety. I’d attended church activities six days a week for years, met my spouse there, dedicated my first two babies to the Lord there, and was heavily pregnant with a third. I assumed I’d never leave, that these girls were who I’d do life with and that our children would grow up as friends. My life was Tuesday Bible studies and orchestra rehearsals, using the church nursery, and going out on “visitation” to “witness to lost souls.” Leaving meant loss but, confusingly, also a relief. It was as if a cosmic thumb had been pressing on a bruise, asking, “Does this hurt?” and now, even though that higher piety included a more rigid form of Christian Fundamentalism, leaving made it stop.