Pants-Free Parenting: Where can you go in the community to feel welcome?

In the middle of the night, my daughter wakes me because she is afraid of mummies. I tell her they are dead and she should go back to sleep, but she whispers in my ear, 'If Jesus can come back from the dead, can't mummies?”

That's it, no more church, I think and let her crawl into bed.

Some days, I don't understand why I take my kids to church. Six years ago, my husband and I tried to start a church. We wanted to be more than a place a worship, we wanted to be a home for people in our community, no matter what faith. We wanted to be a space where we neighbored as a verb instead of a noun. Last year, it closed. Our great experiment failed. In the end, we fell desperately short of our vision.

After taking a few months off, we've begun to go to church again. The place we've found is fine. It's welcoming to an extent. They don't allow women to be pastors. A visiting pastor recently complained about the Supreme Court decision allowing gay marriage across our country. I don't want to be political, I just want to be welcoming. But lately, it feels like I can't separate the two.

We should probably try to find somewhere else, but honestly, I'm tired. And I don't believe that the function of faith is to surround myself with people who see things like I do. I go for the opposite reason, to find a way to care about my neighbors and community - people who are different from me. People who still need welcome.

On my better days, this is why I bring my children to church - to learn to care about others, to find a place where shared experience and shared goals, draw us together.

Iowa is changing. People are moving from rural communities into urban centers. Rural schools are closing and so are rural churches. And while school is mandatory, church isn't. The shift in demographics hasn't translated into the growth of the urban church. In fact, many people of my generation aren't going. Churches, which used to be the adhesive of Midwestern life, is falling apart. And I worry that what is replacing it - sports, activities, the Internet, are separating us, rather than drawing us together. All of those activities and the Internet cost money, so I wonder who is being lost in the shift? What neighbors don't we see now that we no longer force ourselves into a seat every Sunday to sit next to them?

Recently, the city voted down a tax levy for the library. Something I lobbied for in my column. You may suspect that I was motivated by the sinister interests of Big Library. Instead, it was motivated by my own experience as an outsider and finding a place at the library, when all other places seemed off limits. And yes, that includes churches. I see the library the same way I see church, it is a resource and a home for those neighbors falling through the spaces that separate us.

What the vote showed me, was that many people don't agree. And that is fine. I couldn't convince my own husband, why should I convince a stranger.

But if not the library, where else? Where else can we find a home, when you are lost, new, confused, unemployed and disenfranchised?

For me, the answer has always been church. But I wonder sometimes if it really is the answer. Because when I go, I sometimes feel excluded, by politics and gender. And I'm a white middle class lady, I can't even imagine what it's like for someone else - a person of color, someone who identifies as transgender.

I recently spoke with Paul Lasley, a sociologist at the University of Iowa, who told me that because of the demographic shifts, Iowa is at risk of losing its social intuitions that make it a uniquely welcoming place to live.

So tell me, if it's not the library, if the community doesn't believe in that, then where can I take my children to teach them that all are welcome? Where? Church? School? Where can we go to find a place that forces us to squish elbow to elbow with those who are different than us and still reach out to care for them anyway?

I don't know. Maybe you can tell me. In the meantime, we go to church every Sunday. Zombie Jesus, mummies and cold welcomes aside, we go and it's an act of faith, because I'm thinking for the future and for my children when they move to a new town and they know no one and understand nothing of the culture. We go and give because I hope someone will welcome them someday.

l Lyz Lenz is a writer, mother of two and hater of pants. Email her at eclenz@gmail.com or find her writing at LyzLenz.com.