My Walk Through Purity Culture: Not a G-rated Blog Post

How exactly does one get writing again after a year’s hiatus? I admit I froze up the first few times I sat down to try and compose some thoughts. Following all that happened last year (read all the tea on that over here), and knowing this news cycle could spin off again at any moment depending on the course Liberal Party Politics takes over the course of the next four years, I’ll admit I found myself feeling — a little over-exposed. 

But nevertheless, the wheels keep on turning in this little old head of mine. Since exiting my childhood church seven years ago, I’ve found myself an accidental storykeeper of sorts. Stories from those who had left or been asked to leave. Stories of those who had faced heartache and loss. Stories of people who had negative experiences in high-demand or high-control churches. Our experiences, though unique in detail and nuance, were similar in kind. And so I became part of the deconstruction movement where we who have found ourselves out on our proverbial behinds grapple with the good, the bad and the straight up hellish. 

Some of us find our way to some form of spiritual practice. Some of us find comfort in atheism. Some of us vacillate or find mental solace in the possibility of something godlike but disengage from the practice of faith because its too darn traumatic. All are fine. That was why I started the podcast (Unchurchable) a few years ago. And because I was scared, having just gone through arguably the most scarring trauma of my life in the wake of what some may call shunning, I adopted a pseudonym so I could write what I knew needed to be written without freezing up completely. 

I talked about theology, culture, and current affairs. I interviewed a lot of other people about their experiences. We laughed. We joked. We even told dick jokes and didn’t get struck down by God for doing so. Guest after guest told their story of experiencing purity culture, but I never told mine. Ironically, I haven’t sucked up much blog space telling my own story at all. Because look - ya girl is chicken shit!

So much so that it has taken me four paragraphs to get to the point. Last week on Australia’s “Four Corners” program, investigative journalist Louise Milligan did a deep dive into a Catholic or Catholic adjacent group called Opus Dei - the independent schools and school communities who engaged in some pretty hardcore practices associated with what we in evangelicalism or exvangelicalism know as purity culture. 

As I watched, I found the similarities unsurprising. I’ve spoken to enough people to know we all experienced a similar sort of artillery fired at our undeveloped sexuality. “Don’t have sex before marriage. You’ll be like chewed up gum that nobody wants.” Sexual acts, desires, or even thoughts were some special sort of sin that diminished your value permanently - especially if you were born without a penis. Girls learned to hide their bodies, because to wear anything “too revealing” would be to cause their brothers in Christ to fall. 

As a collective, we learned that our breasts were weapons of a special sort of sin. Our butts and hips were deadly weapons we could all-too-easily deploy in service of Satan. We learned body shame, strict gender roles in many cases, we were told men were visual and shouldn’t (couldn’t?) be expected to control their desires so it was our responsibility to watch for them. And so we learned to fear sexuality. We learned to shut off sexual desire. We were given either no sex ed, or worse, bad sex ed. And for so many exvangelicals, we waded into marriages thinking we would instantly become sex gods because we saved ourselves for the night that follows the big day. 

Spoiler alert: that doesn’t happen.

Instead, I am now seeing much needed services pop up around the globe as sex and intimacy coaches, therapists and sex educators help purity culture survivors learn what we were actively misinformed about - that sex is good, that women are important, that boundaries should be honoured, that pleasure is more than just okay, and well, some basic mechanics of it all in the mix. Heartbreakingly, I’ve heard stories of sex lives and marriages under pressure because of the deep conditioning against sex and desire that the nervous system has been unable to unlearn. 

Of course you know my story. I married a gay conversion therapy survivor. And while I joke about being the beneficiary of eight years of overcompensation, ultimately, our divorce settles this month. 

There are so many great resources on purity culture so I’m not going to do a big expose in this post. But beyond the broad strokes of purity culture universal - I’m going to get brave and tell you my story. Here we go folks. 

My First look at Purity Culture

I’m going to say that this part of my church life was a pretty unremarkable. My teenage years were spent in the late 90’s and early 2000’s, with a typical evangelical soundtrack including Rebecca St. James’ “Wait for me” (a love song to her future husband, who would turn out to be Cubbie Fink of that group that played “Pumped up kicks.” Weird.) We also had DC Talks “I don’t want it, I don’t want your sex for now.” Actually I think we really did want it, but that didn’t fit the vernacular. The Bible of our generation was Josh Harris’s “I kissed dating goodbye” and its younger sibling “Boy meets Girl.” The books systematically demonised dating, emotional and physical attachments before marriage and introduced ‘courtship’ as the solution for this generation of young celibates. 

Years later, Josh Harris renounced his life’s work, left his job as a pastor, left his marriage and deconstructed his faith. His was the heavy burden of facing up to the damage he had done. Yet the truth is Josh Harris didn’t invent purity culture. The good Christian Patriarchy had been policing women’s bodies for years and it wasn’t done yet. Its not done yet. We see that in the SCOTUS reversal of Roe V. Wade, and in consistent efforts by conservative governments across the world to police access to reproductive health and options for women. Butttt thats another rant.

I completely understand that purity culture showed up as an answer to parents who didn’t want their kids screwing around. Perhaps it showed up as a way they could have their kids avoid the heartbreaks they had faced on the road to happily ever after. What parent could truly deny wanting that? I get that no one foresaw the results. So on this, I am completely unbitter. (Totally a word)

But in truth, this doctrine became our generations legalism. Virginity became the ultimate prize and a marker of pseudo-spiritual devotion, sensuality became the ultimate shame, and we wouldn’t figure out the breadth of the damage until years later. I was probably conditioned to purity culture long before we got the handbook and the soundtrack. I got the purity talk the same day I found out what a period was and the bit about purity took all the bandwidth. Only a small part of this vital chat was devoted to what the heck was going on in my young body. Purity before puberty. How icky.

My first overt taste of purity culture occurred when a group called “The Masters Commission” visited a sister church. The MC’s as we called them, were young people who had been recruited to what I would now call a high-control gap year where they signed over every aspect of their life to high-demand, high-control discipleship (My characterisation of the program anyway). But in this first year class of MC’s, their mission trip come victory lap around churches involved something called “the courtship drama.” 

The suite from Forrest Gump plays over the speakers.

An elegant dancer, clad in virginal white flowing robes enters the stage portraying naivety and innocence. Gradually, we see her being taken advantage of by all these men who only have one thing on their mind and who will take part of her heart along with it. And because you apparently can’t have sex without becoming eternally bonded in a ‘soul tie’ to your sexual partners, by the time she approaches her wedding day, she has no heart to give. She is used up. Unworthy. Unloveable. 

I didn’t see it as insidious. I saw it as inspirational. Enchanting. And there was this bit about redemption and being forgiven for having the sex (or the intimate connection). I can’t really remember the details. But I do remember being absolutely taken with the artistry and thus the message of the courtship drama. 

Something sinister happened beneath this veil of entertainment though: us girls all cast ourselves as the dancer, and cast men as those who would want to take from us. The boys likely cast themselves as deserving of our virginity (and that is something poor Josh Harris has had to deal with in his deconstruction). All of us cast sex and sensuality before marriage as evil. During that week, we heard about how we aren’t designed to switch off half way. How if you’re kissing, you’re going to want to go the whole way. Therefore, we needed to not engage with desire at all, lest we do the sex, catch pregnancy and demons, and then be judged by God and die (I exaggerate here, of course. But the fear was there in the subtext). I think, on a subliminal level, I and others likely associated sex with the abandonment of our faith. As some special class of sin, and because you can’t unvirgin yourself, it seemed to make you irredeemable. 

Years later, I recall going to a youth camp hosted by the same church. I’ll never forget how two youth leaders, just weeks short of their wedding, gave the sex and purity talk to the eager listeners at that camp. Oh the sexual tension between them! It was unbearably awkward. If any of us allowed ourselves to even think in terms of innuendo, the recognition would have been “WOW these two want to bone.” In hindsight, its kinda amusing to the point of cringey.

In my case, these moments, these books, these songs - they were all met with a discipleship culture that soon put accountability around what we wore and how we behaved. No flirting. That was ‘discouraged’ (read: shamed). No dating. That was practice for divorce. We learned that courtship was the way. We would submit our crushes to the pastor who would pray about it and become the romantic intermediary who would either approach the desired party or advise against the match. Most of us participated in this wholeheartedly, having internalised the pseudo-biblical doctrine of policing womens bodies and repackaged as a better way to love. Over the years, more than one couple in my orbit decided to “date” and I recall how many soon found themselves pressured to leave, removed from leadership or service, or even publicly chastised for their choices and their sexual ‘sins’ made fodder for the leadership and thus gossip for the whole church. The majority left, and as this happened, the ‘covenant’ relationships they experienced inside the church vanished into thin air (as numerous survivors have recounted to me. This also lines up with my observation and my own experience in leaving).

As the pastors eldest daughter, I found myself saddled with a triple bag of fun here: purity culture pressure in and of itself. I have a naturally bubbly nature and thus innocent flirting comes naturally to me. But it was not okay. I learned to suppress part of my personality. Being a pastors kid was the second part of my triple burden. I knew people looked to our family as being an example. My parents were regularly praised as being the ideal parents. Others would model their parenting after my parents methods, and a number of ex members recall how my parents began to usurp their natural parents in terms of affection and influence. Finally, I was an eldest child and thus the example for my younger siblings. The pressure was immense. Not only was I at war with my natural disposition, I felt as if I was in an unwanted spotlight where every action and inaction had consequences. I was paralysed with fear every time a guy showed interest in me, and so I began to  mentally block out desire and try to subdue personality. 

When I was 27, my dad finally suggested a match to me that I didn’t turn down. There had been several before that, but I’d proven difficult to charm. In truth, I was in a complementarian system that believed in female submission and male headship. I wasn’t suited to that life. I wanted to think, and achieve, and fly. Finally, Dad had suggested someone who already treated me as an equal - who even looked up to me. 

As 60 minutes and The Age will tell you, that didn’t turn out ideally. My intended life-long love was gay. A survivor of gay conversion therapy which - spoiler alert - does not work and does immense harm. 

I was 29 when I married. And only days prior, I’d gotten the sex talk from my mother in the Bunnings cafe. Mortifying. Especially because she yelled it over the sound of coffee being burned to oblivion, and because she was unaware that I’d been dispensing the puberty talk to people who refused to read “preparing for adolescence” by James Dobson for quite some years now. I’d also been a bra fitter for 5 years. Don’t know how I got away with that. 

So my first kiss was - lengthy - and only two days before my wedding. 

Fast forward two days and its time for purity culture to make good on its promise to transform both of us, instantly, from chaste virgins as pure as the driven snow to sex god and goddess who are absolutely sexually compatible and swinging from the rafters. 

Yeah nah. Not what happened. 

My beloved had been promised a coy bride who would need to be coaxed and encouraged beyond her virginal timidity. What he got as a horny almost-nympho with a damn good lingerie collection, and a “hell yeah! Did not become the 30 year old virgin, let’s make up for lost time” attitude. 

It threw him for a loop and destroyed the programming he had subjected himself to with both purity culture and gay conversion therapy. 

There was probably also a “holy shit, I really am gay” moment in there too. But we got through eight beautiful, complex, incredible, joyful years of marriage before he acknowledged that this was unsustainable. And before you go thinking they were sexless years of marriage - no. I’d give details, but they’re mine. And I’m sure they’d horrify the people who read my blog for the sake of rage. (You’re welcome guys)

I never thought I’d have to deconstruct my faith. Nor did I think I’d have to deconstruct purity culture. What came next for me was a shocker.

Life after Separation

There we were: newly separated, still living together and traversing a pandemic, a massive relocation to three hours away from the town we had called home, parenting two young kids, and for me, recovering from the physical toll of two full term pregnancies (and five miscarriages). Being that I have a neural tube defect which manifests as both a congenital and degenerative back condition, I found mobility to be a huge challenge and had to relearn some basics after trimester three. So look, when the Physio wouldn’t even let me walk 500 metres unassisted, you can bet your arse losing the mummy tummy wasn’t high on the list of priorities. The stress of the years had also etched deep worry lines into my forehead. Dating, let alone adopting the “fuck the pain away” mantra so many of my more sexually liberated divorced deconstructors adopt - well that didn’t happen for me. 

I had to learn to love my body for surviving all it had allowed me to survive. I had to allow myself to spend money on my appearance - as I also had to realise that prioritising myself was prioritising my children. 

I think in that first year I went on 19 first dates and I purposefully tanked them all. It took me a long time to realise that purity culture had taught me to either shut off or want it all. And the internalised slut shaming for even wanting more than a meal together and a handshake was something I wore like an armour. I was seeing someone for about six months there. But I also had to learn that I shouldn’t just accept the guy who wants me - that I was also desirable, smart, vivacious and had the right to choose the guy I wanted. Ironically, choice-making was something I believe purity culture robbed me of. "God" chose. And we just had to hope we liked the choice.

I also had to learn to stop mirroring my date. I recognised that I would instantly, upon meeting in person, assess what this person wanted me to be and I’d switch into being that girl. It was a trauma response, no doubt. I’d somehow learned this thing where women are safe when the men we are with aren’t threatened by us. But it also came with the idea that men as these bad, sex-obsessed things with no self-control. I had to learn my way through that mental barrier (and to learn how to pick the bitcoin bros, from the fuckbois, to the nice guys who are worth your time but not quite what you’re after. Its a thing people. Stay married! Dating in your late thirties isn’t fun!)

I had to learn to say no. I had to learn to understand consent, in the beginning I didn’t even know consent could be withdrawn. I had to make my way through the mire of forming my own sexual ethic, realising the soul-tie thing as complete BS, and had to unlearn a lot of taboos and non-facts I’d adopted into my bag of beliefs. I also had to learn that if I wasn’t comfortable with sex outside a genuine connection or a relationship, that was absolutely fine too and I didn’t need to explain that to anyone! This was a process I mostly went through by myself. And hey! If I wanted to (as my comedian friend Sam puts it) "ride a carousel of cocks," that would be fine! Oddly, I found it more difficult to justify not doing so. Turns out I think I’m maybe a bit demisexual. The almost-nympho is there, but she will only show up in the context of a genuine connection that fits with my personal sexual ethic. So yeah. I’ve probably got a way-less than average body count going on and I’m absolutely ok with that. Who cares about body counts anyway. Thats slut shaming and I won’t do it.

What I’m not okay with is this: purity culture didn’t just do a number on my mind, on our minds because I’m talking about the collective here too. It did a number on our bodies. There is an element of conditioning on a nervous system level that goes on here. If all our lives, we think sex is some cardinal sin, some special class of wrongdoing that will throw us into a special sort of hell populated with the ghosts of conquests past - it requires undoing on a body level not just a mind level. You can’t think your way to normal sexual arousal if your brain connects sex with the fear-type fight or flight arousal which actually represses sexual function. Who wants to be making a baby when you are running from a bear?  When that baby-making action is the bear you’re running from, friend you’ve got some deconditioning work to do.

I’ve spoken to so many purity culture survivors who are learning this. Some of us struggle saying no, because we think if we’ve let a date kiss us goodnight we also need to submit to their sexual desires. Some of us struggle to say no because we don’t understand consent, as women just do what they’re told. Some of us feel shame at enjoying sex outside of reproductive purposes, or shame at developing a healthy sex life with a partner of our choice who we aren’t married to. In a world where ethical porn and erotica is available, some of us feel crippled by even casual use of the genre - instantly thinking ethical porn use is an addiction and shameful. 

I don’t have the answers here. I happily refer people who my favourite sex educator, Erica Smith who works specifically with what she terms “purity culture dropouts” and my favourite sex and intimacy coach, Meg Cowan, who works with a broad spectrum of couples and individuals who experience issues with sex, sexuality, intimacy and connection. 

Where am I at now?

Well in truth I don’t have to tell you this. And that is growth in and off itself. I didn’t really date at all in the last year and a half, save for a couple of ill fated dates that I actually think could belong quite happily in a comedy bit. Needless to say they didn’t go far! But I also recognised I had some baggage to move through and this wasn’t an experiment I’d want to run with any participant other than myself. 

So here we are. Valentines Day 2023, and I’m happily owning the space I’m in. I’ve got a firm idea of my sexual ethic. I know what I’m looking for in a man and indeed in a relationship now that I’ve got the modern woman thing down. I don’t owe anyone an explanation. I finally understand consent and healthy boundaries.  And I finally own the fact that it is okay for women to like sex. How am I celebrating V Day? I’m going to a girlfriends house to bitch about the guy she just dumped from the emergency room of a hospital, and to laugh about my latest clangers on the dating apps. We will eat burgers and not care if we get bloated. 

And I’m going to listen to “Flowers” by Miley Cyrus, recognising that she stopped one revelation short. It is so okay to buy your own flowers, but you can also buy your own sex toys. Because pleasure isn’t the demon we thought it was. Its alllll good. You do you, boo. 

Good luck making your own way through purity culture. If you need to, contact Meg or Erica. They are the OG’s! 

Religion Shouldn’t Hurt

Dear Bloggosphere,
There’s a hot new instagram bandwagon. I’m jumping on it. Sort of.
Religion Shouldn’t Hurt. That’s the movement. Thats the hashtag. That’s the message. It’s geared at helping survivors of religious trauma to tell their stories.
Here’s why I’m keen to use my teeny tiny section of the interwebs to talk about why it matters.

Sometimes bandwagons annoy me. They tend to isolate one side of a story and ignore the complexities behind it. They can be little more than virtue signalling. They can offer up a quick blast of cathartic venting but give very little else to people who are impacted by dark side of the cause at hand. The “Religion Shouldn’t Hurt” movement (currently trending on Instagram in certain circles) is about empowering people to tell their stories of religious trauma in the hopes that we can gain a little traction when it comes to curtailing the corruption and abuse that exists within some (yeah yeah not all) churches.

To be honest, some of the stories are chilling. They contain details of people who turned to the church in their darkest moments and somewhere along the road, the place that should have been a safe haven became a breeding ground for more trauma. Others, like mine, involve people who were born into churches. We were baptised (or dedicated) there as babies. We played by the rules. We memorised chunks of the Bible, chapter and verse, and yet fell victim to the darkness within these communities.

Let’s be clear on this, too: the church that covers up abuse is also the church that retraumatises the victim. On this, as on so many things, we need to do much much better.

Anyway! I’m not actually going to tell my story. I’ve told snippets of it on “A Tiny Revolution” and on an upcoming episode of “A Spiritual Adventure” but I’m not going to rehash it. Why? Because awareness of religious trauma shouldn’t hinge on the salacious details of someones mistreatment. The fact is that Religious Trauma Syndrome (RTS) is being talked about more and more. There are pushes to get it recognised in the DSM-IV (A diagnostic manual for psychologists) as its own class of trauma syndrome rather than a subset of extreme stress disorders. The recognition that RTS is unique in its presentations is important. This is not just about the amount of people who suffer from complex PTSD post religious abuse. Its about the layer of existential and eternal dread that gets layered over the top of it when abuse renders it impossible for someone to engage with their faith or faith community because of what it will do to their mental health. Too many people are forced to reckon with whether or not it is okay to defend themselves against their abuser, or whether God will judge them for that because the abuser is in a position of power in the church. Too many people have to walk away from church to recover from the trauma it caused, and by doing so face the existential dread of whether or not God will judge them for that too.

