In my distress I called to the Lord;
I cried out to my God.
From his heavenly temple he heard my voice;
he listened to my cry for help.
(Psalm 18:6 NET)

Several years ago, I submitted an article to an online Christian women’s magazine. Passionately, but very generally, the article told a snippet of my painful experience of shunning in the church.

The woman who responded to me said the article was well written and very compelling. But “we’ve decided not to publish it.”

Then she added: “Maybe you should try writing about an experience that someone else can identify with.”

Ooof! More pain. More silencing, invalidating, excluding.

But even as I reeled from that editor’s gut punch, I didn’t believe her. I did not believe I was the only one who had been blindsided by church people banding together to isolate and reject one of their own.

When I could breathe again, I self-published a (different) piece about Shunning in the Church. It has consistently been the most-visited post on my website.

So very many Christians, of all different stripes, have experienced shunning by their church community.

So very many church people have, naively or willfully, taken part in this type of abuse. So very many have shut down anyone who tries to speak up to bring the wrongs to light. And so very many have denied that shunning even exists – especially in their part of the church.

All of that together leaves people feeling erased.

That’s because such tactics do try to erase people, and especially people who have in some way bucked church systems and displeased church leaders.

David’s cries in the Psalms

In the big middle of my own pain, I often found myself alone with God, crying aloud and writing passionately in my journal what people had not wanted to hear.

During that time too, I came to identify with David, the shepherd-poet-warrior-king, in ways I had not before. For David also felt the searing pain of rejection by people close to him. He wrote in Psalm 55:

It is not an enemy who taunts me –
I could bear that.
It is not my foes who so arrogantly insult me –
I could have hidden from them.
Instead, it is you – my equal,
my companion and close friend.
What good fellowship we once enjoyed
as we walked together to the house of God.
(vv. 12-14 NLT)

David was not ashamed to admit the deep inner pain that such betrayals caused him. In fact, he wrote far more about his mental and emotional anguish than he did about his physical suffering. In Psalm 55, he cried:

My thoughts trouble me and I am distraught. (v. 2)
My heart is in anguish within me. (v. 4)
I am scared and shaking. (v. 5 NCV)

Again and again, in this psalm and many others, David took his pain to the Lord. Again and again, he uttered cries of distress at being counted the enemy by those he had not wronged. Again and again, he uttered cries of faith in God.

As for me, I call to God,
and the Lord saves me.
Evening, morning and noon
I cry out in distress, and
he hears my voice. (vv. 16-17)

Two entries from my journal

Recently, I’ve returned to the cries I wrote in my journals during that long dark-valley time.

Rereading my own words, I’m reminded: It is good for me, healing for me, to face into anguish when I feel it and to give my soul permission to express it.

It is good for me, too, to take the pain to God, to cry out to him, to be very honest with him and also to watch and wait for him.

My journals remind me how faithfully God has met me, Spirit-to-spirit, to comfort and to help.

And now (deep breath), the Spirit nudges me, and David’s example encourages me, to include here two of my cries from January 2018.

As I prepare to do that, my heart too “is anxious within me.” Yet the Lord who loves me keeps nudging me.

And so I look to him and cry for the blessing of the Lord again today. And I believe him when he tells me: Others who love me are experiencing this too.

The devouring of me

(Journal entry, January 2, 2018)

Yesterday, a lot of anger surfaced in me – anger over the devouring of me – the shunning, the sabotaging, the denying of who I am in Christ and his call on my life, and so robbing me of acceptance/community/relationship, voice, purpose, resources, reputation, joy, hope.

Specifically I felt angry with God, and his seeming to leave me in this place where I cannot go forward, while continuing to tell me to go forward.

Ironically, God has been restoring me – indeed, transforming me – right alongside the abuse and the crashing in of everything I thought I knew and could trust. Yet where I find myself now – both the circumstances and the united testimony of my abusers – belies that.

And land mines go off every time I try to take a step. That is, something explodes and wreaks havoc. And it requires me to divert time, energy, resources just to try to deal with the chaos. All of that belies my ever actually being able to go forward at all.

Today, God pointed me to Peter’s cry in Acts 2:22-28.

Listen to these words!
Jesus the Nazarene was a man
whose credentials God proved to you
through miracles, wonders, and signs,
which God performed through him among you.
You yourselves know this.
In accordance with God’s established plan and foreknowledge,
he was betrayed.
(vv. 22-23 CEB)

Jesus was betrayed, and his life devoured, by people. People nailed him to a cross.

But God:

• Worked beforehand to validate Jesus in every way, to the people who should have received him.
• Knew how the people would respond and planned accordingly.
• Overcame, upended, reversed what people did.

God raised him up!
God freed him from death’s dreadful grip,
since it was impossible for death to hang on to him.
(v. 24 CEB)

So Jesus accomplished what he had come to do in spite of – and even through – betrayal and devouring. In so doing, he opened the way for the deepest of relationships, between us and him, and with each other.

