Let's Talk About Church Hurt

How do Christians heal from the pain caused by God's people?

I’ve heard the phrase in conversations. I’ve used it in sermons. I’ve read the words in articles and listened to them in testimonies. Church Hurt. Anyone who has spent any amount of time within the Christian community has experienced pain at the hands of other people. It’s disorienting because we expect the church to be a place of relational grace and peace, but instead find heartache, betrayal, and loss. The same faith community that leads us to God and helps us grow can also wound us and leave us with questions. We wonder what this means for the reality of Christ and the truth of the gospel. We struggle to stay involved and support the institution that has caused us pain.

As a church leader, I have experienced church hurt from both sides of the equation. Undoubtedly, I have caused my own share of church hurt. My careless words and poor decisions have hurt real people, sometimes deeply. I carry many regrets from 25 years of vocational ministry and know that I will answer to the Lord for what I have said and done as His representative (see James 3:1). At the same time, I have also been hurt by people in the church. Like every pastor I know, I walk with a limp and have to fight the temptation to keep everyone at arm’s length. I often see people at their worst. Pastors and their spouses (and children) carry heavy relational scars that impact them for life.

Despite this, we need to acknowledge that people are not our ultimate enemy (see Ephesians 6:12). We face a hidden spiritual adversary who wants to destroy us and weaken the church. Satan seeks to use church hurt to divide, isolate, and weaken God’s people. He wants to see Christians destroyed, the lost damned forever, and the witness of the church severely limited. We cannot allow him to win. We must find true healing, resist division, and participate in God’s redemptive work within and through the church. This is a serious challenge for everyone. How do we heal from the hurt we’ve experienced from God’s people and move toward wholeness? Let’s start by carefully defining our terms.

Defining our Terms

I’m growing in my conviction that our language in this conversation is unclear and ultimately unhelpful. What do we mean when we say we have “church hurt?” Don’t we mean that people have hurt us? Maybe a person in our small group or ministry team let us down or betrayed our trust. Maybe a pastor or leadership team made a decision that felt impersonal or unfair. Maybe a leader misused their authority and was not held accountable for their actions. Either way, what we really mean when we say we have church hurt is that we have been hurt by a person or a group of people inside the church. This may seem like I’m playing semantic games, but I’m not. Keeping the distinction helps us avoid the danger of generalization. We fall into this trap when we apply the hurtful actions of a person or a leadership team to the entire church, the whole body of Christ. When we make this move (or are deceived by the enemy to make this generalization), we begin to see the entire church as untrustworthy or harmful. But the truth is more nuanced. While a member, leader, friend, or governing board hurt you, the whole church (meaning every person in the church) didn’t hurt you. When we assign our pain to the whole church, we can logically conclude that we must leave the church to get away from the pain. But this is the destructive response I want us to reconsider.

Unhelpful Responses

Beyond our natural, human reaction to relational pain and spiritual trauma, we need to ask a deeper question: what does God want us to do? Or maybe closer to the bullseye: how does Satan want us to react? While God wants us to heal from our hurts and become people of increasing Christlike love, Satan wants us to isolate ourselves from other believers and walk away from following Jesus. Which path are you currently following?

I talk to many people who no longer attend church because of the emotional wounds they experienced at the hands of other Christians. In fact, I know many former pastors who used to lead the church but now don’t even attend church. What happened? How did former leaders of the church give up on the household of faith?

As I’ve searched my heart during vulnerable moments, times when I’m deeply hurting, I have to be honest that I could easily rationalize a path away from the church. Because the truth is that the mind can justify what the heart wants. And in times when you are hurting, what the heart most wants is to stop hurting. So you make logical arguments in your mind to explain why getting away from the church makes sense biblically, theologically, and practically. But there is real danger along this path. It might stop the pain in the short term but then stunt your healing and growth in the long term.