If God is love, and I believe that to be true, then God would love an RTS sufferer enough to recognise the pain caused by the institutions of religion and the toxic theology they too often condition us with. If God is love, then we surely won’t be damned for doing what we need to do to recover from the wrongs done against us in God’s name.

So point one is that Religious Trauma is real. Very real. Painfully real. Point number two is that it is conditioned quite deeply. Autonomically deeply, a lot of the time. Let me explain.

In the 1890’s, a Russian physiologist named Ivan Pavlov did some experiments on dogs. Yes, I’m talking about Pavlov’s Dog in a piece about religious trauma. Go with me here.

Dogs, like humans, salivate when they smell food. That is what we are meant to do. Our autonomic nervous system, which is responsible for all the functions we don’t think about (heartbeat, sweating, blood pressure, salivation among other things), organises it for us. We can’t control it - directly anyway. Pavlov played around with this concept. Every time he bought the food out, he would ring a bell. Soon the dogs began to associate the bell with food. Then, when the bell rang on its own, they would salivate anyway.

Their nervous systems had been reprogrammed. We call this classical conditioning.

It is present in every day life. My son vomited his Easter eggs all over the car last week. For the next week, he was sure chocolate made him sick and he would feel sick at the thought of it. Because I’m a dedicated mother, I reconditioned him by showing him he can eat chocolate without spewing. He just couldn’t eat a mountain of chocolate and then look at a phone in a car.

Still, the visceral response of feeling sick at the thought of chocolate once you’ve spewed it all over the car is one type of classical conditioning. Your body responds automatically to the stimuli because of a bad reaction to it. But its not the only way conditioning occurs. One of the earlier, more horribly unethical examples of classical conditioning was the case of little Albert; a nine month old baby who loved playing with the little white lab mice at first. But they conditioned him to fear those very mice by sounding a loud bang every time a mouse was released. He would cry at the sound but grew to associate that fear response with the mice. Eventually it was discovered that Little Albert had been conditioned to fear not only the mice, but all white fluffy things.

Thank GOD we now have ethical panels to stop horrendous experiments like this from taking place nowadays. Anyway…

What do Pavlov’s Dog and Little Albert have to do with religious trauma?

I raise these to illustrate that trauma isn’t housed simply in the mind. It isn’t simply intrusive memories. When we have been in environments that hold such mixed stimuli, those memories can be tied up with physical responses. As such, they can be conditioned together. The dread you felt when you heard a certain person say a certain thing can produce a fear response in you years afterwards when you hear that same phrase, or see that same sign. And that response is deeply physical, not just mental or emotional distress. Your body can feel that distress as well. Common fear responses can include sweating, increased respiratory rate, racing heart, sweaty palms, right up to feeling flighty or frozen, being unable to think, or suffering from flashbacks or night terrors.

Church, for me as for many, is a place of mixed memories. It held happiness as well as fear, dread, and humiliation at times. It was a place I took seriously, because I took (and take) my spirituality seriously. I, like many, wanted to please God. I wanted to do what He wanted me to do. I didn’t want to go to Hell. I gave great weight to the teachings of those who took the pulpit. I was raised to believe certain pastors and leaders without ever questioning. Immediate, unquestioning obedience was the expectation.

Church is also a place where one can reach an altered state of consciousness. We do this in worship and in extended prayer sessions. In evangelicalism or neocharismatic practice particularly, these sessions can be hours long, and involve praying in tongues for extended periods of time, yelling in agreement with someone regardless of what they are saying. The logical brain is cast off as we “put to death the flesh” and “Press in to the spirit.” It is an altered state of consciousness.

For the person who has been traumatised in religious settings or by people they were exposed to at church, this is a toxic mix. This toxic combination of mixed memories, orientation towards pleasing God and by virtue of that the church leaders, the music, the prayer, the altered state of consciousness, the friendships, the happiness, the theology (good and bad), the sights, the smells, the sounds - it can all elicit a trauma response from the body that has been designed to protect you. And you can’t just undo this conditioning by acknowledging it. This work takes time, because it isn’t just your mind that learned it. Your body and your primal brain systems did too.

So your body and brain do what they are meant to do. They go into survival mode.

When we say church shouldn’t hurt, it isn’t just about a bad experience. It is about something that goes far deeper than that. Church shouldn’t condition you to fear. It shouldn’t result in people suffering from complex PTSD. It shouldn’t result in abuse or abuse coverups that retraumatise a victim.

It shouldn’t cost good dollars in therapy sessions to recover from this conditioning that elicits visceral, bodily survival responses and fires off the fear responses in the brain.

Yet this is what it does for so many. I’m happy to say that recovery is possible, and that reclaiming a spiritual practice that sits right with you is absolutely possible. There are some amazing voices out there on social media who are leading the way when it comes to deconstructing toxic theology and toxic religious experiences, and my hope is that these show RTS sufferers that they aren’t alone. I know that many of these voices have been instrumental in my own recovery and reclaiming of my authentic self. I hope they are for you too.

If you have been touched by the “Religion Shouldn’t Hurt” movement, if you have suffered trauma in church, please know that recovery is work that takes time and often a good therapist. You are not alone in your suffering. Don’t be alone in your recovery.

Religion, spirituality, should be positive. It should be uplifting. It should inspire us to be our freest, truest, most altruistic selves. It should surround us with love and community. It should bring solace in our most difficult moments but remind us that we can make it through. It should empower. It should care. If these things are missing from the iteration of religion or spirituality that you are experiencing, then I would encourage you to ask yourself, is this what Jesus would do to me? If the answer is no, get out of there and don’t look back. There is a community of people out here who have deconstructed from toxic religion and found a way to be free. Many of us are in therapy and highly recommend it. We all sit at different places on the spirituality spectrum. We (Should) all affirm your right to find your own way and are here to support you if you need it.

That and your local doctor and therapist. I cannot emphasise that enough.

Sending all the love.

Be well. Be free

Kit K.

Surrendering the Fated Romance

Earlier this week, I jumped on a Zoom call with a dear friend of mine (the fabulous, insightful and brave as heck, Carrie Maya). We were just two friends, chatting, catching up, pretending to attempt to do some work side by side because this whole work from home jam can be tough. And then we started talking about dating. And purity culture. And the fated romances we had both been taught to wait for. In past lives, we had sung the songs (Cue Rebecca St. James’ “Wait for me”), and we had read the books, the most famous of which would be Josh Harris’s “I kissed dating goodbye” (although now, as I dive into the archives, purity culture had gone before him. Long before him. I kinda feel like he was set up, just like we were).

As Carrie started talking about the fated romance and musing about how brave I was to actually be tiptoeing into the weird waters of dating, I mused that in a way, I felt like I was still saving myself for marriage, and found it difficult to get past that notion. It rang true for both of us - unnervingly so. In a “Why the heck did I acknowledge that?” kind of way.

Carrie and I come from slightly different places on this, because our deconstruction journeys and our romantic lives have been different. But it affected us both anyway. You can read her courageous dialogue on it here, and it wouldn’t even slightly do it justice for me to try and explain the complexity and honesty with which she approached this topic. Trigger warnings apply.

My position is this: I waited for “the one.” We were set up by my dad, who was also our pastor. After our breakup, our reunion didn’t happen until it was essentially green-lit by the presiding apostle/prophet over our then-church’s network. I was surrounded by “prophets” and people in the know. But nobody saw it coming that gay conversion therapy wouldn’t work. And nobody mentioned to me that there was any inkling of the possibility that he was truly gay. I walked, completely naive and uninformed, into a situation that could not be won. This relationship was always destined for divorce.

It’s complicated. Knowing all of this, knowing I have the absolute right to be angry (and I am), I would also do it all over again if I had of known how our lives would pan out.

I had the fated romance. A beautiful, decade long relationship with an incredible man. We rescued each other. We had two incredible (and cute) kids together. We moved mountains. We laughed. We cried. We gained. We lost. We were meant for each other.

I’m also divorcing. Because you can’t cure gay. Because gay isn’t a disease. It isn’t wrong. It isn’t even unbiblical when you read that book without bias or bad translation. I’m proud of him for taking on deconstruction and the navigating of his sexuality (and acceptance thereof) with such selflessness and integrity. Our marriage didn’t dissolve. It evolved beyond.

Anyway. Here I am at age 37, dating for the first time in my life. Completely clueless about how to go about that. I know I’m attractive, stable, intelligent, financially solvent, funny, capable, and fascinating. But golly gee wouldn’t it be nice if I could actually feel anything.

Purity culture, courtship culture, the message that you shouldn’t allow emotional entanglements or any physical contact with a person until you were sure they were “the one” left me feeling almost disembodied. It sure made the honeymoon…different. Upon reading other accounts of purity culture deconstruction, I see that is a common thing.

Disembodiment seems like something a lot of ex-evangelicals feel. When you were raised in an environment that relied so heavily on the “prophetic unction” you learn to look for the feeling. You learn to join that feeling with what you believe to be the “still small voice of God.” You also learn in many circles that, when it comes to relationships, a woman’s worth is connected to her marital status. So as a woman, I let myself dull a bubbly personality lest I be confused for flirtatious. I learned to pray about how I should approach certain relationships so I could get the cosmic green light to feel for anyone. After my first breakup with P (my now ex-husband), I remember heading around to my parents place to confide in my mother. To cry on her shoulder. She ended up 'anointing me with oil’ and praying to cut the soul ties between me and P.

Comfort came in the form of deliverance (which those outside church would call a slightly gentler form of ‘exorcism’). It wasn’t…comforting. Although I think its possible my mother may have been doing what she was instructed to do, or perhaps what she thought was best. I don’t blame her for this. We were all part of a system.

So I guess what I’m saying is this: we deconstructed ones, we post-Christians, or exvangelicals, or whatever you want to call us - we have a mixed relationship with our bodies. On one hand we learned to look to our gut feeling as a way to connect with “God” and hear from him. We also learned to divorce ourselves from our bodies as we navigated courtship and relationships. What is chemistry? Golly gee, I dunno.

All I know is that I can sit across the table from a good looking, employed, stable, financially solvent, intelligent, witty, nice-smelling (hey that’s important) man and feel nothing. Only the feeling that I should be attracted to him.

I can’t quite run with should. And my conversation with Carrie made it clear why. I’m still waiting for God, or some higher authority to give the green light. I had three higher authorities say “yes” to my marriage with P. Three people/entities I could blame for my divorce. P isn’t one of them. I’m not one of them. Dammit, I don’t even call our relationship a failed marriage. I view it as wildly successful.

But still, isn’t it nice to have someone to blame. People often ask me why people join cults. The truest answer is, you don’t. You join the nicest group of people you’ve ever met, make the best friends you’ve ever had, are introduced to the highest “truth” you’ve ever heard, enter a thought reform process and then find that its too darn hard to leave because of all that you will lose or of all the ways you’ll be exposed if you do. But there’s another inkling that nips at my heels.

Its this: We all want to live empowered lives. But we also don’t want to be held responsible if it all comes crashing down. If you invest in the wrong business, or marry the wrong person, or if you fall ill, or are the victim of a crime. Cult’s and high demand groups, even healthier religions, give us an out. We can say ‘God’ willed it and we just have to make sense of it all. We can say ‘we followed God’ or whatever deity we are following, and absolve ourselves of the feeling that we got it wrong. We also can’t take credit if we get it right. Glory be to Jesus. Who ironically never sought glory.

So back to that disembodied feeling. I didn’t really bother with dating during Covid. I just did a rough count and I think over the last 13 months I’ve been on 16 first dates and 3 second dates. I’m a conservative type when it comes to dating - I’ll tell you that up front. But I can say that every single date I’ve been on included wonderful conversation (apart from that one dude who really just wanted to sell me ice - not kidding). But I left feeling nothing. I left feeling confusion over what chemistry should feel like. I had a glass of wine with an old friend and, at the time I was in the early stages of dating a lovely guy. But my friend asked “Does any part of you want to jump the table and pash him?”

I said no. On paper, he was everything. But I couldn’t feel a damn thing. So the third date never happened.

My “aha” moment happened with my therapist. She helped me discover that the way I coped with leaving the prophetic movement, the way I coped with the PTSD from abuse that happened in religious settings, was to move out of my feelings and into my head. While I can aspire to feel things and rationalise things, the former is deeply uncomfortable for me while the latter gives me a feeling of safety and even superiority. I can rationalise what happened to me, and what my experiences of life have been. It’s easier than feeling them.

But you can’t rationalise love or chemistry, can you?

So I’m learning a few things. I’m learning to ask myself “what do I think about this?” and then move quickly to “what do I feel about this, both physically and emotionally?” And then to repeat that cycle of “head” and. “body.” I say “body” because a gut feeling is literally in your gut (enteric nervous system if you want to be techy about it). Our emotions also manifest in physical tells - shaking, elevated heart rate, fuzzy head, sweating, other uh, happier sensations. But we in church were erroneously taught that the body was evil. As it turns out, it isn’t. Our body is a temple. A life-sustaining, intelligent, and sacred thing that should not be absent from our experience of life.

It is but one of the many ways church taught me contradictions that I’m now unravelling. I was taught that my thoughts could not be trusted. Only the spirit. I was taught that my body was to be subjugated, but also that it was a temple. There are so many things left to unravel.

Think and feel. Think and feel. It’s okay to do both. My body isn’t evil. My thoughts are not evil. I am not evil.

I suppose dating is a small act of courage. It is so because I am deciding to own my future; mistakes and successes. I am deciding to ignore the threats of judgement and accept that my own assessment of risk and my efforts to keep myself safe are okay. I am unlearning shame. I am unlearning fear. I am unlearning the idea of the divine as an old white man in the sky who watches everything with a judgemental eye and a trident full of lightening ready to strike me. I am learning to laugh at the “cloud of witnesses” notion that literally had me wondering whether they watched me all the time, or whether I got to sit on the loo, or lather myself up in the shower unsupervised.

Do I need to date? No. Am I unhappy single? No. But this small act of courage helps me reclaim who I always should have been: a woman who experiences life fully, who is present in her body and not divorced from it, who can feel life and not just rationalise it.

I don’t think I believe in “the one” anymore. I certainly don’t believe in one “gold standard” future and anything else being substandard. I believe we get to design the lives we want. We get to create a beautiful masterpiece. And if there are mistakes or “didn’t expect that” moments, so be it. It doesn’t affect our value as people.

I write this today because I know there are so darn many of us who feel this way. Or think this way. This is deconstruction, hey. Its confronting the things we were taught, both implicitly and explicitly, and in rebuilding the lives we deserve, having left behind the Calvinist bullshit that has us believe that we are dirty, depraved and unworthy.

Hey - you are worthy, you are good, you are beautiful, not defined by your mistakes, not prohibited from fully revelling in the joy or success your life may bring. Read that line as many times as you need to. It’s the truth.

January 6th, 2021 - The Fruits of Dominionism

I used to write fiction. In fact, my last novel was an exploration of this festering idea that the western church was somehow persecuted. While I liked the book, the storyline, and the characters, the sequel never materialised. I’ll tell you why: I’m not prophet, that’s for sure. But I am logical. In my mind, the logical flow from dominionist theology (seven mountain dominionism, or the idea that God has mandated the church to take dominion in “every domain of society”) was not good. In fact, it scared me. It may have even helped scare me into deconstruction.

What I saw yesterday as Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol looked eerily familiar to what I had seen in my minds eye. I could not, and did not, foresee a Trump presidency when I wrote that book. Like I said, I’m not a prophet. But I was deeply concerned by the attitude of entitlement that went along with the dominionist idea that political dominion was God-given. I watched, mystified, as Christian leaders abandoned their own moral convictions to rally behind an obvious narcissist with a checkered marital history, allegations of sexual assault, and a thin-to-the-point-of-laughable veneer of Christian allegiance. How was it anything but bleedingly obvious that this pathologically selfish, power-hungry thug was doing anything other than saying what he needed to say to lock up the nomination?

There are multiple flaws within the church universal that allowed for this to happen. Bad theology, poor discernment, prophets who confuse their own ideas or desires with the voice of God, the toxic mix of capitalism, dominionism and church to name a few. Perhaps the most significant issue was the tendency for neo-charismatic spokespeople to herald a “greater truth” when referring to the schism between the natural world and the spirit world. How could that not be cherry picked alongside scriptures about the “kingdom of God suffering violence and the violent take it by force”? How could that not result in prophets claiming supernatural overthrow of election results that church leaders hadn’t prophesied? How could that not end up in protests and riots?

It was not arrested then, and it hasn’t been arrested yet.

Now isn’t the day to go into a deep-dive on the issues with these sub-doctrines that seem to have combined to create a perfect storm for Christians to get caught up in the collective right-wing delusion. I have neither the heart nor the time for it. But I will say this:

• We must take a keen, unbiased look at every doctrine and belief we hold, realising that if it is not good, if it is not kind, if it is not pure, if it does not build up what the Bible called “the least of us”, then it is not of God.

• We must root out the heretical, damaging and unbiblical doctrine of dominionism that has woven its way into evangelical Christianity. Where money and power are promised, corruption can grow. The church is simply another at-risk organisation in this way.

• We must give no pass to subtle or clandestine racism, misogyny, anti-government rhetoric, or false prophecy in our midst.

• We must be about the hard work of reconciliation. Thoughts and prayers are not enough.

• And we must realise that until the church is given back to the marginalised and disenfranchised for whom the person of Jesus dedicated his earthly life, then we are not the church he intended to be.

Now is not a moment to listen to a single church leader who excuses the behaviour at the capitol yesterday, or who claims it was “actually peaceful”, or that it was “necessary.” This was seditious and lawless. God is not glorified.

To my American friends, be safe. If it weren’t for Coronavirus, I’d offer my house up for your escapism! What a mad world we live in right now.

What a mad world indeed.

It’s Okay to be Okay

Well, it has been a hard year to blog. I’ll say that upfront. I mean there have been literal firestorms, and pandemics and all sorts. They’ve all been external though. Then there has been the internal stuff. Late last year, my husband and I published his story of surviving gay conversion therapy (also known as Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Change Efforts). I had intended to follow that piece up with a lot of stuff on mixed-orientation marriage, but something didn’t feel right. I’m glad I listened to that gut feeling. Because only a couple of months later, he and I would separate. 

Fast forward to today: The ink is barely dry on the announcement of our separation. My best friend and her girlfriend came around to get the kids and take them out for a play because this covid19 lockdown has been hard on parents! Another newly single friend dropped around with coffee because we are allowed to now thank God! She and I sat on the couch with Patrick, who now comfortably inhabits the ‘best friend’ space, and we laughed. Like, belly-laughed. This is our life now: separated,  best friends, co-parents, in lockdown until the pandemic passes and then living together by choice afterwards.

I didn’t think this would be how my life went. But it is. And every day I spend a moment in gratitude that this separation didn’t go the way of animosity and loathing.

