Back to Writing

It's taken me roughly three weeks to put this blog post together. If you found this on Facebook, you may remember the Google Form survey I put out a while back where I promised I had something in the works other than just collecting your data and personal stories.

I've always had a knack and, frankly, a drive for writing. I find writing to be a great release. All of the things that get bottled up inside my head on a daily basis are usually poured out into my poor wife’s ears or into a group chat among some of my friends. When it came to baseball, however, I didn't feel like bothering them with useless information about random teenagers playing for the Royals minor league teams, so I helped start a blog to get my "fix" in on baseball happenings.

I guess you could say that was the inspiration for this blog as well. I constantly find myself thinking about things that I couldn't possibly organize into speech as well as I can write it all down. I've also been thinking a lot about my own faith in the last calendar year or so and...well...I felt like it was time to try to mobilize that faith in some capacity. A little bit of background info first...

If you're reading this, I'm assuming that you know me personally in some capacity, given that this website has existed for less than an hour at the time I'm writing this. I want to dedicate a series of posts to my "story" at some point, but to make a very long story short, I grew up going to Catholic mass on Sundays and we went very frequently. I won't say we "rarely" missed, but from what I can remember, we definitely went more than we didn't when I was really young. I also grew up going to a Christian athlete kamp in Branson called "Kanakuk" that shaped my faith more than I would credit any other event. "Kamp" changed my life in a way that nothing else would until my son was born in 2021.

However, there was a time in my life, between high school and college, where I completely stopped going to church. At one point I swore I would never go back. I was so jaded by the stories of sexual assault from church leaders and the (seemingly) constant requests for more money. The problem I realize now is that church, like any other aspect of our lives, is not perfect. There is no such thing as a group of human beings without their faults. Although I never lost touch with my faith, and I actually found ways to strengthen my relationship with Christ without church, I allowed the sins of a few to skew my view of all organized religion.

It wasn't until COVID that I really started to realize how much human beings NEED church. If you're reading this and you're not a believer, replace the word "church" with community. Human beings cannot survive without community. Church IS community for believers, and I realized during COVID that I was stalling a bit in my faith without my community. Luckily for me, my mom had found Church of the Resurrection in Blue Springs and Hannah and I had a church home to turn to when we were ready.

I will never forget walking into a service on Sunday morning in October of 2020. Church of the Resurrection's Blue Springs pastor, Penny Ellwood, who had married Hannah and I two years earlier, was preaching that day. On the way into the church, I had told my wife, "You know, I haven't done any kind of volunteering in a long time. I really feel like getting out and doing something soon." The sermon that morning was about service, and concluded with Penny offering a volunteer opportunity at the end of the month feeding the homeless.

Hannah and I have been going to the 9:00 am service at Resurrection Blue Springs ever since. We have been a part of and hosted small groups, served, joined men's and women's groups, and I now serve as the Student Ministries Director for the church. Hannah and I affirmed our baptisms in August of 2022 when we had Sam baptized. Our marriage, our lives in general, have never been better. Being a part of our church community has changed our lives for the better and, I hope, the people around us as well.

At Resurrection, our pastors talk often about how Americans are rapidly leaving the church. Many of them for the same reasons I swore I'd never go back. A few bad eggs have completely ruined the Christian experience for millions of people. There was a point in my life that I didn't really blame people for being skeptical of a faith that was seemingly littered with hypocrites.

Then, at some point in the last year, it dawned on me that the lives we're talking about are FAR too important to just...give up on. When I took the job as our youth pastor, my goal was to help kids slowly find their faith as they grow up, to plant seeds in their head that they could always come back to when they inevitably graduate. I guess I'm now turning my attention to my peers. It legitimately pains my soul to know that so many people have been hurt by the church, that there are people who may never know the joy and the peace that Christ offers because of the wrongdoings of the people who were supposed to be followers of Christ. I guess I hope that this blog will find somebody out there that's looking for an excuse to go back to church and hasn't found it yet. In the next couple of weeks, I plan on writing about my personal story so that others may feel like someone else out there has experienced the pains and the joys that they have felt in the church, and that there is still hope for them to find their church home, if not their faith entirely.

Psalm 119:105: "Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path."

Alex Duvall

Student Ministries Director

Chruch of the Resurrection, Blue Springs