Photo by Nick : https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-church-with-stained-glass-windows-and-pews-27403851/
Before anybody objects, just let me say this about religion: I have participated in religion for most of my life and was a pastor for 20 years. So, I know the advantages of being involved in a faith community. Since we are hardwired for connection, faith communities provide this basic community that creates a lot of hope in us.
I have listened to many stories about the black community and how they see their faith communities. I understand that their faith communities are often more directly tied to their community action and political aspirations. They are, much like a smaller town, which tends to view “going to church” as a community function and the spiritual.
I know that communities of faith also provide some regulation for us. When someone hugs us, shakes our hands, or prays with us, it can be a comfort that helps us escape from our trauma brain for a few minutes each week. They are designed to be “sanctuaries” from the outside world and the dangers that may or may not exist.
That said, I still believe that churches can also create more trauma, and they’re not very good at healing the trauma we already have. They promise miraculous transformations, but those transformations do not happen often, so faith communities are often walking wounded that injure each other.
I know from experience that pastors often carry a lot of traumas and don’t usually seek the help they need from outside professionals. Just like some churches try to pray the gay away, they also have a habit of trying to exercise the trauma from us without understanding what causes it in the first place. So much good and bad can happen inside a faith community, much like it would in a community center, where people in similar situations gather to do things together and help each other as much as they can.
Putting all our eggs in one basket
When we put all our eggs in the religious basket, and it doesn’t produce the results we hoped for, we have to resign ourselves to the results we got from praying and waiting for a miracle. We say, “I did what I was supposed to, and it didn’t happen, so this must be as good as possible. If God didn’t do it, he must not want it to happen, or I must not be doing something right.” The thought never crosses our mind that more relevant information might be elsewhere.
What we know about psychotherapy and what trauma-informed therapy can do for us is relatively new information. Studying only one ancient, 1700-year-old book will probably not help us to heal the mental health issues and the trauma we have accumulated over time. This includes generational trauma, systemic problems within the church, and the nature of humanity and how we are put together.
I know the most about Christianity, and I understand that it doesn’t understand things like how our brain works and how we store trauma as well as it should. As a pastor, I studied leadership and theology and occasionally read a book, usually by a man who agreed with me. At the current time, my suggestion would be to read the stories of women who have survived religious trauma and the stories of minorities who didn’t have the same privileges we had.
Failing to ask questions.
The general unspoken procedure of most churches is to keep the congregants busy and do things so that we don’t spend a lot of time pondering questions to which we don’t know the answer. We develop belief systems and doctrines around our assumptions so that we don’t spend much time asking questions. Instead, we spend time teaching the doctrines of our organization and teaching congregants to defend those beliefs instead of searching any deeper for truth or answers. I thought this way most of my life, but then I started asking questions and doing my research and found that there was a way to address my trauma. I could get better, I could have better relationships, and I could find peace. But first, I had to quit trusting religion to solve my problems. There were some good things about it, but it’s not the solution to everything.
Avoiding hard work.
I took a spiritual leadership coaching course only to realize that the essential solutions were still the same as those I taught my 7th-grade Sunday school class: read your Bible, pray, and come to church every chance you get. Again, there might be some benefit to those exercises, but they didn’t solve our biggest problems; they only prolonged them. Because of experience, we knew not to expect much, and prayer rarely gets answered, so we settled for what we already knew.
Once I started to learn more, it was simply a matter of doing the work. I had to schedule the counseling sessions and show up. Then, I had to be vulnerable, share my story, and feel my emotions. When I started to do this, I found myself finding the healing I had always dismissed in Christianity because I was resigned to my belief that life was just tough and there wasn’t much I could do about it.
May I challenge you to aim higher? If a faith community is helpful for you, by all means, keep attending. If it is wounding you, I would encourage you to separate yourself from it until you can heal and your situation can change to one that is safe.
But even if your faith community is nurturing but not healing you, get some outside professional help. Ask a professional to help you understand what they can see about you that you can’t see about yourself. And then be willing to do the work because I promise it will be worth it. Faith communities are famous for framing coming to church as getting fed. While it is important to get fed, there are many places to eat, and sometimes, the best meals are the home-cooked ones. Think about that for a while.
https://thedesertsanctuary.org/treasure-trove/embed/#?secret=mcM27Pom1Z#?secret=F1VXuZpKtN
Karl Forehand is a former pastor, podcaster, and award-winning author. His books include Out into the Desert, Leaning Forward, Apparent Faith: What Fatherhood Taught Me About the Father’s Heart, The Tea Shop and Being: A Journey Toward Presence and Authenticity. He is the creator of The Desert Sanctuary podcast and community. He is married to his wife Laura of 35 years and has one dog named Winston. His three children are grown and are beginning to multiply! You can read more about the author
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