There has long been a message out there in the ether about mental illness, saying “It’s okay not to be okay,” and it is. It 100% is. But I’m also learning, here on the other side of chronic pain, trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder, repetitive pregnancy loss, losing family-relationships, losing a community of friends who were supposed to be “covenant” and “forever no matter what”,  having to leave a church that represented the only life I’d ever known, changing careers, deconstructing faith, reconstructing faith, having a whole town talk about my family’s dirty laundry, having my dad take to the newspaper to discredit us when it came out that we no longer go to his church, supporting my husband through a sexuality crisis and recovery from the horrendous damage of conversion therapy and a lifetime of internalised homophobia, separating from that husband because of his sexuality and reinventing our partnership – it’s okay to be okay, too.

It’s okay to be okay, too.

When I was diagnosed with PTSD nearly a decade ago, following a misdiagnosis of anxiety and depression, I wondered whether I would ever be normal again. I had been diagnosed with a mental illness that seemed to mean I had diminished coping skills. Counselling failed to dull the vivid flashbacks (thanks to an extraordinary ability to recall details in picture format). It seemed I would live a lifetime under the weight of past trauma. I felt the shame of that diagnosis, and within my social circle at the time where everyone knew everyone’s business, I had failed to find a feeling of safety. Instead, I felt exposed, ashamed and on-show every time I had an episode. I was finding it even more difficult to enjoy life. That was the unwanted gift my diagnosis gave me.

I was wearing the weight of stigma that often comes with mental illness. That made it hard to accept that for the most part, I was a strong, smart, worthy person with so much going for her. Sometimes I think we can have such a deep attachment to our trauma or to the diagnosis that explained our difficulty that it is difficult to lean into the beauty, strength and complexity of who we are.

Ironically, after my diagnosis, this made my condition worse: I would fear having a PTS episode, which would increase my ambient anxiety levels, which would mean my tolerance was lower and I was more likely to have an episode. Saturday nights became long, sleepless nights, which meant I would march into Sunday ill-prepared for the stressors I would face. Usually, this meant my body would burn through stress hormones and I’d crash on Monday’s with blinding migraines. My long-suffering (now ex) husband supported me through this beautifully. During this time, we also coped with the loss of four pregnancies before finally, our son was born. On the day I found out I was pregnant for the fifth time, Patrick knew it was time to leave the church. I would fight to stay for another few months before realising leaving was our only choice. We were about to plunge into an incredible time of upheaval. I was about to face more confrontation, stress, grief and loss than I had ever experienced before. But something unexpected happened: I stayed pregnant for the first time, and my PTSD episodes decreased to the point where the coping mechanisms I used to use daily are all but forgotten.

I went from having an episode once a week at least, to forgetting I even had the condition.

Despite all the heartache we faced, the years I spent married to Patrick were wonderful and beautiful too. We have truly walked through fire together, and we’ve laughed, lived, and created a beautiful family that remains and will remain the centre of our hearts and lives. But he is gay, and there’s just no way around that. I’m truly happy for him, and am happy that I reached a point of being whole-heartedly LGBTQIA+ affirming in my theology before our separation. That means I celebrate with him instead of feeling a whole lot of unhelpful, and in my opinion unbiblical, things.

After we made the call, I felt grief and sadness, of course. But the main thing I felt was “What on earth will people say? How will they judge us?” I felt this because I used to be the person who thought divorce was always the wrong thing. I had this naive idea that everything could be prayed away, or ignored away, and that which couldn’t be was a tragedy. Deconstructing my faith disabused me of that idea.

I don’t see divorce as a tragedy anymore. I see abuse as a tragedy, but if someone has walked away from an abusive marriage then the walking isn’t tragic! It is brave and wonderful.

I see mistreatment of a spouse as a tragedy. But I don’t see that spouse standing up for themselves and realising they are worth happiness as a tragic.

I don’t see dissolving a marriage because of sexuality as a tragedy. I see living a lifetime of repression as a tragedy.

I do see growing apart as sad. I do think marriage is to be fought for. I do see “til death do us part” as a beautiful ideal that I hope to experience. That I will experience (lets put that down as #goals here). But I am no longer naive enough to think that misery is noble and kids are better off with married parents even if those parents are miserable, depressed and at eachother’s throats.

Once I realised that this is what I really thought, I came to another realisation: its okay to be okay, even if you are divorced or divorcing, even if you have a mental illness (no matter if it is well-managed or not), even if life didn’t go the way you planned it would go, even if you’ve caught more curveballs than its really fair for life to offer up. You don’t have to feel miserable just because that’s what society expects of you. It is okay to separate and feel genuine love and happiness for your ex-partner, and geniuine optimism about what comes next for us as individuals.

Because I’m a woman and I can totally multitask, it is also okay to have moments of sadness, too. The existance of one doesn’t have to deny the existance of the other.

It’s like my friend Bridget told me: “Don’t let anyone shit in your peace bubble. You get to have the life you want.”

So here we are in the middle of a pandemic, locked down in our homes, feeling a little bit caged and realising the human spirit really isn’t made for captivity. This has been a time of upheaval globally, and mental illness has compounded this difficulty for many of us. I like to say that Patrick and I split “before it was cool” because you bet your butt there will be a spike in divorces post Covid19.

But I want to say this: if joy visits you, let it. If you wake up one day and you don’t feel depressed or anxious or caged or let down or beaten up by life, let yourself feel okay. Sometimes it’s hard to let ourselves be happy when we have been conditioned to another reality. Being happy, experiencing joy, doesn’t deny life’s hardships. It doesn’t mean you no longer have a mental illness, or that your life is suddenly easy. It certainly doesn’t mean you have to stay happy either. It just means that here, in this moment, you are okay. That is something you can lean into with a smile.

Why say all of this? I’ve been looking around at Christian messaging (and I still identify as Christian FYI), and I’ve noticed there is often a lot of emphasis on suffering. “When we suffer God is glorified.” “His strength is made perfect in our weakness.” “God disciplines those he loves.” “Let God heal you from your hurts and your wounds.” Also, pretty much everything about the Lutheran and Billy Grahamesque versions of Christianity. It all seems to tune us into our deficits and low points so that “God can be magnified”. That has been my experience, at least.

Here is my progressive Christian hot-take: we don’t have to hate ourselves, or focus on the bad things in us or around us. God doesn’t have to use every experience of our lives as a glory-grabbing moment, nor do I think miserable people bring all that much glory. You know? Happiness is okay too. Acceptance of ourselves in all our imperfect perfection is wonderful.

Over the last decade, I’ve spent a lot of time doing the hard yards when it comes to my wellbeing. I’m no longer the traumatised girl with the new PTSD diagnosis. Every now and then, once in a blue moon, I experience the taste of metal in my mouth and realise my pulse is racing and my cognition is a little scrambled. But now I know the sky isn’t falling; I’m just having a PTSD episode. I now know that PTSD isn’t shameful. Its a normal reaction to a set of really abnormal circumstances. Having spent a lot of time learning from experts and doing the work, I have built up some pretty amazing skills when it comes to resilience and wellness. I’m proud of that. And I’m going to say something pretty wild here – I’m not giving God the glory for it. He knows I did the work!

I’ve also learned something precious: I can’t control my life. I can live it. I can throw myself into it, make the best of it, and take responsibility for my own decisions and actions, but control is a myth because life is filled with other people and their choices and inner realities.

A couple of years ago, I got the first niggle that “til death do us part”might not happen for Patrick and I. So I did what I had learned to do – enjoyed every moment that I could, knowing I couldn’t change the inevitable but I could enjoy what we had. Those two years have been an absolute gift. We have loved to the best of our ability until we both knew it was time to love platonically instead. Now that time has come, our ability to accept the things we cannot change has meant we navigate our way forward as friends with a truly special bond. He cheers me on as a single woman in her prime. I cheer him on as the most fabulous Dad my kids could ask for, and I can’t wait to see how life unfolds for us in this unconventionally, wholly affirming post-separation family.

Sometimes resilience means fighting for what you know you must fight for. Sometimes it means knowing when something can’t be changed and accepting the outcome so that you can find your way forward.

I get that this is hard for some people to understand. I also get that this blog post is a little more rambly and a little less cerebral than my normal posts, but I just wanted to say: for my friends who caught a curveball and whose lives turned out differently to what they planned, for my friends who are struggling with lockdown, for my friends who have a diagnosed or undiagnosed mental illness – its okay to be okay.

If you feel good, that is a good thing. It doesn’t decrease your hardship. It magnifies your strength.

Be well, fam

Kit K

What Happens When God Doesn’t Answer Our Prayers

Late last night, a friend send me a text message. “Have you seen, #wakeupolive on instagram?” it read. I jumped on over and saw every mothers nightmare. A beautiful little girl name Olive, 2 years old, full of life, had suddenly stopped breathing and died. She was taken to hospital and declared dead on arrival. She was not on life support. Olive was gone. My heart sunk to my shoes. I wanted to wake my sweet 2 year old girl and cuddle her forever. Because no parent should lose a child. But little Olive’s case was different. Her mother is a worship leader at Bethel and the last five days have been filled with worship sessions, worldwide prayer and fervent beseechings for God to raise this little girl to life.Now read me right, I’d be thrilled if the best were to happen. I’d pull a Tom Cruise and jump  up and down on the couch with my kids. 

But we are heading into day six now and so this story will have a lot of people asking “What if she doesn’t get raised from the dead?” Well that, my friend, is a very good question.

I want to start by saying I believe in miracles, in that I have been the very reluctant recipient of two of them. (I.e. It wasn’t mind over matter because I was sure that I was not going to be healed from these conditions. I’d even been in big arguments about it. There were witnesses to that.) Long story…

But miracle healings do happen. In the science world, they are called spontaneous remissions. There are thousands of documented instances of sudden and inexplicable recoveries in both Christian and secular settings. When you look at people like Dr Joe Dispenza, Dr Gregg Braden and even illusionist Derren Brown,  you actually do get some pretty fascinating explanations for how these healings might take place. I’mma blog more on that another day because it’s complicated. But for the sake of today I want to say this:

I believe that God, or whatever you choose to call the force that animates the universe, can use various mechanisms to heal us. Science and metaphysical philosophers of various streams may be able to explain some aspects of it. Great. I’m not offended by that. I believe that God can do whatever He wants to do. I also believe know it can be profoundly disappointing when it doesn’t pan out the way we’d have liked.

Real talk: God has been profoundly disappointing to me at times. I remember sobbing in the shower after my fourth miscarriage and telling God some things I really hated and was furious about. Then I hated myself for hating God. And then I realised God has big shoulders. He can handle my anger and my questions.

When these questions become deep questioning, that can be called deconstruction. It’s the moment we start to grapple with whether or not our faith and worldview holds up to scrutiny. The issue with deconstruction is not whether God can handle it. Its whether we can. When I look at the Bethel movement, I can see some pretty big red flags. One is the doctrine that complete healing is guaranteed as part of atonement at the point of salvation.

Bill Johnson believes and teaches that [1]:

God never causes sickness.
God always chooses to heal.
Paul’s thorn in the flesh was definitely not a physical ailment.
If you do not believe in healing on demand, you are preaching another gospel

Johnson has said “I refuse to create a theology that allows for sickness.”

Well! Bill isn’t God. He doesn’t get to decide that, but…

The first point I don’t have an issue with per se. Although, as we age, the body is subject to entropy and atrophy. That, to me, seems to be just part of life after Eden.

The second is rubbish. God doesn’t always choose to heal. Jacob walked with a limp. God didn’t choose to heal him. The argument that Paul’s thorn in the flesh was “definitely not a physical ailment” is laughable. There is no way we can tell. I know plenty of people of great faith, who walked closely with God, who were constantly bringing their sin and failures before him who did not receive their miracles. I wouldn’t dare question their salvation. I wouldn’t dare question anyone listed in Hebrews 11 who didn’t receive their healing or the thing they were praying for.

The moment we create a theology that portrays God as a genie in a bottle who grants our healing wishes, we deny the sovereignty of God. If we believe that God is God, we have to believe He is sovereign over the timing of healing (i.e. here or eternity). We have to believe the choice is ultimately His. If not, we are demoting Him to genie, and promoting ourselves to deity.

And hey – the scripture tells us that if we share in his sufferings, we share in his glory. Why would that be dropped into scripture if salvation meant life would be a painless walk in the park?

The idea that healing is guaranteed on demand is a bad doctrine that has the potential to knock someone right out of the church door if tragedy strikes. It’s bad theology. And bad theology is dangerous.

I used to come at faith from a position of, I don’t know, superiority maybe? I had some bad theology of my own. Now, having lost the blessed naivety of my youth, I know that Christianity isn’t a magic wand, a silver spoon or a genie in a bottle. It is a comfort and a guide. It is a set of ethics and morals. It is a way of seeing the world. It’s a reverence and a reference point, and so much more.

I believe it should constantly be something I wrestle with and think about in terms of how best to live it out. But it doesn’t change the amount of struggles I will face in my life (spoiler: there have been a few!). 

I doesn’t change the amount of struggles anyone faces. The Bible never said it would. It said though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will *fear* no evil for you are with me. It said thy rod and staff comfort me. It said all things would work together for good for those who love God and are called according to his purpose. But that never meant we would be immune to pain.

Hey. I’ve got unanswered prayers. I have significant health challenges. I don’t for one minute blame God, and I don’t for one minute blame myself. Those challenges mean I can sit with people who have invisible illnesses, support them and understand them. I grieve my angel babies. But I’ve been able to hold the hands of people walking the road of infertility. Sharing those deeply personal struggles is an honour I don’t take lightly. I might not be healed, but I am bloody resilient. I thank God for that gift.

(I’m not suggesting that poor Olive’s mum looks for any such silver lining right now. I am hurting for that woman! Let’s make that clear.)

The case of young Olive is a tragedy. I hope it doesn’t become a dual tragedy that causes her mother to lose faith, or causes other people to ask God why He didn’t be a good genie and bring her back when we demanded it. If it did, I wouldn’t blame the parents. I wouldn’t blame the people who are praying for these precious souls because of the compassion and empathy and faith they have right now. Thank God for them!

I’d blame the people who trot out bad theology and raise expectations above the Biblical bar.

God isn’t our genie. He is our father in heaven. He is the author and finisher of our faith. He is sovereign. He is not able to be fully understood and I cringe at even using male pronouns for him right now. God is too big for our petty labels. God is too big to push around.

And hey side note: I read this fabulous quote on instagram (I’m looking at you, Jess Hugenberg): Types of witchcraft: 1) incantation: magic spells, a series of words or phrases believed to be uttered to achieve a desired result. 2) Divination: seeking knowledge by supernatural means, such as necromancy, which is summoning spirits or raising the dead.

Proclaiming “resurrection power” with poor understanding is heresy. Resurrection power is NOT the power to raise anyone from the dead. Resurrection power is the power that fuelled and accompanied Jesus’ resurrection which defeated sin and death. That doesn’t mean we will never die but that our souls will have eternal life in Jesus.

Look, I don’t know about you, but I like to stand well clear of the line that tells God what to do. The rationale above is pretty good reasoning as to why. My witch friend (yes! She’s fab) has shown me there is far more to witchcraft that what I wrote above. Her practice is quite different. But I’ve put that quote up there for thought provocation. We need to be careful which lines we cross. In my mind here, Bethel is crossing some dangerous lines.

If God didn’t answer your prayer, 
If he didn’t heal your child, or your sibling, your friend or partner, if He didn’t grant your wish on demand, that doesn’t mean God doesn’t exist. Look for him in comfort you receive. In the medical treatment you can access. In the faces of the friends who support you, and hopefully even in the blogs that try and help you to grapple with the questions that fall out of that disappointment.

But when we subscribe to the genie in a bottle doctrine of complete and guaranteed healing as part of atonement, then we not only question God but our very salvation. There is no biblical case for us to think we get to demand God heal us and have him scramble to snap his cosmic fingers.

Now, for my atheist readers, Hi! Good to have you along. I’m sure there are a million thoughts you have here, including the power of the mind and the placebo effect in healings. I’ll get to that another day! But for everyone else who believes there is something out there, for those of us who believe that something out there is called God, hang tight.

Unattained healing, ungranted wishes, unrequited desires – these are not evidence of an absent God. I like what a friend of mine says “Lack of evidence is not evidence of lack.” She was saying it about the world of research, indicating that there is much yet to be discovered in terms of the power of the body, the mind and the forces that animate and impact upon it.

I think it applies to God, too. I look at world history, at world religions, at the different denominations that exist around the world and I know that we are all striving to find meaning on this planet and to try to understand and explain the uncontainable Divine.

If God hasn’t answered your prayer. I’m sorry. I hope in time, He does. But if tragedy has struck, I hope that you can find comfort in the knowledge of a loving God who will carry you through the aftermath. When we subject ourselves to bad theology that treats God like a genie and denigrates His sovereignty, we can’t find comfort in God when we go through hard times. We can only be angry that our genie didn’t perform, or we can think that somehow we weren’t good enough.

Don’t do that. Life is hard enough. My heart is with the Bethel Church and the Heiligenthal family. I’m praying for them right now in this horrendous time of grief. I’m also grieved that this has played out in such a public and desperate fashion. Gosh. Imagine.

That’s all I got. I’m going to go hug my daughter real tight.

Over and out

Internalised Victim Blaming

One day last week, my husband got home and asked me how my day was. Ordinarily, it’s an innocuous question. This day, it was loaded. We had just posted something big on the blog. Something I had been carrying around for years, and he for decades: his story of surviving gay conversion therapy (what others might call ‘sexual orientation change efforts’ or the ‘LGBTQA+ conversion movement), which of course involved him coming out as bisexual. That kind of thing can make you feel a little vulnerable. Brene Brown tells me that vulnerability is courage though, so I was mentally feeling like a badass, while emotionally feeling a little…meh.



I rambled, as I tend to do when I’m feeling overwhelmed. As I rambled, I explained my fears that people would make it about them when it wasn’t, or that it would be seen as an attack on churches when it isn’t…that it was, in fact, a call for churches in general to wake up to damage that may be invisible to them and to become safe places for LGBTQA+ people. But I was scared that it would be taken the wrong way, and I was pre-empting the responses. 

Then my husband said something that made me sit up and listen.

He said, “Babe, that sounds like internalised victim blaming.” 

Yowza. He didn’t tell me what to do about it. He just let me sit with it. And sit with it I have.

I wanted to take a moment on this blog to pass on that little lightbulb moment. Victim blaming happens. We see it all over the news in all sorts of horrendous situations. It happens when people try to cover up institutional abuse. It happens when judges take the side of a neat, tidy, middle class perp and offer un-earned leniency or when people say the victim was asking for it. It happens in all sorts of places. It’s wrong on all counts.

But it also happens inside us. We blame ourselves. When someone has been the victim of any type of abuse, be it psychological, spiritual, physical, or sexual, it might be hard to realise that we are internalising the victim blaming – that we are blaming ourselves for things others might say or think, or pre-empting how they’ll react. 

I’m inviting you to notice it. In particular, I’m inviting survivors of religious abuse to take a moment to do so. Because noticing matters. It can be so healing.

