MrsDarcy_MrsDarcy_MrsDarcy's Xanga

The Garden of Love

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 16:41:30 GMT

--by William Blake, from his "Songs of Experience"

The Garden of Love

I went to the Garden of Love,
And saw what I never had seen;
A Chapel was built in the midst,
Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut
And "Thou shalt not," writ over the door;
So I turned to the Garden of Love
That so many sweet flowers bore.

And I saw it was filled with graves,
And tombstones where flowers should be;
And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,
And binding with briars my joys and desires.

40 Days Away

Tue, 05 Feb 2008 17:24:06 GMT

Lent is beginning tomorrow.

I received so much deep, healing good this past year that I am certain that this Lenten season I need to do better than sacrificing the Splenda in my morning coffee (dear as that is to me ). I'm going to give up this Xanga site!! (here comes the withdrawal ) So for the next 40 days I'll be largely out of touch.

[Those of you whose religious tradition doesn't include Lent may be interested to know that Sundays are never supposed to be fasting days; they are always feast days, so I may drop in on Sundays and see how you all are doing.]

In the meantime, I'll miss you all. Enjoy your Fat Tuesday evening, and I'll see you on the other side!

[Edit 2/5/08, 10:08 PM--Even though I won't be blogging, I will answer private messages. You won't be bothering me!]

Gay or Gossip?

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 10:06:03 GMT

I have a thought question for you---which do you think is the worse sin: being homosexual or being a gossip?

If you're from a fundamentalist or very conservative church you probably know that gossips roam freely unchecked or even encouraged but gays are allowed nowhere near. If you're in a more liberal church, you're going to notice that people have a greater sense of the impropriety of gossiping and a greater sense of delicacy toward peoples' personal struggles. (Ok, I guess my opinion is showing through here ) To tell the truth, I've never been in one of those very liberal churches where being gay is almost a badge of honor, so I have no visceral reaction to such an idea. I think everyone here on this site agrees that's just too extreme, so let's not bother reacting to it here.

I saw some really ugly, false gossip today on a forum where people were supposed to be hashing out ideas about how to deal with a very serious problem in the Episcopal Church. Everyone there was a conservative and the disagreement was about how we conservatives should respond to the liberalization of the national leadership of the church (gay bishop and all that.) The more militant folks quickly descended into personal attacks and gossip against folks who merely disagreed with them about tactics, while what I think are the more thoughtful conservatives tried to keep the discussion focussed on ideas and solutions. Keep in mind that we weren't debating charged issues like homosexuality, we were just debating our practical response to the national church, and very soon the militants were hitting below the belt.

Have we become a little insane? Has our crusade to return to 'family values' become an obesssion with gays, divorce and unmarried sex and made us become blind to our own sins? Have we gone a little crazy?

Boring Churches

Sat, 26 Jan 2008 15:08:29 GMT

I have seen both boring churches and churches that really grab your attention and make you think that things are really 'happening', and I am convinced that an exciting, interesting church may well be the most unhealthy place a Christian can be.

Think about what goes on in places like that. Maybe there are intense doctrinal debates, or a cutting edge ecclesiastical movement, or maybe the church is in the middle of a big explosion in growth, or the head pastor is taking the city by storm with his preaching. Any of these things can be very appealing and exciting and can make church members feel like they are at last in the center of things--that they are finally in a true church. But you know what happens when we start to feel that our church is the only true church--we get proud, insulated from the rest of the Christian communion and judgmental. We stop critiquing ourselves and starting only critiquing every other church. What happens when our pastor is the best preacher around? We tend to idolize him and without being quite aware of it we let him take God's place in our spiritual lives--and open the door to allowing him to abuse his authority. What happens when we are in the middle of an exciting big church growth phase and our church is building buildings and starting new programs or 'shaking things up' and reengineering the whole idea of church? We get caught up in the excitement and busy-ness of the thing and forget about the need for serene contemplation and communion with God. And we don't stop to question whether our capital expansion projects or our new worship styles are really what we should be focusing on. Who wants to spoil everybody else's fun?

And what happens if our church or denomination or our preacher are the only ones that really understand the Trinity or salvation or true holiness? We become fearful of everything outside the church--maybe even terrified of falling short of the standards and risking judgment from God just like all those people in those other 'dead' churches. We start working very hard to make sure we stay pure. We let the church tell us what to believe and how to behave and we lose our own identity, and worse, we lose our personal relationship with God and substitute it with a dysfunctional human relationship with the pastor or other leaders.

