I’m hearing from a lot of folks about the need for healing from the kind of theology I talked about in today’s post on John Piper’s seashell sermon. This chat thread is for talking about healing. I’d particularly love to hear about what has encouraged you and helped you to move toward wholeness.
Coming out of college, I very much wanted to be a missionary. I believed that was my highest calling. When that didn't work out, I thought I had failed God or at the very least that I had taken the cheap way out by getting a secular job.
What healed me from that was the very patient love of God over the span decades, and the people he put around me who loved me and taught me so much. My own failures and shortcomings also contributed a lot to my healing. At age 23 I had no idea how much growing up I needed to do and how my own priorities were out of whack. I wanted to be a missionary maybe partly because I cared about people in other countries and partly out of gratitude for God's love for me, but honestly it was a lot more about validating myself as someone that mattered in God's kingdom and proving that I was capable of being a star, which is not a healthy way at all to "give to others".
As I worked through my own issues with suppressed anger and the need to seek approval and self-worth from other father figures, I learned to see the depth of God's love for me no matter what I accomplished or who I was. I'd be a far better missionary now than I would have been 25 years ago, but I've also gained some humility about how God works in people's lives and moved away from thinking about other people as projects for my self validation in the hierarchy of God's kingdom.
When I was young, I knew the verses about the last in God's kingdom being first and about the eternal value of small acts like sharing a cup of water with a child, but I didn't know God's heart in those things. Now I think I know God's heart so much better. It's led me to a place of greater peace with who I am and greater hope for God's ultimate redemption of all people and the whole creation.
I liken the church message of doing great things for God to MLM schemes. You “earn” your way to love and acceptance by working your way from convert to first level worker ( coffee maker, VBS helper, to second layer ( kids SS, youth group, small group leader). You are really important when you are an elder or ministry leader and you get hang out with the really important group with access to pastors. And there were the superstars.
I was a very successful corporate leader and found church life mirrored the same ethics. Of course I fit right in and took that great things for God message to heart. Until I didnt want to do either anymore. I had to learn the true heart of the gospel. God loves me. God loves me. God loves me.
Thank you so much for this. As a worker in campus ministry, I've heard a million try hard/be great for Jesus messages. There is a residue of guilt that I've never been able to completely remove. Thank you for giving words and sound theology to something so many of us have felt. Just thank you!
As a millennial, I grew up with a lot of the “God wants you to be a world changer” messaging, which meant I internalized a lot of works-based, pressure-filled ideas about what God wanted from and expected of me.
In school, studying even the basics of Christian theology and better understanding the meta-narrative of Scripture helped immensely.
In my twenties, after realizing that I was over-identifying with my career and calling to the point of anxiety, I found deeper healing through my own season of counseling with a Christian and licensed IFS therapist (think the book Boundaries for Your Soul).
In my early thirties, my relationship with my spiritual director has helped me more deeply access my belovedness in Christ, regardless of my in-group reputation or level of productivity.
I’ve always trusted the character of God, and have always found the body of Christ passages so beautiful, but I couldn’t quite internalize His nature and heart for me until I worked through the false doctrines of Christian individualism and works-based faith.
Thanks for making space to talk about healing and wholeness here!
I grew up with the same messaging. It was like the primary sermon topic in youth group beside purity-focused talks. It got worse in college. Just about every chapel message was framed the same way. One in particular has stuck with me. The speaker (a man with a lot of political connections) told the students that God hadn't called us to a quiet, contemplative life. Instead, He was looking for people of action. This jived well with my personality bent (especially at the time), but it only took one year of working DC without much of a spiritual support base to burn me out.
I ended up returning to my Christian bubble and working at a Christian non-profit as a place to heal--only to discover that year in the real world had changed me and raised some questions I couldn't just push away. God used these questions and unexpected life events to reveal the lack of roots my faith had--my reliance on shallow Christian slogans and trite explanations.
(Re)building real faith in a real Person and learning to accept the broken Christian around me has been a long process, the accumulation of individual encounters with God and fellow Christians further down the road than me over two decades. But I think the biggest two factors were taking a break from church as usual and later going to seminary. After leaving a shrinking congregation that had taken a rather extreme (and sudden) shift toward very conservative complementarianism, my husband and I floated from church to church, desperately trying to find community and failing. So we stopped going to church for a year or two took the time to rest and ask God for guidance. Obviously, we still had believing family and friends who we interacted with, but formal church attendance was off the table. The break was very healing and helped us thinking through key theological concepts about the purpose of the Church on earth and our part in it. Fast-forward, we've found a good congregation with a lot of other over-churched folks and people with church-baggage just looking for space to heal. It just took time.
