Kids, Consent, and Church

In my ministry as a church finder, I help people who are wounded by their church experience to return to Christian community of various denominations.  These folks have been hurt for a variety of reasons – their gay son was rejected by church leadership, they were told they couldn’t serve in ministry because they are divorced, they witnessed abuse but told not to report it, they were continually taught they were inherently bad and evil, they were told they couldn’t leave their abusive husband.  The list goes on and on. 

So when I hear sexual assault victims come forward to accuse their perpetrators and others question why they didn’t say something sooner, I know why.  I know because of my own assault experience and because of my ministry with the wounded.  We don’t teach consent well in America.  I have never accused my attacker and probably never will.  Many times, teaching consent starts with church and that can go well but it can also go very badly.

Church wounding is a deep, deep cut that takes a long time to heal, if ever.  There is a grieving in both admitting that you have been hurt (a profound loss of innocence) and that you feel you must leave.  For many, leaving their church is a death.  It is the death of community, relationships, and hopes.  But standing up and saying, “this place will not hurt me anymore” is a boundary.  We talk about physical consent but there is also emotional consent.  And we don’t teach this well.

As I hear the stories of parents struggling with leaving their church community after a wounding experience involving their children, I am learning more and more.  They often feel they are being “judgmental” or “un-Christlike” if they abandon their faith community.  Christian teaching will tell us to forgive 70 times seven, right?  This scripture, as well as others, is misused to create an “anything goes” dynamic and it is dangerous.  Forgiving each other does not mean accepting abuse and hurt. 

These parents worry about the lesson they are teaching their children if they abandon their church instead of staying and working towards reconciliation.  In the Episcopal Church, we believe the mission of the Church is to be reconciled to God and each other but this does not mean that we tolerate hurtful treatment.  Reconciliation can take many forms and it can be done without remaining within a painful community.  It may take years to be reconciled and in the meantime, we are teaching our children.

Here is the lesson I tell parents they are teaching their children when they leave their church:  You are teaching them consent.  You are teaching them that consent is not only physical, it is emotional and spiritual.  You are teaching them it is okay and healthy for them to reject hurtful treatment and protect themselves.  This is an important lesson for all people.  No one has the right to hurt you and especially not in the name of Jesus.  You are empowering them with consent and that is a great gift that will serve them in all areas of their lives.   

Our faith communities need to challenge us to leave our comfort zones, grow more Christ-like, and take risks in the name of Jesus.  They are not there to convince us of our unworthiness, to wound our souls, or stress us out. 

When I hear the joy in the voice of these tender souls when they discover a Christian community that loves them just the way they are, where their soul feels safe, I am over the moon.  Sometimes, even worshipping one time in a place that is loving and welcoming is profoundly healing.  And I am continually amazed at how God shows up in these people’s lives and opens all the right doors for them.  It is truly a miracle.

Seek and you will find.  Knock and the door will be opened for you.  What are you waiting for? 

Taking a Chance on Love

When my husband and I were dating, I was the one who said I love you first to which he responded, “oh.”  This was not the reaction I was expecting.  I felt completely ridiculous.  I pretty much figured the relationship was over; that he did not feel the same way I did and that he was likely getting advice from his friends about how to end it.  At the time, Ryan was a social worker and worked with a team of women who were glad to give him dating advice.  Apparently, the women in his office were horrified when they learned that he was in love with me and didn’t say so.  He cleared this up much to my relief!  This is a happy ending but I have had my share of heartbreak as I am sure you have, too.  We humans can be unpredictable and fickle when it comes to love. 

The Good News is there is a love that is unconditional and unfailing and that is the love that Jesus has for each of us.  This love has no limits.  Jesus doesn’t love us because we’re cute, funny, smart, charming, or talented.  He loves us because we are a child of God and he is our brother.  Tragically, some of you have been hurt by your Christian brothers or sisters and are still trying to recover.  Please know that Jesus loves you extravagantly.  We must separate the actions of imperfect humans from the true love that Jesus has for us.  That Jesus you read about in the Bible, the one that breaks the rules to heal the suffering, he is crazy in love with you. 