Over the year that I’ve been writing this blog, it has gathered together a unique readership: we come from all over the world. We are mostly Millennials and Gen X’ers. We have been raised in and around churches, but have found ourselves at odds with doctrines or power structures that we weren’t allowed to question, or that crushed our spirits. Many of us are spiritually curious. We are Christians in and out of church, many of us are agnostics who have been burned by church, or atheists who have walked away from their childhood faith. So many of us are closet progressives who are wondering if we can be called “Christian” and still sit to the left of Judo-Christian conservatism.

I like you. You are my people. I blog for you. And me, but I’m one of you so there’s that.

A lot of us, sadly, have left groups that were toxic to us. I have a feeling a lot of us have suffered some type of religious abuse. So here are some things you need to know [1]:

• Religious abuse is real. It can involve psychological manipulation or various types of harm inflicted on a person through the teachings of their religion.

• It is often perpetrated by people in positions of power within the religion, but I’d argue that it can include lateral violence (whereby the abuse becomes part of the culture of a group or religion and is then inflicted by peers as well).

• Wikipedia, the font of all wisdom as we know, says “It is most often directed at children and emotionally vulnerable adults, and motivations behind such abuse vary, but can be either well-intentioned or malicious.”

• It’s confusing as heck, because sometimes it is well-intentioned and is interwoven with empowering moments or talk of a benevolent, loving God. A lot of us have heard church referred to as a “Family.” That can be so promising but so traumatic at the same time. All of this amounts to what can be well-intentioned and damaging at the same time.

• Regardless of the intent, the effects are real. Long term damage may include “the victim developing phobias or long-term depression. They may have a sense of shame that persists even after they leave the religion. A person can also be manipulated into avoiding a beneficial action (such as a medical treatment) or to engage in a harmful behavior.” Depression, anxiety, PTSD and dissociative disorders are among the other mental health issues that may arise from religious abuse. So it is serious. It shouldn’t be fobbed off.

• It’s not that uncommon. You might be surprised how many people relate to it. A recent study took a sample from a College campus in the States and found 12.5% of participants had experienced religious abuse.

An expert in the topic, Ronald Enroth, wrote a book called “Churches that abuse”. In it, he proposed 5 categories of abuse (Thanks wiki *again.* for the summary [1].)

1. “Authority and Power: abuse arises when leaders of a group arrogate to themselves power and authority that lacks the dynamics of open accountability and the capacity to question or challenge decisions made by leaders. The shift entails moving from general respect for an office bearer to one where members loyally submit without any right to dissent.

2. Manipulation and Control: abusive groups are characterized by social dynamics where fear, guilt or threats are routinely used to produce unquestioning obedience, group conformity or stringent tests of loyalty. The leader-disciple relationship may become one in which the leader’s decisions control and usurp the disciple’s right or capacity to make choices.

3. Elitism and Persecution: abusive groups depict themselves as unique and have a strong organizational tendency to be separate from other bodies and institutions. The social dynamism of the group involves being independent or separate, with diminishing possibilities for internal correction or reflection, whilst outside criticism.

4. Life-style and Experience: abusive groups foster rigidity in behavior and belief that requires conformity to the group’s ideals.

5. Dissent and Discipline: abusive groups tend to suppress any kind of internal challenge to decisions made by leaders. (end wiki quote)

You can imagine that all sorts of ploys would be needed to maintain that sort of control. The book is excellent. Read it if you need to. But consider the ways in which mind games, gaslighting and manipulative control methods would be needed to create such an environment (Even if it started out, or is still to some degree (of cognitive dissonance, I’d argue) well-intentioned).

Research has shown the people who depart from such groups often show symptoms associated with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. In fact, complex PTSD is one of the points laid out in something called “Religious Trauma Syndrome [2] Mensline Australia has published a list of things to watch out for in terms of religious trauma [3]. Some of these cut pretty close to home, so I’ll leave it to you to jump over to that page if you feel the need. But why am I talking about this in an article about internalised victim blaming. Well for one thing, we need to understand the harm is real. For another thing, this:

Someone raised a point to me a few months back that really made me think: he said “people who have been gaslit (made to question their own mind) in abusive situations are often chronic over-explainers.”

Again. Yowza. When my husband mentioned the term “internalised victim blaming” it connected for me, instantly. When you’ve been made to question your own mind, you over-explain because you need to be believed. When other people have blamed you or made you question your own nature or worthiness, you can blame yourself too. Long after their voices are absent from your life, you still hear them. As long as this goes unchecked, the damage can continue. And you deserve better than that. We all do.

I lay all these things out for a few reasons: Firstly, I want you to know that you aren’t alone. Secondly, I want you to know that internalised victim blaming isn’t uncommon. But thirdly, that doesn’t mean what happened to you was your fault. And it doesn’t mean you have to continue to listen the voices that blame you. 

Even if those voices are from your own mind, or echoes from memories you’d much rather forget.

I’m a strong believer in therapy. I’m a strong believer that the company of positive people, intentionally chosen to support and empower you, is therapeutic. I’m a strong believer that meta-cognition, or the act of noticing your own thoughts, can help free you from the prison built by trauma.

I didn’t know that internalised victim blaming existed until this week. Or perhaps I did, I just hadn’t given it words. I didn’t know that victims of gaslighting were often chronic over-explainers until recently. I’ve noticed now. 

So if this is you, too, then I want you to know that you don’t have to blame yourself or explain yourself to anyone. I want you to notice that internalised victim blaming can sometimes mean feeling the pressure of what you are sure people are thinking even when it isn’t said to you. Hey – no one can read minds.

You don’t have to blame yourself or be responsible for what others think about you.

You don’t have to avoid God just because church was traumatic.

Not all churches are traumatic but that doesn’t meant you have to step inside if you just can’t bring yourself to.

If you can’t be a Christian inside church at the moment, then you can be a friend of mind and we can follow Jesus together, and grapple with the big questions, and get into the philosophical and hermeneutical mess of life knowing God’s shoulders are big enough to carry it if we stuff it up.

I just don’t think God would be nearly as hard on us as we are on ourselves sometimes. The irony in fearing hell is that sometimes you can live it anyway. I hope that, in noticing with me that internalised victim blaming and chronic over-explaining is a thing, we can release ourselves from that kind of hell.

Hey people – take care of yourself this Christmas. I’m aware this can be a triggering time of year for some. Make sure you check in with yourself and exercise some self-care if you need.

Peace! 


Kit K

PSA: God Doesn’t Kill People in Bushfires

Okay. My least favourite athlete is back in the news – perhaps because he and Margaret Court like to compete for titles (like Australia’s biggest homophobe). I joke. I joke. But he claimed this weekend that the bushfires in Queensland are God’s judgement for abortion and marriage equality laws. When lives are lost in natural disasters and an accusation like this comes out, it’s no joke. But sadly, it’s not even new. Daniel Naliah made the same claim about abortion law and bushfires back in 2009. 

It was outrageous and unbiblical then, and it’s outrageous and unbiblical now. But with lives lost, Imma drop a microblog on it to drop a few Biblical truthbombs.

Here they are. I’m sure there is more, but here’s the start:

• Isaiah 51:6 describes some pretty heavy weather but promises his salvation shall endure. (I.e. He doesn’t kill people via extreme weather)

•  Luke 9:56 says Jesus came to save our lives not destroy them.

•  Matt 18:4 says it’s not God’s will that even one should perish.

• Noah’s flood, and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah occurred before the Old Testament/New Testament split whereby Jesus took the judgement of Mankind.

• Even if this wasn’t the case, Abraham negotiated with God in Genesis 18:16ff and God said that if there were even 10 good men in Sodom and Gomorrah, he wouldn’t destroy it. I know there are more than 10 good men in Australia.

This is a long way of say that Izzy Folau’s statements are unbiblical, unfounded fear-mongering that does nothing but tarnish the name and perceived-nature of God. God doesn’t kill people because of law changes. But maybe we should pay some attention to climate change (which, believe it or not is not a religious issue! You can be a Christian and reject single use plastic because it’s bad for the environment).

Anyway. Hi! It’s Monday. Hope your’s is good. It’s going to be a huge week on the blog here, and I’m working really hard on some kicking’ content for you. If you haven’t subscribed yet, get on it friends. You won’t want to miss Thursday’s piece.

Have a great week, safe in the knowledge that God isn’t  burning Australia down or causing crippling drought. Comforting, yeah?

Kit K.

The Good Christian Persecution Complex

Hey there bloggerati! It’s been a while. I’m afraid this months blogging effort has lapsed far behind others but I’m telling myself there’s a good reason for that. I’ve finished the first major redraft of a book I’m ghostwriting. I got a short-notice request for a coffee-table book of layman-friendly research articles that ate through a week, and in between, there has been man-flu, 2-year old molars and various kinds of growth spurts to hit Casa-Kennedy. In amongst this, something has been burning in my mind: the good Christian Persecution Complex. I want to take a moment to talk about it.

The truth is, it has been on my mind because we’ve been covering my least favourite book of the Bible at church recently: The Book of Revelation.

I hate it. I think I was put off it when I viewed a Kirk Douglas rapture film of some description when I was a touch too young, and thus my yearning for writings regarding apocalyptic prophecy died then and there. But there’s no denying it. Revelation exists. The powers that be saw fit to put it in the final cut of the Bible. So we’ve got to look at it, right? Nestled in Revelation chapter 2 is a reference to the church of Smyrna: the persecuted church. In his letter to the Smyrnaans, John encourages them not to fear prison, tribulation, poverty, or blasphemy, and promises they will overcome “the second death” and be given the crown of life. (Rev 2:12ff). Now, this is a beautiful note of encouragement to the persecuted church. But here is my strong feeling on it: we can’t call any opposition we might experience ‘persecution’. And perhaps not for the reasons you think.

Discomfort and bullying vs. persecution proper

Persecution is defined as “hostility and ill-treatment, especially because of race or political or religious beliefs; oppression.”  Among its synonyms are victimization, maltreatment, abuse, tyrannisation, torture, torment, discrimination and other such terms. Over the course of the last five or so years, I’ve observed a lot of good Christians cry “persecution” when someone challenges their ideals on Facebook (which, oddly, seems to be where ‘real-life’ plays out these days. Weird.). While I do concede that cyberbullying is very real and also agree that for some, it takes real guts and incites real anxiety when they put their faith out there for the world to judge, I do have to offer up a caution: we can’t claim the martyrs crown because someone disagreed with our belief system.

Society is becoming increasingly pluralistic if you ask me. We don’t have one faith that everyone needs to subscribe to anymore and thus we can expect a bit more pushback when we say things like “Because the Bible says so.” Even if we look at Christianity alone, there are increasingly diverse ways of looking at our individual and collective efforts at following Christ. Two people who are well-educated, well-read and genuinely searching for the best way to live a Christian life can arrive at two very different conclusions. This means a lot of people can disagree with us, and even within the Christian faith alone, a lot of us can disagree with each other.

The results can often mean conflict, even nasty conflict. But here in this complicated and uncomfortable zone lies a truth we need to acknowledge: Discomfort, bullying and persecution aren’t the same things.

For clarity, I’ll offer up a qualification here: bullying is bad! I’m not a fan of bullying! Don’t do it. Don’t take part it in. Don’t stay silent if you witness it and can safely speak up and help the target. But don’t equate it with persecution. There may be overlap, but it is not the same thing. Persecution is often systematic and wide-spread. Bullying is more often one on one. Persecution involves large groups or power structures bearing down on minorities or marginalised people. Bullying is more targetted and nuanced. Persecution may involve bullying, but the reverse isn’t necessarily true.

And then there is discomfort. Discomfort is good sometimes. I’ve heard countless motivational speakers remind us that no growth happens inside our comfort zone, and I have to agree! We shouldn’t fear discomfort. It is part of life and sometimes good things come out of it! Persecution, however, is crushing, life-altering, and in so many cases, life-threatening. Open Doors USA, an organisation that exists for persecuted Christians, has this to say on the matter:  “While Christian persecution takes many forms, it is defined as any hostility experienced as a result of identification with Jesus Christ. From Sudan to Russia, from Nigeria to North Korea, from Colombia to India, followers of Christianity are targeted for their faith. They are attacked; they are discriminated against at work and at school; they risk sexual violence, torture, arrest and much more.

In just the last year*, there have been:

• Over 245 million Christians living in places where they experience high levels of persecution

• 4,305 Christians killed for their faith

• 1,847 churches and other Christian buildings attacked.

• 3,150 believers detained without trial, arrested, sentenced or imprisoned.”

These numbers are mind-boggling. But a further look into them (which came from the 2019 World Watch List) is this: Saudi Arabia didn’t even crack the top ten in terms of persecution against Christians. China didn’t crack the top twenty.  The  United Arab Emirates sat at number 45. Open Doors only carried the top 50 countries in terms of persecution on their list: The United States of America, Australia, and Great Britain did not make the list. Yet, at least from my observation, there is a growing idea that Evangelical Christians are being persecuted, and we seem to buy into this rhetoric all too easily.

The idea that we, in our privilege as some of the richest nations on earth, with our human rights advancements, our employment anti-discrimination laws, and our religious freedom acts, might be persecuted ignores the very real systematic targeting of our Christian brothers and sisters in other countries like North Korea, Somalia and Afghanistan – places where confessing Jesus as your saviour may cost you your life or your safety and livelihood.

The worst I will face here, in my white Judeo-Christian privilege, is someone calling me names on the internet. Bullying or harassment, but not high-level stuff that makes me legitimately fear for my safety. Not systematic torture, displacement and even murder of my people. I feel for those who face bullying because of the effects it has on them. I pray for them because that hurt is real. But it isn’t necessarily persecution and its unhelpful to confuse the two.

I have to make another distinction here: there may be many of us who have faced a bit of harassment, especially online, because of a “Christian” argument. This could be taken as a lesser form of persecution, and perhaps it is, but if you don’t have to worry that someone will even find out that you are a Christian (regardless of your thoughts on certain doctrines or current events), the odds are you aren’t being persecuted. I used to get called a “churchy” at work. I learned to take it in good humour. Later on, there was a swear jar at work put up for people who swore around me (because their assumption was that I would be offended. If only they hung around me now!) It made me a bit awkward in the beginning but then I took part in the game. I’ve been involved in my share of debates, but when I changed my posture from one of dogma to one of debate (with a particular bent towards connection and understanding rather than making the other person wrong), I found the world was a much softer place than I originally thought.

Why am I pointing it out? For a couple of reasons. One is that it is sometimes the abrasiveness in the delivery of our message that gets peoples backs up. People sense when someone is trying to make them wrong, and automatically defend their status quo. But the second reason is one that I find gravely concerning – There is a difference between persecution and the persecution complex. Both are harmful, one unspeakably so. But the persecution complex is something that can isolate and divide unnecessarily, especially if a person believes they are suffering persecution when they aren’t.

As I said a few paragraphs up, I’ve seen Christians cry persecution over Facebook stoushes they willingly waded into. I’ve seen mindboggling claims that the President of the United States is being persecuted (i.e. victimized on an international scale). Like…wow! While repeated efforts at convincing an unwilling world of an unpopular opinion (especially on social media) may reap repeated disagreements or arguments that certainly have a negative effect on a person’s state of mind, it is not necessarily persecution.  Nor do I think you can claim persecution when you are the most powerful man in the free world. Holding that position of privilege is the antithesis of persecution.

Of late, I’ve started listening a little harder to my friends who are people of colour, or who belong to the LGBTQ+ community. I’ve been confronted by something I noticed here: we straight, white, cis-gendered, Judeo-Christian, middle-class westerners can be blissfully unaware of our own profound privilege and, by virtue of this, confuse the loss of that privilege with persecution. A better word for what we are feeling would be, I don’t know, crestfallen? Uncomfortable? But systematically victimized and oppressed, not so much. We might find ourselves needing to learn resilience a bit more, but the answer to this problem is compassion and self-development not fear.

Alan Noble, in an article for The Atlantic, pointed out some very real flaws in the evangelical tendency to buy into the persecution complex. He said: “Persecution has an allure for many evangelicals. In the Bible, Christians are promised by Saint Paul that they will suffer for Christ, if they love Him (Second Timothy 3:12). But especially in contemporary America, it is not clear what shape that suffering will take. Narratives of political, cultural, and theological oppression are popular in evangelical communities, but these are sometimes fiction or deeply exaggerated non-fiction—and only rarely accurate. This is problematic: If evangelicals want to have a persuasive voice in a pluralist society, a voice that can defend Christians from serious persecution, then we must be able to discern accurately when we are truly victims of oppression—and when this victimization is only imagined.”

But the last thing I want readers of this article to do is mock those who are suffering from a persecution complex. Here’s why:

The Persecution Complex is a Worrying Mental Delusion

The Merriam-Webster Complex Medical Dictionary calls it “the feeling of being persecuted especially without basis in reality.” In individuals, the persecution complex may be called a persecutory delusion and fall within a range of “delusional disorders’ in the DSM V (the diagnostic handbook of the psychological profession). In groups though, it is an interesting and perhaps dangerous phenomenon.  I found a study resource online that helpfully described a persecution complex in the following way: “A persecution complex is a type of delusion. A delusion is a fixed, irrational belief that one is convinced is true despite evidence to the contrary. In the case of people suffering with delusions of persecution, the fixed irrational belief is that others are plotting against and/or following them. Signs that someone may be struggling with a persecution delusion include:

• Increased isolation.

• Paranoid behaviors

• Verbal statements that make little sense or are not rational.

• An increase in angry outbursts.”

If we were to witness this in a friend, we would have the right to be very concerned. But with the rise of cultural and political discourse in the public sphere (i.e. media), it isn’t uncommon for people to face off against a strong or emotive and opposing viewpoint. When this hit to the ego (and we all have an ego, or a sense of self) is combined with a persecution complex, things can get ugly.

So what happens when a group of people holds to the same ideals and experiences similar opposition? You have the potential for a group persecution complex to develop. You have the potential for the group to isolate itself, to believe society is against it, to develop an “us versus them” mentality, and for verbal statements rooted in the persecution delusion to be met with confirmation bias and thus become part of groups’ folklore. My fear is that this can then become the narrative of their lived experience and entrench the persecutory delusion even further.

Let me be real here: this is a terrible situation. Imagine believing society is against you, and the only people who truly understand you are part of a particular group. Imagine constantly thinking everything people write online is geared at you. Imagine the mental and emotional toll that would take. I could unpack this a lot further but I hope the case is clear: Even if the persecution is imagined, the effects of the persecution complex can be very, very real.

What do we do about it? I can’t give you all the answers, because I’m certainly not the authority on this issue. I write this for awareness and reflection more than anything. But I can say this: start with compassion. Regardless of whether someone is going through persecution proper or experiencing a persecution complex, something is going down here. You can’t fix the former easily. You can pray, and donate to good causes. You can be part of organisations working to end persecution. But if a friend of yours is experiencing a persecution complex, you can’t tell them they’re idiots and should get over it. That may just reinforce the delusion.

