Is this the Church?
The first time I remember really cognitively questioning all I knew about what I believed and what was true was in late 2014 when going to church was so excruciatingly painful. We spent the past 11 years in this church, and the toxic underbelly exposed itself proudly and loudly. Two-thirds of the church left. I had no allies, no kindred spirits there. But my husband was an elder there and we were stuck. My input regarding what church needed to be, what leadership needed to be, was met with derision. I was shut down quickly. Going to church was like sitting in a desert, desperately begging for water, and being given a tall glass full of sand to drink. I began questioning the purpose of church.
A few months later, after we left that church, I remember writing a blog post about how figuring out what I believed was like cleaning out my purse. Sometimes my purse got so full of unnecessary things that I could not find it in what was important. Sometimes it grew so heavy that it weighed me down, straining my neck, back, shoulders until they ached. I would clean it out by dumping the whole lot of it on the table, throwing away the trash, putting away the extra, unnecessary items, and only returning the essentials to my bag.
We moved on, this time to a new, vibrant church plant and for the next 4+ years we poured ourselves, really everything we had, into this community. This was a different denomination, with a different M.O. at the outset. The vision of the church was such a good fit for us. We had so much hope.
While we were among the younger people left at our old church, we were some of the oldest at this one. In fact, we were a good 20 years older than anyone in the core group sent from another city to plant this church. We saw a lot over the years. We watched churches thrive and others fail. Most of all, we saw what causes people to flee churches in horror or crawl away in anguish. We thought our life experience might be useful. We were wrong.
Over the years I determined one thing: the powers that be didn’t want to know what I saw. They didn’t want to hear my input. They didn’t want to listen to my concerns. This church became an evangelism factory. Get ‘em in the door. Baptize ‘em (those numbers count). Polish ‘em up good and shiny. And send ‘em back out to get more. They called this spiritual multiplication. I call it Play-Doh Factory Spirituality. Caring for one another was not the priority in this church. It became clear that once you were a believer, your only value was as a cog in the evangelism wheel. It became clear that any believer who was struggling was considered a danger to the mission of the church, pulling resources away from the only job that mattered: winning converts and baptizing them.
I saw red flags everywhere I turned, from the gross spiritual neglect to the demands for loyalty to the lack of transparency to the demand for trust and fidelity to their spiritual authority.
By October 2019 I was done. Out of gas. Out of everything. With my husband’s blessing, I quit going to church. I sat on the couch on Sunday mornings, terrified that I was losing my grip on God and not even certain who God was or if he existed at all. And if this was what church is supposed to be, I wanted nothing to do with it.
A year earlier I read David Johnson and Jeff Van Vonderen’s The Subtle Power of Spiritual Abuse. Somehow, and I can only say it was a divine intervention, I came across another book of Van Vonderen’s, written with Dale and Juanita Ryan, entitled Soul Repair. It was exactly what I needed at the exact time I needed it. My soul was lying in a million pieces. I needed a way forward.
The book met me where I was, met my faith where it was, and invited me, with compassion and understanding, to tear it down. To tear down my house of belief, one built on my faulty view of God that was informed by decades of abusive, legalistic, toxic ideology cloaked as Christianity, to clear the rubble, and begin again. This time, with a strong foundation based on the true God.
Tearing down was messy, as it always is, but I do love me some demolition. There were times when I would waffle back and forth, one minute feeling as if I was sliding off the cliff of belief altogether and the next minute begging Jesus to hold me.
Over time, however, God has put me back together. Put my faith back together. I can’t even explain it. I’m not sure how it happened. But it did.
What has been most helpful?
1) Reading, reading, reading. I have read so many books on the abuse of power, narcissism in churches, and toxic structures and how they operate. I was not alone after all. I wasn’t crazy. What I read in these books I had lived. These books gave me the words and the framework I needed to make sense of my experiences. Other books helped me see the heart of God as someone for me and someone safe. As someone radically different from what I had experienced. A book on lament was hugely helpful in opening back up my communication with a God who hears me.
2.) Ezekiel 34. When I was in such despair, I would go back and read Ezekiel 34 and see God’s anger at shepherds who neglect and abuse the sheep. Neglect and abuse are equally demoralizing. Equally painful. Equally dangerous. You can die of thirst or a blow to the head. You can die of starvation or a stab to the gut. One just takes longer. They both lead to death.
3.) I started a small Facebook group for those of us who are sitting among the rubble of our faith, where we can share our stories.
4.) It doesn’t hurt that the church we left most recently has suffered the ramifications of those red flags I saw. While you don’t always get confirmation of your concerns, it sure is nice when others see the same things you’ve been seeing.
5.) I have found a church home. A “merry band of misfits,” I call them. We are all “outside the camp,” so to speak, feeling like we do not fit, do not belong in the more tidy, pious places of the Evangelical community.
6.) My husband has been tremendously supportive of me, giving me time and space to question and come to my own conclusions. To him, I am forever grateful.
7.) The growing online conversation is hugely helpful and certainly buffers the isolation one can feel when dealing with issues that are so outside the box of the typical prescribed Christian experience.
So here I am, thankful to not be tottering around in that expansive Evangelical McMansion, built on a false view of God and with bricks of “do this” and “don’t do that” and with floor joists eaten up by years of legalism and neglect and abuse. That place was ugly. And dangerous. I’ll take my new tiny home any day, built on a solid foundation of a loving and compassionate and very personal God, who values me for who I am, not for all the hoops I jump through. I’ll take this house any day. It’ll do.
Ginny Barker is a realtor who lives in the mountains of Western North Carolina with her long suffering husband (and business partner), Matt. They have four amazing adult children and one extroverted and energetic granddaughter. Ginny has a passion for the intersection of mental health and faith and is particularly vocal about the abuse of power in its various manifestations. She loves long walks, old houses, coffee, dogs, books, maps, and severe weather and, if she had her way, would spend her days as a storm chaser. She occasionally blogs her thoughts and experiences at Cheetos For Breakfast
Photo by Billy Pasco on Unsplash