why I still love the church

and why I am compelled to write about church hurt

I am five years old. I open the door to the church library, one of many rooms in a long line of rooms with white cinder block walls. The church librarian, a grandmotherly woman, smiles when she sees me. She stands up and reaches into a tall cabinet and pulls something out. It is a VHS copy of Mary Poppins. She has been saving it for me so that no one else checks it out. I gleefully take it with me so I can go home and watch it for the umpteenth time.

I am nine years old. Our church is huge, but when I say I am ready to be baptized, the pastor meets with me personally. I even get a handwritten certificate of baptism. The whole church is thrilled for me.

I am twelve years old. We live in Michigan. We moved there less than two years before, right after my grandmother died unexpectedly. In the time that we lived there, my aunt has also died in a car accident. Now we are moving again, this time to South Carolina. My friends give me a going away present. It is a notebook in which they have written letters to me so that I will remember them when I move. It becomes a treasured possession.

I am seventeen years old. My youth pastor is a husband and father with four young kids. Every Wednesday morning, he meets me and another girl from our youth group at a Waffle House before school and leads us through a Bible study on the Holy Spirit.

These are only a few memories that stick out, but there are dozens of others. Going to church extra early with my dad on Easter morning so he could cook breakfast for everyone to eat after the sunrise service. Vacation Bible School. Learning how to play the guitar so I could help lead worship in my youth group. Teaching the preschool Sunday school class when I was in high school. Memorizing Scripture as part of an AWANA program. Playing in the handbell choir. Mission trips to Appalachia where we built houses during the day and rode on mattresses in a hallway at night. Summers spent at a camp for adults with special needs run by our church’s denomination.

My parents were never on staff at a church. My dad was, I think, a deacon at some of those churches. He was eventually ordained as an elder, but not until I no longer lived at home. What I saw growing up, week after week after week, was not that church was not a compartmentalized part of our lives, but that our lives were under the umbrella of Jesus’ church. Not everything we did was associated with church, but the church cast a warm shadow on everything else. My closest friends were from church. When we needed help moving, it was church friends who loaded our furniture onto the truck. When my grandmother was sick and my mom had to go to Florida for weeks, church friends took care of me and my younger sisters while our dad was at work.

When I started college, there was freedom for me to make a decision about church. I lived on campus, but my home church was only 25 minutes away. I kept going there for a while, but realized that if I wanted to go to church with people I could see throughout the week, I’d need to find a church closer to campus. It took some time, but I eventually settled on a large, non-denominational church downtown, maybe a mile from my dorm as the crow flew.

It was at this church that I first heard expository preaching, where the pastor works his way through a section of Scripture instead of more topical sermons. Around the same time, I met a guy online (a story for another day) and began sending him CDs of the sermons. When he moved to Columbia after college so we could work toward getting married, we went to this church together. We got married at that church, and then he began working full-time at the church as an administrative assistant. That church paid for most of the cost of his seminary degree, and it was people at that church who brought us meals after our first two children were born and helped us move multiple times.

Our next church home as a family was a Presbyterian church plant. The very first Sunday we visited, the pastor did a children’s sermon where he held up an old report card he had gotten as a child. He used it to explain to the kids that because of Jesus, when God looks at us, he sees us as having gotten straight As, even though we completely failed. I wept, realizing how much of my life I had thought I had to be perfect in order for God to love me.

My third church as an adult was another non-denominational church plant where my husband had his first full-time ministry job. Although he wasn’t ordained yet, he was almost done with seminary. We experienced deep fellowship with other believers at this church.

The fourth church was a church that had been planted 6-8 years before, but that was moving into the established church phase. Our last church had closed, and we were grieving. We were welcomed with open arms. It was here that my husband got his first job as an ordained pastor, where our daughter was born, and where I developed friendships that I still have today. When I was diagnosed with gestational diabetes during the pregnancy of our fourth child, a friend from church made a huge batch of freezer meals that met my dietary requirements. When I was having conflict with my boss, it was elders and friends from church who offered compassion and wisdom. We experienced so much love there.

