Healing Church Hurts: Moving from “Your Fault” to “My Life”
by Ronald “Dee” Vaughan
Many of the most joyful and life-affirming experiences of my life have come through my forty-one years of service as the pastor of Baptist congregations. Sadly, church has also been the source of some of the deepest personal wounds I’ve suffered. I’m not alone in my complicated and sometimes conflicted relationship with the church. Most everyone who’s devoted themselves to serving through the church has both the medals and the scars to show for it. A key to surviving and, better still, thriving in ministry is knowing what to do with hurts when they happen. I’m writing this article to share a breakthrough moment I experienced in learning how to move beyond church hurts and, in some ways, be better for them.
I had to travel far from home to grasp an important truth about healing church hurts. I’d been blindsided by a devastating church disappointment that ended a twelve-year ministry and required my family to uproot from home, friends, and extended family. I was hurting deeply and felt stuck in my pain when I received an unexpected invitation. A seminary in Honduras needed teachers for short-term courses to address the needs of local pastors. Because I had some experience in teaching pastoral care, I was asked to lead a focused study of the book, Changes that Heal by Henry Cloud. I pored over the book, planned our class sessions, then sent class materials to the school to be translated into Spanish. I taught with the help of a gifted translator who bridged the language gap between these hard-working pastors and their tall pale American teacher.
One evening, as I reviewed the material I planned to present to the class the following day, one of the insights offered in Changes that Heal leapt off the page and into my struggle to find a sense of direction in moving beyond my hurt. Dr. Cloud writes that when you are hurt by someone, your first reaction is to assign blame for the wrongdoing. This is a necessary beginning as you assert the fact that you have been mistreated and disrespected. You need some assurance that you are right in believing that your abusers were wrong. The problem comes when the wounded person remains in the blaming phase for too long. The hurt they’ve suffered becomes the defining event of their lives and the theme of their life story. Their interactions with others become an unending campaign to enlist supporters who agree that they were victims of mistreatment. The hurt they’ve suffered becomes an excuse for not living responsibly and pursuing life goals. They take the briefly helpful act of crying foul and turn it into a vocation. They are like the hospital patient who wears his ID bracelet weeks after being discharged.
The key to finding healing from hurts is to move beyond the blaming stage and undertake two essential life tasks. First, the wounded person must grieve what was lost through someone else’s hurtful behavior. The hurting person may have lost a job, a home, a professional standing, or financial security. He’s certainly lost some important relationships. Grieving moves beyond the righteous indignation of declaring “this should not have happened,” to embrace the present reality of “this is what I’ve lost.”
The second life task that moves us toward healing is to realize that after we have named the hurt someone has caused and grieved what the injury has taken from us, we must take responsibility for what we will do with our hurt. Naturally, we resist any suggestion that we should clean up a mess someone else has made, but the hurts we suffer are on our relational property. The mess is in our yard. If we don’t want it, we must work to clean it up, no matter who made it.
Realizing the work of recovery was my responsibility was the breakthrough discovery in my journey toward healing. I saw that, for a season, the hurt I’d suffered revealed the character flaws and misguided values of others. But now, on the other side of blaming, the way I chose to deal with my wounds was now a reflection of my own heart. I no longer waited on someone else to apologize or otherwise try to repair the damage. I owned my personal power to claim responsibility for my life, hurts and all.
Perhaps the teacher learned more than the students that week in that Honduran seminary. Church hurts will happen whether we like it or not, but how we deal with them is up to us. Healing is your job and mine. Name the hurt. Grieve the loss. Clean up the mess.
Blessings as you seek and find the help you need.