By Anonymous
Once upon a time I thought of the church as “the dearest place on earth.” It was where I felt safest, where I belonged, where I thought I was known and loved unconditionally. It was my happy place for decades – as a child, teenager, young adult. The idea of spending the rest of my life serving Christ among God’s people was beautiful and compelling. It was all I’d ever wanted.
As a teen I served any chance I could, and when I was sixteen, I sensed the Spirit calling me to make Christ known wherever I was. I strongly felt called to ministry in the church, and I knew that for the rest of my life in one form or another, that is what I would do.
I have been in ministry for about twenty-five years now. I have served in many ways – in discipleship ministries, outreach, children’s ministry, church planting, and overseas gospel work. And while loving the Church has brought me some of my deepest joys and seasons when I have felt more alive than ever, I have also been harmed by it. I know these days the word “trauma” gets thrown around a lot, but I am not using it lightly when I say that I have quite a bit of spiritual trauma that I am now also moving through and healing from.
I am not sure the details of the story matter here. Maybe it is enough to say that the church I once thought was the dearest place on earth, I came to realize was only safe as long as I stayed within a certain narrative and version of reality.
The narrative I had built my life on crumbled in my late 30s and early 40s. I thought I was known there but came to see that to “thrive” in that environment, I wasn’t allowed to feel the pain of the harm and dysfunction I grew up in. The people who should have protected me as a child and young adult didn’t. Some actively harmed me in the name and with the authority of “God.” Others weren’t able to care well for me in the places of my deepest pain and harm.
I have come to understand in the last five years the amount of spiritual oppression I was under for decades and how living in low-trust, high-control spiritual environments shaped my view of God and my view of self.
From very early on, my conscience was bound to very oppressive ways to honor God. So even though I didn’t feel safe, my autonomy and sense of agency were bypassed, and my conscience was forced to submit to toxic authority. My young mind learned that I couldn’t trust my perception of reality, only the interpretation of reality that my spiritual authority had. That message has stayed with me for a very long time.
As an adult, I have experienced leadership as not owning their part of the harm, as not being interested in how it impacted me. If I was going to stay in good relationship with church leadership, I couldn’t face my own experience in that environment because somehow it was a form of betrayal – and of lack of submission to the sovereignty of God who placed me under said authority.
When I started to face my experience and my story, I couldn’t experience God as being for me in my suffering, because if I accepted that my suffering came because of those in spiritual authority over me (who were also family or as close as family), then how were they also representatives of God? Subconsciously I thought then that the Lord must be my oppressor.
I have at times experienced intense post-traumatic stress symptoms when I seek his nearness in the Word. How can I experience the nearness of God in his Word when that same Word was wielded as a weapon to me? Dissociation sometimes kicks in more brutally as a result in those very moments of seeking him.
As I have recognized spiritual trauma in my soul, I have wrestled with the question, can I stay in ministry and heal? Or even honestly, can I stay in church period and heal?
And while I know the answer to this question will vary from person to person and story to story, I want to share with you how I am moving through this question and how I am both still in ministry and healing.
To be clear, though, the main issue has never been whether to stay in ministry. The key question after spiritual trauma has been, who is the real and true Christ? And then, what does it mean for me to follow him?
All I can say is that Christ has been my champion. He is the one who started leading me down a path I would have never chosen on my own, to open my eyes to the harm I had experienced and to the ways I was trapped and enslaved. He has kindly and relentlessly shown me a different life than the one I thought was from him and for him.
So how has he done that? How has he cared for me and held me through the most tumultuous years of my soul? When I reflect on his goodness, I see four main ways.
He has provided the safety to help me see the shackles I lived with.
In ways I would have never architectured myself, the Lord allowed me to taste and see many things that were wrong, dysfunctional, harmful, and hurtful. While I would have never chosen to walk through some really tough church situations or to experience in my own body the intensity of post-traumatic stress responses, the Lord used these things to help me see that “Something is not as it should be. Something harmful happened to me early on that is being triggered in a similar situation.” It moved me to ask questions and to face my story honestly.