There could be something a lot deeper going on. The persecution complex isn’t uncommon in cults. It can also be part of mental illness. It may simply be a way of externalising some deep internal unrest. Either way, its tough stuff. It might require professional help to shift.

Approach it with care. But know this: we can’t fix a problem if we can’t accurately diagnose it. If it isn’t persecution, if its a persecution complex, then the system isn’t the problem. The problem is a lot closer to home.

Just some thoughts! Hopefully thats writer’s block out of the way! lol. I’ll return next week friends!

Can Christian’s Suffer From Depression?

It seems that my corner of the interwebs is all lit up with mental health awareness messages this week. It’s possibly because of ‘RUOK? Day’ that just passed in Australia, possibly because its Mental Health Awareness Month in the United States, and possibly because I follow a lot of people on Twitter who are grieving the death of Jarrid Wilson. He was a pastor and mental health advocate who tragically lost his battle with depression, even more tragically it was on the day he officiated the funeral of another Christian who lost her battle with depression. In amongst the outpouring of grief, the voice of ignorance seems to have raised itself in the form of people who assert that Christians can’t have mental illnesses, or that suffering from a mental illness disqualifies them from the ministry. This is a dangerous belief; one that is unbiblical and unhelpful at best, and flat out dangerous at worst. In a time when mental illness is thought to affect up to 25% of us, its not good enough to turn a deaf ear to such rubbish. So let’s talk about it.

First cab off the rank: Can Christians Suffer from Mental Illness? Short answer? Yes, they can. But of course, there is more to it than that. For some, this question stems from the NAR/Bethel-Esque belief that total healing from all conditions is guaranteed at the point of salvation. Thus, if someone is born again in Christ, they won’t suffer from mental illness, or indeed any other illness (!!! More on that later). For others, it comes from an antiquated and even subconscious belief that mental illness is demonic or spiritual in origin. Now, thankfully most Christian’s will at least acknowledge that some depression can have neurological or physiological origins. But others hold to the idea that depression is a spiritual, demonic or sin-related malady.

*sigh*

The latter is not helpful. And it’s not true.

Let me switch out my “Christian blogger” hat for my “Research blogger” hat for a second. Here’s what research tells us about depression: it is neurological. Every time. It is physiological. Every time. Why? Because thoughts, feelings, ruminations and such all take place in the brain which is a physical and neurological thing, and having stressors (whether they are physical, chemical or emotional) often factor into the etiology of depressive disorders. The research is a little fuzzy on why serotonin reuptake inhibitors help in a lot of cases, but it seems to have something to do with the neurotransmitters that help signals jump from one neuron to another (i.e. that lovely serotonin in your brain and gut that bathes your neurocircuitry).

There is also emerging research that indicates depression is an inflammation issue, and there are well-established links between mental health and gut health (with the gut being home to the enteric nervous system which houses billions of neurons and communicates to the brain via the vagus nerve and the gut-brain axis. I.e. Many depression sufferers have gut problems, too.

Depression is physical. Read that again. Depression is a physical issue. It’s time we stopped treating mental health as some ethereal, intangible thing. Its time we stopped saying “Oh its all in your head.” Guess what: your head is a tangible thing. Your brain is a tangible thing. If its all in your head, it exists. The thoughts of the mind (with the mind being the brain in action) can be seen on brain scans in the form of neuronal pathways lighting up on the screen. The activity of the limbic system (which governs our emotions) is something that can be measured. We can also measure sympathetic function (the sympathetic nervous system is the part of the nervous system that fires up under stress, and kicks our survival mechanisms into play). Thus, mental illness is tangible in many ways. (Research blogger hat now removed, FYI)

So when you ask yourself if a Christian can have depression, you are really asking whether a Christian can experience physical illness, inflammation, chronic or acute stress, or gut problems. If you can have diarrhea after you eat something you shouldn’t, your Christian brother or sister can have depression. One is no more demonic than the other. Yes, one is more short term than the other (hopefully!) but the point still stands.

Have you ever taken a panadol/Tylenol or aspirin for a headache? Have you ever put an icepack on a sprained ankle or knee? Have you ever gone to the doctor for an upset tummy or other condition? It might have been easy to say that it’s okay for you to suffer from those ailments because its just life, yet turn to depression and related illnesses and say “but that’s not.”

That, right there, is hypocritical. I’m coming out of the gate firing on this one because it matters. If we apply shame is to physical, neurological, chemical conditions that manifest as depression or other mental illnesses we may inadvertently create a situation in which someone may feel shame in getting help. This is the danger of bad theology. It can, quite literally, put a life at risk. People! Let’s not do this! Let’s make churches a safe place for someone to say “I think I’m depressed” and receive support in getting help – not shame or demotions.

It is my belief that depression should not be treated as a spiritual issue. It should be treated as a very real, very serious condition that requires a holistic approach for treatment. That approach should include professional (qualified) help such as counselling and medication. It should include diet and exercise (which is often prescribed as part of the action plan). The place where church should come into a Christian’s action plan is that it should provide community, pastoral support, an opportunity to connect in a positive environment, receive peace and encouragement through scripture (etc), and receive prayer for encouragement or healing if if IF the depression sufferer asks for it. *The latter should never be administered as the sole approach to recovery.* I say this as a person who has been ashamed to admit that attempts at faith healing had failed. In my case it was shoulder and elbow damage after an accident. It was obvious my conditions hadn’t been healed and I felt shame. The hidden shame when a mental illness isn’t healed by faith could be dangerous.

I do believe in prayer. I do believe that when we turn to God, He can perform miracles. I don’t believe that should be the only approach with mental illness. To limit “treatment” to faith healing could be deadly because it could cause a person to feel shame or failure if it doesn’t work. Worse still, it could cause them to feel pressure to act like all is well, or discontinue other treatment. I sweat at the thought.

A particularly concerning doctrine regarding and all healing is an increasingly prevalent belief in some NAR churches that healing from all maladies is guaranteed at the point of salvation. I mentioned it at the top of this piece and I’ll mention it again here: it’s not true and it’s not helpful. We can’t measure the quality of our salvation on whether or not our cancerous tumours disappeared when we said the prayer. Nor can we measure it on whether or not our depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, bipolar, (etc. etc. etc.) disappeared when we said the prayer. Some people may get healed when they invite Jesus into their hearts. GOOD for them. Some people may take years to heal. Good for them. Others may be healed in eternity. Good for them. The fact is every walk with God is different and none should be judged against another.

Paul had a “thorn in his side.” Jacob had a limp. No one would look at them and say “disqualified.” God certainly wouldn’t. We shouldn’t do this to people who suffer mental illness.

Now to the question of whether or not someone should be in the ministry if they suffer from depression or another mental illness. I’d like to turn your attention to King David. As the author of many of the Psalms, it has often been questioned whether his natural artistry and melancholy crossed the line into depression or bipolar disorder. It’s possible! Some of those Psalms are dark! But he was called ‘a man after God’s own heart,’ depression or not. Then there is Elijah the prophet: perhaps the clearest example of burnout or depression in ministry, when the burdens of the call proved too much to bear and he felt the need to hide in a cave for three years and not look after himself (thank God for sending the birds as a catering service). Jeremiah was called the weeping prophet. King Saul had moments of extreme darkness (not that he was a pillar of godliness, I know). All these illustrate the point that the personal struggles or mental illnesses of some of the greatest Bible heroes did not disqualify them from serving God.

Nor should it disqualify our modern ministers from serving God. What it should mean is better support around them, and medical help if required. It should mean that their occupational oversight makes sure they take their holidays every year to recharge the batteries and that stress or complexity is well-managed within the context of their role. It shouldn’t mean they feel shame over their condition or hide it from those around them while wondering why God hasn’t cured them yet.

In a secular workplace, you might feel the need to take extended leave if you were suffering to the point where it was affecting your job. A pastor may need that from time to time if his or her condition is serious or worrying, or that sharing other peoples burdens (as they so often do) is proving too much. That should be okay. I see it as the duty of care the denomination or oversight owes to their pastor. (If a church is independent, this would be difficult. Yet another reason I’m cautious of independent churches – but that’s another topic for another day).

So if you are a minister or a Christian feeling shame about mental illness – please don’t. We didn’t see God shaming Elijah, David, Noah, or many others for their walks with the black dog. You are loved as you are, valued as you are, and precious to God as you are – but don’t mess around with this illness. Please. You deserve care and the best chance at recovery.

“Now Kit, you’ve taken a very unspiritual look at this problem,” I hear you say. “Where does spiritual stuff fit in?” I know many people still believe there is potential spiritual involvement in illnesses including mental illnesses. I have heard of people doing prayer counselling to remove generational curses and such. I’m going to do another piece on this because it’s a loaded topic so come back next week for that one. But here’s the scoop: there are three forms of deliverance. The first happens at the point of salvation. The second happens more gradually, as we consume and internalise the word of God. The third is so rare and problematic I’d almost call it needless in a modern setting where the consent issue can push it over into spiritual abuse.

While it is obvious that Jesus cast out spirits in some extreme cases in the New Testament (the one with Legion and the herd of pigs in Mark 5/Luke 8 for example), He had the benefit of one thing: He was God and had perfect insight into the situation. He was yet to give His life for the redemption of humanity. He was yet to send the Holy Spirit as our helper, counsellor and guide. These are benefits that we now have. To invoke power-deliverance ministries and ignore the health-related fields dedicated to a more gentle and therapeutic approach to mental illness is, in my opinion, needless and dangerous. As Christians, as the living representation of Christ on earth, it is our duty to tread very carefully with the most vulnerable of people. But more on that next week.

I hope you’re intrigued. See you again soon

Peace
Kit K

Jesus: God, Man or Mascot?

A good many writers have considered the formula C.S. Lewis put forward: who was Jesus? Was he a liar who defrauded the public on purpose, a lunatic who believed he was God but wasn’t, or was actually he who he said he was – the son of God? That’s a paraphrase, obviously. But you get the gist. It’s a question many of us have asked ourselves. Once we’ve come to the answer on that, which inevitably tells us (in our heart of hearts if not in our rational minds) whether he is God or man, I believe there is another question we need to ask: have we reduced him from divine status to simply a mascot? Have we edited him and changed his appearance until he is acceptable to us, but merely a caricature of himself?

A little context for you: Some months back, I wrote a series on dominionism. (You can find that hereand follow the links through to the end of the series if you so desire). Dominionism is the belief that there are seven mountains in society and God has destined Christians to dominate in all of them. The irony is that it is, according to my interpretation of the Bible, a pseudo-Christian heresy at best and completely unbiblical at worst. But how seductive it is: to leave behind the idea that God might have called us to minister to the poor, lift the broken, sit with the outcasts, give voice to the voiceless, and love those whom society has left behind, and trade this for a “predestined” position occupying the seats of power in society and letting other people do the nitty-gritty work of Christianity.

While dominionism has been around for quite some time, it was recently made chillingly and abundantly clear in the form of a Netflix documentary based on the investigative journalism of Jeff Sharlett. He infiltrated an American dominionist pseudo-church movement (my best explanation of the bizarre yet eerily familiar scenes laid out in that doco) and wrote two books about them, thus exposing an organisation that had made every effort to stay as secretive as possible.

I can’t tell you how many times words were uttered in that document that made my skin crawl – because I had heard them before. Almost exactly. But the thing that made my stomach drop was this ponderance: it was abundantly clear how “The Family” reduced Jesus to a mascot. They used His name to appear righteous but their one-eyed pursuit of power, and the methods they used to infiltrate high places and secure powerful allies, would have the real Jesus doing a heck of a lot more than throwing some tables around in the temple. But in truth, it isn’t just pseudo-Christian cult groups that use Jesus as a mascot and then just do their own thing. If we look at it, if we study Him then look hard at the world around us, we just might see it everywhere.

Jesus isn’t a mascot we can use to influence the mood of the crowd before we just go ahead and do whatever we want. Nor is He a “get out of jail free” card people can wave around to cover up wrongdoing committed in the name of the cross. We can’t just choose our own gospel and call it Christianity when true Christianity is followership of one who embodied truth, compassion, self-sacrifice and more, one who seemed to shun self-interest all His earthly life. I think Jesus would be angered by people using partial truths to advance a cause so far from His nature yet trotted out with His name emblazoned upon it. It made me mad. Then it made me think.

People of colour have long been joking about how there are different Jesus’s. There is white Jesus who appears on white Christian’s artwork (for those who like that sort of thing). When we pray, an image pops up in our heads of a white guy with sandy blonde hair, a beard, and flowing white robes. Go on. Admit it. It’s true. Then there is Black Jesus and Mexican Jesus, who appear a lot closer to those cultures. Rinse and repeat around the globe. But hey, reality check, the real Jesus was Jewish. He was Middle Eastern. We need not airbrush him to fit our cultural ideals and yet it seems we have. Already, by virtue of his appearance, He is a mascot of sorts.

We’ve made him a caricature of himself by changing how he looks, altering the Bible to suit our need for power or influence, and we seem to have painted over the parts of Jesus we don’t like: we choose the prosperity gospel, or the gospel of the tidy middle class instead of the kind of gospel that takes us to the poor. We choose the purity gospel instead of the gospel that was shared with the woman at the well, who had had seven husbands and was living with a man who she wasn’t married to. We choose the shallow gospel that doesn’t confront us even though the Jesus who walked the earth stopped people in their tracks and made them want to change. We choose a gospel of aggressive conservatism, even though Jesus may have indicated his progressivism when he stood on the mountaintop and uttered the words”But…a new law I give to you.”

Christianity over the years has taken many forms. So very many. From dry, unengaging, obligatory attendance to immersive worship experiences that could take any secular song and swap the words “Baby” for “Jesus” and emerge with something like devotion.

But is this a caricature of Jesus too.

For once, I’m not blogging with the answer in mind, or a tidy list of references, or a neat ending waiting at the end of this paragraph. I’m asking us to think: the Jesus who walked the earth was a revolutionary not because of violence or stoic observation of the good old days. He was a revolutionary because of love. He did not defend himself when accusations came against him. He did not seek power. He took time for the unclean, the unpopular, the at-risk and those the world had cast aside. He was not controlling. He spoke in parables and allowed the listener to find the interpretation within their own heart. He was humble, seeking out another revolutionary with a camel-skin robe and an unkempt beard to baptize him.

That was Jesus. Who is it that we have created? How have we changed him so that he is fit for us to worship? That’s mascot Jesus. That’s not the real Jesus. As the church across the globe grapples with how to hold on to millennials (who seem to be seeking truth, not entertainment), we need to ask ourselves if we are failing to keep the interest of the next generation because we have disengaged mascot Jesus from social justice, equality and inclusion, and made him a vanilla, middle-class white dude who doesn’t ruffle feathers.

Just a thought. (I finish a lot of blogs with that sign-off, don’t I? I’m not even sorry about that. I guess I’m sort of inviting you to think with me.)

Peace
Kit K

Finding Kindred When You’ve Lost Community

It’s hard to make friends when you are a grown-up. One of the blessings of childhood seems to be that friends are a touch easier to come by. You meet them at school, at sporting matches, parks, parties, jobs. But as we age, we seem to bunker down into the world of routine. We meet people through work, then fail to keep in touch with the majority of them (Facebook notwithstanding) when we move on. This is despite our best efforts. We might meet people through sport, or common interests but that’s sort of it. That is one reason why leaving a church is hard. I’m sure its even a reason many people over the years have stayed, or stayed longer than they should, at a church that was toxic or damaging to them. 

Like it or not, a church is a social club of sorts. You join one, you make friends there. You have a common interest, a similar way of seeing the world. You meet through activities run by the church and the fact that you keep running into each other at church events manages to sustain the relationship to a point. So what happens when you leave the church and lose that community?

Let me tell you from experience: hurt. Hurt is what happens. Anger happens. Misinformation often happens. I’m currently watching from a distance as someone I know had her support network disappear overnight. I’m not sure of the particulars of her case, but I’m sure the dynamics would be the same: hurt, anger, disbelief. Potentially rejection and the shattering of an illusion. I’m looking at Josh Harris (author of “I Kissed Dating Goodbye”) and given his recent renunciation of faith, I’d say he is going through a lot of this too.

So what do you do when something happens and *poof* up goes your support network in a puff of smoke and you find yourself all alone? This is my 100% unqualified, non-exhaustive list. But I’ve experienced this and I wanted to offer a little wisdom if I could be so presumptuous.

1. Find a good therapist. I’m putting this first on the list because frankly, I think everyone needs one. Science is starting to catch up with just how profound the physical effects of stress or emotional upheaval can be. So a good therapist (emphasis on the word *good*) should be in everyone’s bag of tricks. It’s especially important when it comes to reinventing your social circle or your community of trust for one good reason though: if you’ve just been through a situation that wounded you so deeply and turned your world upside down, you need to vent to someone and learn some strategies to get your resilience game on point. If you go looking for friends at the same time as you go looking for someone to vent to, and you don’t have positive mechanisms for emotional recovery in place, the two worlds may collide and you may become that person who always wants to bitch about the people who let you down.
   Don’t get me wrong. You need to do that. Just do it constructively so it doesn’t poison or define your new friendships. When my husband and I started redeveloping our tribe, we knew our story was pretty dramatic. We also knew there would be a lot of curiosity about it. We had to decide who was in the very small, trusted circle of people we confided in and who was in the circle of people we just got to know from a place of fun,  shared interests, and doing life together.  We also got a good therapist. Oh boy! She is worth her weight in gold, and the three-hour drive to get to her. (It’s also a night off kids though so I’ll be honest, sometimes I’m more excited about that than therapy.)

2. Understand, it’s different in adulthood. Friends don’t just fall in your lap. This takes effort, and sometimes that means confronting a bit of social anxiety! I used to do things like invite other mums to the park. That way our kids could play, there could be something there for us to talk about (i.e kids and playing) and I could leave at any time. Through that, I got the feel for who was easy to be around and who I could connect with. We also joined groups – things like playgroups, writing groups, book clubs, and theatre groups. Through them, we have met some amazing people.We also had a look at our Facebook friends list. On it, there were a few people we had often thought “Yeah, I bet we would get along great.” So we took the plunge and invited them out for dinner. (Risky move, seeing if it went terribly, it would have been just hideous!) Thankfully, the conversation came very easily! But still, the friendships we cultivate in adulthood do require cultivating. You don’t have a long shared history. You have to invite them to things. You have to put in the effort to work it. It’s 100% worth it because loneliness and social isolation are killers for mental health. All I’m saying is that it needs to be approached proactively.

3. Look for common interests. I remember chatting to this couple that makes “cool” look completely effortless. Like, these two were just so insta-perfect its not funny. I figured they were out of my league, socially. (Cue massive social anxiety!) But as we chatted in the foyer of our new church (which was scary at first! Whole other story in that…), we realized we both had an interest in the Middle East. My hubby was like “Great! You guys should come over and we can cook Middle Eastern food and watch movies about the Middle East.” I was petrified. This sounded like the perfect recipe for awkward. I usually invite new friends out for dinner at first so I can fake digestive distress and RUN HOME TO CRY if it’s awkward.Fast forward two years and they are among our closest, bestest friends. Yes, I just used the word “Bestest.” We actually didn’t end up talking about the Middle East at all though, and as it turns out that was absolutely fine.

