Heartbreak in the church: Part 2

When I ended my last post about heartbreak in the church, I felt like I left some readers at an intersection without a lot of guidance. I wanted so badly to write in detail about some of the deep hurt that violated my trust in the church. I wanted those stories to finally be told in full after keeping them secret all these years. My heart that’s crying out for justice wants to name names, but that’s God’s fight.

I know I am not alone in feeling this way. I know people who have witnessed horrific things behind those church doors. I feel intensely vulnerable asking you to come back anyway–you who must feel like no place is safe.

You must think I’m crazy. I would have told myself I was crazy if I had time traveled to the past and said, “Give it time. You’ll figure out how to do this again.”

I’d probably say, what’s the point? I’d probably say, why in God’s name do I need to sit in a building full of people who make me uncomfortable, who solicit me every Sunday for money, who make me feel crappy about myself?

And those would have been totally valid questions to ask my future self.

The answer is not simple, but it is very short. Because it gets better than this.

I was a really angry person. I hadn’t abandoned God, but I did not want to be part of his church posse. I didn’t want to solicit people with Bible tracts door-to-door. I didn’t feel called to be a missionary. I didn’t want any more guilt piled on about Christ’s suffering because of my sins. I was sucked into a culture that said people are inescapably and irreversibly bad, and we must work very hard for the Lord all the days of our life to receive our reward after we die. It said heaven was nowhere near here, and every day would only get harder and sadder than the last one.

It was easy to believe these things back then, because it made more sense. When life was filled with suffering, it explained it all away even though the pain remained.

After we found a new church home, I started to see and believe that heaven intersects with our world every day like another dimension. I saw that hope was woven with suffering, and I needed both of them equally in order to see and know God. I saw freedom from the laws of evangelical Christianity, and instead I found a God who uses the Bible to reveal himself to me. I started living the sort of life that made people wonder about God instead of knocking down people’s doors with church brochures.

The truth is I know there isn’t much I can say to change your mind. You’ve probably been gone for a long time. You’ve made your own “church,” a new community of people, and you’re all making it work the best you can. You’ve been figuring things out on your own, and you can’t imagine any of that changing now.

So, forgiveness is not forgetting or walking away from accountability or condoning a hurtful act; it’s the process of taking back and healing our lives so we can truly live.

Brené Brown, Rising Strong

What would I say to my 18-year-old self walking out of my home church for the last time?

You need to sit in a building full of people who make you uncomfortable because discomfort is the source of your greatest growth. God is calling you to do the hardest thing imaginable–acknowledge what happened as part of your story and release the Church (the greater Church, capital “C”) from the sins of the local church. You may have to spend some time away, but God will call you back. You may realize, after all, you are the reason for your own discomfort.

You need to recognize that some people think church is a country club. Some people want to believe that only certain kinds of people can have access to heaven, because they don’t know how to love people like Jesus loved people. You will be asked to give, but giving, as my husband says, is between you and God. Don’t wait for the moment when you “feel” like this church is the right place. Right now you’re broken, but you can heal and come to love a new place and a new people. You can learn to give out of love that inspires unbounded generosity, and it will fill you up. It will have nothing to do with membership or blind obedience. It will flow from a heart that has seen the goodness of God and from the promise of God that he will meet all of your needs.

You need to know that refusing to go back is like locking up a part of yourself. The longer you wait, the harder it will be to break out. The prison will become home where you hang pictures of all the people and moments that remind you why you aren’t going back. There won’t be room for anyone but you. And, by the way, no amount of justice served will ever give you a satisfaction greater than you taking your life back through forgiveness. Waiting for justice to be served is like waiting on a private jet and getting Dodge Neon instead – unreliable and unglamorous.

Here’s the thing – all of this is just as much for me as it is for us. I have been sitting on this for a week trying to figure out how to end it. Brené Brown, in Rising Strong, says it better than I can (emphasis added):

“The bottom line is that we need each other. And not just the civilized, proper, convenient kind of need. Not one of us gets through life without expressing desperate, messy, and uncivilized need.”

Coming soon – part three: desperate, messy, and uncivilized need in the church.

Heartbreak in the church: Coming back to the sanctuary when people say and do terrible things

If you’ve ever had to walk into the sanctuary and face people who have gained something at your expense – if you’ve ever feared going back to church – if you’ve ever rushed out of the service to avoid people… This is for you.

When I was a teenager, I attended a large, growing church in my hometown. We had all of these TV evangelist-type pastors (appropriate because this church was actually on TV) who were charming, energetic, persuasive. Our youth pastor was no different. He was kind of a celebrity in the church because of his reputation for planning large-scale, blowout, teen-oriented events.

I loved youth group – we all did. It was the highlight of my week. I always wanted to be more involved because participation was encouraged, but it was also a way to work your way up the ranks of the group. If you wanted to be popular or one of the youth pastor’s few “chosen ones,” you had to demonstrate dedication.

One summer, I felt God calling me to donate funds I had raised to another student so they could go to camp instead of me. I spent weeks working up the courage to talk to the celebrity youth pastor about this calling. When I finally told him, he nonchalantly dismissed me, saying he didn’t believe God was calling me to do such a thing.

Silly me. Of course I had misheard God. We had a bad connection because I hadn’t memorized enough Bible verses and didn’t pray in the morning before school.

But after some more consideration, I realized this was definitely not a miscommunication between God and me. This was the cherry on a long list of humiliating moments brought about by this man, starting with the time he convinced me I wasn’t “saved” and needed to come forward a second time to declare my faith in front of everyone.

This became a theme in my life – moments of vulnerability crushed by church leaders. When I realized this humiliation was not isolated to just one individual leader, I did not have a church home for several years.

Six years later, my husband and I crawled, tired and desperate, into this big church (likely corrupted, I had convinced myself) and sat down in the back. It was our last hope. For several months, we resided in the back pew of the smallest, quietest service. Eventually we became regulars. Then members.

It wasn’t a miraculous fix. No love at first sight. We didn’t tithe for a long time. We didn’t attend every Sunday. We didn’t join a Bible study. We did find a place where we could be anonymous. This place gave us space and time to heal. People made room for us to deal with our stuff in our own way and our own time, and that was all we needed. We didn’t want a prayer intervention, intensive one-on-one spiritual mentoring or super personal Bible study encounters.

We have bragged on our church about this. Even in our desire to have a lot of “room,” people we’ve grown to love have supported us through my diagnosis and treatments, deaths in our families, job changes, and other tough stuff.

This place isn’t perfect. The gossip mill runs strong, and we’ve been victims. We’ve actually been criticized for being too private, and some people can’t help but sensationalize my diagnosis because they need it to be this bigger, better, more triumphant story. It took us five years to find a small group that worked for us.

It’s not easy to stick it out when people are… well, people.

In all honesty, the church’s rap sheet was pretty long in those in-between years. My damaged perception of pastors was just one part of my relationship with the church that needed repaired.

Since I witnessed this kind of wide open love, it feels like someone has cleaned a dirty window and now I see heaven a little clearer. I used to dread heaven as a teenager. I thought, if this church is what heaven looks like, I can’t imagine spending eternity there. Every day having to face the people who have bonded by gossiping about you, who have humiliated you, who have stolen the joy of the church from you.

I’m here to tell you those people have only seen heaven through a foggy window. And sometimes the best way to show them heaven is to show up and face them even when they’re still figuring things out (like how to be nice).