Back in 2011, my CelticAnglican’s Ramblings/Hanging by a Thread blog saw an interesting comments discussion that I thought I’d like to share. There’s a little bit of context-related explanation coming, so please bear with me.
I posted about what individual congregations can do to help make visitors coming from spiritually abusive backgrounds feel more at ease in a setting that was probably very different for them. One long-time member who no longer attended services shared that she felt that certain changes to how the Sunday service was done and no longer using the older type of service were abusive.
This gave me a bit of a pause because here I was addressing the struggles of Christians coming from cultic backgrounds and a visitor had a vastly different understanding of spiritual abuse. I did encourage her to discuss her concerns in another thread and hope that she felt that having a chance to talk about what had bothered her was at least therapeutic.
However, I did make a judgment call to treat this visitor’s church issues as something different from the spiritual abuse I’d written the post about. Undergoing the public humiliation, shame or harassment that so many others on this site have detailed over the years is a very different thing, IMO, from not wanting to attend services because of the music style, using You/Your instead of Thee/Thou in prayers or passing the peace.
I seriously doubt this lady had been called an apostate or told she was going to hell for disagreeing with liturgical changes. Striking that careful balance between understanding the needs of spiritual abuse survivors and understanding the needs of those not attending church for other reasons is important, I think.
Church members are far from perfect, and there are enough among the walking wounded to serve as proof of that. There are some people who are simply not going to be happy with anything new or different – several groups that have split off from other denominations are perfect proof.
However, this doesn’t mean that people who stop attending because of change need to be written off. If the Church as a whole is to be one of Christ’s instruments of reconciliation in the larger world, maybe we need to remember those a little closer to home, too.
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