She Speaks FireSample

Ideally, the church should be the one place where we can live authentically, without fear, as a community, but that’s not some people’s experience. Just as Jesus experienced before His crucifixion, the deepest bruises and bloodiest beatings often come at the hands of church people, not sinners.

Let me stop before anyone gets it twisted. I can tell you that I fundamentally, wholeheartedly, and unapologetically love God’s house. But I’d be lying if I told you the church hasn’t sometimes looked more like the enemy of Christ than the bride of Christ.

People expect blows of manipulation, abuse, and neglect from the world, but they don’t expect them in the name of their God. It changes something in the minds and hearts of believers when they experience their deepest pain in the house of God. Faith is the very fabric of the church, and when people are broken and bleeding at the hands of people they’d expected to trust, asking them to trust again in a faith community can be nearly impossible.

The truth is that community—not isolation—has always been a part of God’s redemptive plan for our lives. He draws us in with His loving-kindness but keeps us through His chosen instruments, which come in the form of people. It’s people who will encourage you and exhort you in the faith, so your heart doesn’t become hardened through the deceitfulness of sin (Hebrews 3:13).

If you’ve been part of a church community that has known the bloodshed and pain of spiritual manipulation, abuse, or neglect, I need you to know it may have changed you, but it didn’t change God.

I can tell you this with full confidence and authority because sin and shame in the garden may have changed Adam and Eve, but it didn’t change God. The first sin didn’t change the fact that God still, a millennia later, wants His sons and daughters to come back to His Son to experience a one-on-one encounter with a real Savior who could silence their shame once and for all. Just because you or I had an encounter with one of His sheep who went astray doesn’t mean God went astray too. He didn’t fail you and He didn’t forsake you. Your purpose didn’t change because your community got shaken or torn down. You’re going to heal and you’re going to move forward. Maybe not today and maybe not tomorrow, but you will heal.

Prayer

Lord, I am so grateful for all that You endured so that purity and truth can be restored in community. Thank You, and please help me live in community, not isolation. Amen.