Detoxing from Church: Crabby Detox

Crabby Detox

When I was but a wee lad, one of my dad's many job transfers took us to Chattanooga, Tennessee. It was a beautiful place, although apparently Canucks talk funny, according to the locals. And while we lived there, we discovered that Southern hospitality in Chattanooga is alive and well.

We also learned various slang expressions, and folklore wisdom of the Southerners (although our immediate neighbours were an Italian family from New Yawk and had the accents to prove it), but I can't honestly remember if I first heard about crab-in-a-bucket behaviour while I was there or not.

It's a fairly well-known story that you can put one crab in a bucket, and it can easily escape. But if you put several crabs -- even a LOT of crabs -- within easy reach of the rim, they'll never get out. If a crab attempts to escape, the others simply reach up and pull them back down.

This picture reminds me of a potential trap to be found when people go through detoxing from church in a group setting. Sometimes, people who are in detox join an existing house or simple church, and find safety and healing. Also common is when "a whole whack of" people (another colloquilism apparently peculiar to Canada, or so friends in California tell me) who are ALL in detox start their own group. And that's where crab mentality can show up.

These groups start off as a place of safety and nurture, as people feel free to share their stories and be heard and understood by others who have been through the same thing (often from the same church). But as time goes on, when you'd expect to see at least some of the people starting to come back to life again, there instead seems to be a perpetual commitment to staying angry, bitter, and cynical.

As soon as one person starts to show signs of returning spiritual and emotional health, and ventures to share this with the group, they are immediately pulled back into the vortex of cynicism by their crabbishly-endowed group. It's REVENGE OF THE CRABS, with their patron saint Mordac the Preventer.

Sadly, I've seen some situations where those who were -- for lack of a better phrase -- "coming back to life" actually felt they had no other recourse but to leave the group behind, in order to escape the Crabbites. This tended to produce a second, albeit much milder and shorter-lived, period of detoxing from the disillusionment of what they'd hoped for in the home group versus how it turned out.

I know I've made this plea here several times before, but please indulge me yet again:

We all talk about "journey" -- and even the original byline of this blog was "robbymac: an ecclesiastical anarchist's journey" -- but we need to respect where others are at in their journey as much as we'd like them to respect our journey. And that has to include allowing people to come to terms with how they will relate to the larger Body of Christ around them, without imposing some kind of uniformity enforced by cynicism.

Hindsight 2010:

The tag "ecclesiastical anarchist" was given to me in 2002 by Gary Best, then-National Director of Vineyard Canada, during a plenary session at a Vineyard Pastors Conference in Regina. He meant it as a joke, and I thought it would be a funny line for my blog, as anyone who knew me - or read my blog - would surely realize that anarchy was not my intent. Sometimes, it back-fired, but you can't please all the people all the time. :)

Some people may stay in house churches for the rest of their lives. Others may return to a more "institutional" setting, perhaps even -- *GASP* -- the same church they left. Does that make them a "sell-out"? A quitter? No longer considered part of the Enlightened Remnant?

And finally, have you ever seen a happy crab? One capable of being extremely jaded and simultaneously Christ-like? If you have, please ~~adjust your medication~~ let me know.