If You’ve Felt Pushed Out

This is Father Jared Cramer from St. John’s Episcopal Church in Grand Haven, Michigan, here with today’s edition of Christian Mythbusters, a regular segment I offer to counter some common misconceptions about the Christian faith. Some of you are hearing this on Christmas Eve itself. Others might be listening a few days later, on the Sunday after Christmas, or sometime else in the long glow of the holiday season. But whenever you’re hearing this, the myth I want to bust right now—and the truth I want to speak—remain the same. The myth is this: you may be feeling that the church is simply not a place for you. Not tonight. Not this season. Maybe not ever. And before anyone rushes to argue with that feeling, let’s be honest about where it comes from. The church has, at times, done a truly bad job of making room for people. Sometimes that’s happened because theology was drawn too narrowly—leaving no space for doubt, struggle, or people who aren’t sure what they believe yet. Sometimes it’s happened because culture quietly infected the church with its own prejudices. Take gender, for example. The early Christian movement was remarkably egalitarian for its time. Women preached, prophesied, led house churches, and were the first witnesses to the resurrection. And yet, over time, Greco-Roman patriarchy won out, and women were pushed aside—not because of the gospel, but in spite of it. Other times, the church has confused faithfulness with fear. When the beauty and diversity of creation challenged old assumptions, the church sometimes reacted defensively. Galileo was condemned. Many Christians fought against evolutionary science. And in our own day, many Christians still exclude LGBTQ people because they mistake a narrow reading of a few biblical texts—or inherited cultural assumptions about gender and sexuality—for the fullness of the gospel. That exclusion is wrong because it treats difference itself as sin, rather than asking the deeper, biblical question of whether people’s lives bear the fruits of love, faithfulness, and self-giving that Scripture consistently names as signs of God’s work in a person’s life. If any of that’s part of your story—if you’ve been told, directly or indirectly, that there’s no room for you—then it makes perfect sense if church feels unsafe, exhausting, or irrelevant. That wound is real. But here’s what the myth gets wrong: that broken version of the church is not what the church was ever meant to be. The letter to the Ephesians gives us a radically different vision. There, the church isn’t a fortress for the righteous or a club for the spiritually certain. It is described as a new humanity. Paul says that in Christ, God is tearing down dividing walls—walls of hostility, fear, and exclusion—and creating something new in their place. In Ephesians, people who were once “far off” are brought near. Former enemies are made members of the same household. The church is called the Body of Christ—not a body made of identical parts, but one where difference is not erased, and where every member matters. Growth, Paul says, doesn’t come through control or conformity, but through being “built up in love.” Even more striking, the church is called a dwelling place for God. Not because it has everything figured out, but precisely because it is being built together—slowly, imperfectly, and humbly. Paul insists that God’s wisdom is revealed not through uniformity, but through reconciliation: a diverse community learning how to live in peace without denying difference. This reconciled life together, he says, is part of God’s plan to gather all things—in heaven and on earth—into wholeness That means the church was never meant to be a place reserved for people who are already whole. It’s meant to be a place where healing can happen. Not a place where you’re required to have perfect faith, but a place where faith can grow. Not a gatekeeping institution, but a living sign of God’s refusal to abandon the world. And that’s why this message matters whether it’s Christmas Eve or the days that follow. Christmas proclaims that God does not wait for ideal conditions. God comes anyway. God is born into vulnerability, uncertainty, and the margins of society. Emmanuel—God with us—means with us, right where we are, not where we think we’re supposed to be. So if you’re tired of church, wary of Christianity, or unsure whether there’s space for you in any of it, hear this clearly: Christmas is not about proving your worthiness. It’s about God’s stubborn, reckless love breaking into the world and saying, “There is room.” Thanks for being with me. To find out more about my parish, you can go to sjegh.com. Until next time, remember: protest like Jesus, love recklessly, and live your faith out in a community that accepts you but also challenges you to be better tomorrow than you are today.