I’m not saying religion is necessarily scandalous, but nobody’s really surprised when something scandalous happens, are they?

Now me? I was raised to have faith in a higher power: baptism, Sunday school, catechism, confirmation, all of that. As a kid, Sundays usually found me in a little church as acolyte, banner bearer, scripture reader, choir singer, or attendee.

I thought it brought me closer to God to be participatory.

And I confess, before my frontal lobe developed, it made me feel special to perform.

But, years later, I began to struggle with my faith. After leaving an abusive marriage and watching my little church go through a lot of drama, I became disillusioned.

I still believed in God, but my brothers and sisters in Christ were pissing me off.

So I just stopped going.

After my grandmother passed away two days before Christmas, I found myself almost dream-walking into church and sitting alone in her usual spot for Christmas Service. It just felt like the right thing to do, even as I sat there, numb.

But I was too angry with God to go back until The Balkan Storm (Storm, from here on) invited me to his larger, nondenominational institution that had the accoutrements of a church I had once known well.

Eventually, my daughter, Storm, and I were baptized there in a symbolic ritual of new beginnings, and it felt like I’d found my way back to my faith.

But over time, it felt like the focus strayed from the Word to opinions.

When The Storm and I were about to marry, we asked for counsel and prayer and were told it wasn't a priority.

Well. Fuck that.

Despite that, I was determined not to let anything interfere with my re-burgeoning faith again. We married, moved to Wisconsin, and quickly found another nondenominational church.

Storm threw himself right back into service, teaching kids' groups and assisting with setups and teardowns during the church’s first expansion. After months of goading, he talked me into auditioning for the worship team.

I called this piece 'confessions' for the simple fact that I, too, felt like a hypocrite.

And that’s where this story begins.  

The concept of even auditioning for a church group felt weird to me; I grew up where if you wanted to sit up front and sing, you pretty much could. Singing His praise was much more important than having perfect pitch and stage presence.

Hell, there was no stage; we just clustered up in scratchy robes beside the altar.

But now there I was, brand new to this whole ‘progressive, come-as-you-are, jeans and hoodies' vibe, feeling like a fish out of water.

Now, the leader was a warm and genuine man, and there were a few others who made the experience feel like what I thought a worship group should be: serving by making beautiful music and inspiring others together.

But during my audition, I learned real quick there was an unspoken hierarchy in this "worship team". Below the leader were the worship team veterans.

The anointed ones, if you will.

Onstage they’d perfected that 'closed eyes, reverent pauses, hands raised aura of ‘I’m not just singing to you people; I’m leading you to the presence of God’.

They were friendly enough with each other, but even when the lobby would be full of people milling around between services, they'd stay mostly to themselves.

Um...isn't hospitality Church 101? Maybe I'm more sensitive to it due to my family's combined background in hospitality, but come on. If you can't get that right, what the hell are you doing presenting yourselves as stewards of faith?

The whole modern worship setup felt foreign to me. I was told to get myself some in-ear monitors while they strapped a mic pack on me and stood me next to this ugly little stand with a box mounted on it.

(This was before church expansion #1, after which everything got much schmancier.)

I remember a rehearsal, all of us standing awkwardly under the stage lights when one of the anointed ones stopped us.

"Could you all not sing here?"

At first I thought she meant someone was in the wrong place; she meant the actual chorus sections, parts we were supposed to harmonize with.

It wasn't like any of us were off-key or anything like that. They auditioned us. I went to a performing arts school, for Christ's sake. Others had been singers in previous churches too - we had pipes.

But there she stood belting out extended solos, and there we stood under the same lights, looking like a bunch of dumbasses

Look, I’m not claiming to know other people's intentions; I can only write my own experiences. I wanted to fit in somewhere, and I never felt like I fit in with that group.

And if I didn’t fit in with “God’s children,” where the hell could I?

This was a group that I rehearsed and performed with while the anointed ones kept to themselves. We had a dedicated space to hang out backstage between services, but the anointed ones usually disappeared.

The rest of us usually ended up doomscrolling.

Then, time to go back out. Get your mic packs on and listen for your cue.

And I felt like a hypocrite because all that cliquishness backstage while presenting this visage of unity onstage felt fake as hell.

How could I stand there and encourage the congregation to celebrate Him when I was struggling with my own faith and feeling alienated?

I didn’t quit because people were rude or whatever. I mean, I felt that, but that wasn't enough to make me quit.

But then came a service where our pastor suddenly dug into specific opinions I hadn’t expected and definitely didn’t appreciate being made to look like I endorsed by being on stage after.

I remember sitting there, thinking, I have to get back up on that stage after that.

I did, but it was the last time.

The worship team leader was incredibly gracious when I left. Which…kind of complicated it for me, cause it would have been easier if everyone had just been a bunch of hypocritical assholes, but that wasn’t the case.

