Dear my former church
I dearly wish you had been everything you said you were. I wih you had been a community. I wish you had been a place genuinely committed to people’s healing, a place where people could ask questions, a place were people honoured commitments, a place where people extended care.
I loved you so much and I gave you my time, my heart, my life. And you go on, unaffected by my life, unaffected by the lives of many like me who were spat out, confused, heartbroken and bewildered. Those of us who loved you so much but were never loved back because we didn’t somehow fit the mould - whatever that mould was.
It wasn’t just that I was on your staff team but unlike other staff members you weren’t interested in my development and that as soon as the leadership changed you made me redundant without taking time to get to know who I was, what I could do, what I was called to, what I dreamed of.
Nor was it just that the people in the church who promised they would not abandon and hurt me as others had done, that they were committed to me no matter what didn’t hold true to their words, didn’t care, had better things to do, better people to spend time with.
Although those things hurt, it was the way you brushed aside my questions and confusion and hurt that killed me the most - not just because it happened to me but because it could happen to so many others like me. Because you think everything that happened is purely down to me being just generally messed up, therefore there is nothing to learn from this experience for you.
When I said I wasn’t sure what the gospel was, when I didn’t see the things in the Bible reflected in my life, when I never felt peace or joy or any of that stuff, when everything God said to me the opposite happened, when my head and heart were so messed up by the failure of God’s word to come to fruition, when I saw no fulfillment on his promises or people’s promises, when I found no healing despite so much prayer ministry, when I asked for help because worship services always made me feel evil and because every Christian I tried to befriend ignored me no matter what I tried, when I was told (and was convinced myself) there were demons in me and most of all when I was devastated to the point of self-harming, panicking and attempting suicide because I had no love, no support and no answers, you told me everything that happened was my fault (with no explanation of why), you shouted at me for being upset and you told me to get over myself.
When I was most in need of people to lament for me, to call out to God for me, to sit in the sackcloth and ashes, you told me there was nothing that could be done for me and cut me off.
What will you do to the next depressed person, the drug addict, the prostitute, the next lonely person, the bereaved, the outcast? You say you want people like this in your church - but you don’t. Only the sorted, the popular, the straightforward fit in. the messy are only allowed if they get unmessy very quickly. There is no room for questions, no room for doubt and very little love for anyone who isn’t perfect.
I believed you, I believed God and I took the most risks I have ever taken in my life in loving, trusting and hoping him and you.
After nine years in your church I left in a worse mess than when I joined (no mean feat), and I’m not sure I will ever join a church again, other than some charade attendance to please my family who would emotionally blackmail and nag me to death if I ever dared to not be a good Christian. In my own heart though, I would no longer call myself a Christian, or at least I would say I was an agnostic Christian although I still try to live by some Christian principles, and I would still love it to be true.
I don’t think I will ever understand what happened - and until I do I will never dare take the same risks of loving, believing or trusting again.
Before I joined your church I was scared to hope, to love, to trust, to believe. You made me drop my guard and then beat me to death when I was most vulnerable. I loved you so much, but it was an abusive relationship. You made out I was the abusive one because I wasn’t perfect, because I wasn’t straightforward, because I got upset, I questioned, I expected returns on the things I was promised. All I did was believe and trust and obey - and have the audactity to hurt and to question when these things didn’t work.
I just wish you’d wanted me to be a part of you as much as I wanted to be.
I know what I believed God said to me, and so many of you confirmed those things. Just because you then randomly decided to do the opposite to what God was saying and told me I needed to go with your decisions because they must be from God even though you’d had no ‘words’ or anything doesn’t mean what you did was of Him. I may have heard him wrong, but if that is possible, it is also possible your words and decisions were wrong, especially as many of them were conflicting and contradictory. I wish someone had cared enough to at least understand the confusion and sit with me through it. The one person I trusted most even said they had to leave me because they were getting confused too and couldn’t handle it.
I know you would tell me the way I am living (by not going to church etc) is wrong, but no more wrong than the things you said or did. I don’t know any more if there is a right, if there is a God. If there was, why didn’t he intervene?
Life is not the way your preach it to be (become a Christian, do everything God’s way, do everything you are told, and your life will be amazing) and until you accept it, your large front door and large back door will always remain.
clergy abuse, depression, desire for community, destructive practices, fallout, forced out of church, frustration, hate, unforgiven by churchEmail this LFL Content to a Friend
Wow. Thank you for sharing this letter with us. I am sorry that you have gone through what you have. Know that there is at least one person who has heard your story and was affected by it.
Tim
That is so sad. You don’t deny your problems, but their doctrine sounds questionable, too, and may have caused harm. In any case, to brush aside your questions, confusion, or hurt is so bad. Like you said, if we can’t find the answer yet, at least we can sit together in sackcloth and ashes. You trusted them enough to talk about your doubts with them; they should appreciate that. The fact you’ve been wrestling with doubt is a likely indication you’re a Christian, and once God brings you through this you’ll be able to help others with similar experiences. But I think you should be honest with yourself about your doubts and not be in a hurry for answers - you are still so young. It’s sad also your family would nag you instead of just being there for you when you’re comfortable talking about it. Thank you for sharing. I haven’t been very faithful about praying but I’ll try to remember you in prayer each day.
Hi Angel
I am posting on this site as darknight, its a reference to what St John of the Cross wrote about The Dark Night of the Soul. It sounds to me as if you were a Protestant, probably Evangelical church. I was and the leaders, and followers were completely ignorant of spiritual formation, perhaps wilfully. I went through something quite like the dark night of the soul, and it sounds to me as if your experience is similar. You speak of confusion, of struggling to hear clearly from God. St John also speaks about these things. My own experiences were not exactly like St John’s but what I learned from his writings and those of others like Teresa of Avila is that in two thousand years of Christianity experiences like mine are not unknown, and certainly not a sign that God isn’t there. I haven’t experienced the blisfullness St John speaks of, but what I do now know is that spiritual life is so much more complex than the trite answers of far too many “churches”.
Those who claim to lead who don’t know about this, who berate those going through these experiences, merely reveal their own ignorance, the shallowness of their own experience.
There are other traditions in Christianity than Christianity by performance. Henri Nouwen writes from the contemplative tradition, others write from other perspective whether it Annie Lammott from her own crazy but on target perspective or John Eldredge, whose writings are surprisingly full of references to the saints from all the ages past.