While some people leave the institutional church, many other people still attend church (out of conviction) but keep their relationships at a surface level. Trust me: I get it. Our defense mechanisms kick in, and we think the only safe way to stay in the community is to avoid giving our heart to anyone. The idea is simple: if I don’t love anyone deeply, they can’t hurt me severely. We believe the lie that we can manage our image in the church and avoid pain by hiding in plain sight. But this has negative consequences as well: crowded loneliness, relational immaturity, and failure to grow as people of love.

Here’s what I’m trying to say in short: when we run from the church to heal from the pain caused by people in the church, we don’t ultimately heal and grow into people of love. We isolate and feed our pain, growing in bitterness and anger, and give up on the very gift that God uses to heal us, His people.

True Healing

I believe that God created us for relationships. From the very beginning of Genesis, God said that it was not good for man to be alone. He created Adam and Eve for each other, and He created you and me to thrive in loving, honest friendships. When Jesus is asked about the most important command in the Bible, He famously answers, “Love God with your whole being and love your neighbor as yourself.” In other words, we are fully alive when we are in a reconciled relationship with God and with other people. God created us to live together in a Christian community with other people who know us and love us, who help us mature in Christlikeness and keep us close to Him.

How does this work when we have been hurt deeply by other Christians? Here’s the conviction I want to share with you today: God uses His people to help us heal from the pain caused by His people. This has 1000% been true in my own life. I am so glad I didn’t quit on the church in times of pain caused by people in the church. God used His people to minister to my heart (and my family) during my lowest lows and eventually used His church to heal my pain. I have also seen this dynamic at work in other people’s lives. I can testify to the growth and transformation I’ve witnessed in my friends when they made the hard decision to stay involved in church when everything in them wanted to flee.

Now, I’m not saying that you should stay in a spiritually abusive environment or submit to ungodly leadership in a church. There are several biblically justifiable reasons to leave your current local church. But I would add this charge with conviction: find another local church quickly and build new friendships. Why? Because you won’t heal in isolation. Your heart won’t heal by maintaining shallow relationships. You won’t fully heal on your own. You need God’s people to help you heal from the pain caused by God’s people.

And if you are not in an abusive or ungodly local church, consider staying in your church. When you leave a local church, you are starting over relationally. You are leaving a group of people who already know you and love you. Yes, someone hurt you. But many other people love you and want you to thrive. You have invested in long-term friendships and will benefit from the wisdom and care of people who know you well.

As a pastor, I talk to people every week who are changing churches. Some have decided to leave Cityview to attend a different church in our community. Some have decided to leave their current church to join Cityview. What do I hear? Some are moving churches for very good reasons - a missional desire to reach their neighbors, a parental desire for their kids to be in church with their classmates, a theological conviction that doesn’t align with their current church. But I also hear many bad reasons - unresolved conflict with a church member or leader, frustration at being held accountable for sinful behavior, or disagreement with a leadership decision.

In the most extreme situations, I talk to Christians who change local churches every two or three years. If this is your story, please search your heart honestly before the Lord and ask a close friend how you can change this pattern in your life. This cycle will only increase your relational pain and hinder your healing.

Know Hope

At the end of the day, please don’t give up on the church. She is messy, but she is also the beautiful bride of Christ. Don’t run from her flawed people and imperfect leaders. They are sinners like you in need of grace. I can’t speak for every Christian, church, or pastor. But I can speak for myself: I am so sorry you have been hurt by people in the church. I wish we never hurt each other, but we do. I don’t have any desire to defend the terrible things Christians have done to one another. But I do want to remind you that the church is our family and the instrument of God to bring His redeeming grace and truth into our lives and the world.

Members, don’t leave the church. Pastors, don’t quit the church. Jesus died for her, and He will use her leaders and her people to heal the broken places in your heart. You need the church more than you know, and she needs you. So don’t lose hope. God is not done with you, and He is not done with the church.

Let all bitterness, anger and wrath, shouting and slander be removed from you, along with all malice. And be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving one another, just as God also forgave you in Christ. Therefore, be imitators of God, as dearly loved children, and walk in love, as Christ also loved us and gave himself for us, a sacrificial and fragrant offering to God. - Ephesians 4:31-5:2