I’m sure that there are some people who have chosen this path outside the walls. But for me, and for most of the folks I’ve heard about–it’s more like this path chose us.
If you’re one of those people who chose…sometimes I envy you.
It would have been nice to have just come to the conclusion one day that institutional Christianity wasn’t working the way it should, and just walked away in search of something more real. It would have been nice to have had the foresight and wisdom to realize this system wasn’t cutting it–that something more was needed–and gone in search of that “something more.”
It would have been nice to have just gotten bored with things, or even disillusioned. It would have been nice to have come to this place devoid of emotional complications.
But it seems that for quite a few of us, it didn’t happen that way. We didn’t just get disillusioned. We got hurt.
For me, there have been several marking moments, several seasons in my life where I got hurt, misused, or let down by broken people working in a broken system. Each experience successively added to my disillusionment and alienation, until I could see a pattern, a common thread tying these moments of pain together.
Some of these things happened many years ago; some happened a little more recently, but are still part of the past. Healing has come, but it takes time. One huge marking moment occured nearly 9 years ago when I left my ChurchLeftBehind. After all that time, I’d like to tell you that it doesn’t hurt anymore.
But that wouldn’t be true. Sometimes it still hurts. Hurts like hell.
Why does it hurt? Because it wasn’t really the institution itself that wounded me. It was people. I didn’t just have some sort of philosophical difference of opinion. I formed relationships, I gave my heart away, I did life with these people. I loved. I trusted, and found my trust broken.
David the psalmist put it so well:
“For it is not an enemy who reproaches me, then I could bear it….but it is you, a man my equal, my companion and my familiar friend; we who had sweet fellowship together walked in the house of God in the throng.” (Ps. 55:12-13, NASB)
This isn’t to say that those of us who find ourselves outside the walls have simply come here due to an emotional over-reaction–as if to say we are in the wrong place now. It’s just to say it isn’t always easy to separate emotion from reason, and we often have to sort out what we feel even as we’re sorting out what we believe. No wonder this transition place can be so messy.
Again, I don’t particularly blame the institution for these wounds; it was people who did the wounding. And that’s important to say, because people are people, and people are broken, and anytime you get around people–inside or outside the system–there’s a risk of getting hurt. Being outside the walls doesn’t guarantee we won’t be hurt again–and that isn’t really the point. But for me, I can easily see that there is so much about those institutional structures that promotes woundedness, and I think it is much better to navigate the murky waters of human relationships without doing it in an unsafe environment. My woundings were only part of the process that showed me a broken system behind the wounds, and part of why I no longer walk those paths.
But people did the wounding. And so we must seek to forgive and not become embittered. The object here is not to isolate ourselves, nor is it to avoid pain. I have lived most of my life with my primary objective being to avoid pain at all costs. I have come to see plainly that this is no way to live. There will be pain. Bank on it. So rather, the object is to walk close to the Healer of all wounds, and with His help, to be willing risk loving again and again. Because the path of love is not a path of safety; but “safety” in this case equals an empty, loveless existence. Outside the walls, we must still forgive, and we must still seek to love as Jesus loved. I have also come to see that being willing to risk the pain carries a much greater reward than protecting myself from pain. And Jesus is the ultimate example of that.
I realize I’m rambling a bit, and I don’t really know why I’m thinking about all this. I’m not really grieving at the moment, no tears. I’m fine, really. I guess it’s just the thoughts in my head, and perhaps putting them down here might help someone else. I guess I just realize that for many like myself, seeking a better way has involved more than just my taking inventory of a broken system and deciding that things didn’t add up. It’s been an emotion-filled process on many levels, woundedness just being one factor. It’s a very real journey with very real people, feeling very real things. All the more reason why we need grace for one another.
Wayward Son
Musician. Composer. Recovering perfectionist. Minister-in-transition. Lover of puns. Hijacker of rock song references. Questioner of the status quo.
I'm not really a rebel. Just a sincere Christ-follower with a thirst for significance that gets me into trouble. My quest has taken me over the fence of institutional Christianity. Here are some of my random thoughts along the way. Read along, join in the conversation. Just be nice.
