When Christianity Lost Its Meaning

November 30, 2011 was the day I learned that being a Christian doesn’t have to mean anything.

I was a senior in high school when my world felt like it fell out from under me. It was an average day until a girl in my art class came back from the bathroom and told me that there was a few junior girls crying outside. This obviously peaked my attention and I wanted to figure out what was going on. It turns out that some of the students in their class had been expelled and some of the students in my class were being called into the Principal’s office for meetings concerning possible expulsion. We weren’t sure the reason behind all this, but throughout the rest of the day, that’s all we could think about. We knew that whatever happened in the first meeting would happen in all of them. So when the first student came back in the room, looked down, and said goodbye, we knew something serious was about to happen. I’ll never forget how dark that room felt with the girls crying and the guys staring at the ground. Word gets around quickly in a small school, so everyone knew what was happening by the time the buses rolled into the parking lot. When one student said that the expulsions were because the students didn’t have a good relationship with God, I wasn’t sure what to believe.  It didn’t surprise me that this was something my school was capable of. They’ve done it before with worse reasons than that. I cried for hours that night….but the bad news was only half over.

I thought my parents were going to their care group meeting that night, but I was wrong. When they came home, they called my sisters and I together and had us sit down. They told us that my youth pastor had been asked to resign effective immediately for a serious reason unknown to the rest of us.

Within six hours, my life was turned completely upside down.

The next day at school was something that will stick with me forever. We had a chapel service in which we were given the explanation behind the chaos. The students were actually expelled because their relationships with God weren’t at a place where the school wanted them to be. Our school’s pastor screamed at us and told us that we needed to evaluate our hearts because if we weren’t interested in being “on fire for God all the time” then we weren’t wanted there. In our Christian Living class, we discussed the issue further and I can still hear a student say “I’m glad that they’re gone. They were just holding us back anyway.” This same student was seen laughing with the Principal’s wife earlier that day and asking a fellow classmate why she was crying about the situation.

Wherever I went, I was in a place of pain and chaos. I became so unhappy because everything I had ever believed in was being manipulated and was harming me. Whenever I would be at church, I would blame my stress on school and whenever I was at school, I would blame it on my youth group situation. I wondered where God’s hand was in all of this. My school that was supposed to be training spiritual leaders was actually manipulating Christianity to suit their own agenda. My church struggled to maintain a youth group at this point. I felt like my Christian foundation had crumbled.

As my life was spinning out of control, I couldn’t understand why everything was happening at once. I cried out to God and begged Him to make it stop hurting so much.  Now, the title may lead you to believe that I lost my faith at this point in my life. But that isn’t the case. From the hurt, I learned a few important lessons.

The more I share this story, the more people have come forward and said that they’ve experienced something similar. The image of Christianity in today’s society is mostly negative. Media portrays Christians in the worst possible light, but are we giving any reason for them to not do so? I do realize that there are so many great Christians who are lost in the mix.  But when experiences like mine are so common, the issue has to be addressed.  It’s amazing how much you can ruin lives when you forget the basic, foundational principle of Christianity–unconditional love. It’s the entire point of the faith, yet is the most left behind concept. Jesus didn’t die the most gruesome death in the history of the world for us to look down on those who are struggling. “They will know we are Christians by our love” should be more than just a lyric-it should be our motivations for our actions. Every Christian was once in a position where we weren’t walking with the Lord. Looking at a person as…well a person, rather than a charity case or a debate to be won over shows that one has grasped the concept of unconditional love and grace.

Forgiveness is freedom. Living with grudges about my past–these experiences in particular–was creating bondage that held me back from spiritual, emotional, and mental growth. I’ve wondered for the past few years why God allowed such troubling issues to happen at the same time, but I’ve realized that God is bigger than those experiences. He is bigger than the “leaders” who caused such chaos. And above all, God is not reflected in those who don’t base their lives on humbling loving others. He shouldn’t be blamed for the negative image of Christians in our society.

The next step is finding one person in your life who you can show unconditional love to. As this spreads, the image of Christianity could be rightly restored. Maybe then, Christianity could be known by who we love, instead of who we don’t love.