Some were, and some weren’t. People are weird like that.

One of the anointed ones was promoted to leadership; the church continued to expand, and the sermons continued to include more requests for funding.

This was a place very proud of being accessible, modern, and open to all. There was no traditional iconography, not even a cross. It’s a place that doesn’t really feel churchy, but yet quintessentially indicative of the rise of the nondenominational church.   

Which…I get the appeal, I really do. There’s nothing inherently wrong with wanting a church to grow, especially with a genuine goal of offering more people some form of spiritual healing. Make no mistake, I see church as a business despite whatever tax-exempt forms they use.

Business operations cost money, after all.

But for me (and I know for a fact I wasn’t alone), it felt like brand growth was the priority, and maybe that wouldn’t have bothered me so much if my experiences with the pastoral elements had been different.

Back when Storm’s mother was dying, he reached out, in need of support. The first response was a message from the children’s ministry asking if he might come back and serve.

Unfortunately, the pastor’s actual response came far too late.

Later, when I mentioned there wasn’t much there for people in our age group and stage of life, no real support or community groups, I was told that community requires participation and you can’t expect to just “come to church on Sunday and go home and somehow build relationships".

…the fuck?

We’d invested so much of our time into serving, and then dealt with an emergency custody situation for several years that took over our lives, something the pastor didn’t know because, by his own admission, his style was to let people experience the space without purposely ingratiating himself into them.

Which explains so much about our overall experience despite us initiating all the time.

But what the hell does pastoral care mean if the pastor prefers to stay at arm's length and default to “you should give more of yourself to the church” when you DO ask for help?

After several more instances like this, I got frustrated and exited church stage left.

But my faith remains intact.

People are people.

Pastors, worship leaders, Christian influencers, authors, televangelists, elders, and charismatic public speakers telling you exactly what God wants from us…are all still people.

And sometimes, people suck.

We can be insecure, selfish, tribal, vain, dishonest, and worst of all, self-justified in making terrible decisions.

Like Caleb Flynn.

Caleb Flynn was a music pastor (I don’t even know what that means) and a worship leader who’d once competed on American Idol. He was a ‘decent, Christian family man’ with a wife, two young daughters, a successful church community, and all the trappings that imply.

He was also in a secret affair with a much younger worship singer on his team.

In September 2026, a jury convicted Flynn of murdering his wife, Ashley; jurors heard about 100,000+ texts exchanged with the other woman, including conversations about wanting Ashley, whom they nicknamed "douche", dead.

All the while singing about God with their hands in the air together.

And the thing about art, about music, is that some of the most beautiful works come from or are performed by absolute piece-of-shit people. You can be inspired by the music; just remember that people are people, and some of us suck.

Sad but true.

Right now I’m at a new church with my toe in the proverbial holy water, just feeling it out. So far it seems a good fit, focusing on the Word first and not so much building a brand around it.

But me being me, I couldn’t help but think as I listened to the worship team: they could put a little more oomph into it, which made me laugh at myself. After everything I’d been drafting for this story about performance, here I was critiquing theirs.

I’ll concede that performance does matter if you want people to actually feel something. And most of us need that; I know I sure do.

I actually listen to some Christian music, but not like, turn it on in the car and make everyone uncomfortable on a Thursday afternoon. Mainly, I use it for my morning motivation when I'm out running.

My current favorite is Honey in the Rock. Essentially, it's about finding everything you need in God, like most Christian songs, but based on biblical imagery of God providing sweetness and nourishment from something as unlikely as a rock.

It’s inspiring, and I feel closer to Him running under a sky full of stars than I ever did with a mic pack and a spotlight.

Don’t get me wrong, though - I’ll also listen to absolute filth if it helps me smash a PR before breakfast.

Music was made to bring people together. Go to any concert, and it’s almost the same experience as a lot of churches. Crowds of people singing with their hands in the air; maybe you get goosebumps, maybe you cry.

Maybe that’s part of why we’re still exploring churches. Maybe we keep looking for God's closest representative, some spiritual version of Earth’s Mightiest Hero who can make it all make sense for us.

But it’s not supposed to completely make sense.

Faith, by its own nature, asks for a certain amount of surrender and acceptance that you will never understand or control everything in your life. That’s my take on it, anyway.

And surrender is really hard for those of us who need to feel on top of everything going on in our lives. Probably why we keep searching for someone with answers. People are people; nobody’s got all the answers, not even those of us with a microphone.

Or a website. Just sayin’.

So raise your hands to the songs that move you, and let yourself be carried away with it. Let it inspire you, comfort you, challenge you, or whatever else you need in that moment.

Just make sure your surrender is to Him.

Not to him.

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I love Jesus, but I cuss a little. How about you?

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