Healing from Church Hurt: Where Do We Begin?
This is post # 6 in a series of posts on church hurt... make sure to check out the posts around this for more practical ideas of What Church Hurt Is, Why Church Hurt is Hard to Talk About, and Practical Ideas for how to heal from Church Hurt. Today, we continue on with Ideas 7-11 on a list of 11 Ideas for Healing from Church Hurt.
Separate God from the Institution
You've probably heard many versions of the old cliche saying - something like "I love Jesus, but I can't stand the church." That phrase is often used as a strawman in sermon illustrations. Something preachers can critique and use as their springboard to make their point.
My feeling on the phrase is: If it's been repeated so many times, there's probably some element of truth to it. I'm not saying it's right. I'm not saying loving Jesus, but resenting the church is something to aspire to. But I think it makes an important point: Jesus and His Church are NOT the same.
One of the most challenging aspects of healing from church hurt is untangling the actions of the institution from the character of God. Church hurt often causes us to project the faults of the church onto God Himself, but the two are not the same.
Learning to separate the failings of the institution from your relationship with God is crucial for healing.
It can actually be freeing in a theologically sound way to acknowlege that God didn't let you down, but the Church did. God is a solid rock and a firm foundation. The bible never promises that the church is. In fact, the church in the New Testament is, at times, really messed up. The opposite of stable, healthy, and holy.
When we lean our lives on the Church, we're building on shifting sand (Matthew 7:24-27). When we separate the Church from Jesus - philosophically and theologically - that keeps our church hurt from infiltrating our theology. In other words, rather than our church hurt causing us to walk away from faith in Jesus, we can hold those two as separate and distinct, allowing us to continue to love and follow Jesus, even though we've been hurt by the Church.
Being able to hold a healthy stance of, "I love Jesus, but I'm skeptical of the Church," isn't a bad thing. I actually think that can be a healthy and theologically sound stance to take. An expression of faith and love for Jesus, even while we sort through our doubts and church hurt.
Find Safe Community
Healing from church hurt doesn’t mean you have to do it alone. In fact, trying to recover in isolation can often deepen the pain.
An unfortunate reality is that it can feel hard to connect and find community with people who haven't seen what we've seen and experienced what we've experienced. Sharing your deepest thoughts, feelings, and healing process with someone who is still on staff at a church or loving their church can create a lot of friction. There are a lot of barriers to authentic relationship and being on the journey together.
Finding people who can relate with your process, who still want to pursue Jesus and healthy spiritual community can be very difficult. But we have to try. Despite how I may want to roll my eyes and a lot of cliches and catch phrases that are rampant in church culture - some of them are still true. We can't do life alone. Not in a healthy way, anyway. We need people who we can be real with and process with.
This might mean grabbing coffee with someone you trust, finding or creating a small group for people who've been burnt, an online community, or even a counselor who understands spiritual trauma. You have to find people who will listen, validate your experience, and encourage you in your journey of healing.
Saying that here makes it sound simple and easy. I understand that finding people who understand where you're coming from and can handle your doubts and questions can be difficult. That's part of why I started ReConstructing.Church. I wanted this to be a place where people could hear that they're not crazy. That there are other people who see what they see. And that Lord-willing, they could find other people to walk with, in their journey to process church hurt and make sense of where we go next.
Pursue Personal Spiritual Growth
While it may be difficult to trust another church or leader right away, that doesn’t mean you have to put your spiritual life on hold. Continue to study the bible. Continue to pray. Try to push yourself toward fresh ways of walking in the way of Jesus in the real world, outside the walls of the institutional church.
Read the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) and think about ways you can practically step out in faith and live out the commands of Jesus in the real world, in this time and place. How can you embody the nature of God, wherever He has you?
If you're not growing, you're dying. Stay hungry for the Spirit and stay connected to the Vine (John 15), even if you're still figuring out what church should look like.
Practice Gratitude
We all know the stereotype of the guy who gets too caught up in the conspiracy theories, and before we know it, he's wearing a tin foil hat. My wife has had to lovingly rebuke me more than once, letting me know that I'm freaking people out at the dinner party, and I sound like a conspiracy theorist.
Not only is unwinding your church hurt and the problems with the American Church a complex process. It can become all-consuming. The darkness and negativity that pain and confusion can create in you can become so large that it has it's own graviational pull - causing your attitude about everything else in life to be drawn toward the darkness.
So much about this journey is heavy and dark and interconnected. Practicing the discipline of gratitude can be a super important and meaningful ways to take our eyes off of the problems and the hurt - to get our eyes up and look to the Giver of all Good Things.
"What you look for is what you'll see." It's important along this journey to train yourself to see some good along with the bad. If we don't force ourselves to choose to see the light, we'll be consumed by the darkness.
This is one of the ways we can live out an authentic expression of what it means to follow Jesus in the real world - joy and peace in the midst of the darkness. It's one thing to talk about joy in a bible study. It's another thing to choose joy in Christ when your world feels like it's falling apart.
Keep Thinking Critically
Deciding to heal from your church hurt doesn’t mean giving up on being intellectually honest, advocating for yourself, thinking critically, or voicing concerns about how we do church. It doesn’t mean that what happened to you didn’t happen, anymore.
Don’t give into the idea that healing from your church hurt means you go back to being ignorant or willfully blind to the things you now know.
God wants you to live in spiritual community. Jesus loves His Church, as broken as it is. But that doesn’t mean you have to go back to who you were before. I believe God brought you out of where you were, because He wanted to show you something and/or do something in you. Don’t forsake who you are today, because of a false idea that you need to go back to who you were in the past.
God may lead you back to the church, but go with wisdom. Think critically. Be a contrarian voice, at times.
Moving Forward in Faith
While church hurt may feel like the end of your faith journey, it doesn’t have to be. Yes, the pain is real, and the disillusionment may run deep, but God is still faithful. Healing is possible, and church hurt recovery is a real and attainable goal. In time, you can find new ways to live out your faith authentically and pursue spiritual community in ways that are healthier and more aligned with God’s true purpose for His Church.
If you’ve been hurt by the church, you’re not alone. There are many of us walking this journey of recovery and rediscovery. The hope for healing is real, and God’s love remains constant, even as we navigate life outside the traditional walls of the church.
Let’s keep walking together—there’s more for us outside the institution.
This was post # 6 of 6 in a series of posts on church hurt... make sure to check out the previous posts for more practical ideas of What Church Hurt Is, Why Church Hurt is Hard to Talk About, and Practical Ideas for how to heal from Church Hurt.
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