We are now at the fifth church of our marriage, and my husband is the senior pastor. In March, we will have been here for five years. It is the first time I have lived in a different city from my family and the place I spent 20 years of my life, and it has taken time for this new place to feel like home. But the reason it feels like home now is because of our church. Our life is entwined with the life of the church, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.

I have struggled with how to write about one of the things I feel called to write about, which is church hurt in general, as well as the uniquely painful challenges of ministry life. I don’t want anyone to read my words and think, “Wow, churches are terrible.” I am who I am today because of my parents’ commitment to the local church, and because of my experience as an adult at five very different churches, all of which included men and women who loved Jesus and who loved us. God’s design for his church is good, and I have tasted and seen its goodness.

We have also experienced great harm in the context of the church. In some situations, the circumstances were not really about us; we were just collateral damage. In others, my husband was the direct target, and we received all the arrows. It has been hard for my brain to reconcile this—a history of being both loved and burned by the church.

I recently read a book about the Johnstown flood of 1889. A cohort of wealthy industrialists built a private retreat high in the mountains of Pennsylvania, and in order to indulge their love of sailing and fishing, they built a dam so they could take advantage of the leisure activities provided by Lake Conemaugh. A combination of heavy rainfall and poor dam construction led to the dam failing in May of 1889, causing billions of gallons of water to tear down into the valley below. The damage and loss of life was catastrophic. More than 2,000 people died, and thousands lost their homes and livelihoods.¹

And yet, inexplicably, there were some buildings that survived. When the waters abated and the survivors came back looking for their homes, a few remained standing.

As I think about my experience in the church as an adult, I feel like I am one of those buildings that remained standing. As I said, we have experienced great harm and even abuse within Jesus’ church. Others have experienced similar things and some have endured far worse. Some of these people have left the church, left the faith, and deconstructed because of what they have seen and experienced within the church. The waters roared down over them, and they were torn from their foundations. I do not begrudge them their decisions, and I do not judge them for their response to their suffering. This is what happens in a broken world.

Remaining committed to the local church, despite having seen the damage that can be done, is not what makes sense. And I cannot pretend to understand why our family is still in ministry. There were dozens of places along the way when we could have called it quits. There were certainly times when I wanted to. But in the strange mystery of God’s providence, here we are.

And so in the future, if and when I write about sin within the church, about abuse perpetrated by leaders who refuse to be held accountable, about the tendency of the church to circle the wagons and protect people who are harming others, I hope you will remember this:

I am a house still standing. I have felt the torrent of the flood waters almost drown me. I have thought that I would lose my footing. I have watched people I love walk away from the church, and sometimes wished that I could go with them. But I am still here, and I still love Jesus’ church. I love the church and Jesus so much that I feel compelled to write about what sometimes goes on behind closed doors. One reason spiritual harm and abuse continue to happen is that some Christians don’t realize it’s happening, and other Christians who know about it pretend like it doesn’t happen, or that when it does, it’s not really that big of a deal.

A house that is still standing after a horrific flood cannot pretend the flood did not happen. The evidence was everywhere in 1889, and the evidence of harm within the church today is also not hard to find. My goal is not merely to look around and point out all the harm for the sake of vengeance or vindication. God is the Judge, and he knows all things. I am just a witness. I want to point to the evidence and tell the stories both of pain but also of redemption. I am not deceived about what goes on in some churches, because I have seen it. I will name the flood for what it is: unrepentant sin. And I hope in that naming you will see the beauty of Christ, who died for all those who come to him humbly.

I don’t believe my writing will change the state of the church on a grand scale. All I know is that there is some reason, maybe a million reasons, that Lord has seen fit to have me and my husband endure so much suffering in the context of the church. May he take these many years the locusts have eaten and restore them with joy not just to us, but to others who have suffered as well.

If you have suffered within Jesus’ church, you are not alone. I will gladly hear your story and keep it in confidence, while providing any encouragement I can. Please don’t hesitate to reach out.

1. For an excellent recounting of the Johnstown flood, I recommend the book Ruthless Tide by Al Roker.