If you are still searching for a Christian community where you can be yourself, don’t lose heart.  We are wired for relationship and not meant to be alone.  Do your research, pray for guidance, and like any healthy relationship, move at your own pace.  Ask the hard questions.  While you search for a church home, be your true self. If you feel too much pressure to conform or fit in, listen to your gut and keep looking.  God wants to use all of you for his purpose because he is tickled as punch with you as you are. 

And if you would like the help of a spiritual matchmaker, send me a private message through Facebook/Twitter/Instagram.  I confidentially help people all over the country who have been wounded by their church experiences return to Christian community.  It is the joy of my life to help others find a loving, affirming, merciful Christianity that truly reflects Jesus of Nazareth.  These places do exist!

Lastly, remember the purpose of being a part of a Christian community is not so you can be a better person.  Christian community is our place to practice loving without bounds, not practice being perfect.  The brave folks who walk through the church doors with their scars and broken hearts, taking a chance on love, these seekers are my heroes.  Jesus loves you.  This I know. 

Losing My Life

For much of my early adult life, I coped with stress by making changes.  I would assess my situation and figure out if there was anything I could change to relieve my stress.  These would be external things like change jobs, change my child’s preschool, or change my city.  Making changes made me feel in control and like I had taken concrete measures to address my emotional distress.  While the Serenity Prayer bids us to “change the things we can,” I didn’t pay much attention to “accept the things we cannot change” part. As I got older, I became more self-aware of this as my personal coping mechanism.

  

These changes were not usually done rashly but they were not always effective.  And since they were external, situational aspects of my life, it didn’t require me to do the inner work required to find peace within myself.  One of the most significant examples is getting a divorce to relieve the crushing depression I experienced.  It didn’t work but it did give me the time and space to get treatment.  I count being able to reconcile with my loving and devoted husband as evidence of my personal growth from some very dark times. 

What reinforced this coping mechanism was that professionally, it served me well.  Being able to assess a dysfunctional situation and determine what changes would rectify the problem was a valued skill.  I became an expert problem solver and change agent.  During the last 13 years of my career, I was never hired to maintain anything.  Over and over, I was brought in to either create something from nothing or to completely revamp what was currently in place.  If a company was in a time of transition, that was attractive to me, especially because I lacked a college degree and when companies are in chaos, their standards get, shall we say, flexible.  The messier it was, the more I wanted it because I knew I could hit the home runs and prove myself quickly.  I earned a reputation for this messy work and never had to look for a job.  Layer on top of this my perfectionism and I finally wore myself out and left the corporate world in 2014.  [See “Following Your Heart” post for more on that.] 

For the past several months, I have been in a period of discernment.  I never seem to quite settle down for good in my life.  While I call it “restlessness,” my spiritual director thinks “responsiveness” is a better term.  So, in response, I am stepping down from several roles in my life including  my evangelism staff position at my church and my advisory role for Invite Welcome Connect at University of the South (Beecken Center) at the end of this month.  These were not easy decisions and ones that I have checked over and over to make sure they were not reactions to stress.  I still feel called to coach and speak on evangelism, help wounded seekers across the country find Christian community, and to finally create time and space to write a spiritual memoir which honestly scares me.  Prayers appreciated!

I am responding to a call for peace versus perfection, to simplicity versus success.  Letting go of so much of my external identity comes with grief.  Jesus said whoever loses his life for my sake, will find it.  I hope so because constantly proving myself is exhausting.  It feels like Jesus is taking me down to bare bones which doesn’t sound very life-giving but I’m going with it. 

After spending much of my life working 150% to make up for not having the right credential, giving up these positions made me rethink my identity.  I now know that the only credential I have that matters is that I’m sealed by the Holy Spirit in Baptism and marked as Christ’s own forever.  And no one can take that away.  And I can’t change it.  That’s a good thing.  A very good thing. 

Thinking Like Hippies

I have a bumper sticker on my car that reads “Worship like catholics.  Think like hippies.  Episcopalians.”  A few weeks ago, while getting gas, a man asked me if, after I worshiped like a catholic, I smoked marijuana – not exactly in those words.  To him, hippies do drugs.  This bumper sticker was the result of a conversation my teenage son was having a with a friend he invited to church.  On the way to worship, he was trying to explain to her what to expect and finally just said, “basically, we worship like Catholics and think like hippies.”  To my son, hippies represent love and acceptance.  To him, our church is love and acceptance.  And, we Episcopalians do worship like Roman Catholics, but the beliefs differ.

