Pressure. The most common symptom that kirkers feel as a result of life in the Kirk is pressure. Fear, stress, worry, anxiety, confusion — all of these and more create a sense of overwhelming pressure that squeezes you from all directions. It occasionally lets up and sometimes you can get your mind off it. But it never goes away and you never know where it’s going to come from next. One day the Moscow-Pullman Daily News prints a front-page story about serial pedophile Steven Sitler, a few days later your pastor writes a post called Jezehellsbells. Who is sufficient for these things?

You can’t get your head around why anyone would encourage a young lady in the congregation to marry a serial pedophile, let alone preside over the ceremony and pray for the couple to have children. And you don’t understand why anyone would viciously attack a rape victim and her husband on the worldwide web.

You reason that if he did it to them, he’d do it to you or to those whom you love, which is a logical inference. So it’s natural to feel terrified. He committed an act of terror. He retained someone to dig for anything that could he could twist into dirt and then he did the incomprehensible. Or to use his novel interpretation of St. Paul, he punched back twice as hard.

Of course, there are many problems with this, starting with the most obvious: No one punched him. Additionally, it’s difficult to describe his action as a “punch.” A grossly overweight man hurling libels from a plastic keyboard in response to a perceived wrong hardly constitutes a punch. The legal term for his action is defamation, or false light. The clinical term is narcissistic rage. And the biblical word is wickedness.

However, while it is natural to fear him because of the next so-called punch he plans to throw, it is not natural to fear your pastor or your church, which is one reason why you feel like you’re in a pressure cooker.

The good news is that you are not alone and you are not the first person to feel it. Hundreds, possibly thousands, have gone before you. They know exactly what you feel and why you feel it because they were in it — just like you. Some stayed longer than thirty years before they left; others bolted after a few weeks. The Kirk is a revolving door for Christians who move to Moscow looking for the unadulterated gospel and who subsequently flee when they see his gospel up close and personal.

Real Life may not be your ultimate landing place and that’s okay. We recommend it for three reasons:

1. It’s a great sanctuary to decompress.
2. Many former kirkers have found peace there.
3. The pastor doesn’t punch.

8:30, 10:00, and 11:30 am.