I just finished listening to a podcast and wanted to record some thoughts I had. It’s called The Wall of Silence, and it was a two-part episode that I listened to from a woman who had been on the ACNA Bishops Council in the Midwest. You can find the podcast and transcript HERE.
I was struck by how similar things were between her story and mine and my husband. Because first of all, the difference in the Anglican Church from what I understand and my denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America, I should say my former denomination, is that women can be ordained. There are women who are public figures, and I think of people like Tish Warren, I believe, and some other folks, and women are definitely platformed and put into leadership positions in a different way than the PCA is, obviously, because the PCA absolutely does not ordain women under any circumstances and insist that they never will, and so there’s that.
That’s one difference. Now it also sounds like the… the way that decisions are made sometimes, it’s just one person, like it’s the bishop gets to decide things that, and I’m not sure, someone can set me straight on this, I’m not sure what decisions that includes.
Now you could argue that in the PCA sometimes it looks like it’s a session, a whole session, or a whole presbytery making a decision, but pretty much people are going to just go with the flow, but you know, I’m certainly not going to accuse anyone of that, but you know, it’s an interesting question. How much can one person really make a decision that is not, you know, is not supported by the rest of their presbytery, or the rest of, you know, whatever governing body there is. That’s above my pay grade.
But I think, for me, listening to this story from this woman who did get to sit at tables and give her opinions and be consulted and be seen as someone who is wise and discerning and learned and worth listening to, and still get rejected… it’s heartbreaking. And it’s, in an odd way, just confirming how some of us have felt all along. Like we’ve been trying to make that point that we come, you know, even in our system where women can be asked to the table, we still ultimately just get rejected and our opinions get debunked and dismissed. We’re told that we don’t understand everything or we didn’t say it the right way.
I mean, I’ve actually been told by an elder that I didn’t say it the right way. It’s like, I don’t know how else to say it. Can you, you know, I told them it was like translating. Like maybe I translated it incorrectly, right? I didn’t translate the original Greek the correct way. So you do it. Please, please help me. Help me translate this. Do you understand what I’m trying to say? And then translate it into PCA Elder. That’d be great. Thank you. And I love, it’s not funny, I mean, it’s beyond, it’s kind of gotten beyond funny for me because it’s…
It’s like just banging on your head, banging your head on the wall and, you know, finally stopping and thinking, wow, this feels really good to not bang your head on the wall anymore.
But the episode was, the two parts were really just affirming for me the futility, just the feeling of futility, like I’ve been trying, I’ve been trying to play by your rules, I’ve been trying to translate my work and my opinions and what I sense. I sense that the Holy Spirit himself is telling me this is what needs to be said. Not always. I certainly can go off, but for the most part, I am trying and trying to be led by the Holy Spirit by what I know of Jesus, by what I know of the Bible and what I want to do, read and studied, and I am constantly looking for godly wisdom and discernment in these, in all of these cases, and particularly when it comes to abuse.
And so, yeah, I mean, listening to the Wall of Silence podcast and this woman’s story and how she pushed so hard and just found the sense of, I mean, just futility, you know, no matter what, and at one point she even says, like, she and her husband realized no matter what they said, it wouldn’t have mattered. It just wouldn’t have mattered. Some people just make up their minds long before you ever sit down at their table, and they’re just trying to convince you that you’re wrong and that you need to fall in line.
And it just made me think of some of the things, and ever since I read the book by Chuck DeGroat When Narcissism Comes to Church, and it kind of struck me that, you know, he talks about a narcissistic system. It’s like this entire system has set itself up so that it cannot be wrong. It cannot fail; it is infallible. When a final decision has been made, that’s it. This is the decision, and it becomes God’s own will in this case. And no one can make a strong enough case against it, that you just, you can’t. And for those of us who have labored in these systems, where we’ve wanted to believe the best, we want to give the benefit of the doubt, all the things, you know? We know some of these people personally. We have worked with them closely. We have prayed with them. We’ve cried with them, yeah. I mean these are our friends. These are people we care about deeply, but when some of these abuse cases go sideways and allegations come out against our buddies, something happens and… something happens.
It’s this fog that just settles in on some people, I really believe it. It’s just this fog of deceit, like self-deceit, SELF-deceit, because I truly believe that for some people who have been a ministry for a while, they just feel this commitment to upholding the system over the people. The system, the institution, and the denomination, right? At all costs. At all costs, we must uphold the system. And it becomes incredibly problematic. I mean, it’s like an understatement. It is so problematic.
Because then, you know, the other side of that, you have people who get accused, like me, like my husband, like this woman on the podcast. You get accused of wanting to just, oh, you’re just trying to burn the system down, or you’re trying to, you know, whatever.
