This summer I signed up to plan a worship service with a team from a consortium of local congregations dedicated to welcoming lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender persons, and I was absolutely geeked about it. As a student wrapping up my first year of diakonia, this seemed right up my alley. All I can think about are ways to connect the church and the world, to connect those uninterested in religion with their faith.

Then on the first conference call one of the pastors I was working with suddenly began steamrolling the discussion. She clearly had ideas she thought were superior, and she was going to do what she could to make them happen regardless of how the rest of us felt.

This is basically the story of being human. We are all terrible in one way or another. Being obnoxiously aggressive on a conference call is one of the milder forms of being terrible to other people, but it’s what we do. I’ve certainly been terrible in my own ways – mean or annoying or ridiculous when I could have been kind. But it got me thinking about what church is supposed to be like, about what the church is supposed to do.

When we’re looking to connect with the divine, to find a safe space to explore our relationship with God, with truth, with faith, could there be any greater barrier to doing so than to have to first get past a deeply flawed, sometimes hurtful gatekeeper? There are plenty of places in our lives where we have to deal with annoying, obnoxious, thoughtless people. Should we waste a Sunday morning – or our weekdays in preparation for Sunday morning – on adding one more to the list?

So what is the point of a church in this century? The early church was known as a place where the widows, the orphans, the poor could be cared for. But as an employee of a particularly amazing not-for-profit, I can tell you first-hand that the widows, the orphans and the poor can be cared for without a mention of God or faith (though if you ask me if I think God is involved in it all, my answer would be, “Absolutely.”)

As a poet and a teacher and a friend and a fiancé, I see God every day in my friends and my loved ones, in music and movies and people and life. Plus I have a home church that I love. I think my pastor is a genius. I think our music director is a virtuoso. I would drop absolutely anything else in my life to help a number of the people with whom I attend church on Sundays.

But do I think my life would be incomplete if I didn’t have a place to go on Sunday morning, on Wednesdays in Lent? I used to think so. I used to plan my calendar around it. But I’m not so sure anymore.

I think God does what God does without us. Love and compassion and mercy happen every day with or without this thousands-years-old institution. Our best intentions to help each other connect with God have fallen short since Peter, since Judas. God doesn’t need us. We are the ones getting in the way.

People – both the ones I love and the ones that annoy me– are screw-ups: well-intentioned, good-hearted, assholes. When you look at the news, at the websites of mega-churches, at the books on the bestseller lists, I have a hard time believing church is very important to God. And for the time being, when I look at the evidence, church has ceased being very important to me.