I read a ‘proper’ Christian book for the first time since I left church two years ago, and I wanted to put some thoughts down because it was an interesting experience. I had a look at some of the book’s themes in Part 1 of this book review.
In this post, I talk about Chapters 12 The Lame and 18 ‘The Best Shitty Feeling in the World’ specifically, and touch on leadership, relationships, and how I think corporate leadership styles, bad leaders and bad communication in the church leads to the dehumanisation of individuals. I delve into my personal history A LOT and reflect on how it affects me today. Yes I need to see a therapist but instead right now there’s this post.
Disclaimer: I’ve known some great leaders. This is not a post about them. If you look at past posts on this blog, you’ll know I’ve had first-hand experience of a controlling high-expectation church environment and some spiritual abuse. For sure my experience is coloured by this and the fact that I was a worship leader there for years, albeit an uncertain one who worked hard against her natural introverted misanthropic instincts. When a person in authority is elevated to a position they are not fit for, or if they abuse their position, be it as a parent, teacher or church leader, it leaves a lasting mark on a person. The damage they can cause is exponentially greater. I’m very biased. I’ll be the first to admit how much easier it is to remember an offense than remember the good, and reading this book brought a lot of the bad to the surface. I can’t get away from that.
I’ve spent hours working on this post so that it wasn’t just a blind attack on church leaders but I suspect I have failed and it is that a lot because of where I am at right now. After talking to my husband I also made the astounding discovery that our experience of church and church support is ENTIRELY different, and I hadn’t even considered how my being a woman might have affected my interactions with church leadership. I mean DUH I feel so dumb because I already had a sense of this but it still caught me by surprise. So I had to do even more rethink and rewrite even more stuff. I wasn’t kidding when I said my thoughts and beliefs aren’t static.
Letting People Down: church leadership role modelling
The BSFITW chapter is about letting people down. Nadia describes on page 178 how she tells people when they first join her church that “(the church) will, at some point, let them down. That I will say and do something stupid and disappoint them. And then I encourage them to decide before that happens if they will stick around after it happens” (italics her emphasis). Inevitably something happens and she lets some people down but they remember her words and recognise this is their moment to make a choice whether or not to forgive. Which they do, because they love and care for each other. We also see the other side, with Nadia’s agonising recognition of her own failure in the situation and how they manage to keep the relationship together despite her mess-up.
I have ALL SORTS of questions about this. I don’t expect churches and leaders to be perfect but I do expect them to care somewhat. However I’ve never seen a leader work to repair a damaged relationship so actively before with this level of honesty. I’ve seldom heard a leader plainly say ‘I was wrong’. I’ve rarely had anyone let alone a leader apologise to me personally for their part in a disagreement or failed endeavour in the way we see here. It is obvious that Nadia sees her role as going beyond providing sermons and facilitating events. She values building a relationship of trust with her parishioners just as much and she is not defensive. Later in the book, in her struggle with the people that she doesn’t ‘get’, Nadia acknowledges that it is her problem and her choice, and not theirs. Wow.
The key takeout for me is that in this context where there is an imbalance of power i.e. one has authority over the other as opposed to a friendship between two equals, she as the leader takes responsibility for her side of the relationship and verbalises it. In my life, attempts at resolution I’ve instigated have often been one-sided. The focus usually turns to your reaction and feelings and how to sort them out, a little ‘I’m sorry you feel this way‘ but little examination of what led to the issue, and no self-reflection from the leader in the way that Nadia displays here. I’m not used to leaders making amends or addressing concerns. When I read about Nadia agonising over letting specific parishioners down, and I can’t recall anyone from our church leadership investing more than a minute on me when our family faced tragedy, I conclude that their priorities lied elsewhere and I wonder if I have just been going to all the wrong churches, and why. Note: they apparently spent more than a minute on my husband and met up with him, but I only got ‘let us know if you need anything’. Bros before hoes, evangelical-style.