And honestly, you know, at first, it’s utterly ridiculous. People like us love our church. We love our people. We love our denomination on paper. We love our denomination in reality. I very much found a home and a place to belong in the PCA when I first became involved.
In this podcast, in the second episode, someone actually talks about, like, finding home. Like, this church was her home. I really, I felt that. You know, my husband and I often talk about, you know, we are our own home. My husband and I are – our marriage, our children. We are home for each other and that’s what we’ve kind of come up with. Like wherever else we end up going along the way, it’s like we will always be home because we’ll always be us.
So there’s that. But I do, it’s like we thought that we were in a system that was our home, it was our family. It were, you know, they were our co-labors in Christ and we had this sense that we’ll always be swimming upstream.
And we always were. People tell us outside, like close friends of ours have said that. You guys are, I mean, someone literally said, you’re a square peg in a round hole. And it’s like, as long as the hole’s big enough, we can do that, right? You can make a square peg fit into a round hole for a long time, and that’s okay, but it’s once you start squeezing, making the hole smaller, we stop fitting.
And so it becomes more and more clear as you go that whatever it is that you have to say, whatever it is you have to offer the system, like they can’t take it, they can’t handle it. And so we get kicked out or we have to leave because of our own consciences.
My conscience was pricked and we had to address it. And I think there are a lot of people in ministry that are really good at quieting their consciences. And that makes me really concerned, because I consider that quenching the Spirit. That’s a bad thing. There’s some that might say that that’s heretical, blasphemy. Blasphemy against the Spirit. When you feel, “I need to say something, but I’m not going to. And I’m going to come up with a long list of reasons why I’m not going to do anything.”
That’s a dangerous, dangerous place to be as a minister of the Word and the sacrament.
Because here’s the thing, you know, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it now. Some of these people are serving your communion week after week and I worry. I worry about that. Because listen, there is a warning, Paul gives us a very, very clear warning about communion, about taking the Lord’s Supper in an unworthy manner. I’ve struggled with that myself over the past couple of years. Am I living at peace as far as I’m able? Can I with a clear conscience before the very throne of God take this bread and drink this cup?
And you know someone, a good dear friend of ours said at one point have you done the work? Have you tried? Have you tried to reconcile? Have you opened the door? Have you kept the door open to people who have hurt you? Are you willing to reconcile with them? Are you forgiving in your heart?
All those things and I’ve wrestled with that. Am I? I mean it depends on the day. Some days I get really angry. I really do. I get angry at the way that things have gone. And then other days, I’m like, you know what? None of this matters. None of it really matters in the end. There are people who are suffering that I need to come alongside of and support.
Now that’s not to say that I’m not suffering. Please don’t hear me say that I’m ranking who gets to suffer. I’m not doing that at all. There are certainly days when I realize how much my husband has suffered, how much we have suffered together, and it breaks my heart. I’m just undone by it. And then I do this thing in my head before God. How much am I at peace? How much am I at peace with the way that God is moving? We certainly never think God’s moving fast enough, right? Or that he’s not doing the thing that we long do. And I know that God is not my personal rabbit’s foot where I say a little prayer and rub it and he makes things happen.
That’s not how it works. But at the same time, we are certainly people who know that God works through his people and that it’s his people who are on the hook for stepping up. We know that. We know through scripture. We know through studying. We know throughout history, church history, that God uses his people to step up, to level up, to say, “This has gone too far, it’s wrong, and we need to fight back against it.”
And we need to hold people accountable for the evils that they have done, that we have allowed to happen under our watch, and get clarity on how to address those things, how to address the abuse of spiritual authority in our camps. Because you can only hide it for so long. And that’s what we’re seeing now.
I mean my generation, Gen X, we’ve hidden a lot under the tent, and we just kind of said, we’re not gonna deal with these things, or we’ve been generally quiet, non-committal, maybe.
But we are rising. There’s certainly a large group of people now speaking out about what’s happened and telling people “this is how it was and it’s not right” and we’re going to make changes. And that has been the crux of what’s been happening for the past few years.
In 2020, you could blame 2020. 2020 was a catalyst for a lot of things. And you know those folks in the evangelical circles who want to say like you know we’ve gone too far or you know everybody’s a victim now or you know I just had a conversation with someone recently who was like how come everybody’s talking about trauma all the time?
And you just kind of sigh and say well because there’s a lot more of it than you may realize and while I certainly am reasonable enough to say not everything is as extreme -it’s not as extreme as some people may want … there are certainly levels right?
Now do I get to choose who gets what level? No, that’s not how that works. Trauma is a science. The science involves, I’m not going there, but my point was that you know there are these folks in our churches who are in leadership positions who just want to sweep it all under the rug and say let’s just get along and not address these issues in any significant way or have some kind of of like big, broad, generalized statement of, yeah, things were bad, but they’re good now, or it’s, you know, those people’s church.
