No Place for Me
Letters to the Church in
America
By John W. Fountain
In 2005, John W. Fountain, penned “No Place for Me,” a stirring essay
on the church and why he no longer attends. First published in the Washington Post, Fountain’s lament about the church in which he says he has lost
faith, drew thousands of letters from across the country. I still love God,” he
writes. “But I have lost faith in the church.” That essay became the impetus
for Fountain’s latest book, “No Place for Me: Letters to the Church in
America” to be released this fall. (WestSide Press, Chicago) The following is
an excerpt.
B
y the time I stopped attending church on a regular
basis in 2005—aside from the visit to one church or
another on some Sunday when mostly a feeling of
guilt mixed with a longing for the cultural ritual of worship I had
known since a child—I was sick of church, literally. Toward the
end, I would get a migraine on Sunday that lasted for about a
week then returned once Sunday had rolled around again. At my
worst, I felt like I needed a drink to go to church. I felt like I was
dying in church, hemorrhaging in
the pew, my mind drifting in and
out of consciousness and my soul
longing for rescue from the agony of
enduring another church service that
neither fed me nor filled me, but
only slowly sucked the life away
from me with dogma, with irrelevant or inept sermons and the
recital of canned “church-isms” that drew a near robotic call and
response from the congregation.
By the time of my departure from the Sunday ritual, it was clear
to me that attending church served little practical purpose for my
life. That my money, along with my silent, non-threatening, unchallenging attendance was what a pastor really wanted from me,
along with mine and my wife’s and children’s bodies occupying
the pews each week. I felt like a piece of meat. I felt used. Overlooked. Diminished. Insignificant. And I felt marginalized in a
world where even at small churches, there are few roles for men
who are not preachers, pastors, deacons or in the choir—and no
room for bucking the status quo, even when the status quo goes
contrary to the Word of God, or the pastor or the church have
gone south of the Gospel.
I felt like the focus—
of time, tithes and talents, of our collective energies—were too
often misguided and leadership shortsighted. That the focus
was too often on raising money rather than on saving souls.
On meetings and conventions and anniversary celebrations,
Men’s Days and Women’s Days. On teas and banquets. On
buying new choir robes. On spending more time and energy in
deciding the important stuff, like what would be the designated
color theme for the clothes everyone was to wear for the pastor’s anniversary celebration and little-to-no time on helping
the poor and needy, on evangelism—on being the Church
rather than on having church. I was convinced that Jesus himself, bearded and not adorned with the scent of Dolce & Gabbana, or a designer suit and gators, would not be welcomed
into the pews of our churches, let
alone the pulpit.
There were other things fueling
my angst, though it would take me
years to unravel that thread. By
the time I wrote the essay that
eventually ran in the Washington
Post, whatever it was, it gnawed at me, vexing my soul. Whatever it was, it would take time to uncover—time to look in the
mirror, time to forgive, time to sift through my hurt, time to
remember what was most critical to my faith, time to write.
When I sat down to write the essay, later titled, “No Place for
Me,” I had no intentions of publishing it. It was for me an exercise to try and exorcise my torment over my disconnection
from the church. A search for answers. In fact, by then, my
wife had asked me many times why I no longer wanted to attend church. And whenever I answered, there was a minivolcanic eruption mixed with anger but mostly hurt that arose,
but that to neither her satisfaction nor mine explained why it
had really come to this. What was clear was that buried deep
within the core was a truth I needed to reach—for my good, if
not also perhaps for the good of others.
“I was convinced that Jesus himself…
would not be
welcomed into the pews of our
churches, let alone the pulpit.”
18
The Well Magazine Fall/Winter 2015