We all thought his explanation of the Episcopal Church was hilarious.  When I shared this story on the Episcopalians on Facebook page, it was liked about 1,000 times and I started receiving private messages urging me to put it on t-shirts and bumper stickers.  So, I did.  (Link is below if you want some swag.)

I would bet you’ve seen “God is love” on bumper stickers and the like but I am not sure that all people believe that.  There is much said and done in the name of God that is not loving.  And it is more than a shame, it is tragic.  Whenever I hear Christians speaking with judgment and disdain in their words, it breaks my heart.  In my ministry, I have the honor of hearing the stories of people seeking God.  They are looking for the followers of Jesus: …everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another. John 13:35  But so many more have just stopped looking because they don’t see Christians who love.

Where are the Christians that we can identify by the way they love?  I hear too many whose conversation reflect a belief that following Jesus is about following rules.  And if you don’t follow the rules, you are a sinner and unworthy of belonging in Christian community.  Newsflash – we are all sinners and we all fall short.  Jesus says over and over that we won’t be justified by following the law; in Galatians 5:4, Paul specifically says if you’re trying to do this, you have cut yourself off from Christ and fallen away from grace.  After repeatedly being asked about the laws and rules, Jesus finally boiled it down to love God and love each other.  Mic drop.

So, after a lifetime of trying to approach things in a logical manner, I am finally coming to understand the supreme importance of approaching all things with my heart.  This is a struggle for me as I was rewarded in my business career by suppressing emotion and remaining analytical.  And, as a person who struggles with depression, I question my motives since my mind can play tricks on my moods.  However, I am seeing that living with our hearts is a matter of life and death.

People are suffering, physically and spiritually, due to our intellectual, dispassionate, and many times, judgmental mindsets.  Where do your actions and opinions come from?  Your head or your heart?  And don’t get me wrong, when it comes to solving problems, we need your brains.  But when we define a problem, when we take a stance, when we share our faith, is it Good News?  Are your opinions rooted in compassion or doctrine?  If the reason you talk, act, or vote a certain way is because you want people to follow the rules, then think again.  I challenge you to examine your heart and ask yourself if viewpoints rooted in right/wrong and black/white fulfill our commandment to love each other. 

Do the rules you want in place prevent us from hurting each other or do they give us license to do so? 

For Episco-Hippie bumper stickers, tshirts, and other merchandise, visit www.cafepress.com/evangelismninja

How Do I Love Me?

Most of us have a longing to feel close to God during worship and to do that, we must be emotionally open.  Our walls must come down in order to let the Spirit penetrate our souls.  That is a very scary proposition for many, especially those wounded by their church experience.  It’s one of the reasons that people cry in church when they can’t cry elsewhere.  It’s one of the reasons people who are struggling actually don’t come to church sometimes because they can’t hide their pain at the same time as being open to God.  This is why it is so important to create cultures of safety and vulnerability in our churches by truly knowing each other, with all our faults and shortcomings, in great love and mercy. 

As I prepare to take some Sabbath time from my ministry, I keep reminding myself that it is okay to rest and be still.  For most of my life, rest was only deserved after everything else was completed.  Being still could only happen as a reward for work done.  Looking back, I see it was a coping mechanism for my depression; get through everything that was expected of me and then I could reward myself somehow.  It kept me moving forward when I wanted to crumble.  Over the years, supervisors have told me, “be kind to yourself.”  I never had a clue what that meant.  Get a manicure?  Take a vacation?  Be still with God.  That is the answer and it’s taken me many, many years to accept it. 

Walking with others on their faith journeys requires my full presence and all of my emotions.  There is no way to fake this ministry. To nurture the divine in others, I have to nurture the divine in myself and I have to take care of my soul as a top priority, not a last one.   So as I ponder the necessity and hopes for my downtime, I am trying to make peace with being kind to myself first.  God worked for seven days and then rested.  I think too often we stretch that “work and then rest” model to the breaking point, well beyond seven days.  For my own spiritual health, I find that I need daily Sabbath time as well as extended Sabbath time to stay connected with the Spirit and to be able to be fully present with others.  I am continually amazed at how God’s peace is with me when I love myself first.  Even a few minutes of meditation and beautiful music before diving into my day is transformational.  And the more simple I am about it, the more I feel God’s presence. 