Seminary was the other component that has boosted me toward healthy orthodoxy AND orthopraxy (minus some of the weird evangelical cultural trappings) during my years in seminary. Although there was a 15-year gap between my undergrad studies and starting seminary, it was the best thing that happened to me academically. Studying theology in my late 30s allowed me to see things I wouldn't have seen at 23, and hopefully engage more maturely as well. The teachings have helped root and recenter my faith and fix so much bad doctrine I absorbed (Specifically, I'm forever grateful for my class with Dr. Sandra Glahn on women in the church. The lectures, readings, and discussions really forced me to deeply think through the issues, form more nuanced understandings, and identify why Piper's teachings had damaged me.)
The relationships and friendships forged with professors and students alike will stay with me the rest of my time on this earth and beyond. Even though surprise babies interrupted my studies and I don't have a degree (yet), the experiences were totally worth it. I'm so grateful God took me there.
I found this to be such a refreshing read. I wish we could live under that level of gentleness and holistic-ness. I wish the Bible and Paul communicated this. Piper can be brutal, but so can Paul (I beat my body and make it my slave, run the race lest I be disqualified and many many more ). So whenever I hear gentleness, I desperately want to hold on to it, but my mind immediately goes to the harsher Bible verses (you wicked servant, you didn’t maximize your talents, as another example). I am so soul-exhausted.
I'm glad it was refreshing and sorry for the soul-exhaustion. Your comment reminds me that we can't pretend we're just reading scripture; we're always reading scripture in a certain way. If Jesus is the interpretive center of the scriptures, then so is love. Also, it can be helpful to remember that some things are rhetorical strategies... :)
How can I learn a better way of interpreting scripture through Jesus and through love? Without enrolling in seminary, that is 🙂. Any good book recommendations etc? I actually have done some seminary courses, but still find sections of the Bible (and NT - Jesus, Paul) soooooooo harsh. I get haunted by the harsh passages.
Coming out of college, I very much wanted to be a missionary. I believed that was my highest calling. When that didn't work out, I thought I had failed God or at the very least that I had taken the cheap way out by getting a secular job.
What healed me from that was the very patient love of God over the span decades, and the people he put around me who loved me and taught me so much. My own failures and shortcomings also contributed a lot to my healing. At age 23 I had no idea how much growing up I needed to do and how my own priorities were out of whack. I wanted to be a missionary maybe partly because I cared about people in other countries and partly out of gratitude for God's love for me, but honestly it was a lot more about validating myself as someone that mattered in God's kingdom and proving that I was capable of being a star, which is not a healthy way at all to "give to others".
As I worked through my own issues with suppressed anger and the need to seek approval and self-worth from other father figures, I learned to see the depth of God's love for me no matter what I accomplished or who I was. I'd be a far better missionary now than I would have been 25 years ago, but I've also gained some humility about how God works in people's lives and moved away from thinking about other people as projects for my self validation in the hierarchy of God's kingdom.
When I was young, I knew the verses about the last in God's kingdom being first and about the eternal value of small acts like sharing a cup of water with a child, but I didn't know God's heart in those things. Now I think I know God's heart so much better. It's led me to a place of greater peace with who I am and greater hope for God's ultimate redemption of all people and the whole creation.
so much wisdom here
I liken the church message of doing great things for God to MLM schemes. You “earn” your way to love and acceptance by working your way from convert to first level worker ( coffee maker, VBS helper, to second layer ( kids SS, youth group, small group leader). You are really important when you are an elder or ministry leader and you get hang out with the really important group with access to pastors. And there were the superstars.
I was a very successful corporate leader and found church life mirrored the same ethics. Of course I fit right in and took that great things for God message to heart. Until I didnt want to do either anymore. I had to learn the true heart of the gospel. God loves me. God loves me. God loves me.
MLM and corporate ethics are rough but true comparisons!
Thank you so much for this. As a worker in campus ministry, I've heard a million try hard/be great for Jesus messages. There is a residue of guilt that I've never been able to completely remove. Thank you for giving words and sound theology to something so many of us have felt. Just thank you!
you're welcome! It's a message I need to hear too, and I'm grateful when others also find it helpful.
As a millennial, I grew up with a lot of the “God wants you to be a world changer” messaging, which meant I internalized a lot of works-based, pressure-filled ideas about what God wanted from and expected of me.
In school, studying even the basics of Christian theology and better understanding the meta-narrative of Scripture helped immensely.