When I finally found myself in the only healthy church I have ever been in, I must admit that I found it quite disappointing at first. Nobody stood clustered around after worship arguing about theology. There were no classes where people feverishly studied up on the evils of Islam or Mormonism. There were no new movements or fads taking hold, nor was anybody interesting in talking down anybody else's new movements or fads. Mostly people talked about our 12-step meetings or the next community project we were helping with or so-and-so's new baby. Bake sales. Food drives. Stuff like that. When folks talked about theology, it was to try to understand the lectionary readings for that week, or to get a better handle on what is really the mission of this congregation: healing, grace and forgiveness. You can easily see that topics like healing, grace and forgiveness aren't nearly as exciting to talk about as law, purity, new church styles or discussions about all the ways that everybody else is sinning. You can hardly get indignant about anybody but yourself when you are focused on God's grace, can you?

The long and short of it is that the more exciting something is, the more readily we will idolize it and let it distract us from our true Christian duties. A nice, quiet, boring church may be the best place to examine yourself, get in touch with God, and learn the gentle virtues that we are most in need of. I know it's right for me, at least.

Free Will

Mon, 21 Jan 2008 13:27:42 GMT

"Bruce Almighty" was playing on our tv in the kitchen and I came into the room just in time to hear this terrific little conversation:

Bruce says to God, "How do you make somebody love you without destroying free will?"
God answers, "Welcome to my world. If you figure that out, let me know."

Ok, it's only Hollywood, and I'm sure God isn't at a loss for how to make us love him, but it does show us a more complex relationship between God and man than we are used to thinking of. In this gentler view, God is wooing us, not strong-arming us. It's not simply a question of Him commanding and us obeying: He wants our love to be freely given--or at least that's how I'm reading it. So He's showing us His love for us. He's guiding and demonstrating and rescuing and convincing. He's championing the weak and lost, destroying principalities and strongholds, showing tender mercy, but he's not destroying our free will. The kind of love He wants from us takes time and generations to develop. And He's patient.

I think abusive unhealthy religion misses this about God. If God is dictatorial and irresistable, as many of us were taught, then why shouldn't religious leaders be so also? Why shouldn't they force people into perfect conformity with their standards and throw them out if they fail? If God demands perfect obedience now, why shouldn't our churches demand it as well?

But I have found that among people who's idea of God is more gentle and patient, they themselves are also gentle and patient. Maybe theology and ideology have as much to do with abusive religion as personality does.

Wall Street Journal Article on Church Shunnings

Fri, 18 Jan 2008 14:33:03 GMT

Banned From Church

Reviving an ancient practice, churches are exposing sinners and shunning those who won't repent.

By ALEXANDRA ALTER
January 18, 2008; Page W1

On a quiet Sunday morning in June, as worshippers settled into the pews at Allen Baptist Church in southwestern Michigan, Pastor Jason Burrick grabbed his cellphone and dialed 911. When a dispatcher answered, the preacher said a former congregant was in the sanctuary. "And we need to, um, have her out A.S.A.P."

Half an hour later, 71-year-old Karolyn Caskey, a church member for nearly 50 years who had taught Sunday school and regularly donated 10% of her pension, was led out by a state trooper and a county sheriff's officer. One held her purse and Bible. The other put her in handcuffs. (Listen to the 911 call)

The charge was trespassing, but Mrs. Caskey's real offense, in her pastor's view, was spiritual. Several months earlier, when she had questioned his authority, he'd charged her with spreading "a spirit of cancer and discord" and expelled her from the congregation. "I've been shunned," she says.

Her story reflects a growing movement among some conservative Protestant pastors to bring back church discipline, an ancient practice in which suspected sinners are privately confronted and then publicly castigated and excommunicated if they refuse to repent. While many Christians find such practices outdated, pastors in large and small churches across the country are expelling members for offenses ranging from adultery and theft to gossiping, skipping service and criticizing church leaders.

Dave Krieger/Getty Images

PODCASTS

• Hear an interview with Doug Laycock, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Michigan, about the legal implications of church discipline.

• Hear the 911 call made by Pastor Burrick.

* * *

CAST OFF

• Timeline: View a brief history of shunning and excommunication.

