I’m curious as to what you, dear reader, would do if you were in this situation (however unlikely it might be that you would be in the situation.

Let’s say you are at a non-accredited (that is, not for credit in a recognized degree program) Bible school abroad, in a country where you do not speak the language. You are enjoying the experience and one weekend you, and a fellow student, go to a salon where you pay over $150 and sit in a chair for many hours in order to have your hair arranged in the dreadlocked style.

You return to the Bible school campus and are told by Leadership that you have a choice to make: you can stay home from upcoming “outreach” trips to nearby churches which are sometimes conservative, or you can go on the outreach, after cutting off your dreadlocks.

What do you do?

I’m the daughter of a pastor, colloquially known in some Christian circles as a PK. I freakin’ hate that abbreviation. Some people wear it like a badge of honour, some people use it to belittle and box-in. There are plenty of reasons to hate the label and that’s why I’ve never applied it to myself or to anyone else to whom it may apply.

My experience is quite atypical of that of many children of clergy, actually. Growing up in the church is a difficult and precarious thing for any kid, whether her parent is the pastor, the moderator, the women’s ministries coordinator, the pianist, the organist, whatever. When I look back on my childhood, I think the difficult aspects of the church stemmed from that sort of general involvement rather than the fact that my dad was the pastor.

Like I said, my experience is not typical. I lucked out and spent most of my growing-up years in a remarkably functional church, where there was little discord. Whatever there was my parents successfully hid from me. My brother and I were treated well. I’ve heard stories about other clergy kids being told things like, “You’re the pastor’s son/daughter, you have to set an example.” No one ever said that to me. Or if they did, I blocked it out of my memory because it’s complete bullshit.

When I look back on my life, being a pastor’s kid meant mostly one thing: presents.

When I was two, we moved out to a parsonage in the country. The rambling house was right next to the church, in the midst of wheat and barley fields cut into squares by gravel roads. My mom was in the middle of a difficult pregnancy, so on Christmas Eve she didn’t attend the service. But after the service, the doorbell started ringing, various parishoners seeking an audience. Not to chide her for her non-attendance (after all, physician-ordered bedrest is an excuse even the most religious can abide). No, they wanted to drop off the presents, for me. Granted, I was a really adorable (if moody) child, but that Christmas Eve set a precedent for years to come. Basically, being the pastor’s kid meant getting special treatment. More attention, more love. And it really was love — presents are nice, but I always felt that people cared about me, and even as a kid I knew that was more important than trinkets.

I never really had any pastor-kid friends until I went to bible school — there, four of my closest friends were children of clergy, and because the school was a denominational one, two of them had lived in the very same rural parsonage I had. In fact, one still did live there. It was super cool to go there on weekends and eat real food and sleep in the basement where I had watched countless hours of Mr. Dressup and built blanket forts with my brother.

Anyway, I don’t think my experience was much different from that of any kid with very devout parents. Which is good, I guess.

Sometimes I wonder what makes one church-raised kid rebel/resist their religion and others not. What makes one person able to incorporate their history and childhood faith into an adult one? Why is it for some a seamless transition, and others not?

In my case I wonder if it’s just flat-out a personality issue. I’m a cranky bitch, always have been. “Strong-willed” is the term, I believe. Though, I’d like to think my struggle with/against Christianity is about more than some kind of inborn antipathy.

Part of me has always been jealous of the people for whom faith is so easy. For whom religion is easy. The people whose eyes close tight in prayer and you know they really believe, that the structures and the symbols all make sense to them.

As a kid, I was always waiting for, praying for that moment when it would be the same way for me. But now I don’t think that moment will ever come, and I have to be OK with that — I have to accept it. Which is harder than it sounds.

technorati tags: childhood, religion, church, christianity, prayer, faith

My brother is a youth pastor-in-training. (His default year at bible college after high school took, where mine didn’t.) I don’t know for which class it was (Pastoral Theology, perhaps?), but this week he had to attend a service at a synagogue. He eschewed the three-hour sabbath service in favour of a Thursday-night minion.

My reaction to bible college exercises like this one is mixed. On one hand, I can’t say it would be better for Christian Leaders of The Future to not have any first-hand experience with other religions. On the other, I find a single field-trip to be inadequate and smacking of tokenism.

Maybe I have a bad taste in my mouth from when I went to bible school in another city and went on one of those field-trips myself — not because I was required to, but because some friends of mine were taking Religions of the World and I thought it would be fun to tag along. And it was, in a train-wrecky sort of way. It was a trip to a mosque, back in those innocent pre-9/11 days. I dutifully veiled my hair and covered my ankles and wrists and listened with great interest as a friendly and open middle-school teacher gave us the tour of his house of worship.

It was all going well, until some rabble-rousers whom I didn’t recognize (seminarians, perhaps?) started barraging the gentleman with questions about the divinity of Christ and such, all of which he fielded with a good nature. It was somewhat embarassing for many of us who had attended the pre-field trip meeting, however, at which we were instructed not to get all aggro and confrontational towards the people who had graciously allowed us to visit their gathering-place and expose themselves to the prying eyes of self-righteous bible school students.

I was embarrassed for myself and my fellow Christians, so after the interlopers were finished with their assault I lobbed a friendly one, asking about the challenges of observing the Muslim faith in a society that does not exactly make it easy to pray five times a day, much less wash thoroughly before doing so.

The trip was educational — I did learn a good deal about the practice of the faith, at least as it was done in that particular community. But at the same time, now, years later, I feel embarrassed for my brother, visiting the synagogue on a Thursday night for what is a much smaller, more intimate family service. I won’t speak to my brother’s thoughts or opinions, and I don’t want to imply that he’s like the obnoxious questioners that came along to the mosque. Somehowe, though, I still find the whole situation slightly offensive — the idea of the Christian student visiting a synagogue as though to be able to say, “Ah, yes, I have sampled this faith and have indeed found it to be inferior to mine.”

I’m being overly cynical, I know. And as I said, I don’t think it would be better for bible school students to never attend other houses of worship. So I guess there’s no way to make me happy. My discomfort with the practice of the World Religions Field Trip, I think, stems from a knowledge of the way most bible school students think. (Especially ones at Calvinist institutions like the one my brother attends.) Maybe it’s just that part of me misses the days when I was sure that Christianity was The Only Way. Being sure about stuff is easier.