Finding Hope After Church Trauma

By: Ryan and Kristine Ponten

“Our life is full of brokenness - broken relationships, broken promises, broken expectations. How can we live with that brokenness without becoming bitter and resentful except by returning again and again to God’s faithful presence in our lives?” Henri Nouwen

When we were college kids, we were heavily involved at a megachurch that began to collapse in 2014 due to a system that one prominent pastor referred to as “the most abusive, coercive ministry culture I’ve ever been involved with.” Needless to say, this had a major impact on our lives as we navigated milestones such as early marriage and career beginnings. We are still unpacking the physical, emotional, and spiritual scars from this experience, but we can honestly say that God has been slowly but surely healing us and drawing us towards hope.

Since then, the one common way we’ve witnessed God’s faithfulness is through the people he has put on our path since then. For a while, we had some trepidation surrounding any church community, but the people we encountered gave us glimpses of God’s character in ways we didn’t expect. It is difficult to fully capture this process in words; especially because healing seems to happen in spurts over long periods of time, so there is no predictable formula. However, there are two key relational values that stand out as we consider the moments we’ve witnessed healing:

• Invitation to vulnerability instead of performance

• Patient friendship

Invitation to vulnerability instead of performance 

“In my own life I well know how hard it is for me to trust that I am loved, and to trust that the intimacy I most crave is there for me. I most often live as if I have to earn love, do something noteworthy, and then perhaps I might get something in return… Do I really believe that I am loved first, independent of what I do or accomplish? This is an important question because as long as I think that what I most need I have to earn, deserve, and collect by hard work. I will never get what I most need and desire, which is a love that cannot be earned, but that is freely given. Thus, my return is my willingness to renounce such thoughts and to choose to live more and more from my true identity as a cherished child of God.” Henri Nouwen.

Despite the fact that its leaders would emphatically deny this, there was a clear worship of charisma in the abusive church we attended. In addition, we learned early on that our value as church members/volunteers/friends was at least partially based on our ability to perform for the church. After leaving this church, it became clear over time that we were not being formed into people defined at their core as “loved by God”. Instead, it was a definition along the lines of: “you are fundamentally broken, and if you see that, and change, you can become important”.

We are learning now that because of this experience, we often default to a good churchgoing performance when we find a church community. Unconsciously, there is an instinct to offer an extreme amount of our time and energy, as if we think that earns belonging. To unlearn this, we’ve attempted to reconnect with the heartbeat of our faith: that we are deeply loved by God. This has been easier said than done, but we have found that our willingness to remain in a community grows stronger when the pressure to perform weakens.

It sounds so simple, but the truth is that the foundation for healing and returning to church community has been rediscovering that God loves us, and he also loves our neighbor. Therefore, shouldn’t we seek out healing within community, and attempt to provide healing to others?

Patient friendship

“Maybe nothing is more important than that we keep track of these stories of who we are and where we have come from and the people we have met along the way because it is precisely through these stories that God makes himself known to each of us.” Frederick Buechner

It is common for us to primarily feel shame when we think about or talk about our history in an abusive church. Shame that we were foolish enough to be drawn into that ministry and that we in turn perpetuated a harmful ministry culture. This baggage is usually carried into potential friendships within church, where intrusive thoughts emerge, such as “what will they think when we share our church history?” or “will they get tired of our church frustrations and inability to grow?”

In spite of this struggle, we have found ourselves drawn to several church communities who have surprised us with genuine hospitality. We have found healing in these spaces when people simply offer the gift of their patient presence. We found this in a small group in Tennessee, where a couple who led our group simply offered their time to listen to us vent and get to know us without any pressure to provide anything back. We have found this through friends that have experienced similar church trauma and want to process the future with us. We have found this  through friendships in New York, where for the first time we felt real hope that a community could provide safe rest for our burnout while also existing for more than itself.

We are slowly learning that oftentimes God shows his faithfulness by answering our fears with people who fight them alongside us, and are willing to stay in the fight whether it seems we are growing or stagnating. We are grateful to every person God has placed in our path who reminded us that we are children of God, and we hope to follow in their footsteps in providing spaces for others to heal as well. 

Looking Ahead

Nobody escapes being wounded. We are all wounded people, whether physically, emotionally, mentally, or spiritually. The main question is not, ‘How can we hide our wounds?’ so we don’t have to be embarrassed, but ‘How can we put our woundedness in the service of others?’”  Henri Nouwen

There is not a great way to end this post as we are in no way fully healed. I think one thing we’ve learned in attempting to be known in community is that healing is not linear. With that being said, I think for the first time in a long time, we have hope for healthy boundaries in new church communities and we have courage to be vulnerable in safe spaces. We will strive to do the least amount of harm, looking to Jesus as our true north. We will strive to show up - albeit imperfectly - seeking and giving forgiveness to those we encounter in our everyday lives.

All of these hopes represent a domino effect from someone in our past who was brave to be vulnerable with us, who was patient in our healing, who did their very best to reflect the character of God, and what other option do we have, but to attempt to do likewise?