After the bubble shatters



I felt delight in growing up in the church. Not only did I attend Sunday school and children’s church, but I went to Christian elementary and secondary school. I felt most safe in the Christian bubble around me. As I grew up, I was very active in my church and volunteered in several different capacities, including with children and teens in my congregation and community. It was this church family that inspired and encouraged me to consider becoming a pastor. In many ways I was nurtured and mentored for the role I’m in now. I was deeply in love with my spiritual family and the broader Mennonite Church.

In my late teens, I became an affirming Christian. I never hid that perspective. In fact, I regularly talked about it with the more traditionally-minded pastors of my church. I believed we were disagreeing well and that we all respected the worth of every individual as equally made in the image of God, all offering valuable contributions to the community. 

Then in 2016, the Being a Faithful Church process, the intentional discernment period around same-sex marriage, concluded with permission for churches that chose to perform same-sex marriages to do so without consequences. 

Fear took over my church. People stopped seeing the image of God in each other. We no longer gave each other the benefit of the doubt and stopped trying to understand where people were coming from. Part of what happened was that the leadership tried to get church members to pass and sign a lifestyle document that included a prohibition on behaviours that affirm same-sex romantic relationships. This endeavour ultimately failed but caused a lot of in-fighting. 

Still, after ten years of volunteering, I was removed from being a youth leader, considered a bad influence. (This happened despite my individual conversations with all the teens’ parents who said they were happy for me to continue mentoring their kids.) I felt the leadership was telling me I wasn’t a good enough Christian to participate my community. I eventually left, jaded, bitter and angry.

This stunted my spiritual growth for quite a while. I stopped being able to pray on my own. It’s not that I didn’t believe that the Holy Spirit was with me. I truly did. She was my main support as my bubble—shown to be made out of glass—shattered in shards that cut me deep as my faith in church was razed to the ground. 

I didn’t have words for what I was feeling, nor could I think of anything else. I turned to the psalms and John Donne’s holy sonnets. I copied them out in my journal and took comfort in the wisdom of people who had come before God in times of major conflict and strife, and who had found comfort and assurance that they were fully loved. I felt God’s presence in the words of others when my heart felt like a giant black hole. 

My grief and my new inability to trust church folks prevented me, a recent seminary graduate, from attending church for about a year. While I still trusted in God, I couldn’t walk into a church building without bursting into tears. I knew that I wanted to return eventually—and even that I was called to serve in the church—but it felt too painful to sing familiar songs and hear certain passages read out loud. Church didn’t feel like a safe space for a long time, even once I started attending regularly again. Sometimes it still doesn’t. Even now, church can bring up old feelings of fear and profound loss. 

Still, despite everything that had happened, I felt a strong sense of call and the urging of the Spirit to move forward. But it took a lot of time, meditation, and work on myself to get to a place where I felt spiritually healthy enough to seek out a pastorate. The healing journey isn’t over, either, even though I’ve been pastoring for a few years and on the other side of the country from where I grew up. 

However, being grafted into the church where I serve—Mennonite Fellowship of Montreal (MFM)—has given me new life and has opened my mind, heart and spirit to new ways of seeing and experiencing God. Not that we always get it right, but I have the privilege of pastoring a community that values curiosity over fear. At MFM, more often than not, people with differing theologies disagree well with each other because they see the value in diversity of opinions and beliefs within a community. (Let me say they were that way before I got there. In fact, sometimes I think they have impacted me and helped bandage some of my church hurts more than I have impacted them.) Seeing church folks disagreeing well has helped me to practice being vulnerable in community again.

In my role as a pastor, I have been able to explore new and creative ways of doing church and worshipping God. And my congregation, full of fellow creatives, has encouraged me through sharing their many gifts in community. For me, somatic practices (practices that bring together mind, body, and spirit) have been a big part of how I’ve connected with the Divine; I have been sharing some of that with my congregation as well. Together, and with all of our accumulated baggage, we are on a journey to seek what it means to live in the footsteps of the one called Love. 

Annika Krause is the pastor of Mennonite Fellowship of Montreal. She serves on the board for Canadian Mennonite.



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