4. Be ready to correct wrong beliefs about friendships. The tough truth of the matter is that, if you lost a church community overnight and had all your friends disappear with it, you might have been gifted with trust issues, God issues and friend issues all in one. I’m not going to trivialize that, because that is big. You’re going to need time to heal from that. You know that therapist in point number 1? Well! He/She is there for a reason. Depending on the reason for you leaving a church or changing churches, you may be going through some pretty deep personal upheaval. It can be easy to throw the baby out with the bathwater and lose sight of what was real and what wasn’t. Perspective will come in time, and hurts will heal in time. But while you walk that journey, you can’t just hide your heart from the world in the hopes you won’t get hurt again. Inevitably. you will be the one who inflicts the damage of loneliness on yourself if you do that.But just because your old pond somehow became poisoned doesn’t mean there aren’t good people out there. Over the years, I have had to confront some false/unhelpful beliefs I had about friends, and replace them with new, helpful paradigms to think about friendships through. It takes time, and a bit of conscious reflection, but its doable. Perhaps with the help of some good books, or good therapy, but it is doable.

Take courage friend. Put yourself out there. Do it proactively. Do it bit by bit. Do it so you feel like you are in control and not in over your head or unsafe. Do it so you’ve got something to talk about (like kids, or a hobby, or a book, or whatever). Do whatever you need, but do it. If you put yourself out there, there is a pretty darn good chance that beautiful connections will be made: connections that can be deepened over time and cherished for a long time to come.

I’m sorry that you’ve been through such a tough time. My hope for you is that you discover resilience you didn’t know you had, that you go deep and rid yourself of unhelpful beliefs about yourself, or friendships, or life, or God, and that this time of pruning old branches results in rich new growth in your life. It sucks. It’s hard. It hurts. Nothing will ever erase the difficulty that you are going through right now…

But its just possible that you will look back on this time in years to come and see it as the making of you – a time when beautiful friendships were formed, when you realised how strong you are, how resilient you are, and how much life truly has to offer when you are pushed out of your comfort zone.

Wishing you peace and strength

Kit K

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K Thx Bye

Deconstruction: Why the Church Needs To Do It Too

I was reading a critique of the Christian deconstruction phenomenon this week (because I like to challenge my own thoughts, too, not just everyone else’s!). It seems the movement is greatly misunderstood. Several articles I read alleged that the problem with deconstruction was that people who went through it seemed determined to do away with absolute truth, or the concept of sin, or the deity of Jesus, or the authority of the Bible. They seemed to believe that the only way to be a Christian and a progressive is to erase these fundamentals in order to line up with our own changing ideals.

As a deconstructor, and as a Christian progressive, nothing could be further from the truth. If anything, the process of deconstruction calls us to delve further into truth. It causes us to search for it beyond dogma and beyond what we have been told scriptures mean, sometimes from the days of early childhood. Deconstruction is applying critical thinking to the concepts we just assume are true. It calls us to really look for truth, and once we find it, to wrap thoughts and words and ways of living around it.

Here’s the kicker: If what you are living by is the truth, then you shouldn’t fear to apply critical thinking to it. The truth will survive examination. If anything, it will become more meaningful because of it.

I’ve been listening to a podcast called “This Cultural Moment.” It’s been fascinating, and while I don’t necessarily agree with everything these guys say (because my analysis on certain things differs), I love the process of looking at cultural moments and current affairs through the eyes of what it means to be a Christian. But a thought hit me when I was listening to it: this phenomenon of “deconstruction” doesn’t just apply to Christians. It applies to churches as well, and that’s a very needed, very good thing.

I look around church establishments these days and I see a few things (and I should note at this point that this article is wholly and solely my opinion!). I see some institutions trying to hold on to relevance by arguing old ideas, asserting dogma because “God says so” in the face of civil rights advancements, and generally bunkering down in some ill-fated attempt to hold on to influence and relevance. I see other churches trying to get hip in order to maintain relevance. Here are fancy stage designs, cutting edge music and tech, coffee machines in foyers, sermons that are less like delivery methods for spiritual and scriptural truths and more like Ted Talks. What is the “right” way, if indeed there is one? I don’t know. Some of these ways of staying hip are very much enjoyed and appreciated in my corner! But I can tell you one thing for sure:

The church needs deconstruction too.

Church attendance used to be every week. Now, to be a regular, you need to go only once every three or four weeks. (I go almost every week. That must make me a zealot. Or a musician). Attendance is deconstructing. Church used to be a moral measuring stick. Now, it isn’t. Church used to be a place where we found God, grew convicted of our sin, and sought the way forward in terms of living a more Godly life. Now, we figure out ethics and morals within the context of our own spheres of influence and our own devotion. Evangelism isn’t so cut and dried. These aspects, too, are deconstructing.

Of late, I’ve found myself asking whether it’s possible to have Christianity without the fear and self-loathing. The answer I came to is that it should be possible: because Jesus was the highest example of love, compassion, and progressive ideas when it came to the inclusion of those the religious system had shunned. He was/is the highest example of life above temptation, of grace and truth in the face of persecution and death. He is always worth following. He doesn’t require me to hate myself so that I can follow Him. He only requires me to love, acknowledge and follow Him, knowing that in my humanness I will mess up and that in those moments, His grace is sufficient.

As more people embark on this journey of deconstruction, and as modern life marches on, there are a few changing realities we can expect: digital church attendance will matter more to people, so our web presence’s need to offer more than shiny pictures and short clips of sermon highlights. Depth will matter. Preaching, being an experiential thing, will take precidence over teaching in many settings, but this does not negate the need for good teaching. If anything, it makes it more important (especially as more independent churches pop up, which has many benefits but also the ever-present risk of bad theology and cults of personality). The community of faith will maintain its importance, but the way this manifests may be faced with challenges.

These are my hunches. There are better experts with more thoughts, I’m sure. But what I’m saying is this: deconstruction is here, and it applies to groups as well as individuals. If the church doesn’t change, it is done. But Jesus isn’t. Because He is still relevant and will always be relevant. Now is not a time for digging in and attempting to maintain old structures of power, influence, dogma or even format. The structure we have now is something we have inherited generation after generation since Constantine. But even that didn’t bear any resemblance to the early church we saw in Acts. So why we have such a devotion to the old familiar format is a curious thing.

Maybe its time to reinvent it.

Just some thoughts! See ya’ll next week for something a touch more scholarly!

Peace out,

Kit K.
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What Made You Hold Onto Jesus?

If you know me, you know I love a reader question. Not only does it mean that someone’s reading my blog (and those stats aren’t lying to me after all!), but it means I don’t have to think of a blog topic for the week. That, right there, is a ‘double yay!’ This weeks reader question wasn’t necessarily a tricky one, but it did still make me delve into the archives of my brain and wrench up some details I’d sorta forgotten. The question was this: “In the enormous process of dismantling and re-establishing your faith, what made you sure that Jesus was still real and worth committing to?”

I’m not going to lie to you; my first answer was “fear.” It’s an answer shared by many a person with a similar background to me. Evangelical, a bit fundamentalist, raised in churches – we Christian kids learn to behave for Jesus before we fall in love with Him. I’d behaved for Him all my life. Of course, there was genuineness in my faith, but for the early part of my walk with God at least, fear was the big motivator. No, not the “awe-inspiring, fear of God” type. Just pure, unadulterated fear. Fear of judgment, hell, stuffing up, getting caught, getting embarrassed, missing out – you know the types.

But in the early process of deconstruction, I realized that the way I’d been viewing faith so far was incongruent with the message of the cross.

If love drove Jesus to the cross, why should fear be the thing that drives us to Jesus? Was it possible to discover a love-based faith rather than a fear-based religion? Was it possible to have Christianity without fear and self-loathing?

As a loving mother, as the wife of an incredible husband, there is nothing in me that wants to scare my husband or my children into devotion toward me. I don’t want to scare my husband into cuddling up on the couch and watching movies with me on a Friday night or whatever. I don’t want to scare my children into sitting on my knee and letting me cuddle them or read books to them. I don’t even want to scare them into behaving well. Rather, I want them to understand how to be safe in the world, and to grow up to be people who make it a better place.

If we stop and think about the reality of scaring our partner or children into loving us, we understand pretty quickly that it isn’t love. It’s abuse.

This equated to a bit of an “ah hah” moment for me. It was followed quickly by another “ah hah” moment: Jesus wasn’t a Christian. This means that this thing we call Christianity is simply mankind’s best attempt at building rituals, systems and understanding around a God too vast and infinite for words. It was always going to fall short. It was always going to be messed up by messed-up people and made better by the best efforts of the well-intentioned ones. It was always going to be a mish-mash of the good, the bad and the ugly. Because Christianity was only ever going to be an attempt at humankind housing the divine.

Expanding the search beyond the fear 

The realization that fear was my first motivator was a sobering one. Thankfully that lightbulb moment happened in a church while listening to a level-headed, and theologically strong pastor. He had dragged a scripture out of the archives that I’d only ever heard one way: it was the scripture about Mephibosheth, Jonathan’s son with the clubbed feet. I’d only ever heard it preached one way – that because when Jonathan gave his armor to David, he held back his shoes. The message was always that what you don’t give up in covenant becomes a curse on the next generation. The message below that: obey because of fear that God will curse your kids.

But that’s not what this pastor had said in his message. My husband mentioned it after the service, and the pastor’s words have stuck with me ever since. “To read it that way is to completely misunderstand the nature of God.” He went on to explain himself in more detail, but I wasn’t listening at that point. I was thinking “What else about God have I misunderstood?”

The truth is that Biblical scholarship is an art almost entirely lost. It used to be that people didn’t read the Bible because they couldn’t. They were illiterate, or the Bible was only in such short supply that the scribes were the only ones who could access it and read it.

Now, in an age where most of us can read, and all of us can get free Bible apps on our smartphones, we still seem Biblically illiterate. Thus, we trust the people standing behind the pulpit to explain what we need to know. But what if “what we need to know” is tainted by lost context, personal agendas, leadership challenges, or the colored lenses of the pain and loss life might have thrown them?

There are a million reasons why we can’t just do this. We don’t know what a preacher is thinking when they choose the message for the morning. We don’t know what lens they are viewing that scripture through or what motive is behind it. If we don’t have enough knowledge about God and the Bible to inform us and ring the bell when and if something is a bit skewiff, then we are at the mercy of bad doctrine that takes us further away from a relationship with God, not further into it. But the sad thing is that bad doctrine almost always drives us further into fear and condemnation than into the redemptive love of God.

That realization drove me into the thing I’d always had in my pocket but never had the power to use: the Bible. But I ditched the complexity of the whole thing for a while and just stuck with the Red Letters.

Red Letter Christianity

I blogged on this a while back, and I won’t rehash the whole thing (because you can read it here). But a personal challenge I took on back at the beginning of my deconstruction was to read just the Red Letters for a while. After all, these were the words spoken by Jesus who was one-third of the Trinity. What could get us closer to the nature of God than the words spoken by the Son of God?

They are a big challenge in and of themselves, so much so that the rest of the New Testament seems largely geared at helping us understand how we can live out followership of Christ. But the revelation that I got from my foray into Red Letter Christianity was that judgment was not the goal of God. Love was. Love had always been. Judgment was a thing that He hoped He could spare us from, so much so that He sent Jesus.

He wasn’t after a perfect people. He was after a devoted people. And if our hearts are turned to him, then despite our humanity and the inevitability of failure, our imperfections are all covered. This, essentially, is the nature of God – love. He is love. He does love. He gives love. Yes, he is holy. Yes, he can’t stand sin. But because he loves us, he found a way around that.

That took me back to the fear-abuse conundrum I spoke about in the beginning: If God loved me, then He wouldn’t want to use abuse to drive me into His embrace. And right there, in that sentence, was the great inconsistency I had witnessed over and over again – People professing to have been moved by the love of God, and the higher way of living He called them to, using the fear of Hell and judgment to drive people into salvation and keep them there. “Just do this one thing different and God will love and bless you. Just change this. Just repent of this. Just cease this…” Always one more thing when the truth of the matter is that His Grace is sufficient and His strength made perfect in our weakness.

Boy, it takes the pressure off. Just like that, a lifetime of striving and wrestling got swapped for the safety in knowing God loved me even in the midst of deconstruction. Even if I had difficulty trusting Him or understanding Him for a time, that was totally okay. Because God has big shoulders. He can deal. He could see the grapple, and he could see my struggle to get to the heart of true Christianity, and He wasn’t going to judge me for that. Because that’s not in His nature.

Other World Religions

During the heavier initial stages of my deconstruction, I read a lot and watched a lot of documentaries. I always did so with one thing in mind: my own life experience had taught me that there is a God. That was something that history and science both echoed and did nothing to refute. Even atheism seems consistent with the tree of knowledge of Good and Evil, as written in Genesis. If we choose that tree, we eat of its fruit.

(Whole magazines are devoted to these topics, so I’m not going to talk about that in this blog post.)

But one documentary series stood out: Morgan Freeman’s “The Story of God.” In it, he looked at many different world religions including Christianity. It seems that, throughout the world and throughout history and even the post-modern age, we all seem to seek out the divine. And though our words for it differ, very similar themes echo through.

It seems to me that from the beginning of time, mankind has been aware of the divine. From the farthest stretches of the world to the modern centers of civilization, there exists an awareness that there is something out there – some greater power. We find different words to wrap around it. We find different lenses and structures to see it through. But its there.

What makes Christianity different? Well, I guess that’s a series for another day. But the place I arrived at is this: throughout my life, I had seen the hand of God. I had seen Him protect me from certain things, and seen him enable certain things that I’d always thought impossible. He had seen what I prayed in the silence of my room, or in the loneliness of my darkest times. He made these things happen in time. Other people might call this divine force something different. But I call Him Jesus. He calls Himself the way, the truth, and the life.

One day I’ll tell those stories, of the things he rescued me from and the things he bought me through. But for now, here is my truth:

Illness, personal upheaval, loss of church, loss of community, financial hardship, deconstruction of faith, a search through science and other world religions, a critical look through the Bible in its various translations and iterations, a critical look at the world around me – none of it has driven me away from God. Rather it has driven me towards an understanding that He is bigger than what I can possibly understand, and more loving than I ever thought. I don’t have to understand everything about him. But I can spend the rest of my life trying and that will be just beautiful.

Anyway! That’s kinda my thoughts on it. Its taken years to live through, so it’s going to take longer to unpack. But these are some of the things that made me realize, throughout the enormous process of dismantling and re-establishing my faith, that Jesus was still real and worth committing to.

Why I Became and LGBT+ Affirming Christian

It’s Pride Month. In Australia, there is a storm in a tea-cup over Israel Folau’s homophobic comments and consequent sacking from Rugby Australia. Some Christian’s are in an uproar over it, claiming its a freedom of religion/speech issue. (It’s not. But I’ve already blogged on that). So now seems as good a time as any to talk about why I’m an affirming Christian: that is, why I believe LGBTI+ people are loved by God just as they are, that they should be equal in the eyes of the church and that gay conversion therapy is dangerous, unnecessary and a form of torture (and it is, according to the UN). 

First a little about me so you know where I’m coming from. I was raised evangelical, the eldest child of Christian ministers. I suppose you could call us fundamentalists in some ways, in that my father’s church believed homosexuality was an abomination, and largely subscribed to complementarian theology which puts men above women ( I do concede that Dad let women lead in some ways, but always under his “covering”).

Growing up, I was used to the idea that I would have to give up any ministry or career I had prior to marriage so that I could serve my husband. I remember my dad telling me this, and advising me to achieve what I wanted to achieve before getting married.  Ironically, it was my husband who freed me from that thinking.

After my husband and I left my fathers church (a painful, dramatic split by the way), I found myself on a journey of discovery. The people who showed my husband and me the greatest, most unconditional love came from places we did not expect. Among them were atheists, agnostics, lapsed Christians – all sorts really. But all of a sudden many of the people closest to me were queer (Gay, lesbian, bisexual, non-binary). These were the people showing the most love to us as we battled our way through recovery. We were also fortunate enough to fall into a new beautiful tribe of Christian friends, but the LGBTQ+ crowd impacted me with their open-heartedness especially when I could have been thought of as undeserving, even a transgressor by association.

I was met with two realities during this rather turbulent time: one was the deconstruction and reconstruction of my own faith. I had to break down the old one and go on a deep search for the truth about life and God (which I thought I already had sorted). The second was the jarring challenge I saw in Mark 12:30-31. If you’re a little fuzzy on that, let me remind you:

“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. And love your neighbour as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these.” 

I say “jarring” because, during Australia’s marriage equality plebiscite, I’d seen some atrocious behaviour on social media from all places on the political spectrum. But in my opinion, some Christians were among the worst bullies – these were people who should have been living by Mark 12:30-31. I can’t tell you how much I wanted to vomit every time I read, “I have gay friends and I love them, but…”

I’ve heard that too many times. I think we all have. I think that’s why Israel Folau’s carry-on hits such a sour note. That line is nothing but a cheap cop-out. If you love your gay friends, then my strong belief is that you need to approach God and read the Bible as if you are them. You need to ask yourself the hard questions. You need to really, truly, deeply search. Because that’s what you would do if it were you. You’d ask yourself:

• Does God love me as I am?

• Does He accept me as I am?

• Did He, the One who supposedly makes no mistakes, make me as I am? Destined for hell?

Admit it: Even on face value, these questions are brutal. These are things I never had to confront as I sat there in my straight privilege, worshiping a God I knew loved me. But it struck me that in churches all across Australia there are young, closeted, Queer Christians asking these same questions and the answer seems different and eternally unjust. The answer seems like “If I hate myself enough, if I pray the gay away, if I never find love, and if I gouge my eyes out so I never have to see a person I find attractive, then maybe God will love me.” What a crushingly impossible standard to have to live up to! No wonder the rate of suicide and mental illness among young LGBTI+ people is so hideously high. It makes me angry and heartsick all at once.

Here’s the thing: It’s the *wrong* answer. Because when you read the Bible like it was originally written, the answer is a clear. “Yes! God loves you. Yes, He made you. No, He doesn’t make mistakes.” But there’s a whole lot of “lost in translation” that gets in the way of that message.

So here’s what the Bible really says about it: I know I’m wading into big territory here by taking on one of the largest, most viciously perpetuated myths in the Christian world, but it’s about time we started talking about it. One “clobber” scripture often used as “evidence” that homosexuality is a sin comes from 1 Corinthians 6:9-10, which reads: “ Do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived. Neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals, nor sodomites,  nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners will inherit the kingdom of God.” There are other scriptures, such as those listed below. I’m not going to break down all of them, but there are a few things to note:

• Genesis 18  and 19 – This actually isn’t referring to homosexuality, but to rape. The sins of Sodom and Gomorrah were about rape, about sexual violence, and not about same-sex attraction per se. It is this that is referred to in Jude 1:7 (another clobber scripture). Objectively, they don’t apply.

