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(OPINION) June 26, 2023, was my grandmother’s 86th birthday party at our family’s house. It also was the day I was excommunicated from my church.
I remember vividly the incongruity of the happy voices and laughter at the party — and the dread I felt as I saw my phone light up with notifications of missed calls and text messages.
No! I screamed inside. Not another precious moment stolen away from me due to crisis and harm from the church.
I hid the phone from my view so I wouldn’t be distracted for the last hour I was playing hostess. We took family pictures. We ate birthday cake and laughed at the combination of my grandma’s sweet and candid comments.
Just two days earlier, we had received the results of the church investigation. It was an internal investigation performed by hand-selected church employees into our allegations of misconduct and harm done to several congregants.
The investigation had dragged on month after month. The wait was agonizing.
Our emotions rode a roller coaster up to periods of optimism and hope only to plummet down to discouragement and despair
Finally, the results came, after we begged to make the roller coaster stop. With my husband Miguel’s anticipated travel for work, he asked that we receive the results together before he left me at home, 35 weeks pregnant and needing to care for our other four children.
The results were sent in a letter via email. The church leaders announced they had come to a different conclusion than ours. But there was no explanation of their interpretation — no answers to our robust spreadsheet where we outlined each concern, using as many specifics as possible. We had spent weeks on that document, attempting to convey the harm that was caused.
Now days after receiving those results, I grabbed my phone with my heart racing and insides shaking. While my sons got ready for bed, I read a text from a friend who had been harmed by the church.
“Our membership was paused,” the text read.
Paused? Paused for what?
I raced to my inbox. Surely, we had a letter too.
And that we did. Except our membership had not been paused. Instead, it was a formal excommunication letter, signed by our church elders. Our membership had been revoked, with explicit instructions that we and our children were no longer welcome on church premises or at church-sponsored events.
“Can we call Daddy now?” my boys asked. Miguel had flown out to Texas the night before.
I looked up from my phone to see their little faces.
The shock was paralyzing.
“Yes. Let’s — call — Daddy,” I slowly answered, while trying to process what I was reading.
After Miguel finished answering 62 questions about where he was and what he could see out his hotel window, I told the boys it was time for bed. They started shuffling up to the attic and I quietly closed our bedroom door.
“So, we were excommunicated, huh?” I stated soberly.
”Excommunicated? I haven’t read it yet,” Miguel replied.
I don’t remember at what moment the tears started flowing, but I know that once they did there was no sense in muffling. The call with Miguel had to end and I needed to finish the bedtime routine with the boys, but the tears wouldn’t stop, and they couldn’t be hidden.
One by one the younger boys gathered in my door frame, looking at their very pregnant mother sobbing on her bed. I cringe that this has become a core memory for some of them.
“Did someone die, mom?” my eldest asked.
I couldn’t answer so I shook my head, “no.” No one had physically died, but it felt like it. I couldn’t bear to tell them what they had just lost or . . . who.
Perceiving the need for some privacy, my firstborn ushered his siblings back to their beds. He was aware of the stress we were under. He offered me a hug and lingered. I wasn’t strong enough to tell him and I wasn’t sure I ever would be.
Less than 24 hours after we received the excommunication letter, church leaders held an emergency meeting where they explained to the congregation the need to cut our young family off from the fold. It was just as much of a surprise to the congregation as it was to us—extreme punishment soiled in confusion.
In the days following, I received very little correspondence from anyone at church. And as fate would have it, my baby shower with many longtime church friends had been scheduled for that same week.
However, after the congregational meeting, the majority of the RSVPs quietly turned from yes to no, without so much as a comment.