We believed in our church. We were wrong.

The beginning of our story

Along with regular posts related to Mary’s story, I plan to write an ongoing series sharing parts of my own. Here’s the first!

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The story was filled with sunshine and hope. We told it so many times over the years, growing in our certainty that this was the place God provided for us. We told it to the friends and neighbors we invited to worship with us, wanting them to see what we believed: here was the kind of community everyone longs for, a place where you will be seen, known, loved. 

We thought it was a happily-ever-after story. But recalling it today, I see a tragedy foreshadowed. 

The beginning

It was a snowy, gray January in upstate New York, but North Carolina welcomed us with 70-degree weather, and thanks to the rental company’s error, a convertible Mustang for the weekend.

The job offer looked good, but we weren’t going to move unless there was a solid church nearby. 

A church that preached the gospel. 

If possible, an Acts 29 church. 

In 2013, Mark Driscoll and the church planting movement looked like the place to be for Christians who were gospel-centered, missional, relevant, etc.

So the church we walked into that Sunday seemed to promise beautiful possibilities. It was a few dozen people meeting in a rented space, and had been planted a few years earlier. But the worship music felt sincere, the sermon was clear and hit the right doctrinal points, and the couple next to us made a point of talking with us after the service. The pastor and worship leader met us, learned our names and why we were visiting. We felt welcomed. 

This, we knew, was the answer to our prayers. Here was a place we could worship and grow, serve our city, maybe even help plant other churches. This was the church we would commit ourselves to. This was the church that would become our home.

And that’s where the story ended every time we told it over nearly 10 years. We believed it so sincerely. We believed the people we loved so much truly loved us, too. 

We believed we’d found true community. 

In fact, we didn’t know what this is. 

All healthy relationships involve “rupture and repair” — the experience of conflict or distance followed by restoration and healing. Rupture followed by repair builds trust and establishes security. This type of relationship means both parties are tuned into one another (attunement) enough to notice when things feel off.¹ A healthy relationship like this involves humility and vulnerability: not just admitting when you’re wrong and working to make it right, but also being willing to work towards repair when you feel wronged. 

A healthy community models and practices this pattern, creating a safe and loving space for those inside. Our church community had very little conflict. As the years passed we learned of some unresolved tensions and broken relationships between other members, but we failed to notice the lack of repair. Our own relationships within the church were easy, and we were more than willing to forgive any sins against us. 

Before our eyes were opened... This was taken back in 2019, by someone on our former church’s volunteer photography team, then shared on the church’s social media page. At some point I need to write about how this common practice of turning the worship service into “content” for marketing is problematic.

We were true believers in this community. Cults and pyramid schemes work by recruiting true believers, people who are so convinced they’ve found “the way” that they begin recruiting their own friends and family. ²

The problem is, true believers are always promising a reward they haven’t actually experienced. Sometimes it’s easy to see through — like when the person trying to recruit you into the “life-changing opportunity” of their MLM still hasn’t earned enough to quit their day job. But when it comes to less tangible benefits, the truth is harder to discern. We “sold” others on our church community because we’d always known happiness and comfort there. But until you’ve experienced conflict in a church, you can’t know what its culture is really like. And a community without healthy practices of conflict and repair is not truly safe or good.³ 

What we know now — the truth that caused us to uproot our family and move across the country — is that our community would not be willing to do the work of repair with us. After nearly 10 years together, those dear friends would choose to discard and forget about us in just a few months. 

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Aside from my podcast interview linked above, I’ve also written about some of the conflict I experienced with our former pastor, and what I learned from it, in a recent series called “The Rise and Fall of a Friendship.”

1. “Attunement” is one of what therapist Adam Young calls the “Big Six” of relational needs for children, but we all need attuned relationships. I highly recommend his podcast, “The Place We Find Ourselves,” which has helped me in understanding and healing from my story.

2. “Cults and pyramid schemes?!” Yes, in fact, many churches are more like cults not because of their doctrine — which may be perfectly orthodox — but because of their patterns of relationship. If you’d like to learn more, a great book is “In the House of Friends: Understanding and Healing from Spiritual Abuse in Christian Churches.”

3. Books and authors I’ve found helpful in understanding what makes churches healthy (or not) include: “Something’s Not Right” by Wade Mullen, “Redeeming Power” by Diane Langberg, and “A Church Called Tov” by Scot McKnight and Laura Barringer.