Childless in the Church

As more and more people are beginning to deconstruct their faith (I am referring to only Christians) and to actually leave the churches they have grown up in, people who are left in those churches and those that know the “deconstructers” well are left with questions. I am going to refer to those who are leaving and deconstructing as “D” and those still in the churches and not going through this process as “C” for easier reading. C is questioning why D is leaving, what are they thinking, and a lot of time stating that they (D) aren’t true Christians if they can just up and leave without their viewpoint of questioning. The one thing that C isn’t doing though, is directly asking D instead they are doing the usual prayer train (which is truly just gossiping and trying to gather more details to gossip some more). Now, this is not true for all Cs but it is true enough to make the general statement that they aren’t asking D what in the world is going on with them. I am not sure what C thinks is going to happen if they ask D, my thoughts on it though are that they are (c) scared of what D is going to say. They are scared to confront what D is upset about because they know they have played some part in it and with that none of us want to be confronted with our short comings, with our selfishness, with our part in hurting someone, with anything that is going to make us look less than and tarnish that holy image we wear on Sundays, Wednesdays, and any other day of the week we walk into a building we hold as revenant. 

            That is the big issue though, D wants to be asked, they want to share what is hurting them and find answers to their questions but sadly they simply are just walking out the doors glancing over their shoulders and wondering where it all went so wrong. One of the biggest ways that it has gone wrong is that there is no place for them, there is no place to call home in a building with a group that touts family ideology. There are all kinds of people leaving the churches because they don’t have place to fit in, whether it is because their church just doesn’t have a program for them, or their ideology doesn’t line up just right with the preachers; these people can go find another church that lines up ideologically with their beliefs, but the harder one is finding the program that they feel they belong in. That is what I want to touch on today, is a lack of programs for childless couples who are not newlyweds. I want to talk about this group because this is my group or actually lack of group. In every church I have ever been associated with there was never a class, small group, or anything aimed at the group of adults without children. Those without children were just lumped into the groups/classes of those married in the same age range.

            I do not want to come across as bitter and angry because at this point in my life I’m not, I am just resigned and that has led me to stop going to any church at all. From this point on most what I’m going to say is my personal experience but I have also talked to a lot of other couples who feel just like I do and have also just become resigned and either left the churches all together, just go to a worship service only, or cry in the car almost every Sunday when they leave because they felt so out of place. I had those Sunday’s where I would cry to my husband because I felt so left out conversations; I was told more than once a month that I wouldn’t understand what they were discussing because I didn’t have children of my own. Just for a little context and background, I was a special education teacher, I was trying to get pregnant but because I have seven diagnosed autoimmune diseases my body rejected even the idea of getting pregnant, and adoption was not feasible at the time in our lives (again autoimmune). None of them knew about what me and my husband were going through, not even our own families knew, we kept it a tightly guarded secret because we knew it was going to be so hard when we would lose a baby and we didn’t want to disappoint anyone but ourselves. I share all this now because I have dealt with the sadness, the anger, the hurt, but the one thing that I still just can’t get over is being told over and over how I wouldn’t understand. 

            I realize I don’t have a living baby/toddler/teenager/child but I do know that I had classrooms full of them, I babysat them, I loved my friends’ children like they were mine (I do make a great Auntie). Sure, I might not exactly what it is like, but I do have experience and I could have contributed to those conversations. I remember several other couples in the Sunday School class that didn’t have children and I knew some were going through fertility treatments too (still I never shared our journey) and I know some had lost babies and they would over hear what was said to me (still never sure why it was always directed at me but I guess it was because I was trying to talk to them, learn from them, listen to them and the other women excused themselves to other parts of the room) and tell me later how sorry they were that I was treated like that; I always brushed it off because I didn’t want them to feel awkward or bad since I knew their situation and I never, ever wanted anyone else to hurt like I was. They all ended up leaving the church in the end long before we did, I think the pain was just too much because at that age the subject of children often dominated the conversations, the lessons being taught, and there was just a lot of insensitivity from others (even the men, because surprisingly their talk was around their kids too) about others who might be dealing with infertility.