• Leviticus 18:22, 20:13 Interestingly, the Levitical scriptures are translated from the Hebrew word “Toevah” which covers a specific sexual act that violated cultural boundaries (Source: Unclobber, by Colby Martin. Go read it because I’m not going into detail). It was a prohibition to God’s chosen people, the Hebrews, who were called to live differently. It was not a directive to Gentile Christians that did not exist at that time. Yes, we are still called to be set apart for God and if God speaks to you about that one, then great. But the detail around that is something between each believer and God alone. Leviticus had no prohibitions towards lesbians because it was about one particular, male-to-male sexual act. (Read more in Colby Martin’s book, because Mamma ain’t giving you the sex talk today.)

• Matthew 19:4–5 and Mark 10:6–8 – In both of these, Jesus was quoting the Old Testament in answering questions about divorce, not homosexuality.

This leaves Romans 1:26–27; 1 Timothy 1:8–11; and 1 Corinthians 6:9-10. All of these were written by Paul, who was ironically the only Apostle who didn’t physically meet Jesus. He’s as human as the rest of us, and he has been criticised by some Biblical scholars for being inconsistent in that he advocates love as our only law, but then gives a whole bunch of guidelines including calling homosexuality a sin. But is he really doing that? Here’s a noteworthy quote (from Chuck McKnight,) that illustrates just how far a little cultural awareness goes at calling that one into question:

“Prostitution was standard practice, often tied to idol worship, and often including sex with young boys. Additionally, it was common for boys to be paired with older men who would have a sexual relationship with them until they reached adulthood. It was also accepted that men would have many sexual partners—male, female, and children—as long as they only played the role of the “active” partner, and as long as they did not have sex with another man’s wife (because wives were property). The “passive” partner was considered the weaker role, reserved for women or young boys. 

The concept of an equal, loving, consensual same-sex partnership, though not entirely unheard of, was not at all a common occurrence in Paul’s day. We have very little basis for assuming that this was the kind of relationship Paul had in mind. It is much more likely that Paul referred to specifically harmful same-sex practices like those described above.”

For a bit more of a scholarly look into the topic, I look to Professor Joan Taylor, professor of Christian Origins and Second Temple Judaism at King’s College, London, and author of “What Did Jesus Look Like.” In a guest post on “Historical Jesus Research” she wrote:

My own translation of 1 Corinthians 6:9 would be: “Or do you not know that unrighteous men shall not inherit God’s kingdom? Do not be deceived: neither whoremongers (pornoi), nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor spineless cowards (malakoi), nor ‘male-bedders’ (arsenokoitai), nor thieves, nor covetous, drunk or reviling men, shall inherit the Kingdom of God”. 

In the Greek text, it seems very clear that the concern Paul has is with damaging male behaviour that would lead to a complaint by another man. All these can easily get lost in translations, done by different committees of translators at different times. So, one of the greatest outrages of Bible translation ever done has been that the word arsenokoitai is translated as ’homosexuals’ in many English Bibles from the 20th century onwards. The problem for all translators is that arsenokoites is a rare word. However, studies have shown that it is always associated with vices of seizing or raping, and therefore it should be understood as involving male-on-male rape or coercion, and socially at the time, it would be more connected with pederasts seizing boys. This behavior does not in any way map on ‘homosexuality’ as we understand it: it is not a word about same-sex love. It is a word describing abusers. To translate arsenokoitai as indicating homosexuals is utterly, totally mistaken, wrong, and itself a kind of abuse by faulty translation. 

In the Jerusalem Bible and New Revised Standard Version, we have ‘sodomites’, which would only be right if the sodomy was understood as forced. The King James Version has more vaguely ‘abusers of themselves with mankind‘, which does at least still ensure that the fundamental concern is with abuse (though here it is of themselves). But all these get interpreted as indicating ‘homosexuals’ thanks to certain interpretive trends.

Furthermore, malakoi, literally ‘softies’, indicates spineless cowards and weaklings in other comparable lists of male vices, but is translated in the King James Bible as ‘effeminate’, again making the Bible condemn male to female transgender people or indeed any male who seems to be ‘girly’ in the eyes of certain beholders. This again is a wrong translation, and its ramifications are incredibly serious, as we see.

The Key Message and the Modern Damage:

The above section is both immensely condensed and substantially paraphrased by Taylor’s own admission. There are entire books and entire theses devoted to this topic. I’m just a little blogger using her little corner of the Internet to holler, “Hey! We’ve been wrong here and its hurting people!” I’d laugh (if it weren’t so damaging and unfunny) when I hear the seemingly age-old retort “it’s been written in the Bible for 2000 years,” because in reality (as Taylor pointed out) its more like 200 and there is a whole lot of historical context missing from those translations.

Beyond all that, the irony is if Paul’s messages were to be condensed into one key message, it is this: Don’t abuse people. Don’t use your power, position, or privilege to exploit others. Yet it is this that the church is guilty of in so many places and so many ways.

I understand that many of the translation errors may have happened at a time when homophobia was much more entrenched, or when sexual and marital practices differed greatly, but that is not our reality today. I understand that Christian leaders don’t all read Hebrew and Greek, nor do they seek to. Heck, even I don’t. But it isn’t hard to find good information from those who do.

In this day and age, it is utterly unacceptable for the church to effectively say “come one, come all, come you rich, come you poor, come you sick, come you whole, come you sinners, come you saints. Just don’t come near us if you aren’t straight or cis-gendered.” That is a complete misrepresentation of the heart of God. I could give you example after example from the Bible, but I’m running out of time in this blog because we’ve got to talk about another burning issue…

The Gay Conversion Therapy Issue:

The fact is that one can’t change their sexuality. Recently, the Premier of my home state in Australia pledged to make gay conversion therapy illegal. I cheered and I did it for a number of reasons. Here are some of them:

• Psychology Today has reported that young adults whose parents enlisted the help of a professional to change their sexual orientation (i.e. Gay conversion therapy through church-based or other therapists) had 5 times the likelihood of attempted suicide than their peers.

• The UN Committee Against Torture has made it an issue for international law. I.e. They are effectively, and reasonably, calling it torture. The American Psychiatric Association has called it unethical. A past US Surgeon General has said there is no evidence for it (read more here).

• The Human Rights Campaign noted that “In 2007, a task force of the American Psychological Association undertook a thorough review of the existing research on the efficacy of conversion therapy. Their report noted that there was very little methodologically sound research on sexual orientation change efforts (SOCEs) and that the “results of scientifically valid research indicate that it is unlikely that individuals will be able to reduce same-sex attractions or increase other-sex sexual attractions through SOCE.”  

• In 2009, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) released a damning report that showed the dangers of SOCE (Sexual orientation change efforts). Among the risks were: “depression, guilt, helplessness, hopelessness, shame, social withdrawal, suicidality, substance abuse, stress, disappointment, self-blame, decreased self-esteem and authenticity to others, increased self-hatred, hostility and blame toward parents, feelings of anger and betrayal, loss of friends and potential romantic partners, problems in sexual and emotional intimacy, sexual dysfunction, high-risk sexual behaviors, a feeling of being dehumanized and untrue to self, a loss of faith, and a sense of having wasted time and resources.” Furthermore, the American Academy of Pediatrics has stated that “Therapy directed at specifically changing sexual orientation is contraindicated since it can provoke guilt and anxiety while having little or no potential for achieving changes in orientation.”

• In short, there is clear evidence that conversion therapy does not work, and some significant evidence that it is also harmful to LGBTQ people.

Even shorter: You are more likely to emerge from gay conversion therapy psychologically damaged and/or suicidal than “straight.”

I’ve heard people ask why anyone would voluntarily do gay conversion therapy. But that is part of the problem. The why lies in hearing, week after week, that you are an abomination (when you aren’t). It’s in loving God but believing He made you for hell unless you change the unchangeable. It’s in the deeply ingrained internalized homophobia taught to young, impressionable, good-hearted, God-loving people in churches and homes across the world. But as we see from scholars like Taylor (and others), it’s all built on faulty translations of the otherwise Good Book.

I’ve told you about why the clobber scriptures are very likely victims of faulty translation. I haven’t told you about the many stories in the Bible that, once you are aware of them, are blindingly obvious in their LGBTI content. It’s just that the blinders have been on for generations, and in an age where the world is more familiar with what the church stands against than what it stands for, it seems there is a great unwillingness to take them off.

When we look back in the Bible we see Jesus scorned by the religious establishments of the day because of His inclusiveness. But today, we seem to see many religious establishments scorning inclusiveness because of Jesus. I find this to be the worst type of misrepresentation. That’s why I’m writing about this in pride month.

Why I’m Not Encouraging LGBTI Christians To Go Back to Church Just Yet:

Ladies, Gentlemen, Others – this has been my “Coming out” as an affirming Christian. It had to happen in pride month, yeah? But I have one caveat: I’m not encouraging you all to get to church just yet. Why? I am aware that the church universal is not always welcoming. I am also aware that if a church is not affirming, then it’s not welcoming either. (thanks Kevin Garcia for that truth bomb).

I think of my beautiful best friend. She rocks rainbow hair and tattoos, and she is looking for the right woman to spend the rest of her life with. She is kind and generous and fun and an adored aunty to my kiddies, and I don’t want her anywhere that isn’t ready to embrace her with no “if’s but’s or despite’s”. I think of my trans friends and I don’t want them to have to deal with sideways glances. I think of my gay friends, I don’t want them to have to wonder whether they can hold their husband’s hand in church. I think of my bisexual friends and I don’t want them to have to explain themselves.

I know that church is a place that has hurt many of you. I’m speaking up about the injustice and bad theology so that one day you will feel safe, welcomed, and affirmed. Until that time, or until such a time as you feel you want to be inside church flying the diversity and equality flag, I’ll do it for you. Others like me will too.

Until that time, where two or more are gathered, there God is in our midst. So you are welcome at my dinner table. Let’s be Christian’s together. You just bring the wine, okay?

Peace, love, and rainbows

Kit

Why Faith Post-Deconstruction is Pretty Great

When I look back through the backlog of topics I’ve written about on here, one thing is abundantly clear: I’ve written on a lot of heavy stuff! (#SorryNotSorry). While you could be forgiven for thinking I’m constantly sitting on a rock, looking at the stars and stroking my chin like some contemplative stone statue, in truth that’s not me at all. I just carve out a few hours a week to be a nerd. And. I. Love. It. But its time for something happy and simple. So today I’m popping out a bit of encouragement for you: if you are going through deconstruction right now, then fear not. Life and faith post deconstruction can be pretty great.

This week, I was talking to a beautiful friend who is just beginning on this journey. I guess I’m optimistic that for her, the deconstruction process won’t be so much like a rug brutally ripped out from under her feet,  toppling a well-ordered world. I hope it will be a little more gentle, a little more hopeful. Hey – I might be way off mark, but a girl can hope, right?

However you approach your deconstruction journey, I want to say there’s hope. Many people who find themselves undergoing this dramatic internal reinvention go on to find deep satisfaction in life and faith. My deconstruction was brutal. But my life now is so deeply satisfying. In the beginning, it felt like all ashes. My world felt burned to the ground. But now, to quote the cliché, beauty has come out of it.

The thing each of us must know is this: you don’t begin a deconstruction journey unless you knew that something wasn’t right and that you had to figure out what and why.

You might not tell yourself this explicitly. It might be something that happens on a subconscious level. It might be something kicked off by conflict or circumstance. But there is a reason for the search. There’s no avoiding that. So you best lean in and strap in, friend.

I’ve met people who are trying their hardest not to go on the deconstruction journey. Eventually, they all find this to be futile. If you find yourself avoiding that pull, its because there is something that needs looking at. There is some soul-sore festering in there and it wants your attention.

But no matter the hardship that lead you there, beauty can come out of it. You can stay a Christian if you want to. You don’t have to walk away from everything. But taking a microscope to your belief system in the service of finding deeper truth just is not a bad thing. If anything, it can lead you into deeper authenticity and happiness.

The Peace Barometer

I love how Marie Kondo’s decluttering method seems to have taken the world by storm. She asks “Does this item spark joy?” If it doesn’t, then we thank it and it goes. Regardless of how you feel about your clutter, or the little sprite who floats into people’s homes and helps clean them, its not a bad approach. I guess, spiritually, my deconstruction journey was a little bit Marie Kondo.

I started comparing things against Romans 14:17 – That the kingdom of God is righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Ghost. I started comparing everything against that. But even within this, we can tell ourselves that our actions are right in the sight of God, and that settles the righteousness conflict. We can even tell ourselves that we are happy and joyful (although if you are about to start deconstructing, then you know this isn’t true).

For me, the one thing I could never manufacture was peace. Therefore, peace became the thing I measured everything against. The other two, righteousness and  joy, factored in but I could convince myself I had both to a certain degree. But if peace was missing then I knew I had issues.

As Christians, we accept a lot of what we are told, because the people rocking our pulpits occupy such a place of respect and honour in our lives. Yet a persons walk with God is such a deeply personal experience. No one does it for you. Its you and God. From here to eternity. Over the years, I had become deeply uncomfortable with some of those things. I could believe them to amount to righteousness. But I did not feel peace and I did not feel joy.

So I had some questions to ask. For example, some of them looked like this:

• Does dominionism bring peace? Does it bring joy? Does it make the world better?

• Does the constant work of ministry bring peace and joy? Does it make me a better ambassador for Christ, or just a tired, cranky, legalistic one?

• Do I have to support “Christian” politicians and their anti-immigration policies just because I too am a Christian? Does it bring me peace? Does it bring me joy to support such suffering? (if so…WHYYYYYY?)

• And for a particularly touchy one – Do I have to be homophobic and transphobic just because I’m a Christian? Does this bring me peace? Does it bring me joy?

There were so many questions asked. These are just four examples. Everyone’s answers will likely be different. Mine were “no, no, no and no.”  So I looked to the Bible. I searched. I listened to podcasts. I read books. I talked to other deconstructors to normalise what I was going through (important step, this!). I leaned into the process. I’m so thankful my hubby was there with me, because I’m sure he’d have gotten CRAZY sick of me if he wasn’t.

I’ve learned that if peace cannot be found, then something needs to change. Just because something is preached at us doesn’t mean it is truth. (Take that with a grain of salt. There are so many wonderful, wise, theologically strong pastors and leaders out there. I’m so blessed to have some of them in my life and my life is better for it. But that does not erase the fact that authority figures can be prone to error and dogma, and when the two combine, we have bad theology that does great damage.)

Chase peace. Chase joy. Chase righteousness. The truth is that the human conscience is a gift from God. It points us to truth when the external stimuli can be so aggressively pointing us to error. If your conscience is telling you something is amiss, then lean in to that. It is never wrong. It can be muted, but never wrong.

Post-deconstruction: love-based faith not fear based religion.

I can’t even begin to explain the depth and breadth of my deconstruction journey. It was big. I can tell you this though: I have peace and I’m happy. I will always carry grief. But that is true for anyone who has faced loss. We don’t stop grieving. We just grow a bigger life around it, and we find joy in appreciating the things that grew into our lives  after loss seemed to prune us back.

I don’t feel anxious on Sunday mornings. I don’t feel anxious when I disagree with something said from the pulpit. I serve in a church and it brings me joy to do so. I grapple with how best to raise my children, but I have peace knowing we all do, and that if I keep faith and conscience at the centre of it then I can’t go too far wrong. I don’t feel that clench in  my chest when I look at the politics section of the news. I feel calm, knowing I’m right where I need to be and the rest is God’s problem.

Even when there is a challenge that comes my way, there is a peace there that I never had before and that’s a truly beautiful thing.

This past weekend, my husband and I dealt with two sick kids and a list of odd jobs as long as our arms. I was leading songs at church and I knew it was going to be a tough gig because I had skeleton staff on the band, was multitasking far more than is practical, and half the church was away at a wedding across the other side of the state. I knew it wasn’t going to be the most earth-moving worship service. But I didn’t feel anxious. I felt peace. The word brought at church had a gentle challenge in it, but I did not feel crushed or at odds. I felt empowered to look at it and let it sink in. In amongst the domestic madness, my husband found moments to look at each-other, look at our kids and feel truly blessed and in love with our little family.

That’s not something that I could have had while I was at odds with myself, my faith and my expression of Christianity. But oh its a blessing now that the deconstruction journey is less intense.

I hope to deconstruct and reconstruct my faith constantly over the years to follow, because I always want my faith to reflect Christ, to be a sweet fragrance to those my life may touch, and to be authentically, peacefully, and joyfully me. Don’t fear deconstruction, friend. Lean in to it. Good things can come out of it.

So that’s me! I hope it encourages you. If you are on a deconstruction journey, then I hope you find support here. Hit me up if you have any questions as I love helping deconstructors if I can in any way – even if that’s linking you with resources.

Anyway! I’ve got to go do some real work. You have a wonderful week.

Kit K. Over and Out

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Faith, Identity, and the Deconstruction Journey

When I first read the terms “deconstruction” and “reconstruction”, I was in the thick of what one might call an existential crisis. Up until this point “deconstruction” was something referring to food in swanky restaurants (A deconstructed cheesecake, for example. Basically it means a messy, smashed cheesecake with a garnish on top.) Suddenly I was hearing this word applied to faith, belief and the way one looks at life. At that time, I felt like my neatly packaged way of looking at the world was suddenly flying about in a million pieces like ticker tape. It was its own messy, smashed cheesecake and I didn’t know how to put it back together. 

I don’t know how to write this series in a way that’s neat. Because deconstruction and reconstruction aren’t neat. But I sure hope its helpful. So here are my first four thoughts.

First thought: You’re going to be okay. Its scary as heck. But you’re going to be ok.

Deconstruction, in psychological terms, is a process of critical analysis. You could apply it to faith, relationships, identity, life, or even specific issues in news or media. You could even apply it to a prize fight. Where did it go right? Where did it go wrong? Etc. But the type I’m talking about here usually comes after a loss of some sort: loss of a friendship, a relationship, a faith, a community, etc. It causes you to look back on time and ask things like “What was I thinking? What do I think? Who am I now?” and in some cases, “How do I approach life?”

The process itself involves deconstructing your old ideas about who you are and what you believe (and reconstruction is the partner to this process: where you put those pieces all back together). Think about this like a thousand piece puzzle. Its lovely when the picture is all together and looking sharp, but when you are holding the pieces and you don’t know where to start – well gee. That’s daunting. And its messy as F. (F meaning foretold. You didn’t think I’d drop the F bomb, did you? Heh.)

For some people this process of deconstruction can be limited to one patch of their life. For others its all encompassing. I’ve read that for people leaving a controlling relationship or a high demand group, for example, it can involve high-anxiety and inability to think through things as simple as deciding where and how to open a bank account.

When I started this journey, I was happy with where my bank accounts where held, thank Heavens. But I was second guessing what the Bible really meant, who was God really, how should I raise my kids or approach faith, God, and contribution to society. I was wondering how I should redevelop a tribe for my husband, kids and I to live and thrive in. My experience of faith had informed everything: my friendships, how I interacted with family, career, finance, sleep, tv consumption, major life decisions – everything. All of a sudden it was blown to pieces. I felt like I my locus of control had been external. I didn’t know how to reach out, grab it and figure out how to possess it for myself. I didn’t even know whether I was allowed to. In some moments, I was rapt in the freedom of it all. At other times, I was almost crippled with fear.

