Choosing to Love the Church
As a pastor’s kid who is now ordained herself, I am occasionally asked if I became a pastor because of being a pastor’s kid or in spite of being a pastor’s kid. My response is always, “both.” The truth is, I have known the wonder and beauty of the church and I have also had a front row seat to her brokenness and have been on the receiving end of the harm she can wield more than once. Yet through it all, I have remained convinced that the church is the most beautiful community on the earth. I still choose to hold to the gospel truth that God has established his church as his chosen instrument for bringing his restoration and reconciliation to the world. It is the bride and body of Christ and so, despite her failings, despite her brokenness, I cannot help but love her and feel called to serve her.
As one who has experienced spiritual abuse and has witnessed great amounts of religious trauma, I understand that loving the church is complicated. When the church has wounded us, there may be seasons in which we need to step away from church for a season. You may still be in a place in your own healing journey where you aren’t quite sure what loving the church could look like for you. If that’s you, I just want to encourage you to breathe and give yourself space as you heal. In fact, you truthfully don’t need to finish reading this blog. As you continue to move forward in your healing journey, Christ will restore you love for his bride and bring you to a body of believers that will be safe for you. For now, simply rest in his grace.
Perhaps your story is different, maybe you personally have not been wounded by the church or maybe you, like me, have come to a place in your healing journey where God has begun to restore your love for the church. The question for all of us then becomes, how do we do this well? How do we love the church amidst her brokenness? Today I want to offer you three ways to love the church well.
Don’t Ignore the Suffering: There is a temptation for those of us who love the church to ignore the broken places. We don’t want to speak poorly about the bride of Christ. However, love does not ignore broken places, it seeks to mend them. We do not want to disparage the church. We do not want to condemn her. Rather, we want to bring everything dark into the light of Christ that healing might come. This is what it looks like to love the church well. It is a naming of the brokenness, and acknowledgement of the harm done, and a fervent working towards restoration that the bride might be presented spotless on the day of her groom’s coming.
Carefully Examine What You Are Loving: When we speak of loving the church we run the risk of loving the wrong things. For some of us, we set out to love the body of Christ and end up loving buildings and certain forms and structures that have come to represent church to us, forgetting that church is not a one hour service with three songs and a 25 minute message but rather is the people of God. For many of us, we have so resisted loving a particular form or structure of church, that we have run into another trap. We have told ourselves that we are loving the church but we are really only loving individuals. For many of us who have been harmed within the structured church, this is often the trap we can fall into, and this is often what is seen in the growing conversation around religious trauma and spiritual abuse. Much of that conversation centers around the healing of individuals who have been harmed. This is essential and needed work. Loving individuals, unlike ascribing our love to buildings and certain forms of church, is good and we are called to do so. The problem is when we stop there. Loving individuals is not the same thing as loving the church. Loving the church requires loving a community of people, a body of people, a gathering of people who are worshipping Jesus and seeking to live for him together. It’s can get messy, but loving the church well means resisting both the temptation to love buildings or structures and also the temptation to only love individuals.
Hold to Hope: To love the church requires that we choose to believe what Jesus said about his church, that he will build it and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. We choose to live with hope that though the church has areas of great brokenness it is still the most beautiful community and the one through which God has chosen to work out his plan of reconciliation. As we maintain these convictions, this hope compels us to love the church and to work for her healing. It is this hope that has continued to fuel my own doctoral studies and remains at the center of all we do at Restor(y).
I want to close by offering you a story from one of my many prayer walks on this journey of seeking to love the church well. It was partway through my first year of my doctoral program and I had recently found out I was pregnant. Somewhere in the midst of the grueling morning sickness of the first trimester, I managed a walk. I hadn’t been able to eat much and my energy was low. I was overwhelmed at the prospect of raising a little baby while working on a doctorate. I remember praying and asking God if I needed to put my research aside for a season and focus on this little child he was giving me. Very clearly I felt the Spirit say to me, “You are doing this research for your child.” Whether you have children or not, the truth is, when we choose today to work for the health and wellbeing of the church, we are working for a future where phrases like “religious trauma” and “spiritual abuse” no longer fill headlines. We are working to ensure that our children grow up in churches that heal rather than harm. We are choosing to hold to the hope that God is not done with his church and it is worth it.
