the heart as it is | courage • grief • beauty

I figured it was about time I shared where I am with my Christian walk. I am currently part of a fellowship group that is going through some reading together, and I will be sharing my story during one of our April meetings, so I thought I would share here as well what my faith walk has looked like. I have also felt empowered to share this by the dear Emily P Freeman who shared a bit more of her faith story recently, and who I have followed for a while now and have noticed my Christian walk has almost paralleled hers since I discovered her:

I started attending church around 5-6 years old. There was a friend from school who also attended my Chinese and elementary school at the time, and so her family invited my family to their non-denominational Taiwanese church. Mainly my mother, sister, and I attended and it was a great place of community for my mother, a first-generation Taiwanese immigrant. I attended that church from about kindergarten through the end of high school (and also attended a different Taiwanese church for a year or so during that time). I participated in children’s choirs, Christmas plays, Bible studies, VBS, and volunteered for AWANA. I made some good friends there, and it was fun to play with them at church and also when we went on all-church retreats that usually took place at some camping site. After Sunday services, my mother would often have some kind of Bible study afterward. Most of the empty upstairs classrooms had pianos in them when my mom was doing her Bible study, so I would pick a piano for the week and play things by ear. There was also fresh lunch served every Sunday after service, and I remember them tasting quite yummy. During my junior year in high school, I even participated in a short mission’s trip to rural Taiwan which at best, was a very strange mission trip. This was the church I was baptized in at 12 years old, and I think I knew somewhat the significance of it at the time. Overall, my time at this church had a mix of good and strange experiences. While it definitely felt like a tight-knit Taiwanese community, it did not exactly feel like a Christian one (at least during my time there, and that could be a whole other post).

I remember after high school, I was attending the English services at the Taiwanese church by myself and was not enjoying it. I can’t exactly remember why – part of it was I did not feel like there was good community and part of it was that I genuinely did not like the worship and sermons there. I remember one day thinking to myself that I would only attend church for a few more weeks, then I would stop attending. Before I reached that part, though, a good friend of mine invited me to her church. It was a primarily white church, which I was not used to, but I remember enjoying the sermons. So I attended that church for a year on my own, sitting on my own way back in the upstairs balcony.

After a year, I connected with the worship pastor there and began playing worship at that church. The next ten years would involve me being very active in the various non-denominational churches I attended in worship ministries, youth groups as a volunteer, and young adult groups. The summer of 2019 would be a shift in my faith for me, as it was the first time I really started my relationship with God, in evangelical terms, as well as the time I would go through the ending of a situationship and experience my mother become very sick from cancer and eventually pass away. I needed all the certainty and community that the evangelical church gave me during such a tumultuous time, and truthfully, I am still grateful for it.

However, after my a relationship break-up in 2021, I realized that all the talk therapy, Bible reading, Christian relationship books, and Celebrate Recovery was really not helping me move past the deeply shaming effects of it. I had essentially continued to date the same kind of guy but in different bodies (with slight improvements from guy to guy). I strongly felt like I needed serious help, so I signed up for an experiential trauma therapy workshop at Onsite just an hour from Nashville, Tennessee in May 2022. This workshop included a week’s worth of intense therapy and it felt very scary and vulnerable, but it was deeply healing.

I would not say this was where my “deconstruction” began, but this is where all the things I had been critically thinking of for a while became big enough of a snowball to start rolling downhill much faster. What was really challenged at this therapy workshop was the concept of ‘original sin’, which, in Western Christianity, is akin to total depravity, meaning humans are essentially born hell-bound because of their inherent nature of wanting to do bad things. This was a concept I deeply believed in until I was at Onsite, where I firsthand experienced and witnessed that we cannot heal unless we know that our original design is good and worthy & wired for love and connection. The concept of having a savior die so that we don’t go to hell still doesn’t cover up the fact that we are still “snow-covered dung” in evangelical terms. It took me a while afterwards to understand that Jesus died FOR us and not ‘instead’ of us, so ‘sin’ has to mean something else other than having an “inherently corrupt nature”. I could probably write a whole other post on this topic, but essentially, the concept of original sin really began to fall apart for me.

Naturally, that important theological pillar falling apart meant a domino effect would occur. If Jesus came to save us because we were inherently corrupt as I was taught – but sin is better explained as a surface level manifestation of disconnection and pain and our original design has always been good – then what did Jesus really come here and die for? Long story short, I eventually discovered my “new” beliefs had actually been beliefs held by the Eastern Orthodox Church ever since the days of the early church. The ideas of ‘original sin’ and ‘total depravity’ as the evangelical church knows them now were actually manmade ideas concocted in the 400s.

I eventually purchased my own Orthodox Study Bible, which is the Bible I am currently using for my personal scripture reading, and was trying my best to stay in my non-denominational church while my beliefs were rapidly changing. During a Sunday I was not scheduled to serve, I attended Oaklife Church in Oakland, and was elated to discover there were churches like this that were did not shy away from hard topics and questions, valued emotions and diversity in its many forms, and also did not teach theology from an original sin perspective, but from an original blessing perspective. As elated as I was discovering churches like this, this was also a deeply lonely time for me and I even went through a small bout of depression as I stepped away from the kind of communities I spent most of my life in.

From then on, I church-hopped a bit until I came across City Church in San Francisco and attended that church for about a year and a half. I really loved it, although it was a long commute, and was very inspired from new ways to practice my Christian faith from people who take Jesus and Scripture as seriously as I do. Since then, I have been thinking about what my faith “should” look like. I don’t “pray” like I used to, but I notice God in different and more expansive ways now. Scripture is still important to me and there are still moments I genuinely hunger to read it and do feel fed by it, but I now read it with a grain of salt with regards to understanding context and translations.

Currently, for practical reasons, I attend another church that is mentored by Fred Harrell (the founder of City Church) and I serve on the worship team there as well. I notice I am a lot more tired when attending church now, and while I think part of it has to do with it taking place Sunday evening, I think perhaps part of it is something else, even while community continues to be very important to me. I am not as triggered as I once was when I was discovering more about the history of original sin, and can appreciate the teachings I heard when I needed it. However, at this point, I cannot go back to that kind of teaching and mindset, nor to communities who still hold that mindset, even though there still exist some things I struggle with theologically (but not necessarily personally) in these new Christian spaces I love. I feel like there used to be so much rush, rigidity, and cognitive dissonance to how my faith was practiced before, and now it feels more relaxed, beautiful, and authentic while I continue to learn endlessly about Jesus – God incarnate, worshiping in community, and experiencing God.