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I'm not sure what to think about church anymore.

My home church, which just celebrated its 30th anniversary, is on its sixth pastor, and he is a gem. But the path to him was rocky. We gathered, just 25 of us, in the community room above a firehouse when I was 12 years old. My young father had died suddenly, and my mother had taken it as a sign to get right with the Lord. Running up the stairs every week past shiny red trucks and perfectly aligned yellow coats felt like home.

The founding pastor was a gentle shepherd who communicated peace and safety to this fearful girl. Then a few troublesome congregants ran him off and replaced him with a star who had served with the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. What had been a casual, hippy-era church was then infiltrated by old-school Baptists. Tension between traditionalists and innovators gnawed at the ministry.

One day, when I was an 18-year-old new convert and the pastor at the time was 60-something, he took me out evangelizing with him. Afterward, we went back to his house for ice cream. I dished it out, and he suggested I come snuggle with him on the couch. Having seen the unholy mingle with the holy in each of my first two pastors, I should have expected to see it again. Instead, my naiveté continued.

Our fourth pastor split the church and started anew in one of our former locations. He resigned from the pulpit on a Sunday morning instead of preaching a sermon, and allowed his supporters to fight for him while he played the invisible man. He acted with such cowardice that when I would see him at the occasional wedding or funeral, the only thing I could think to say was, You're like a seductress who stole someone else's family. But I said nothing. He later had an affair with a congregant and was fired.

Our denomination's regional director mediated the conflict that ensued. This voice of authority told us what we wanted to hear: The church split had been primarily the other side's fault. So, of course, we made this arbitrator our pastor. When his office-time pornography addiction was uncovered, he took his computer and fled. We should have known there was a problem. He had come to the Halloween alternative party dressed as Fabio, the romance novel cover model.

With an understandable distrust of strangers, the congregation finally voted in a longtime member as pastor. The dwindling remnant merged with another congregation, and for the past six years, there has been no significant division or growth. Is church death inevitable, or is growth overrated?

My next church was a racially diverse congregation that had been founded by two former leaders of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. I fell in love with the Holy Spirit in this community. Then consecutive youth leaders divorced (a stumbling block to my children) and tension surfaced in the leadership. The church was located in Middletown, New Jersey, the town reported by The New York Times to have had the highest casualty count in the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Amid the stress, strained relationships broke, and the church split in May 2002.

Despite the turmoil and our dysfunctional church experiences, my family moved to California so that my husband, Jeff, could study for the pastorate. The goings-on at the megachurch where he was a student and then an assistant pastor made everything that came before seem like Sunday school games. During Jeff's tenure on staff, both we and others were victimized by abuse of power. We also witnessed sexual misconduct and abuse, dishonesty, cruelty and cowardice, and a contentious church culture that fed on gossip. I have never seen anything like it, inside or outside the church.

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July 2007, Vol. 51, No. 7