And as agonizing as the hours were just before and during his crucifixion, unrelenting pain did not characterize his life on earth.

Rather, he could say – and in him I can too:

I foresaw that the Lord was always with me;
because he is at my right hand I won’t be shaken.
Therefore, my heart was glad
and my tongue rejoiced.
Moreover, my body will live in hope,
because you won’t abandon me to the grave,
nor permit your holy one to experience decay.
[And even now, in this life]
You have shown me the paths of life;
your presence will fill me with happiness.
(vv. 25-28 CEB; quoted from Ps. 16)

The reproach attached to me

(Journal entry, January 27, 2018)

Well, it’s been a hard month emotionally:

I’ve tried to speak up about the abuse and shunning – to three women I thought would hear, three women who advocate #SilenceIsNotSpiritual. In response, I’ve met only with suspicion and silence.

So I’ve been crying out – sometimes screaming out – to God. And I’ve been pondering, embracing, pondering, hating, pondering … feeling the hope in, the fear of, and the impossibility in these words from Hebrews 13:13.

So, let us go out to Him outside the camp,
bearing His reproach. (NAS)

All this time, I’ve been desperately trying to avoid reproach. Again and again, I’ve frantically tried to get out from under undeserved condemnation, defamation, disgrace and contempt.

I don’t want to just appear to do right. I want to do what is wise, right, loving and just, by God’s grace, for his glory.

Yet also, I want to be seen, rightly seen, by others.

But the more I’ve tried to speak up – about so much reproach coming from so many different directions – the more people disbelieve me. Speaking the truth about the abuse that has repeatedly been designed to make me look like the “real problem” has only brought me more reproach.

So now what I’m hearing from you, Lord, is:

I need to quit trying to proclaim my innocence, quit retelling my story with intent to convince the skeptics – a story that in their eyes only seems to damn me.

I need to quit trying desperately to remove the reproach that has so profoundly attached to me. I cannot get it off.

Rather, I need to do what I most fear and most have tried to avoid: bear the reproach. That might mean unto death. It feels like worse than death.

But I am not to stand alone, trying to hold what crushes. Rather, I go to Jesus “outside the camp.” I carry the reproach to him, and I remain with him.

Outside the camp of any church culture –
not looking to any church leader of any stripe to validate me –
I tell Jesus my story, or rather, just bring it to him who knows.

And I recognize that the reproach I bring to him is not mine, but HIS. The reproaches have come because I chose to do my Father’s will above what people wanted.

I’m pausing here and wrestling with this one a bit, because it’s all been very confusing. The people reproaching me may believe they’re speaking for God. And I have so believed my abusers to be godly. Others still do.

So many “Christian voices” – well-respected voices – against my lone one. Who wouldn’t believe that I was the problem?

And yet, you are witness, Lord Jesus, that I have been seeking to go with you. And I’ve been trying to speak out to warn, to help, to seek the welfare of, those who are vilifying me.

I do not claim to have done it perfectly – not even close.

But the fact remains: I’m being condemned and shunned by Christians for choosing to do what Christ wants, instead of what they demand.

It’s totally disorienting. But it’s not new. It’s been happening on a grand scale, at least since the days of Constantine, wherever the “church” has power in a culture.

So to acquiesce, to “go along,” to be counted again as above reproach in my church culture, I would have to dishonor and disobey God.

When I suffer for following him, I’m actually bearing his reproach. And I can cry with David:

May those who wait for You not be ashamed through me, O Lord God of hosts;
May those who seek You not be dishonored through me, O God of Israel,
Because for Your sake I have borne reproach;
Dishonor has covered my face.
I have become estranged from my brothers
And an alien to my mother’s sons.
For zeal for Your house has consumed me,
And the reproaches of those who reproach You have fallen on me.
(Psalm 69:6-9 NAS1995)

When all of that feels too hard, and I try to get myself, my reputation, out from under it – to go along with people in order to be approved by them – then the reproach I bear is deserved and is mine, because I’m choosing my reputation over the Lord.

When I bring his reproach to him, and remain with him outside the camp, no longer trying to defend myself, then Jesus can do with his reproach what he will. And he can give me grace to respond to false accusations rightly and wisely. That includes, among other things: entrusting myself to him, and continuing to follow him.¹

Outside the camp with Jesus –
only there will I find others exiled for the same reason.
Contrary to all appearances,
there I find the church.

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The two excerpts from my journal have been slightly edited, for clarity. Primarily, I’ve quoted here more than I originally wrote of the Scripture passages that proved so life-giving to me at the time.

Image by Petya Georgieva from Pixabay

See also

• Shunning in the church
• To the exiles scattered (by abuse in the church)
• #SilenceIsNotSpiritual – except when it is
• Humble your soul, release your spirit
• Can we talk about shame?
• I will change your name
• My cup overflows: Resting in God’s favor

Footnotes

1. Also! See my notes on ”despising the shame” in Can we talk about shame? ↩︎