The Simplest Thing

The Church I Left and the Gospel I Didn't

There is a version of Christianity I have been avoiding for ten years. I didn’t stop believing anything, but because the institutions that carried the faith seemed more invested in the boundaries of belonging than in belonging itself. I watched churches spend their energy deciding who was in and who was out, who could lead and who should be silent, as well as which sins in other people warranted the most attention. I watched women be taught, quietly and persistently, that their place was smaller than their gifts. I watched LGBTQ people stand at the edge of communities that spoke of welcome and practiced exclusion. And after a while, I stopped going. What I could not reconcile then, and still wrestle with now, is how an institution built around a teacher who touched lepers and ate with tax collectors became so preoccupied with maintaining its own interior order. The Jesus I encountered in the text was not a boundary keeper. He was a boundary crosser. The religious institutions of his own time found him dangerous precisely because he refused to honor the lines they had drawn.

The harshest language in the gospels is never directed at the people the religious establishment had already condemned. It is directed at the establishment itself and at those leaders who used sin management as a tool of social control, who kept careful account of who was acceptable and who was not, and called that faithfulness. Jesus reserved his sharpest words for the people most confident they were doing God’s work by maintaining the boundaries. And somewhere in two thousand years of organizing, the church became the institution he was critiquing. I am not interested in a simple anti-church argument. That is too easy and not entirely honest. What I am interested in is the gap between the teaching and the institution, and what it costs people who fall into that gap. The summary Jesus gives in Matthew 22 is not complicated. Love God. Love your neighbor. He calls these the two commandments on which everything else depends. Not a list of managed behaviors. Not a hierarchy of acceptable people. Two relational imperatives that point outward, not inward. Everything else in Christian tradition is commentary on those two lines, and commentary has a way of becoming more important than the text it was meant to serve.

Paul is where it gets complicated, and where the most damage has been done. The selective use of Pauline texts to subordinate women and exclude others from full participation requires ignoring the same Paul who wrote in Galatians that in Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female. The interpretive choices reveal an agenda. When a church reaches for the texts that limit women’s leadership while setting aside the texts that flatten every human hierarchy, it is not doing theology. It is doing politics and calling it scripture. The political capture of American Christianity in recent decades has not helped. When faith becomes a cultural identity marker rather than a set of demands on how one lives, it loses its capacity to challenge anything. A Christianity that blesses power rather than interrogating it, that wraps itself in flags and electoral alignments, has not simply made a political choice. It has made a theological one. It has decided that belonging to a tribe matters more than following a teacher who had very little patience for tribalism. The Jesus of the gospels was not a nationalist. He was not interested in restoring a nation’s former greatness. He was interested in the person in front of him who had been discarded by every system that was supposed to care for them. I say this as someone who works in decolonial frameworks, which means I cannot pretend Christianity has a clean history. The cross arrived in this hemisphere on the same ships as the conquistadors. The faith was used to justify what was done to Indigenous people, to enslaved people, to anyone whose humanity was inconvenient to the colonial project. I carry that history. I do not get to set it aside because I miss something.

What I miss is simpler than an institution. I miss the relational core of the teaching. I miss the idea that love is not a feeling but a practice, that it has weight and cost and direction. I miss the possibility that there is something larger than my own effort holding the world together. I miss, if I am honest, the person of Jesus. Not the doctrine constructed around him, not the institutional power exercised in his name, but the figure in the gospels who kept moving toward people everyone else had decided to move away from. I do not know yet what it looks like to move back toward that. I know it will not look like returning to the churches I left. It may not look like church at all, at least not in any form I currently recognize. But I think the first honest step is admitting that the longing is real, that it has not gone away in ten years of absence, and that longing for something true is not the same as being naive about the institutions that claim to hold it. The message was always simpler than what we made it. Love your neighbor. Not manage your neighbor. Not rank your neighbor. Not decide which neighbors qualify. Just love them. Everything else is commentary.