In my twenties, after realizing that I was over-identifying with my career and calling to the point of anxiety, I found deeper healing through my own season of counseling with a Christian and licensed IFS therapist (think the book Boundaries for Your Soul).
In my early thirties, my relationship with my spiritual director has helped me more deeply access my belovedness in Christ, regardless of my in-group reputation or level of productivity.
I’ve always trusted the character of God, and have always found the body of Christ passages so beautiful, but I couldn’t quite internalize His nature and heart for me until I worked through the false doctrines of Christian individualism and works-based faith.
Thanks for making space to talk about healing and wholeness here!
I grew up with the same messaging. It was like the primary sermon topic in youth group beside purity-focused talks. It got worse in college. Just about every chapel message was framed the same way. One in particular has stuck with me. The speaker (a man with a lot of political connections) told the students that God hadn't called us to a quiet, contemplative life. Instead, He was looking for people of action. This jived well with my personality bent (especially at the time), but it only took one year of working DC without much of a spiritual support base to burn me out.
I ended up returning to my Christian bubble and working at a Christian non-profit as a place to heal--only to discover that year in the real world had changed me and raised some questions I couldn't just push away. God used these questions and unexpected life events to reveal the lack of roots my faith had--my reliance on shallow Christian slogans and trite explanations.
(Re)building real faith in a real Person and learning to accept the broken Christian around me has been a long process, the accumulation of individual encounters with God and fellow Christians further down the road than me over two decades. But I think the biggest two factors were taking a break from church as usual and later going to seminary. After leaving a shrinking congregation that had taken a rather extreme (and sudden) shift toward very conservative complementarianism, my husband and I floated from church to church, desperately trying to find community and failing. So we stopped going to church for a year or two took the time to rest and ask God for guidance. Obviously, we still had believing family and friends who we interacted with, but formal church attendance was off the table. The break was very healing and helped us thinking through key theological concepts about the purpose of the Church on earth and our part in it. Fast-forward, we've found a good congregation with a lot of other over-churched folks and people with church-baggage just looking for space to heal. It just took time.
Seminary was the other component that has boosted me toward healthy orthodoxy AND orthopraxy (minus some of the weird evangelical cultural trappings) during my years in seminary. Although there was a 15-year gap between my undergrad studies and starting seminary, it was the best thing that happened to me academically. Studying theology in my late 30s allowed me to see things I wouldn't have seen at 23, and hopefully engage more maturely as well. The teachings have helped root and recenter my faith and fix so much bad doctrine I absorbed (Specifically, I'm forever grateful for my class with Dr. Sandra Glahn on women in the church. The lectures, readings, and discussions really forced me to deeply think through the issues, form more nuanced understandings, and identify why Piper's teachings had damaged me.)
The relationships and friendships forged with professors and students alike will stay with me the rest of my time on this earth and beyond. Even though surprise babies interrupted my studies and I don't have a degree (yet), the experiences were totally worth it. I'm so grateful God took me there.
thanks for sharing this! Yes, we humans are time people and it's wonderful that God works in time.
thanks for sharing this journey of healing!
Good point!
Loved this so much. So so much.
thank you!
I found this to be such a refreshing read. I wish we could live under that level of gentleness and holistic-ness. I wish the Bible and Paul communicated this. Piper can be brutal, but so can Paul (I beat my body and make it my slave, run the race lest I be disqualified and many many more ). So whenever I hear gentleness, I desperately want to hold on to it, but my mind immediately goes to the harsher Bible verses (you wicked servant, you didn’t maximize your talents, as another example). I am so soul-exhausted.
I'm glad it was refreshing and sorry for the soul-exhaustion. Your comment reminds me that we can't pretend we're just reading scripture; we're always reading scripture in a certain way. If Jesus is the interpretive center of the scriptures, then so is love. Also, it can be helpful to remember that some things are rhetorical strategies... :)
How can I learn a better way of interpreting scripture through Jesus and through love? Without enrolling in seminary, that is 🙂. Any good book recommendations etc? I actually have done some seminary courses, but still find sections of the Bible (and NT - Jesus, Paul) soooooooo harsh. I get haunted by the harsh passages.
I don't think books do all the work, but a good book to start with biblical interpretation on tough passages is Scot McKnight's *The Blue Parakeet*
Thank you!
For what it's worth, I wrote a critical article on Substack about some similar feelings on how the modern church is making the Bible Too Safe. Anyone interested (it's a free publication) can read it here: https://open.substack.com/pub/divergentdad/p/so-safe-its-boring?r=cqg2x&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web