            Childless couples in churches often and can experience shame over not being able to conceive. They feel grief and disappointment, a deep sense of loss because of what society tells us is what we are supposed to be and do once we hit a certain age; whether you realize it or not, churches are some of the people who put the most pressure on others to go forth and multiply. If you were to look up infertile couples in the bible, you’ll see that almost all of them, go on to conceive at least one child, so there aren’t even verses that couples who are childless can cling to in the actual sense of what they are experiencing. These stories are usually viewed as God’s redemption of human kind. These stories are also told as a way to show God’s ability to do the impossible. Plus, we cannot leave out the couples who have simply made a choice not to procreate. There are a multitude of reasons why couples chose not to have children and that is perfectly fine and they should not feel any pressure to do so. They do feel the pressure because they are stuck in the same classes and they hear the same rhetoric from those with children. When they were younger in these classes, they were told that oh just wait, one day you will that urge and you’ll have kids; they didn’t feel that urge then and don’t feel it now but they too are displaced in church. They are the ones leaving too. 

            If you want to dig deep into the bible and infertility, in the Old Testament God curses nations with infertility because they do not obey Him. It can appear that God is using infertility as a cause for something greater. It is demonstrated through passages about entire populations including the animals, but it is never used to slight a single individual. Infertility was a curse of a nation not on a personal level, it wasn’t one on one from God to one person. If you want to go and look at the verse and commandment to be fruitful and multiply, some churches use this theme to talk about procreation but if you look farther into scripture, it is truly referring to going and making more disciples for God. Sure, reproducing physically is a special part of humanity, but this is not what God was referencing here, He was stating to go out and make more disciples to spread the gospel of His word. 

            It is interesting because one of His disciples, Paul, actually called upon having a celibate life in 1 Corinthians 7. But according to him if you could not control yourself then marriage would be fine. This always strikes me as humorous for some reason, if you can’t be like and be chaste then go ahead and get married, I guess. I just imagine Paul saying this with exasperation and a heavy sigh. If we go back to the Old Testament and look at Psalms 127-128, we see that children (especially in that day and age) are considered and seen as a gift, a gift of inheritance. Then in 128 we see where a man’s wife is considered a precious gift as well and the children are mentioned again but the two gifts don’t necessarily go hand in hand with one another, both are referred to as a blessing from the Lord. Even if the couple cannot have children or chooses not to have children, there are blessings given from the Lord no matter what.

  In 2 Samuel 6:32 we do have a statement that the daughter of Saul never had any children until her death. This gives proof that there were women who did not conceive, although we don’t know why and what happened with her, we do know that she never produced an heir. Then in Luke 23:29 we see where Jesus tells the women mourning for him that there will come the time when they will say that women who did not have children would be blessed. Isaiah 54 calls for women who have never had children to burst into song, shout for joy, and to live their lives abundantly. Galatians 4 calls back to the women of Isaiah, telling them again to be glad, shout for joy, and to cry aloud. While there are few examples in the bible about people not having children or producing heirs, the ones we have are ones that I have championed in my life. The one major example of someone not producing and heir, is Jesus himself. He simply went and made disciples of women and men throughout the nations. He gathered the children to Him and taught them, He was basically their uncle figure. I have clung to that thought many times throughout my life when I felt like a failure because I could not produce a child that would live in this world. 

            The sense of loss I have felt over the years is indescribable. The amount of guilt I have experienced over being angry, hurt, and mad at God. The shame that comes over me still when I think about not having a child this side of heaven and just how it makes me feel. There were times when I thought I was going to lose my religion because of how hurt I was over how others treated me, how they talked about me (that’s the funny thing about the pray train-gossip-it usually finds its way back to the person you are “praying” for), and just how insensitive they were with their words. In fact, I have lost several “friendships” over hurtful words said about me, I realized that they weren’t truly friends if they were willing to talk about me like that, but that’s a whole different writing that maybe one of these days I’ll feel like talking/writing about. But I have learned it is not unspiritual to feel a profound and deep sense of loss especially in today’s (mostly southern) society. The great thing about feeling so deeply is that God is perfectly fine with you having those feelings. He is willing and even happy to take that burden from you. All we have to do is lay our burdens at His feet and allow Him to pick them up, deal with them for us, and guide us to where we need to be in our life. I realize that is so much easier said than done. I still want to go to the foot of the cross and pick up somethings that truly need to stay there. I fight a lot of days to not pick up past hurts and fight them all over again, or there are things I have laid bare that I didn’t fight for and I struggle with not picking those up and fighting tooth and nail over them. Strangely, at least to me, a good bit of my hurt is over this very subject; being left out in church of all places. I am not currently attending any church and I don’t honestly plan to any time soon because there is a lot of things I need to deconstruct and deal with, within myself, my marriage, my family life, and life in general. When I do decide to return to a church building, if I do, I really want to find a place where there are people like me. People who don’t have children but they have struggles, dreams, health concerns, whatever it is that makes them valid in this world. See that is the most important thing from all this, we are valid even without children.