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Jeff-
I identify so much with what you wrote here! I think most people outside the church system who love the kingdom and the church have been forced out on some level, perhaps by being unheard.
Once we are on the outside of this thing we have given our lives to, we have several things to process. One is grief because we have lost something we greatly valued. Another is relational pain because, as you wrote, it is people who hurt us. Then we have to evaluate our relationship to the church system. Are we going to try to get back in somewhere else or regard the system as generally, fatally flawed? Perhaps hardest for those of us who were ultimate insiders (paid staff,) we have to decide who we really are and how we will make a living. No wonder it hurts!
Yet, I can’t help but think that the church is headed toward an unanticipated revival.
Hi Jeff,
I have been reading some of your blog for a while now, I so appreciate your candidness and transparency in sharing your inner transformational struggles.
This was riveting Bro, “. But for me, and for most of the folks I’ve heard about–it’s more like this path chose us.” YES indeed it is! Sorta has the flavour of, ‘You have not chosen me, but I have chooses you, and we love Him because He first loved us.’
I remember after being euphemistically ‘let go’ of my position as a pastor within the Vineyard back in May of 1991, there was so much hurt, I was numb.
The pivotal turning point for me in the thick of this hounding relentless bludgeoning was when Papa spoke directly to this very hurt, devastated son, ‘It was not those flesh and blood friends, family that hurt you, it was Me, using these human instruments to accomplish my purposes.
In a flash, all of the bitterness, blaming, came to a sudden halt, I was freed to further enter into what might lie ahead and why He had given me the invitation to either stay where I was and die, or to go and live.
When He spoke to my heart about (and this was after I was let go from being the assistant pastor) staying and dying, it was a personal word to me, it had NO reflection upon my siblings that particular morning, I have no idea of what or anything He might have being doing in their lives but He most definitely had my attention. I accepted His invitation, ‘to go and live’ and to this day I am on a journey ‘outside the camp’ of discovery, finding so many delightful treasures my Father has hidden for me and not from me.
For what its worth, imo it was a setting of wonder and glorious innocence that Adam and Eve basked in, but it was not until their treasonous and willful defiant act of rebellion that they discovered their need.
I am experiencing the needed and often recurring crashing/crushing as it were in my life walk with my Father, and through such painful encounters realizing afresh my deep, deep need for Him.
Being extricated from the Matrix of religion is a life long journey, but as we overcome, we experience true Life.
Blessings to you my friend
http://andthenlifehappened.blogspot.com/
I’ve just ‘stumbled’ on this post.
In some ways I’ve been ‘outside the four walls’ for some 40 years. I’ve never been in a leadership position within the church and until last summer I never felt I had a faith to share.
That has all changed now – but I have no idea where I am being led.
I just know that there is a real work of the Spirit involved with the way in which people are being drawn away from the churches that they may have attended for many years.
I sense that as a result of my own wilderness experience I can begin to share with others on a similar journey.
There has been a lot of pain – but when you haven’t been in a leadership position it may have been easier to come to terms with ‘the baggage of religion’.
hey jeff, i just got this link from grace’s blog and i really connected with it. the journey “out” is a really painful one…sometimes i am fine and then other days i am like “wow, that really really really really hurt”. i am two years out, even though the refuge is a faith community, it is so unlike “church” that i have in effect, left the old system 100% completely. the people who hurt me are happy and fine, don’t think about all of the carnage that was created far beyond me, and sometimes that is what feels so weird. like it was such a big deal to me but pretty much not even a blip on their radar. bizarre. i am so thankful for the pain, it does help clarify in so many ways but it still doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt. anyway, thanks for sharing. you are so not alone in the wacky grief process…kathy
Thanks to all who have commented so far (and feel free to chime in)!
Glenn,
“Yet, I can’t help but think that the church is headed toward an unanticipated revival.”
AMEN TO THAT!
Rich & Pete–the two new commentors:
Thanks so much for sharing a bit of your journeys. I’ll look forward to checking your blogs and tracking with you to see where God leads you.
