How good is a place, how big are its horizons, if there isn’t room for everyone? - Lyz Lenz

There are so many churches that remain strong, while being awful to women or providing safe havens for the power hungry. And there are so many good places that close despite being a home for the hungry, the lost, and the hurting. To brush off problems with churches as the problems of the inherently flawed nature of people is to miss the bigger picture: that life and faith can function together in a place where all are welcome and respected.

Chained to a child or chained to a desk, a woman's value is contained within her (re)productive abilities. And when these abilities fail, through miscarriage, stillbirth, medical problems, infertility, or she opts out of the whole process, we don't know how to see her. We can't see her. (pg. 52)

In his book Shopping Malls and Other Sacred Spaces, Jon Pahl argues that the consumer aspect of American Christianity is a kind of a feel-good cop-out of deeper truths. But for those who have been hurt by the church, who have been told their bodies are unacceptable in the eyes of God, or have witnessed other’s pain perpetuated by religion, it is nothing of the sort. It’s actually freedom. And it’s freedom that has been sought and found by religious outsiders for millennia. The saints we revere like Joan of Arc and St. Francis of Assisi, were difficult nomadic outsiders who created their own religious spaces when none could be found for them. Even the model of Jesus, walking smelly and dirty in the desert with his band of fishermen, all men, was a rogue, cast out by the religious authorities. But these thoughts can be cold comfort when you are the one deemed unacceptable, deemed sinful by the very community that by its very precepts ought to love you.