An awesome observation, used by permission:
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What if pastors treated their congregants as patients? What if they approached every situation based on the premise of ‘first do no harm’? The phrase is well known in the medical community, and it means more than just avoiding intentional injury. It means thinking about the possible consequences of each approach to treatment.
Why don’t pastors consider how their response to survivors of trauma might cause further harm? How their response to abuse could add shame upon shame. Jesus didn’t rebuke people who were suffering. He understood we are both body and spirit; and, he addressed a person’s immediate need so that he could speak to their heart.
Churches are so filled with broken, lonely people. Yet, instead of being a place of healing it’s a place where we go to be reminded how to stuff our suffering under more submission, more praying through, more pretense. And when you’ve lost your last shred of trust in the place you were supposed to be safe, they label you as backslidden, kicking you while you’re down so you know your place.
And Jesus wept.
~Heather P |
That really makes you think.
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Author: Through Grace
I was raised in a somewhat unhealthy church group within the Nondenominational Christian Church. After graduating high school, I began attending a United Pentecostal Church (UPC). I've been a member of four UPC churches and visited many others. Of the four of which I was a member, I was "encouraged" not to leave the first and then later sent to the second; attended the second where an usher repeatedly attempted to touch me and the pastor told me I should not care about the standards of the organization and was wrong to do so; ran to a third at that point, which threw me out after a couple years; and walked out of a fourth. For these transfers and because I refused to gossip about my former churches, some called me a "wandering star, a cloud without water" (Jude 1:12).
I love the fact that when the blind man was healed, questioned by the Pharisees and temple rulers, and expelled from the temple, Jesus went and sought him out. He very rarely did this once someone was healed, but for this man, he did. I believe God has a special place in his heart for those who are abused, wrongfully accused, or condemned by religious leadership. I believe He loves those who are wronged by churchianity--yes, churchianity, not Christianity, because those who do these wrongs follow a church, not Christ.
1 John 4:7-8
7 Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God.
8 He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.
9 In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him.
10 Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.
11 Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another.
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