Kathy,
I’ve been checking your blog since Glenn’s synchroblog, and I appreciate your heart, your insight, and your comments here. Thanks!
You are so right about needing grace. It’s the only way we can survive.
Possibly the real issues are the lies that we subconciously embrace about church – inside or outside the walls. Until we deal with the lies we will continually walk around with unmet expectations and unhealed wounds.
The truth is that healthy and unhealthy people exist inside and outside of the walls. It is not so much about institutions so much as it is about our belief about them.. if we embrace a lie about house churches it may be just as damaging as a lie about traditional church.
The issue is not so much in the expression of church as it is in the belief about the expression. Hope ths makes sense.
KB,
I think you make some good points here–especially about the fact that there is unhealthiness both in and out of church institutions.
I think, however, it might be oversimplifying to suggest that the woundedness comes merely from our wrong beliefs and unmet expectations about the institution–just as it would be oversimplifying to say that the institution is to blame for all our problems.
In my case, the leaders who wounded me didn’t just let me down, and I didn’t merely “perceive” a wound. They did actual things that no Christian ought to do, inside or outside the walls. However, I understand the climate in which those woundings took place, and a huge factor was the fact that those leaders felt they needed to “protect their position”–a position clearly marked out for them by the institutions in which they served. In other words, I believe the system *encouraged* and *promoted* the woundings; it did not *cause* them.
Most of my ramblings on this blog are more pragmatic about this stuff–what works, what doesn’t work. I posted this one just to say that it isn’t always that cut-and-dried–sometimes you have to process some pain, too. To me, though, the inordinate amount of woundedness that occurs in the institutional climate is evidence that this system is not working well.
Jeff,
Possibly those leaders who hurt you did so because of the lies that they embraced about positional authority.
I think the issue is that it is not so much about the expression of church but about the lies that people embrace about church and about authority. People who embrace a lie about authority will act in ways that are unloving and uncaring. On the other side, people who embrace those lies are more susceptible to wounds from those kinds of leaders.
I had to get free of that lie a few years ago.. when I did I was set free to forgive from my heart .. truth set me free from the lie.
Hope this explains my thinkings a bit better.
Blessings, Bob
Thanks for this post, Jeff. I would probably fall into the category of those ‘envied’ (left for reasons other than wounding), but my parents went through a similar process that you and Grace and Former Leader and so many others went through. I was only 10 years old (this was in the 1980s), and there were some heavy repercussions for me as well, but I gleaned so much about discerning spiritual abuse from their devestating experience that I think it saved me from a lot. So in the grief and frustration and processing, I hope people realize that they are also paving the way for future generations. And that is a tremendous blessing! I’m thankful.
Leaving from boredom and dissillusionment isn’t exactly glamorous though. I would agree with you that it is less painful, but still there has been the pain of loneliness, and the pain of being misunderstood and misjudged. Ah, but this has always been the experience of disciples of Jesus! So we’re in good company! 🙂
KB,
Thanks for the additional clarity, and for your take on things. I can see your point about the expression itself not being of the utmost importance–and I think that’s significant because to place too much importance on it could cause us to be just as religious about new expressions as we were about the old ones. Even so…there are lots of other reasons besides lies and woundings that cause people to leave the “system” (see Sarah’s comment, for example), and in the midst of all this, I sense God is shifting His church into some new expressions. Part of my own journey is a deep hunger for His fullness, and for being in the center of what He is doing.
Sarah,
I think my 18-year-old son is in the same boat with you. He hasn’t been personally wounded nearly as much as we, but he’s seen it firsthand, and has a very similar bent on things, from what you’re describing. He won’t go near traditional church, yet it’s obvious he has a deep love for God. It will be awesome to see where that will take him.
Oh, what a wonderfully written post. I’ll have to come back to it. I’m grappling with some issues right now. I’m surprised to find myself dealing with these things, because I really am (was?) comfortable in my church. I’m not sure what comes next. I just feel like my job is to keep my mouth shut, so as not to alienate others, while waiting for the lesson God is trying to teach me to become clear. Lonely time, for a fact.