Part 1: The Deconstruction of Trust

What I’m sharing here is Part 1 of a series of posts I’ve been sitting on and thinking about for the last 2 years.  Every time I thought about writing them I locked up.  I couldn’t put fingers to keys without the fear of hurting someone, or the fear of “getting in trouble,” forcing me to shut the computer lid one more time.  What’s pushed me to finally move forward is a growing sense that the church needs to restore trust with her people, her pastors, and the world if it hopes to be all that Jesus intended her to be. 

My experience of trust-breaking hurt from the church is not unique to me.  I am a professional counselor and at this time, 30% of my clients are folks working through church hurt that has led them to leave church or endure a deep sense of hurt or unsafety in order to remain with their church families.  These are not just congregants, but ministry leaders and pastors as well.  My hope is that these posts might give voice to the hurts many in church experience while also provoking honest self-reflection and courageous action from pastors and shepherds, whom I know love their sheep and long for their good, but also falter under the weight of fear and shame and exhaustion from trying to manage the sheer magnitude of their jobs.

A few years back, my wife and I saw Brandi Carlile in concert.  I already admired her honesty and artistry, but that night I came to admire her courage and her wisdom as well.  She was introducing a song she wrote in which she was working through significant hurt that she encountered from the church.  When she mentioned the baptist church by name, a segment of the audience began to boo.  “Wait.  Wait,” she interrupted in her wonderful ‘southern by way of north western’ twang, “the baptist church, and religion at its best, really is a beautiful thing and has been a source of good when it’s driven by love, but when it’s driven by fear, it can deal real hurt.”  She could have won the crowd by joining with them in their derision, but she didn’t.  She risked her connection with her audience to stand in protection of the good and beautiful aspects of a church that hurt her, while then going on to sing about that hurt.  It was a beautiful high wire routine of vulnerability, authenticity, and risky, loving protection.  She managed to honor everyone in that room, including herself, allowed no one to be hurt, and still spoke honestly about her experience.  Though I am unlikely to stick the landing as Brandi did, it is in this spirit that I hope to speak.

Before deconstruction is something you do, it’s something that happens to you. 

I didn’t realize that was what was even happening to me until I was well into the process. Deconstruction, at least in the way I’ve experienced it, is less college freshman after their first philosophy course and more like a Florida homeowner post-hurricane.  This is not a remodel for aesthetic purposes or keeping up with the trends.  This is not some last ditch effort to get a few more years out of a house we’d really just prefer to move on from.  This is the necessary work of trying to salvage a home we love.  A home in which we’ve made friends and raised families, learned and built our faith, and found safety and rest. This beloved house has been decimated by the storms, and now we have to go back in, tear down all of the soaked drywall, rip out all the damaged studs, pull the fried wiring back to the source, and determine if this is a total loss or if repair is possible.   

When I first came into the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA), I thought I’d come home.   Covenant Seminary was my first experience of the denomination, and so many things about it seemed like a fit.  The counseling department and The Francis Schaeffer Institute dignified people, saw beauty in the world, and understood the complexity of humanity.  The way in which theology was taught gave me a framework for understanding Scripture that held the primary beliefs with strength but was wise enough to hold secondary issues with humility.  My first church experience in the PCA was with a congregation whose longest running ministry was a discipleship group for adults with mental and physical disabilities.  The pastors of the church took turns teaching at their weekly meeting, and multiple church members volunteered to lead songs and activities and offer dignifying friendship to a group one could consider “the least of these.”   I remember thinking, “If this church can love and value these folks, maybe they can love and value someone like me.”  For nearly 20 years, I served in the PCA in various volunteer and leadership capacities without fear.  As far as I knew, this church and this seminary were typical of the PCA, so not only did I feel at home in these two organizations, I assumed the denomination was a safe and solid home as well.  I had no idea that the PCA was in a hurricane zone.

So, what was the destructive force that came barreling through my living room that instigated this de-homing?  It was watching, and participating in, the PCA’s fight over whether men who experience same sex attraction (men who are either gay/same-sex-attracted and married to women, or gay/ssa and single and celibate) and may choose to use the word “gay” to describe themselves, were fit to be elders in the church. (Side Note: It seemed that the biggest issue was whether men who are elders could consider their same-sex orientation as fixed, and likely unchangeable, and speak of it as such, or if they must consider it, and speak of it, specifically as sin that God would transform)  Experiencing, and watching others experience, abusive actions from one set of shepherds and the absence of protection from the other set dealt blow after blow to my sense of safety in my denomination.  And it devastated my sense of trust in myself, in these shepherds, and in the church as a whole. 

When I first saw the muted response from elders against what I saw as abusive actions from some pastors in our denomination, I first doubted myself.  “Maybe I’m making a bigger deal of this than it is.  Maybe it’s not actually abusive.  No one else seems as upset about this as me, maybe I’m just overreacting.”  As the years went on, I had moments of actually believing what some pastors were saying about men like me.  I began to wonder if I was, in fact, deceived and dangerous.    

In the midst of this loss of trust in myself, I also began to lose trust in the pastors and elders of my denomination.  Seeing the absence of protective actions against the men that were most abusive made me wonder whether these shepherds were willing or able to protect vulnerable sheep when it came down to it.  And, in the darker moments, I distrusted their motives and intentions behind being shepherds at all.

It wasn’t a far walk from losing trust in shepherds to losing trust in the church as a whole, and wondering if the American version of Christianity is how Jesus actually intended his church to be.  

It seems that at the heart of religious faith is trust.  Seems evident, right?  The two words are practically synonyms.  What is the central point of Christianity but “faith in the death and resurrection of Jesus, the Son of God, and trust in him for my salvation”?  But, through this experience, I’ve realized that it’s not just trust in theological truths that builds and strengthens faith.  It’s trust in one’s own ability to discern truth.   And, it is trust in the people who taught us these truths.

If trust in our own discernment, or in our shepherds, breaks down, the whole house collapses.  Trust is a load bearing wall in the house of faith.  As this load bearing trust continued to take blow after blow, my house shifted out of kilter.  Doors and windows no longer opened or closed easily.  The lights dimmed and flickered, and for days would go out altogether.  And, God, the rain and cold that poured in through the ramshackle roof was unrelenting.  This is the discouragement of deconstruction.         

Though we knew we needed to move forward and make decisions about whether we should repair this home, find a new one in the same town, or completely start over in a new state, the combination of discouragement and distrust made decision making nearly impossible.  So, we just kept circling the wreckage.   

“Maybe we’re better off doing the demo and reconstruction ourselves,” we would think.  We are under no delusion that we can actually build a house from scratch, but the idea of finding and trusting another builder is beyond what we can do. So, we do the best we can with our limited tools and YouTube.  We join with other de-homed folks, compare notes, share grief and labor and help each other out with what we’ve learned along the way.  Is it ideal?  Far from it.  But, we are well past ideal.  We are in the “desert of the real.” Fighting for our faith, fighting for our livelihoods (many of my friends have lost employment in their churches as a result of this and other such fights in the church), and fighting to rebuild trust in our shepherds, in our churches and in ourselves.  

Deconstruction has taken me back, by force, to the beginning. I have been forced to return to the foundational lessons of how to build faith and how to build relationships. I am learning, again, how to love (and trust) God and how to love (and trust) people, and how to love (and trust) myself. In a new and profound way, I am being forced to wait for the author and perfecter, the architect and builder, the carpenter’s son, to reconstruct this deconstructed trust.

For a poetic interpretation of this process of deconstruction and reconstruction:
https://wordpress.com/post/askingforme.com/299

For part 2 of this series click here