The revival is part of a broader movement to restore churches to their traditional role as moral enforcers, Christian leaders say. Some say that contemporary churches have grown soft on sinners, citing the rise of suburban megachurches where pastors preach self-affirming messages rather than focusing on sin and redemption. Others point to a passage in the gospel of Matthew that says unrepentant sinners must be shunned.

Causing Disharmony

Watermark Community Church, a nondenominational church in Dallas that draws 4,000 people to services, requires members to sign a form stating they will submit to the "care and correction" of church elders. Last week, the pastor of a 6,000-member megachurch in Nashville, Tenn., threatened to expel 74 members for gossiping and causing disharmony unless they repented. The congregants had sued the pastor for access to the church's financial records.

First Baptist Church of Muscle Shoals, Ala., a 1,000-member congregation, expels five to seven members a year for "blatant, undeniable patterns of willful sin," which have included adultery, drunkenness and refusal to honor church elders. About 400 people have left the church over the years for what they view as an overly harsh persecution of sinners, Pastor Jeff Noblit says.

The process can be messy, says Al Jackson, pastor of Lakeview Baptist Church in Auburn, Ala., which began disciplining members in the 1990s. Once, when the congregation voted out an adulterer who refused to repent, an older woman was confused and thought the church had voted to send the man to hell.

Karolyn Caskey was expelled from Allen Baptist Church after clashing with the pastor.

Amy Hitt, 43, a mortgage officer in Amissville, Va., was voted out of her Baptist congregation in 2004 for gossiping about her pastor's plans to buy a bigger house. Her ouster was especially hard on her twin sons, now 12 years old, who had made friends in the church, she says. "Some people have looked past it, but then there are others who haven't," says Ms. Hitt, who believes the episode cost her a seat on the school board last year; she lost by 42 votes.

Scholars estimate that 10% to 15% of Protestant evangelical churches practice church discipline -- about 14,000 to 21,000 U.S. congregations in total. Increasingly, clashes within churches are spilling into communities, splitting congregations and occasionally landing church leaders in court after congregants, who believed they were confessing in private, were publicly shamed.

In the past decade, more than two dozen lawsuits related to church discipline have been filed as congregants sue pastors for defamation, negligent counseling and emotional injury, according to the Religion Case Reporter, a legal-research database. Peggy Penley, a Fort Worth, Texas, woman whose pastor revealed her extramarital affair to the congregation after she confessed it in confidence, waged a six-year battle against the pastor, charging him with negligence. Last summer, the Texas Supreme Court dismissed her suit, ruling that the pastor was exercising his religious beliefs by publicizing the affair.

Allen Baptist Church

Courts have often refused to hear such cases on the grounds that churches are protected by the constitutional right to free religious exercise, but some have sided with alleged sinners. In 2003, a woman and her husband won a defamation suit against the Iowa Methodist conference and its superintendent after he publicly accused her of "spreading the spirit of Satan" because she gossiped about her pastor. A district court rejected the case, but the Iowa Supreme Court upheld the woman's appeal on the grounds that the letter labeling her a sinner was circulated beyond the church.

Advocates of shunning say it rarely leads to the public disclosure of a member's sin. "We're not the FBI; we're not sniffing around people's homes trying to find out some secret sin," says Don Singleton, pastor of Ridgeview Baptist Church in Talladega, Ala., who says the 50-member church has disciplined six members in his 2½ years as pastor. "Ninety-nine percent of these cases never go that far."

When they do, it can be humiliating. A devout Christian and grandmother of three, Mrs. Caskey moves with a halting gait, due to two artificial knees and a double hip replacement. Friends and family describe her as a generous woman who helped pay the electricity bill for Allen Baptist, in Allen, Mich., when funds were low, gave the church $1,200 after she sold her van, and even cut the church's lawn on occasion. She has requested an engraved image of the church on her tombstone.

Gossip and Slander

Her expulsion came as a shock to some church members when, in August 2006, the pastor sent a letter to the congregation stating Mrs. Caskey and an older married couple, Patsy and Emmit Church, had been removed for taking "action against the church and your preacher." The pastor, Mr. Burrick, told congregants the three were guilty of gossip, slander and idolatry and should be shunned, according to several former church members.

"People couldn't believe it," says Janet Biggs, 53, a former church member who quit the congregation in protest.

