Several years ago now, a man I knew left a church. He had done all the right things: led ministries, offered (and given) of his time and money, supported the leadership as far and as much as he could. He was a son of the church, in all the right ways, as well as imperfect. Impetuous. Unsubtle.
When he confronted the pastor—a man he had considered a close friend and mentor—with his deep and legitimate concerns about the church’s treatment of others, he was condemned during the meeting and ostracized thereafter. It was subtle: targeted stabs from the pulpit decrying disloyalty; rumors started during staff meetings. The good news is that, having grown past the need for an abusive father figure, he left. The bad news is that, at least for now, his heart cannot hang on to God while leaving behind the pain.
He wasn’t the first person to have tried to speak truth collegially and lovingly to a pastor, only to have been abused in response, but he was the first I’d known personally. Since then I’ve known a dozen more brave souls who have tried to directly address the problems of their particular local institution, suffering the response of public barbs and private innuendo until they finally gave up and left.
Let me be very clear: I do not believe that anyone, including these particular pastors involved, intended harm. Not really. Not intentionally. Instead, it is the screwed-up models of what it means to be a church, what counts as authority and morality and community, that create and sustain these destructive situations.
Local churches are human-made institutions. They are prone to the same jaw-dropping mishandlings as every other human-made institution. We just expect them to do better.
I don’t really get why people stay in these churches. I mean, I understand the ones who experience the reflected glory of being part of an inner circle: those visible members who enjoy status and recognition. I understand the ones who are codependent, as well as the ones who simply approve of the behaviors. I even understand the ones who feel like they have nowhere else to go. (They’re wrong, of course, but feeling isolated and stuck is just as powerful as actually being isolated and stuck.)
It’s everyone else I don’t get: the ones who stay for the friendships they have there, as if actual friendships cannot exist beyond those invisible walls. The ones devoted to the institution, who excuse the toxicity as if it were simply a collection of personal peccadillos, rather than a force that, like a tidal wave, overwhelms and washes away hope.
Back in May I heard of yet another situation of a similar sort, and that one really got to me. I don’t know why that one, except that maybe I heard about it after the sweetness of one of our Sunday night gatherings. I was angry and sad, crying and frustrated, for a couple of days. Woke with a horrible headache. I texted my ministry partner that I could not understand why the event was hitting me so hard, but that I felt as though I were watching someone beat up my children while I was powerless to fight on their behalf.
I was angry and sad and frustrated because it isn’t one pastor, or one institution, that creates these situations of dependence and abuse. It is the generations of families that develop and maintain them. It is the human desire to be Part Of Something, to have that gaping maw of loneliness and insignificance fed.
Dependence and abuse are sustained by the wounded places inside each of us that desperately need mending.
The problem is sin, to use that quaint and misunderstood term. Not “sinful acts” that we find so easy to identify and condemn in others. No, it is the context of sin, the disconnection between ourselves and God, ourselves and others, ourselves and Our Self, that makes this kind of culture, community, institution possible. Because the context of sin is universal, abusive people and institutions are epidemic.
The apostle Paul wrote, “For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” Though I believe with all my heart that goodness has already won, and do my level best to teach and demonstrate that fact, on the days when I see Jesus’ brethren causing His children to believe that His church is no place for the fragile or the truthful, despair and sorrow hit.
I believe that each of us has a duty to find help and practice healing. We have a duty to shine light. We have a duty to sustain hope. We have a duty to love.
Even when we’d just as soon hit someone over the head with a baseball bat and call it done.