When a first-time guest comes to my church after belonging to a different congregation in the area, I brace myself. We used to call them “church shoppers,” those looking for a different youth program or sermon style, but now they are more often the walking wounded. They are not so much shopping as fleeing, cagey and cautious, wondering if they can risk pain to get involved in another church. They proceed to tell me a story—often one of abuse of pastoral power.
When congregants tell me their experiences of what many label “church hurt,” I believe them. Some pastors do wield power inappropriately. Yet when pastors tell me their own stories of church hurt, I also believe them. I can’t think of a time when I’ve sat with a pastor who didn’t have several stories: congregants who turned into bullies, volunteers who caused damage because they didn’t get their way, or an elder who went rogue. Members of the flock, too, can cause damage to good-hearted and hard-working pastors.
While I’ve heard congregants say, “The church hurt me,” I’ve never heard a congregant confess, “I hurt the church.” Similarly, I’ve heard many pastors say, “These congregants bullied me,” but I’ve yet to hear one say, “My use of power caused unnecessary pain and hurt.” Church hurt travels in both directions—from the pews to the pulpit and in reverse. Given these complexities, what are we to do?
We must start by understanding the power dynamic. Almost all congregants and pastors sense a power mismatch, and both sides feel at a disadvantage. Congregants see pastors as very powerful, while pastors see themselves as very human—and they see some congregants as powerful, especially when they form a mob.
It might surprise congregants to learn most pastors feel more vulnerable than powerful. When I was a young pastor, a particularly harsh critic would exaggerate his case in meetings. I thought he was being dishonest. Maybe he was, but over time I realized that because he felt a power imbalance he would overstate his case to match his perception of my power. This also can help explain the tendency for gossip. Some people gossip because they are emotionally immature, but others do it to power up. Feeling weak, they form a team to offset their perceived power imbalance. Too often, that team quickly becomes a mob.
In my early meetings with congregants, I learned that my words carried more weight than I thought they did because I was the primary leader and Bible teacher. I often don’t consider how opening the Bible each week affects a church’s power dynamics. Pastors come with a natural intimidation factor that we can be blind to. When a pastor manages the staff, the budget, and the pulpit, that is a lot of power—felt or not.
And church power is unlike any other organizational power because of the way we baptize it. Some pastors truly believe they are God’s only authority for the church. They’re rare—and dangerous. Yet there’s also the challenges of two warring ministries, both convinced they were doing God’s will while gossiping and wreaking havoc in one another’s lives. Sometimes our earnestness for the mission can cause us to violate the fruit
of the Spirit.
While some church hurt is a result of evil behavior and systemic cover-up, most of it is a result of unmanaged triggers and assumptions rather than of ill intent. When our assumptions about God, ourselves, and others don’t match those around us, we get triggered and reactive. Our next move is often where the damage occurs, and it is difficult to notice these things in ourselves. But we can all learn to notice and manage our triggers to increase the chance of deeply connecting with others.
One of the great tragedies of church hurt is how closely it is tied to faith deconstruction. I ran into my own intense deconstruction in the late 1990s after a stint as a trauma chaplain. I needed time to detangle my assumptions about healing and God’s intervention with what Scripture actually taught. In the same way, people recovering from church hurt need time to detangle their experiences with church people and leaders from their faith in Jesus.
I find some deconstruction to be necessary for faith to survive. But too often, people deconstruct their entire belief in God because of their experience in church. The Western church is already hyperindividualistic, and too many deconstruct into a personalized, customized faith that doesn’t require the difficult work of loving and serving the body of Christ. As counterintuitive and vulnerable as it might be, the best place to work out deconstruction is in the local church, discussing it with others, bringing hurts into the light for recovery and perspective.
Again, for some, the hurt is genuine trauma and should be treated as such. While some have endured horrific spiritual abuse, most of us weren’t abused; we were burned. Fire can consume, but it can also forge. My hope is that we are forged by the fire of church hurt, not consumed by it, and that our church hurt would grow our empathy rather than our bitterness.
To start, we can carefully listen to how we talk about our experience to see if we are more burned or forged. A healthy posture to emulate is that of my friend Steve Carter. Steve served on staff at Willow Creek Community Church when its former senior pastor, Bill Hybels, left a wake of destruction in the aftermath of spiritual and sexual abuse and cover-up. Although Steve was hurting, he said, “The church didn’t hurt me; five people hurt me.”
I find that stunning. I am prone to exaggerate and generalize my pain, but his simple comment has helped me test my own language around my church-hurt experiences, both as a congregant and as a pastor. Our best hope to rightsize the power dynamic is to rightsize ourselves: We are human-sized, limited in actual power—but worshipers of the One True Power.
Steve Cuss is the host of CT’s podcast also called Being Human.
Being Human: A column by Being Human’s host, Steve Cuss.
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