The conflict had been brewing for months. Shortly after the church hired Mr. Burrick in 2005 to help revive the congregation, which had dwindled to 12 members, Mrs. Caskey asked him to appoint a board of deacons to help govern the church, a tradition outlined in the church's charter. Mr. Burrick said the congregation was too small to warrant deacons. Mrs. Caskey pressed the issue at the church's quarterly business meetings and began complaining that Mr. Burrick was not following the church's bylaws. "She's one of the nicest, kindest people I know," says friend and neighbor Robert Johnston, 69, a retired cabinet maker. "But she won't be pushed around."

Karolyn Caskey reads her Bible.

In April 2006, Mrs. Caskey received a stern letter from Mr. Burrick. "This church will not tolerate this spirit of cancer and discord that you would like to spread," it said. Mrs. Caskey, along with Mr. and Mrs. Church, continued to insist that the pastor follow the church's constitution. In August, she received a letter from Mr. Burrick that said her failure to repent had led to her removal. It also said he would not write her a transfer letter enabling her to join another church, a requirement in many Baptist congregations, until she had "made things right here at Allen Baptist."

She went to Florida for the winter, and when she returned to Michigan last June, she drove the two miles to Allen Baptist as usual. A church member asked her to leave, saying she was not welcome, but Mrs. Caskey told him she had come to worship and asked if they could speak after the service. Twenty minutes into the service, a sheriff's officer was at her side, and an hour later, she was in jail.

"It was very humiliating," says Mrs. Caskey, who worked for the state of Michigan for 25 years before retiring from the Department of Corrections in 1992. "The other prisoners were surprised to see a little old lady in her church clothes. One of them said, 'You robbed a church?' and I said, 'No, I just attended church.' "

Word quickly spread throughout Allen, a close-knit town of about 200 residents. Once a thriving community of farmers and factory workers, Allen consists of little more than a strip of dusty antiques stores. Mr. and Mrs. Church, both in their 70s, eventually joined another Baptist congregation nearby.

About 25 people stopped attending Allen Baptist Church after Mrs. Caskey was shunned, according to several former church members.

Current members say they support the pastor's actions, and they note that the congregation has grown under his leadership. The simple, white-washed building now draws around 70 people on Sunday mornings, many of them young families. "He's a very good leader; he has total respect for the people," says Stephen Johnson, 66, an auto parts inspector, who added that Mr. Burrick was right to remove Mrs. Caskey because "the Bible says causing discord in the church is an abomination."

Mrs. Caskey went back to the church about a month after her arrest, shortly after the county prosecutor threw out the trespassing charge. More than a dozen supporters gathered outside, some with signs that read "What Would Jesus Do?" She sat in the front row as Mr. Burrick preached about "infidels in the pews," according to reports from those present.

Once again, Mrs. Caskey was escorted out by a state trooper and taken to jail, where she posted the $62 bail and was released. After that, the county prosecutor dismissed the charge and told county law enforcement not to arrest her again unless she was creating a disturbance.

In the following weeks, Mrs. Caskey continued to worship at Allen Baptist. Some congregants no longer spoke to her or passed the offering plate, and some changed seats if she sat next to them, she says.

Mr. Burrick repeatedly declined to comment on Mrs. Caskey's case, calling it a "private ecclesiastical matter." He did say that while the church does not "blacklist" anyone, a strict reading of the Bible requires pastors to punish disobedient members. "A lot of times, flocks aren't willing to submit or be obedient to God," he said in an interview before a Sunday evening service. "If somebody is not willing to be helped, they forfeit their membership."

In Christianity's early centuries, church discipline led sinners to cover themselves with ashes or spend time in the stocks. In later centuries, expulsion was more common. Until the late 19th century, shunning was widely practiced by American evangelicals, including Methodists, Presbyterians and Baptists. Today, excommunication rarely occurs in the U.S. Catholic Church, and shunning is largely unheard of among mainline Protestants.

Little Consensus

Among churches that practice discipline, there is little consensus on how sinners should be dealt with, says Gregory Wills, a theologian at Southern Baptist Theological seminary. Some pastors remove members on their own, while other churches require agreement among deacons or a majority vote from the congregation.