I recently had an exchange with someone about grace.  Her perspective was that God’s grace transforms us – allows us to kick a drug addiction or the like – essentially improve.  This was a wake-up call to me.  I have never viewed grace in this way.  From what I see in my ministry, grace shows us how to love ourselves and others more.  When I invite others into Christian community, it is not an invitation to become better people but an invitation to experience compassion for ourselves and others.  When we encourage each other to be transformed, it is not to do better or be better, but to simply love more.  The premise that we need to go to church to “keep us on the straight and narrow” or to “be the best version of ourselves” is shallow theology. 

Jesus tried to boil it down for us:  Love yourself and love others.  And it had nothing to do with being good enough.  He consistently modeled loving those who were despised.  So, as we Christians work to change the world, let us remember that each of us deserves love and rest.  Our churches do not exist to improve anyone but to teach us how to see the divine in all people with great love and mercy. 

How can you prepare to love others more by loving yourself today?  And not because you feel you deserve it but because God is waiting to sit with you and love you unconditionally.  

The Human Stage

I only perform in live theatre every few years now but there was a time when I would appear in three to four shows a year.  During that time, I would invite anyone and everyone to come and typically groups from my day jobs would attend.  I called it “theatre evangelism.”  Little did I know that my vocation would be Christian evangelism all these years later.  I invited people to the theatre with abandon.  Whether the show was dramatic or comedic, there was real emotion experienced by all of us through the magic of live theatre – a connection that crossed all sorts of lines - and that is truly what I was inviting others to experience.  

As we observe the birthday of the civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. in the US, I am struck by how incredibly relevant his words are today.  I am also reminded of Dr. Brené Brown’s recent book, Braving the Wilderness, where she talks about dehumanization which is the process by which our natural inhibitions against harming others of our species are removed.  Dehumanization starts with language and moves to images, creating an enemy or less-than-human status of others.  This tragically allows entire groups of people to be morally excluded from (or undeserving of) humane treatment.  This happened in the 1850’s, the 1960’s and it’s happening now to immigrants, refugees, the LGTBQ community, the poor, victims of sexual assault.  The list goes on and on.  Dehumanization makes things like discrimination, genocide, human trafficking, and indifference possible.  When you start hearing human beings described in callous language and that language being accepted and defended, dehumanization is in process.

Back to the theatre.  As I get ready to perform, I spend time letting go of my own reality and stepping into the shoes of the Jewish New York art dealer I will portray.  I keep a picture of my onstage husband and me framed on my dressing table to remind me of my new identity, if only an identity that lasts a few hours.  It is an exercise in self-denial like we are called to do every day: step into the shoes of others and focus less on ourselves.  I believe this is what Jesus was talking about when he said those who lose their lives for my sake, will live.  I don’t think he was only talking about literally dying although some have died as they denied themselves for the sake of others, which is really for the sake of Christ. 

How do we change this tide of dehumanization that is sweeping our society?  There is more slavery in the world now than during Civil War times.  In 2016, 80% of districts reflected landslide victories for Trump or Clinton.  That means people are more ideologically segregated in the US than ever before in history.  Dr. Brown tells us to resist insulating ourselves in bunkers of likeminded people.  She cautions that being united by hating the same people is not true connection and it breeds moral exclusion.  We must be united by collective experiences of pain and joy that cross all lines.  It can be as profound as disaster relief or as simple as laughing together at live theatre.  It helps us see the humanity in all people.  

The theatre is a place where I find collective experiences of pain and joy – both from the entertainment itself and the community that is built in the process.  The practice of considering someone else’s motives, thoughts, pains, joys, and experiences is an exercise in self-denial.  There are also very clear boundaries about each person’s role and contribution.  You may have heard the old saying, “there are no small parts, only small actors.”  Everyone has a piece of the production and without their piece, the whole doesn’t work.  No one’s contribution is more important than the other, much like the body of Christ.  All have value.

Can you resist dehumanization and invite others to share experiences of collective joy or be present with others in their collective pain?  You might just end up being an evangelist, too.