Christ had worked for over a decade to get me to a place of knowing deep safety with the Father so that when the time came to explore my story, I was deeply grounded and rooted in the safety of God. With Christ’s strength, and hidden inside him, I was able to face the scariest parts, the things I had blocked out, dissociated from, and pushed really deep down.
He also provided safe people to help as I processed my story. They were more removed from the situation and hadn’t been affected in the same way, so they helped me see the harm. They could discern better than I could that “This isn’t right. That was high abuse. This shouldn’t have happened to you.” These safe people help me contrast between healthy and unhealthy leadership.
He is giving me courage to name what I need and to pursue it.
When your nervous system has learned that “safe” means not naming reality or what you need in light of your experience, it is incredibly terrifying to say, “This is what I need.” But in the goodness and kindness of Christ, because of the work he has done in extricating me from harmful and unsafe community, I am able to safely recognize, “I need clinical/trauma counseling. I need to be removed from this situation. I am not able to continue these relationships. My brain needs to heal.”
He has provided the care — physical, mental, spiritual, emotional — that I need.
He opened the way for us to leave an oppressive church. Safety is key for the brain to heal, and I am so grateful He provided really safe church leadership to transition to when we left. He provided clinical counselors that have walked with me for close to four years and the insurance to pay for EMDR for a time.
Overseas he surrounded me with Christians who were very different from the ones I grew up with and who introduced me to ways of connecting and communing with him that didn’t trigger my fight-or-flight response. Some of those Christians were more emotionally healthy than anyone I had ever seen, giving me a vision of the kind of freedom that was possible for me as a daughter of God.
His spirit gripped me with the conviction that if sound doctrine (or healthy beliefs) leads to healthy living (the whole point of the letter to Titus), then the unhealthy fruit I was seeing wasn’t coming from God himself but from unhealthy beliefs. In other words, he showed me more of who he really is so that I could differentiate unhealthy, toxic, oppressive leadership from God himself.
He himself has been my healer, my salvation.
If so much of the harm was spiritual, unseen, I needed the triune unseen God to personally care for me — his spirit tending my spirit. He gave me friends who shared the deep conviction that the presence of Christ himself could heal my broken, trapped spirit and that I needed sights of my Savior more than anything else. Their experience with listening prayer and Immanuel prayer was a gift to me to experience the tending of Christ.
I have also spent so much time in the gospels getting to know the true Christ, the one who lived, suffered, died, and rose again for me, and who did all that in union with me. Slowing down, I have watched him, using my senses to be in the story with him, listening to his tone of voice, paying attention to his categories, contrasting him with the Christ I thought was the true Christ. This all helped me consciously differentiate him from harmful spiritual authority in my life. Getting to know my Shepherd grew my confidence that I really do hear his voice and that he knows me.
The truth is that getting to know this beautiful true Christ has only fueled my heart’s fire to not only know him more but also to create spaces for others to show up with their whole selves and experience his deep tending. His healing hand has not only tenderly loved me and cared for me personally and specifically but also replenished the spring of water within me that overflows and moves toward others so that together we can taste and see how good he is.
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Staying in ministry means that I am still working in the church and that church still feels a bit like a minefield. I am especially still learning what it means to trust my pastors. It is easy for me to live in the old story that trauma wired deep in my body and expect not only that they will fail me and harm me (because in this fallen world that is bound to happen) but that they will not own the harm. I half expect them to be sneaky, to withhold information, to not mean what they say, to have a hidden agenda (even if not intentionally), and to use their spiritual authority to take away my sense of agency and autonomy.
I am in the thick of growing discernment muscles, learning to live in a new story — one where pastors are emotionally mature and don’t treat you like a child, one where they know how to stay in their lane. Yet even though I am a work in progress, and I am not naive about the people of God, the mysterious beauty of Christ still compels me. He is the dearest Person on earth, my life and my home in this world.
He compels me to entrust my whole being, my whole journey, my whole life and calling to him. I have tasted him to truly be a refuge for the helpless. He keeps calling me daughter, he keeps taking away my shame, he keeps freeing me, he keeps telling me, “Go and tell and embody all that I am so others too can also taste my goodness.” And so I am.