Since Mrs. Caskey's second arrest last July, the turmoil at Allen Baptist has fizzled into an awkward stalemate. Allen Baptist is an independent congregation, unaffiliated with a church hierarchy that might review the ouster. Supporters have urged Mrs. Caskey to sue to have her membership restored, but she says the matter should be settled in the church. Mr. Burrick no longer calls the police when Mrs. Caskey shows up for Sunday services.

Since November, Mrs. Caskey has been attending a Baptist church near her winter home in Tavares, Fla. She plans to go back to Allen Baptist when she returns to Michigan this spring.

"I don't intend to abandon that church," Mrs. Caskey says. "I feel like I have every right to be there."

Write to Alexandra Alter at alexandra.alter@wsj.com

"Puritanism - the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy."

Wed, 09 Jan 2008 21:08:58 GMT

That's a quote from H.L. Mencken (source is www.quotedb.com). You could also say that for religious abusers, their greatest fear is that someone, somewhere may be getting away with something they disapprove of.

Recently someone anonymously flamed this site, accusing us all of 'encouraging liars to embellish.' This is not fair to any of you. I have always tried to make this site a safe place and she came and threw around, in typical religiously abusive style, accusations and condemnation to people who have had much more than their share of condemnation from the church already. That's the last thing any of you need. She aimed at me, but you all caught her shrapnel. (I know her well from her stilted syntax, misspellings and bitterness.)

She did this because she can't stand the idea that one of us here is out from under her control, being supported and respected, and speaking frankly. If we were back in our controlling churches, you know that we'd all be called on the carpet for such openness and plain-speaking as we enjoy on this site. But here I want us all to have freedom and mutual respect, which is, after all, only normal human decency.

I get the feeling that the worse thing that abusers and manipulators imagine happening is that someone who used to be under their influence goes off and enjoys life without any reference at all to their former church. That we can be imperfect and lead imperfect lives and still be happy drives them nuts. If they had courage (see my last post) they would be running out in front of us to our new communities making sure that none of our new acquaintances makes the mistake of actually liking or accepting us. Actually,some of you have told me that your former churches actually did, inexcusably, sour your new churches for you. As for us, our former leaders and their hangers-on tried to trash our reputations in very high places, and our livelihood, but they gave up in a resentful snit when people stopped listening to them. Now the best they and their supporters can do is write anonymous, vague comments on a weblog. Pathetic, isn't it?

Let this be a reason to take heart. Once we take ourselves out of their reach and get them out of our heads, there's nothing more they can do. We can live our lives, enjoy our lives, be happy and blessed and they can't do anything about it but chew their tongues.

Now go and have fun with something and be happy!

Arrogance and Cowardice

Mon, 07 Jan 2008 15:53:10 GMT

I have a quick question to ask you:

Have you noticed yet that your church leaders who are giving you so much grief and are so very fierce and sure of themselves in their own little church, will hardly make a peep outside it? Abusive or manipulative leaders take great liberties with their members. They'll call for meetings with the elders, they'll talk about your personal affairs with other members, they may preach against you in a veiled way from the pulpit, they may make your 'problems' public affairs, they'll phone you and pressure you and come over to your house to confront you.

But if you have ever tried to arrange a meeting with them with an outside mediator, you will probably find them entirely unwilling to show themselves. For instance if you have tried to call in a disinterested party from another denomination to help you work out your differences, I suspect you will have found what we have found: Your leaders will refuse to show their faces.

I assume it's because outside their church, they have no power. Nobody respects and fears them the way their own members do, and whether they consciously realize this or not, they are not willing to have their weakness exposed. They may tell themselves that it would be useless to meet with anyone outside the church because they are ungodly or sold out or closed-minded, but the real reason is that they know they won't come out looking good.

If you have stories like this, or thoughts, I'm all ears. My last question to you was very fruitful!

Shunning: Tell Me Your Story

Tue, 01 Jan 2008 11:47:20 GMT

I have heard lots of snippets of stories from many of you about how your unhealthy churches shunned you when you made your breaks with them. For some of you the shunnings began even before you left, when the leadership decided that you were not quite the kind of person they wanted in their church.

Mine was pretty severe, and I won't bore you with a recap here just now, but something funny happened recently to make me think about this phenomenon again. I discovered I had been blocked from the Xanga site of one of the leaders of my old church. His is a site that I rarely visited, so who knows how long I had been blocked before I noticed, but I thought it was funny, and I now have a new term to add to the spiritual abuse lexicon: 'cyber-shunning.' (The list keeps growing!)

