Maybe the church has become bewildering to you. Leaders you trusted and people you respected are acting in ways that do not reflect who Jesus is, nor what they profess to believe. They have turned on anyone among them who appears to threaten the status quo. What is going on?
Leaders in our church systems can create an illusion that refuge for the abused exists, where it does not. How can we recognize when this is happening?
In the church, those obsessed with manipulating, intimidating and dominating can pose as those serving God. And we can be very fooled for a very long time.
Any group that shuns is withholding your deepest needs in order to control you. That’s the opposite of loving you. It’s people you trusted, trying to erase you.
The day I realized what I had been seeing for years, it broke my heart: church leaders bullying people, rejecting God, leading their followers to do the same.
In the middle of that dark-valley time, I often found myself alone with God, crying aloud and writing passionately in my journal. During that time too, I came to identify with David, the shepherd-poet-warrior-king, in ways I had not before. For David was also ostracized by people he trusted. And he cried out in distress - and in faith.
No longer wounded, outcast, lonely, afraid - your new name shall be Confidence, Joyfulness, Overcoming one, Faithfulness, Friend of God, One who seeks My face.
Why, in midlife, did I suddenly find my boundaries battered and my adulthood denied? The answer hinged on the skewed view of womanhood in my church culture.
Frustrated, exhausted, I realized: I would never count as an adult in my church system. Free at last, I’m embracing the adulthood God works in his own
What if the ways the Southern Baptist Convention has handled clergy sexual abuse in its midst reflect the ways a narcissistic abuser handles getting caught out?