Dear Church,

It’s time we do better. Pastors, leaders, elders, deacons, congregants, volunteers, givers. Collectively. It’s time.

Let’s. Do. Better.

The church is meant to be a place of restoration, reconciliation, and redemption. It’s supposed to be a safe place.

Instead, we’ve experienced retaliation and rejection. Again. I grieve for the bitter tastes of organized religion forming in my children’s mouths. Instead of hard hearts and complaining spirits, I pray that strength and courage flood their souls in order to boldly stand for truth and change.

I want to clear the air, because there has been some confusion around the topic. And it breaks my heart that my husband’s character is being questioned in this way.

PSA: My husband was not fired from his job because of a moral failure. Jon did not have an affair. He did nothing wrong.

I tried to go through the correct channels, and came up empty-handed. For three weeks I was ignored. And then my husband was fired. He was told he no longer met the biblical requirements of a pastor. (We’re still not sure which one; our questions remain unanswered.)

What do you do when you vocalize your concerns, and they close the doors in your face? What do you do when you ask the unwanted questions, and you’re no longer welcome as a result?

Pastors are quick to quote Matthew 18 and the “biblical model” to deal with issues and “offense”. But the knee-jerk response to questioning is to extinguish the gossip, and get rid of the “problem”.

What if the effects of narcissism cut so deep that the light can’t get in? What if the spiritual abuse and exploitation are too big to uncover? The wounded are cut off. The truth stays hidden. The wolves stay in the pasture with all the innocent, compliant sheep.

Instead of being a place of grace and healing, the church has once again become a distant religious system. Underneath the lies and deception, under all the masks and disguises, we find another cycle of spiritual abuse.

It’s not fair.

I rewind the tapes; I replay the scenes. The gaslighting. The blame. The assumptions. The pain. The grief cycle goes round and round. One minute I’m sobbing. The next I’m yelling. And when I find my footing, I’m stuck on this truth: it’s not fair.

God recently used a new church, a new friend, and a new sermon to remind me that Jesus was found guilty by the religious leaders even though he had done nothing wrong.

No matter what, God was with Him.

I was reading my daily Bible plan, and one of the chapters was about Joseph. He was wrongly accused of pursuing Potiphar’s wife, and then thrown in jail. It wasn’t fair.

“I was forcibly carried off from the land of the Hebrews, and even here I have done nothing to deserve being put in a dungeon.” – Genesis 40:15

But God was with him.

My heart breaks for my husband; what happened to him isn’t fair. What’s happening to our family isn’t fair. But God is with us. He is present. And He is creating beauty from ashes. He rescued us and brought us out into a spacious place. Our story isn’t over. Together, we turn the page; we begin again. And we fix our eyes on the One who called us, the One who marked out this race for us to run.