Messy churches

The Hearth is a place for “religious refugees”—those folks who carry religious, spiritual, or church abuse and trauma. I have often been told by congregants that it is the last church they’re going to try before they give up on church altogether, which is why I take my job so seriously in terms of creating a trauma-informed worship experience and cultivating a healing community. As I was discerning my call to ministry, I originally thought I was called to be a Deacon so that I could use my therapy background to work with people who have religious trauma through their healing, deconstruction, and reconstruction. However, as my calling clarified, I realized that God could provide much more healing through me if I shepherded a church that did not cause the trauma in the first place and encouraged a community that provided a different kind of healing than anything I could provide one-on-one in a therapy office. 

I’ve been leading The Hearth now for almost three years; and although I maintain my original call, I have grown into the wisdom that while we can do our best, we will still make mistakes and people will sometimes still get hurt. More importantly, though, I have learned that not all mistakes have to lead to religious trauma because profound healing can come from mistakes that are handled with humility, accountability, and grace. I also believe that hurt may be mitigated when we hold our expectations of what church is “supposed” to be in an open hand. 
 
I think many people approach church as a representation of God on earth when in actuality it is a community of messy people who love God and are doing their best to love each other. This distinction is important because when messy people at church mess up and hurt us, it will cut deeper if we expect them to be acting on behalf of a perfect God. You see, the simplest definition of trauma is when something happens to us that differs drastically from our expectation about how the world is supposed to work, how people are supposed to behave, and who God is supposed to be. When something like this happens, the memory of the experience does not have a place to land inside our brains because it is such an outlier, so it bounces around in our minds and disturbs us in unexpected ways until we are able to sort through it and find a filing cabinet in our brains to store it. This is why if you have church trauma and a particular song comes on, you may have a primal trauma response because that experience is at the forefront of your brain and will be triggered into active memory much more easily than if it was healthily stored away. 

So, the first step in healing from trauma and preventing trauma is to shift our perspective about church. For many people with church trauma, they have been told that the leader of the church is somehow closer to God or that what that leader says and does is infallible because of their Divine call. This is fundamentally untrue. Leaders of churches are just as human as the rest of the community. They are fully capable of making mistakes and should be held accountable for their words and actions. Yes, church leaders have a call to be teachers and healers, and their leadership should be respected as we respect any leader in our lives, but that does not mean that they are any closer to God or that they represent God in some fundamentally different way than the rest of us. It does mean that they have a responsibility to ensure they are healthy so that they reduce the chances of harm.

Likewise, just because people call themselves Christ followers and belong to a church does not mean that they are any better than people who do not. I have known some lovely atheists who would blow some Christians out of the water in terms of general moral goodness if it was a competition (which it is not). The reality is, though, the person who is going to be most hurt by this expectation is you. If in your mind someone needs to live up to an expectation that you or they have, they have much farther to fall and the hurt will be much deeper. I get the frustration of hypocrisy—of watching someone act like they are holier than thou and then royally mess up. However, grace for messiness heals us as much as it heals them. Taking a posture of forgiveness can go a long way in maintaining your own peace. 

The next step in healing is a bit more difficult. For those of us who have done our fair share of church shopping, we have learned to run at the first sign of unpleasantness, conflict, messiness, or theology/politics that may be different from our own. Church is like any relationship, though. No person and no church is going to perfectly align with every one of your desires. The best relationship advice I ever heard was to choose your partner not based on all the things you want, but rather on all the things you don’t want but can live with. Every person is going to have faults, so imagining you’re going to end up with someone who doesn’t is silly. Figure out what faults are ones you are okay with, and choose a partner based on that. Church is the same way. Determine what faults in a church are ones for which you can have grace, and choose your church based on that—with eyes wide open that no church is perfect and we have a responsibility for our own experiences. And then stick it out. 

Trauma is about unresolved conflict. Remember when I said trauma happens when our expectations are challenged and experiences rattle around in our heads? We have a responsibility for doing the work to sort those things into filing cabinets. Healing is not a passive process. Often, healing means facing the issue and seeking reconciliation through accountability and grace. You cannot heal if you run before the reconciliation can happen. Obviously, there are situations where this is not applicable. For example, this is not applicable to severe and repeated abuse with no accountability. This is applicable to those faults that you have already predetermined are ones you are okay living with—and severe and repeated abuse is not one in which any of us should be okay living. That being said, if you identify with this, please come and talk with me so I can help you find the resources you need for healing and removing yourself from whatever situation has made this feel normal for you. No one deserves to live in fear including you.

We have all heard and experienced the epidemic of loneliness in our world today. There are so many things that contribute to this state of being, but one that I think stands out is our intolerance for working through hard things. It is no longer true that most people live within 5 miles of their neighborhood church, and that this church has been their home church for generations because it was unheard of to seek out a church farther away if things went south. Now, we can jump ship and drive across town if we want. But a pattern of church shopping and severed relationships contribute to loneliness. I say this not to shame anyone who has needed to find a new church because I can deeply relate to this and have done my fair share of church hopping before I found The Hearth. I say this to encourage you to engage differently with community now. When someone says something or does something you don’t like, resist the urge to immediately wash your hands of the community and choose instead to do the difficult work of dealing with it head-on. Have that hard conversation, work through the conflict, admit when you’ve been hurt or when you’ve hurt someone. It is uncomfortable in the moment, but it builds deep and lasting relationships. This is the antidote to loneliness. This is how we heal. 

There is no perfect community that will be comfortable to be a part of all the time. There are just messy communities of messy people that get by with a LOT of grace and a LOT of love and a LOT of humility, who are willing to have some hard conversations, grow and stretch, and lean on the wisdom of the Holy Spirit. I no longer believe I can create a community free of hurt, but I do believe that when we all are willing to work at it, we can create a community of healing.