I’m gonna close with this. It made me think, listening to the podcast and listening to Helen’s story in the ACNA, it made me think about this time when a woman I know, I won’t name names. She posted something and she’s all, you know, let’s talk about abuse in the church. Now she is a PCA person. I know her personally. It’s like, yeah, let’s talk about it. Let’s talk about what we’re doing in the church. And the post was specifically kind of talking about silencing people and shunning them and shutting them out.
I was like, yeah, that happens all the time. Let’s talk about it. And I specifically said, what about our denomination? The denomination that you and I belong to, that we’ve made oaths to, you know, covenant members of the PCA? Let’s talk about how we address these things and what we see in our churches.
I then got a private message from her saying, “I really appreciate your voice and I’m gonna delete your comment because I don’t wanna talk about the PCA. I just wanna be more broad in my whatever.” I don’t remember exactly how she put it. But she specifically said, “I don’t want it to just be about the PCA.” And I read it and I, you know, I laughed.
I laughed because I was just like, oh man, the irony, right?
The irony of that. And then I said, so what you’re saying is you’re silencing me. She deleted my comment and she wrote me this note. Like, let’s not talk about the PCA. I have a lot, she said something like, I have a lot of friends who aren’t PCA. Like, okay.
And this is where we’re at, right? This is how we do things. It’s like, well, we can point fingers at other people. Like, oh yeah, those churches are really messed up. But don’t talk about my church. Don’t talk about, you know, things that have happened in my circles. Cause that’s a whole new ballgame.
One metaphor I always use -it’s this idea of like just shooting arrows. I like bow and arrows. You just shoot arrows into various directions. Like, okay, we’re just gonna shoot all the arrows and just see where they land, and inevitably they’re going to take out someone you don’t want to take out.
And that’s where we’re at. And listening to other people in other denominations that I think, you know, I felt like, oh, well, they should have it more together than we do, right? I mean, they’re less conservative than we are and all things, and they’re more settled on women in ministry, I thought.
It’s like, oh, well, actually, they have some issues too. And I’m not here to poke at the ACNA by any means. It’s not my job, it’s not my business. In a lot of ways, I don’t even, I don’t have to poke at PCA anymore either. I don’t.
I would love for the people that I know personally who have asked me for my opinions and who have … you know, I get emails from people asking me for help. I’m more than happy to give it to them. I’m more than happy if you’re someone who would like a conversation about an issue in the PCA, more than happy to help you, but I’m also trying to figure out you know this particular time for such a time with this what is my role in the church with the people I know and how can I help contribute to this repentance and reconciliation and justice for the evangelical church in America today. What can I do to help?
And that’s where I’m at and listening to people like Helen and her story and there’s plenty of other people out there now with their stories coming out and we need it. We need these stories. We need to be talking about these things. We need to be addressing the sin under the tent and how do we do that? How do we do that well? How do we do that with grace? And it is with grace. It’s with kindness and that needs more attention, like, hey, here’s the thing.
You know some of these people in leadership will right away feel like you’re attacking them if you ask questions. That was another thing that she talked about, which I absolutely get. Just asking the questions gets you in trouble. We have every right to ask questions of our pastors and our elders and those who are in leadership over us. Like, “I don’t know about this. I want to understand this.” Or “why did you make this decision?” Or “is this true?”
And when our readers and pastors and spiritual counselors tell us to mind our own business, or how dare you? And I’ve had people, I’ve had people who are responsible for my soul by their oath, say things like, “how dare you ask?” Or, you know, “how could you make those allegations?” I just… I asked a question.
I asked a question. And your non-answer said everything.
So here we are, right?
And we decided to change the name of the podcast that I was doing. And I was like, what is a good name for a podcast? The phrase “asking for a friend” came into my mind. And I was like, you know what? I’m asking for me. I mean, I’m asking for all of us. I’m asking for all of us. For the safety of all the people that I love, people I’m responsible for and to, people I’m responsible to.
But I’m also just asking for me. I want to know. I want to know the answers to these questions. I want to know what people in leadership are doing, what they’re thinking, what they’re, you know, what are you thinking in your waking hours and you’re deliberating over what to do. I want to know where your ideas are coming from. Like, what is your rationale for whatever it is that you decide on? And I think we all deserve that. We all deserve to know that. And I think that’s what it means, in a lot of ways, that’s what it means, to live above reproach, which is a qualification of our shepherds, to live above reproach. How do you answer questions? How do you engage with the people you’re responsible for? How do you defend yourself? And how do you live? How do you live with yourself? These are all the questions that really need to be answered in the days ahead.
And I hope we’re doing that. I hope we’re all doing that. For the sake of the church. Thank you.
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Asking For Me 
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