Lacking

So, now that you’ve heard some of my story: what I needed to quit and who I want to serve- I’d like to tell you what exactly I did with all of this. I wonder if it might give you some insights into how to proceed after spiritual abuse or a harmful church culture?

Before I left Radford, I started thinking about the inconsistencies that were present in my experience from the beginning. The hair splitting theology, the silencing and suppression of questions, and the mental gymnastics to justify their gender theology. I was deeply devastated by all of these things because, more than anything, I value honesty. You cannot live honestly if you live inconsistently. Inconsistency creates cognitive dissonance that you have to work really hard to justify. Thus, the mental gymnastics.

The discomfort that I felt with the culture surrounding me eventually grew into a wound that I could not stand anymore. It was like a slowly progressing disease. First, it was just an itchy spot on my skin. Then, after I scratched it for awhile, it grew into an open wound and started to spread. Finally, it became an abscess that was impacting my ability to live my life in a healthy way. I had to address it.

So, I took my concerns to God. I wish that I could tell you that I took them to God first and only. I did not. While I did not neglect airing my grievances in prayer, I also talked them out with my husband and others in the community. At that time, I was less cautious in choosing who to talk to and how. I drew the erroneous conclusion that Christian community was a safe place to “work out your salvation with fear and trembling” (Phil. 2:12). I have an unshakable hope that there are Christian communities where that is true. The one that I was a part of was, unfortunately for me, not such a place.

What I wish that I would have done was taken my concerns to God and a few other safe folks. When I took them to an unsafe community, it only compounded my issues. 

I spent years wrestling with God over the things that were passed off as “truth” to me. I sought his word, wise council of those outside the community, and the Holy Spirit. I read books and did thought experiments and agonized over things. This was a pretty miserable process until, years into it, I realized that I was not going to go to hell or be excluded from the Kingdom of God for having the wrong ideas or landing in a “wrong” place theologically. 

In the book of 1 Samuel, you’ll find the story of the prophet Samuel and David, the shepherd, soon to be king. There are a lot of details that I’m going to skip over, so do yourself a favor and read the whole account found in 1 Samuel 16. The few chapters before and after give you even more context. What I want to focus on is how Samuel, prophet of the Lord, misjudged what was necessary for a good leader. He loved the previous king, Saul so much that this chapter starts with God chastising him for still being sad over Saul’s failure as a king. 

When Samuel gets to David’s house to crown him, he has to go through all of David’s brothers before David’s dad even calls David into the room. God told Samuel, so Samuel told David’s father that one of his sons would be the king. David’s dad thought so little of David’s chances of being king that he didn’t even invite him to the annointing. David was the youngest and, in that culture, least likely for leadership. Your birth order qualified you more than other things. Samuel also thought that David’s oldest brother would surely be king because he was tall, strong, and good looking. 

But right in the middle of this passage we get a nugget of gold: “for the LORD sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the LORD looks on the heart” (v. 7).

It is this story and this passage that brought me so much comfort as I realized that the things that this community was “certain” about were not necessarily certainties in the Kingdom of God. In the same way that he does not care about how someone or something looks, he doesn’t care about whether or not we have the right ideas, important as those are. God cares, mostly, about our hearts.

Wherever you are in your faith or understanding of God, I want you to hear, loud and clear, that God cares about your heart. There are many in the community that I used to be a part of and those like them who would defame and criticize you for using the word deconstruction, but it’s such a helpful process. If ideas are so fragile that they cannot stand the test of deconstruction and close examination, then they aren’t ideas worth having. I don’t care if you think they’re Biblically founded. Good, solid deconstruction, like I’m advocating for, is Biblically based and interested in learning God’s heart, not cultural ideals. 

So, I deconstructed Western, white evangelicalism and I found it weak and lacking.

I found it not only lacking in substance, but fruit. When I decided to leave evangelicalism, I didn’t decide to leave God. Far from it. I went in search of a deeper, more realistic way to follow the Lord. Because of my work with Young Life, I had read widely across denominational persuasions. Much of what I’d found produced by Anglicans was compelling to me. The Lord was gracious when we went to leave Radford and led us to an Anglican church.

When people ask me why we decided to become Anglicans, the answer, for me, is really simple. The fruit that I found produced by Western Evangelicalism was bitter, sour, and rotten to the core. It produced judgmentalism, hatred, and outright meanness in those who subscribed to it. Gossip ran rampant in these communities and I found a spirituality based on white-knuckling your way through temptations and sin. I found an idea-based prosperity gospel where God would give you good things if you thought the right things and lived the right way. I found a toxic certainty that characterized anyone who disagreed in the slightest as a heretic. I found no beauty, only condemnation.

What I’ve experienced in my church community so far, and what I saw come out of Anglicanism prior to joining this community was almost unspeakably beautiful. There are stories, words, and songs to bring you to tears. There are people who understand suffering and hold fast to hope anyway. There is a deeply rooted theological understanding that takes conviction seriously without condemning those who disagree. Women aren’t second-class. There are many ways to live a God-honoring life. God is actually present with you in your fight against sin and there is hope to overcome it- no white knuckles. There’s also no certainty. We’re comfortable with mystery and open to letting God do his work in all his ways.

I’m fumbling a little as I grapple for words to communicate something deeply healing for me. Deconstructing the faith community that I found myself in throughout my twenties was the best thing I ever did for myself and my faith in Jesus.

I’d encourage you, if you find yourself in a similar place, to not be afraid to ask questions. Don’t be afraid to deconstruct your faith before God and see what’s still left standing. It doesn’t mean that everything you took off the walls is bad. It just means that it’s not necessary and anyone who claims that it is selling something. 

You don’t have to have the right ideas to follow Jesus. You just have to have the right heart. And I have yet to encounter a heart walking through deconstruction that isn’t consumed with Jesus and deeply grieved by those consumed with their ideas about him.