So it got me thinking about all the different clever ways abusers think of to try to manipulate and control the people around them. I'd love to hear your shunning stories, if you are comfortable sharing them! The more we put these things out in the open, the more we can help each other.

Fear, Compulsion and Religious Abuse

Tue, 18 Dec 2007 13:54:36 GMT

This world is broken and ruined. We come into it broken, and then we just get broken more. Fear is part of that brokenness, and it’s in our spiritual DNA. We all have, at the core of our beings, fear of the outer darkness, fear of God’s judgment, fear of many other lesser evils that all echo the terrible, primal, unbearable fear of eternity. But you and I know that’s not the end of the story. Christ came into the world to conquer fear and all other forms of brokenness and restore us to the security we were created in. “Perfect love casts out fear.” Religion, properly taught and properly practiced, teaches us the security we have in Christ and teaches us not to fear any longer. He faced the darkness on our behalf and broke it into smithereens, broke open the eternal tomb, and shed His light on everything. He looked under the bed and into the closet, shone flashlights behind the dresser and showed us that there’s nothing there to hurt us. He made everything ok. He turned on the nightlight and the hallway light and left our doors open, and left His door open, too. This is wonderful! It emboldens us to do amazing, daring things, to go into lions’ dens and confront principalities and pull down idols and rush into burning buildings to save the innocent and do deeds of daring for Christ’s kingdom, because we know He’s with us and has it all under control. No fear of judgment, no fear of damnation to trip us up and keep us from doing our work in the world.

Bad religion turns this good thing upside down and inside out. Instead of speaking comfort to us and echoing the Angels’ admonition to fear not, it plays up our primal fear and uses it to shackle us. Spiritually unwell people, who themselves have not received the healing and freedom from fear that Christ offers, are not content to see others live in security without fear. They believe that God’s judgment is hanging over their heads by a thin thread and will fall on them if they breathe too deeply. Religion for them becomes an obsession, an addiction, a thing to turn to compulsively again and again in order to get quick little shots of relief from their fear.

You know what I’m talking about. In order to quell the fear that you’ll be judged by God, or that you maybe aren’t genuinely saved, you surround yourself with external security blankets. You keep the rules. You go to church as often as it’s offered. You talk Christianese so the people around you will look at you approvingly. You give your testimony publicly so people will tell you it’s genuine. You put religious identifiers on your car bumpers and the walls in your house. You talk about all the false teachings of all those other churches. You hold to more and more strict ideas of morality in order to feel that you are clearly and obviously different from the lost sinners of the world. You display your religiousness in whatever way gives you the most assurance.

It’s never enough, though. These artifices aren’t once and done—they have to be returned to again and again, and in larger doses. You will find yourself drawn to the more legalistic churches. You will feel that if rigid, ‘righteous’ Pharisaical people who are so quick to judge others and so hard to satisfy and who seem to have such strict ideas of what it takes to please God can give you their stamp of approval, then you might be able to believe you are secure. But what you don’t see is that the more power you give the Pharisees to dole out security and approval to you, the more they will use that power to jerk your strings for the pleasure of watching you dance. You see, they are compulsively attempting to quell their own fears, too, and their chosen addiction is the power to lord it over other peoples’ consciences. It can be argued that their fear is so much greater than yours, so the drug they need to subdue that fear is so much stronger—it’s not enough for them to keep the rules and surround themselves with showy religion; they have to control the spiritual lives of the people around them. If they can do that, they feel more secure. If they can dole out judgment and forgiveness, they can believe that they might have the power to escape judgment themselves.

It is extremely difficult to break this compulsive, addictive cycle. As long as you are among legalistic people, I fear to say you may not be able to be free of it at all. The best place to be is among people whose attitudes are a mixture of reverence for Christ, love of serving and helping their neighbors, a desire to comfort and support one another, and a very low opinion of their own righteousness and their right to tell other people how to live. The Pharisee that you have sitting on your shoulder (we all have one) will probably tell you that this sounds like loosey-goosey religion, liberalism, anything goes, that you have to confront peoples’ sin, not gloss it over, if you’re going to be a genuine church. I can say a lot about this, but I also know from experience that any change of attitude is difficult to accept until you’ve made your break with the Pharisees entirely.

But I do not despair. Christ is saving us all, and I have great hope for you and me and for our abusers alike. Blessings to you all.