Its been three years. And I want to say something to people who are just starting this journey – you are going to be ok. I’ll give you a spoiler here: I’m ok. In fact, I’m happier. My marriage is thriving, as are my friendships. I love my tribe, and my weekends are spent with people I just adore. We soak in the sunshine, watch our kids play, drink wine (on many if not all occasions) and we laugh a lot. I laugh a lot more than I used to. I still have struggles but they are well within the bounds of “normal.” How do you deal with 2 year olds? How do you squeeze in date night when you are so tired? Why do the weeds in my garden have to grow so freakin’ fast? That sort of thing.

If you’re just starting this journey, then it feels all-encompassing right now. It feels messy, and painful, and out of control. But it won’t feel that way forever. I’ve got friends who are 4, 5, 6 and even 15 years post-deconstruction. They are doing well. Life looks different but it looks good. You’re going to be okay. Just keep taking one step at a time.

Second thought: There’s grief, and no matter what you’ve heard about the five stages of grief – it isn’t linear. One moment you are in denial. The next you are angry. You think you’ve accepted it then you change your mind about that. That’s okay. Just roll with it.

Yes, you can grieve for faith, community, or relationships as deeply as you would grieve for a person.  Why? Because if you are grieving for the loss of identity or a relationship, then its almost like you are grieving for the person you were before. Its okay. My husband and I used to try to fix each-other. If one of us was having an off day, we would try to talk each-other up and out of that funk. One would compensate for the other persons sadness or rumination with confidence and cheeriness. It was noble. But we have learned something over the years: its better to acknowledge those feelings of sadness and rumination, hug it out, and simply be there in the sadness. You don’t have to feel “up” all the time. You can’t. That’s life. But if you have someone beside you to simply share it, then cherish that. I’m so blessed that hubby was on this journey with me. The way we worked through our deconstruction/reconstruction was different, as was the timeline, but we were in it together. I’m so thankful for that.

Not everyone will go through this process with a partner. If you can’t, then find a friend, a support group, or a therapist. Better still, find all of the above. This is hard stuff. You’re going to make it. But its hard stuff.

Third thought: You probably need to know about limbic lag.

Fun fact: Your prefrontal cortex (which makes sense of the world) sometimes works on a different timeline to your limbic system (which is thought to govern emotions). So when it comes to matters like re-evaluating and re-building your life, if you are feeling like crap, it doesn’t have to mean anything more than that you’re feeling like crap. Acknowledge it. Don’t fight it. But don’t think you need to rethink everything because you are feeling like rubbish in that moment. It could simply be limbic lag – thoughts and feelings working on different schedules. Eventually they’ll line up a bit better. But in the midst of the crisis, they might not. And that’s okay.

Tomorrow will be another day. You don’t have to feel sad tomorrow if you felt sad today. But if you do that’s okay too. (Disclaimer: one or two days is okay, but if your low mood lasts much longer than that, see a doctor. Sometimes when we face upheavals in life, it can wear on our mental health. If you are suffering from ongoing low mood then it could be depression, which is a medical condition. Don’t muck around with that. Your life means too much. Yes, even if you feel like you’ve lost your sense of purpose and place right now. You are worth help. And help helps, you know.)

Now, I know that limbic lag is a bit of a pop-psych terminology to describe this phenomenon but its a helpful one based on how the different sections of the brain work. If you’ve gone on a big process of deconstruction, then your whole life might be put under the microscope of critical thought, and you might be grieving a lot while also talking and thinking through it all. If you are used to “following your gut” to know whether you are right or wrong, then this limbic lag could be confusing. You might wonder if you are wrong on something just because you don’t get that happy, peaceful feeling about it.

In this moment, I encourage you to sit with the feelings and know that sometimes you just feel bad. I’m about to use another pop-psych term (eeek!) but in these moments, self-care matters. So run that bath. Have that chocolate. Go for that walk (get dressed first if you’ve just had that bath! You’re welcome). Phone that friend. See that movie. Deconstruction can feel all encompassing, but you can take a few hours off your existential crisis to see Jason Momoa, er I mean Aquaman or whatever. Your existential crisis will still be there tomorrow, so you can give yourself permission to take a day off making sense of the world.

Fourth Thought: Deconstruction and reconstruction don’t have to be separate. You can do one as you do the other. They can also be positive and freeing, even if the circumstances that lead you there weren’t.

Look, how you face your crisis is your business. No one can tell you how to do it (apart from a good therapist, which EVERYONE needs. I swear. Emphasis on the word good though. A good one will guide you through it, give you the skills to do it, but never demand you do it their way or according to their values). But I found I had to approach deconstruction and reconstruction together, and in an ongoing fashion.

In the beginning, something would pop up almost every day. Its amazing how pervading your belief system can be. During the heavy deconstruction phase after I left a church, lost a community and had to reinvent it all, I was amazed at how much I had to rethink. But deconstruction and reconstruction ran together. Something would pop up, and I’d realise “I used to think this about a particular thing. What do I think now?” I’d then study, think, talk it through with people in my circle and arrive at what I now think. It was a constant process of taking one belief out of my box of beliefs, turning it over, thinking about it and deciding whether it was to be kept, discarded or reinvented.

You see, you can’t just discard a belief. You have to replace it with what you now think. It’s not just a matter of realising Santa doesn’t exist. Its a matter of realising he doesn’t exist, and he’s actually your parents waiting until after you go to bed and putting the presents bought with their hard-earned cash under the tree. Santa didn’t eat the cookie. Ruddolph didn’t eat the carrot. Dad ate the cookie and Mum put the carrot back in the crisper so it could be chopped up and put in with the roasting vegetables.

It sounds terribly orderly, doesn’t it? I wish it were. It was actually a lot less organised. Because one day it was church attendance and tithing, the next it was social justice, predestination, the afterlife and fear of Hell. Then back to tithing or whatever. It was haphazard and emotionally draining, sometimes intellectual, and other times deeply emotive. Sometimes it was easy to arrive at a new conclusion or retain the old one, and sometimes it was too hard to sort through in a day, a week or a month.

Three years on, I hope I keep deconstructing and reconstructing for the rest of my life. Now that I’m through the existential crisis and into a more authentic, congruent and peaceful way of living and expressing faith, I think its an altogether healthy thing to keep asking yourself important questions. Its hard in the beginning if you’ve been living life one way and then it all gets thrown up in the air. But its not always a negative thing or something undertaken in reaction to loss or upheaval.

I realise this blog post lacks my usual references and intellectual geek-speak. I felt like it deserved a bit more of a personal look. I hope it helps. If it doesn’t, then I hope you just hold on to two things: find a good therapist, and you’re going to be okay.

Life can get sunnier if you do the work.

Three years into a deconstruction/reconstruction journey that may come and go for the rest of my life, here’s what I know: I’m still me. I just like me more. I am more able to grow and evolve than I thought I was. I am stronger and more capable than I thought I was. I am still a Christian. God hasn’t changed, but my understanding of Him has and so the way I express that and love people has changed. There will always be things I grieve. Because grief doesn’t necessarily go away. You just grow a bigger life around it.

And you can, you will, grow a bigger life around it.

Good luck. Stay tuned next week when I talk about…something relevant.

xo
Kit K

A Quick Thought on Reconstructing Identity

Morning! It’s a Wednesday. My kids are in care today so it gives me a few blessed hours to slam out literary brilliance. (Where is the sarcasm sign when you need it?) I’m about to start a series that will be geared around rediscovering yourself and your faith after your world has been turned upside down. I thought it would be easy to slam out, but I’m giving it some good thought first. Because when someone loses something that formed a big part of their identity – well gee, thats not trivial! It deserves a bit of homework on my part before I write it.

But before I start on that, I wanted to pop a quick thought out there – a challenge perhaps. So here’s todays microblog.

It’s easy to define ourselves on what we aren’t anymore, or what we don’t believe in. It’s easy to say I’m ex-this or ex-that. When I first began the process of deconstructing and reconstructing faith, I liked the term exvangelical (short for ex-evangelical). It resonated with me as it encapsulated some of the things I was no longer comfortable with. I still like it. I’m still probably exvangelical (even though technically my church is evangelical, I guess.)

Deconstructing your old faith and reconstructing your new one is tough, messy work. I’m also going to say its beautiful, because deep reflection and thought can lead to a more informed and authentic faith. It can lead you through some of the roadblocks that kept you and God apart, helping you to shed the unhelpful aspects of religion and dogma and discover new, more helpful aspects of a living, evolving faith. If you are on that journey, be it about faith or identity or whatever, perhaps you could try to think about defining yourself by what you are rather than by what you’re not anymore. I found that helpful.

I am most likely an exvangelical. But I’d rather think of myself as a post-modern Christian, a compassionate person, a deep thinker, a good friend, a person of faith, and a person of conscience. There’s no tidy, all-encompassing term for that. But its a positive identity based on what I’m moving towards, not an identity based on what I’m moving away from.

Just a thought.
Have a fab day and I’ll see you early next week with a piece on deconstruction and reconstruction of faith!

Kit K

What is the Difference Between a Cult and a Healthy Church?

After an interesting week, to say the least, and more than 2000 hits on a blog series I haven’t advertised at all, I’m taking a short break from the juicy cult stuff to write about an important topic – what to look for in a healthy church. After this, I’ll be writing about cognitive distortions (unhelpful thinking patterns) common in cults, and theological cat-fishing. Can’t wait to bring you those, but in the meantime, lets talk about something positive!

First of all, I have to acknowledge an irony here: my husband and I skipped church today. We just couldn’t bring ourselves to go. We’d had a big week. Our phones have been pinging constantly for two weeks following a couple of Facebook posts which mentioned that we were no longer members of my family’s church (the one they run), a disclosure that lead my Dad (the senior pastor) to comment in the local newspaper about it. Not going to lie: that stung. But the public response to that fiasco lead to yet more support for us, and sadly, more disclosures of peoples own sad stories. I’m seeing that there are a lot of people wounded by church. I mean, I knew there would be a lot of hurt people out there because there are a lot of unhealthy churches out there. But it really hit home this week. It motivates me to write more. Because knowledge is power, and because to me, faith should be empowering not crushing.

I understand that if you’ve been wounded by a church or cult experience, it can be seriously difficult to approach church or faith again. But there is a difference between cults and true christianity, just like there’s a difference between healthy and unhealthy churches. I can’t possibly cover the whole gamete here, but I can give you a few gems on what I believe you should to look for in a healthy (vs. unhealthy) church.

Here’s my list of considerations:

1. The Hebrews 10 test: In Hebrews 10:23-25 it says “Let us hold fast the confession of our hope without wavering, for He who promised is faithful. And let us consider one another in order to stir up love and good works, not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as is the manner of some, but exhorting one another, and so much the more as you see the Day approaching.” Some translations say “for the uplifting and edification” of the saints.” But whatever the translation, this is about stirring up hope, love, good works, and leaving us feeling encouraged and edified or empowered. Sure, exhortation can also involve delivering the tough-love truth in order to bring us further along in our walk with God, but it should always leave us feeling more empowered. 

This scripture doesn’t encourage us to hand over control of our walk with God.  It’s about stirring up love and good works. “Assembling together” and “exhorting one another” sound very egalitarian to me – eluding that we are peers, we are together, there is not one whose place is over us to make demands or control us. A healthy church, to me, has a pastor as a leader among peers, not ever on a pedestal to be the one through whom we filter our faith or our relationship with God. There is a mountain of scripture I could go through here, but lets save that for another blog post.

Another quick caveat here – Ephesians 2:8-9 says that “Salvation is by grace through faith and not of works, lest anyone should boast.” So there’s a line. Exhorting each-other towards good works is one thing, demanding it so it qualifies you for salvation is quite another.

What to look for: a church that lifts you up, empowers you, doesn’t avoid preaching truth, but always binds it in love, hope, and exhortation towards good works. A church should make a positive contribution to the families and community that it touches.

2. The Romans 14 test: In Romans 14: 17 it says “for the kingdom of God is not eating and drinking, but righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.” So look at that last bit.  Righteousness is right standing with God. That is something that can only be attained through Christ. If we think good works is the key here, and if there is no peace or joy, we have legalism – a problem (in my opinion). If we do not have peace, then there’s a problem. If there is no joy, then there is another potential red flag. If this is the metaphorical three legged stool, then we need to look for evidence of all three. Otherwise we have ourselves in a wonky establishment, something we can’t rest our metaphorical tooshes on without risk of a fall. The Bible exhorts us to judge a tree by its fruit. So have a look around and see how this is sitting.

How do you test it? Follow your heart, honestly, as that’s the best barometer of whether or not you’ve found your spiritual home. But be aware. “In their slick advertising, cults present smiling faces and happy families (Aron, Cults, too Good to be True).” So if the smiles are too wide and constant, you might be looking at something with a shiny facade that can’t be trusted.

The other point up for consideration is mental health. In mental health terms, the antithesis of peace is anxiety and the antithesis of joy is depression. Does this mean that depression and anxiety shouldn’t exist in the church? I’m not saying that. One in four people in the modern world will have mental health struggles at some point, that’s ok. That’s life. A healthy church will support them as they find treatment and restoration. But church should build us up. It should support us. If you are looking around and seeing a lot of people diagnosed with mental health issues after becoming involved in a group, you might have to think about why.

What to look for: three legs to the stool – righteousness, peace and joy. But make sure its genuine, not a front. 

3. The Doctrinal Question Test: What happens when a doctrine is questioned? Does the pastor react poorly? Or do they say “Make yourself a cuppa. Let’s kick this around”? Are you allowed to arrive at an “agree to disagree” point after discussion? Cults and high demand groups usually don’t allow questions, even from the inner circle (More on that here). In a healthy church, questions and genuine respectful debate are allowed or even encouraged. The truth is that the Bible is a complicated book. Theologically, there are many different lenses you can apply to it. Choosing one over the other shouldn’t leave you feeling excluded, mocked, shamed or at worst, excommunicated. The other part to the “doctrine” test is this: does your church know what it believes and is this consistent through each layer of the church? If you don’t know what your church believes when it comes to basic doctrines, you could have a problem.

What to look for: a church that encourages healthy discourse when it comes to matters of faith, doctrine, or even the how the church itself runs, and is clear on what it’s key doctrines are.

4. The Friends, Family and Community Test: Does your church encourage healthy engagement with friends, family and community, strengthening them and building them up? Or does it drive a wedge between you and them? Does it encourage legitimate, altruistic engagement with your community, or is there another agenda behind it? A healthy church will never divide you from your family or friends, and it won’t foster and “us and them” mentality. Dividing someone from friends and family is something that is flagged as a concern in domestic-abuse type relationships. If a church exhibits this characteristic, it is no less concerning (read more on that here). I’ll also have to flag here that I’m strongly anti-dominionist in my theology. My belief (based on Philippians 2:5-11 among others) is that Jesus came to serve not to conquer and we should emulate that. Not everyone will agree with that, but I’m strongly skeptical of churches that exhibit dominionist theology and want to take over a community rather than serve it.

What to look for: A church that doesn’t divide families or do harm to communities. It should serve and uplift both.

5. The Discipleship Test: Discipleship programs are common in churches, just as thought-reform programs are common in cults. I like to ask this question: does the discipleship program build up the person so they are more empowered, more discerning, more informed, more able to make their own life choices in accordance with where they believe God is guiding them? Or are they less able to engage in independent thought, becoming more and more dependant on the group? If the latter, watch out. (Because I’m dropping in a reference or scripture in every section here, I’ve linked this article on abusive forms of discipleship, but only read it if you’re in for something heavy!)

What to look for:  Programs that make people more personally empowered and capable of independent thought, rather than more dependant on the group and less capable to think independently.

6. The Clear Structure Test: If you were to have a grievance in your church, would it be clear to you who and how this would be rectified? Or would you feel fear and potential isolation? I’m a little wary of independent churches, especially if there is no board the pastor legitimately answers to. Most cults are ‘self-sealing systems‘ – they are their own power structures which can make grievances difficult to air or resolve. The central person becomes “the voice of God” who can’t be questioned. If your pastor has no one they are accountable to, or if you don’t know who you could take a grievance to, then this risk is wide open.

What to look for: Somewhere where there are clear lines of communication and accountability, clear policies and procedures, and consistency through-out the whole organisation. 

7. The Truth Test: I didn’t know what to call this one, but I guess the thing I’m questioning here is this – does your group have a single guru-type that it gleans all its truth from, or does it recognise truth can and does come from multiple sources? Does it always come back and check “truth” with the Bible and consider the interpretation of it against the nature of God? If your church is only allowed to ‘draw from one well’ so to speak, then you could have a problem. Clean water is clean water wherever you drink it from. Truth is truth, wherever you glean it from. My other little flag here, and it is a personal flag, is this: does your church talk about different types of truth, or suggest that facts and truth may differ. They don’t. Truth is truth. If the facts don’t line up, then there’s an issue.

What to look for: a church that genuinely seeks to grow in its understanding of truth and doctrine, that looks for confirmation from multiple sources and checks back with the Big Guy and His Book (meaning God and the Bible).

8. The “I’ve missed a Sunday” test: I missed this Sunday. I missed it because we had a huge week, one that was incredibly raw emotionally. There was no demand on me to justify why I missed it. I just did. This, to me, is good. Because it means my church trusts me to make my own decisions, and doesn’t treat me as its property. If your church puts unreasonable attendance demands on you, even for midweek meetings or for “volunteering” opportunities (which may be voluntary in name only), then you might consider the possibility that this could be a high demand group. (Read more here)

What to look for: genuine freedom, known by its fruit and not just by its narrative. 

9. The Robert Lifton Test: I’m not going to spell this all out again, but check out my blog post on 8 Key Characteristics of Cults. They’re taken from a well-respected psychiatrist who researched mind-control techniques. Read that and make sure your group doesn’t check too many boxes!

If you want another opinion on this whole issue of finding a healthy church, check out this article here.

As mentioned above, this past week or so has seen us inundated with contact from people with various stories. Some of you will find it impossible to even think about walking back into a church again. I completely get that. So I have three encouragements for you: 1. Allow yourself to heal. That takes time. 2. Feel free to use this post as a checklist if you find yourself able to consider church again. 3. If you can’t ever walk into a church again, know that doesn’t mean you can’t ever approach God again. I’d encourage you to find a friend, even one, that you can share your life and faith with. Even if thats just over a coffee or a beer every now and then, because guess what “Wherever two or more are gathered in My [God’s] name, there I AM in the midst.”

Take the pressure off, friend. Recover. Then revisit this stuff always remembering that your gut instinct is something to be listened to. Once again, I’ve hyperlinked the heck out of this article. Don’t feel like you have to follow every link. Its just so you know I didn’t make up all these opinions myself. There are a mountain of considerations you could make. These are just my top 9.

Cheers and good luck.
Kit K