A legacy of broken-down trust
I’ve been burnt before by having my assumptions about a relationship slap me in the face. Like leaders wanting to know me because they like me. I invested a lot of years working with a mentor, and they declined attending my wedding without explanation, not even directly but via another guest. Not all leaders are created equal but I’ve been on the receiving end of this sort of careless indifference often enough to see that in my life, the people and places to whom I have invested the most of myself – churches and their leaders – have been the ones who let me down the most. They welcomed my service and the role I could fulfil in their own ambitions and projects. They enticed me with loaded words like vision and calling and anointing. They enjoyed my contributions and asked for more, and I gave it all because I thought they valued me and because it was what God wanted me to do through them. Apparently, it’s entirely on me for not being clear with myself why I do things, there’s no acknowledgement of how power works and how it might have played a part. I’m happy to say that I’ve learnt to say no to things since, but it’s been a hard-learnt lesson.
Lesson learnt: you should be wary of leaders whose interest in you is only equal to the level of service you provide them at any given time. You should be wary of defensive leaders. You should be wary of leaders who say one thing and do another. You should be wary of leaders who lack empathy, who are too busy with ‘church stuff’ to care for their own people and offload it to others. This way lies a corporate approach to leading that turns to seeing people in terms of what they can offer instead of caring for who they are. It is dehumanising.
Historical pains: being a teenager is super depressing
In Chapter 12 The Lame, Nadia mentions her childhood and the part it played in making her who she is, back when she was this “pissed-off”, “bug-eyed kid with no friends” (page 122). It should have come with a trigger warning, because damn if it didn’t bring back a whole lot of painful memories.
My disappointment with the church and its people started a long time ago when I was a tween. Back then, my life was a miasma of anxiety and fear because of my home life situation. At 14, I was lonely and alienated and I wasn’t able to ask for help. I don’t remember the church helping my parents or us kids practically or emotionally in what was a really tricky time when my dad’s mental health medication was, to put it mildly, not working. Some people had to know our home was a battlefield but I don’t remember anyone lifting a finger to alleviate our struggle. I do remember my poor mum being told to grin and bear it because she’d made her bed in that marriage. Rightly or wrongly I felt let down by the very group who should have cared for us and it left a deep mark on me. It would be foolish not to assume that who I am today is at least a smidgeon coloured by this. My behaviour and thoughts are bound to be tied to it, but how powerless to know that a change is needed but not how to go about it.
I harp on some more about hypocrisy
Fourteen-year-old me did not have any reason to trust the church. But I tried later; things were different for a while. There were many years after during which I thought the benefits outweighed the losses, because obviously people are imperfect and will hurt and disappoint you.
I keep going back to the same thing at the moment, which is true for every person but even more so for leaders: if you don’t want to come across as an uncaring hypocrite, you have to stop hiding your failures and pretending you don’t have any, you have to stop using your faith as a weapon against others, stop defending yourself against all evidence to protect your position, start admitting you don’t have all the answers and stop judging and shaming other people for not living up to your expectations of purity and morality. The problem is that everybody can see through it. It’s a given we all make mistakes, so people who pretend they have made it just look bad and it is really awkward and damaging. Leaders who are like this are also more likely to get a free card because they’ve been ‘called by God’. It’s all on a scale, but it makes them look, well, it makes them look like a slightly less malignant version of Trump levels of arrogance. It looks particularly bad if they also claim to have a direct line to God’s ear and make prophetic statements and claims about the clarity of God’s voice. It diminishes every word that comes out of their mouth. It makes them untrustworthy.
It doesn’t help that I’m like Jeff on page 167 who wrote this on his church Facebook group: “I struggle with despising people (…) I somehow find the energy to mentally eviscerate such people every single day. I’m a hater.” It’s me. I’m a hater too. I find people exhausting and boastful and full of inconsistencies at the best of times. But because of the above, I mistrust Christians leaders (#notallchristians) most of all because on top of being exhausting and boastful and full of inconsistencies, they also take a moral high ground from their Bible altar and make all sorts of assertions about non-Christians that are completely untrue. They don’t believe that you can be truly moral and an atheist, that you can have an active conscience without the Holy Spirit, and all the while they have the same struggles as everyone else. Non-Christians are hypocrites too but they don’t hide it behind grace and Jesus and call themselves saints, accidental or not. I just want people to admit being human is messy and be done with the moral high ground.
Sometimes people who are leaders are arseholes but we’ve been taught to pretend they are not because apparently character is not as important for the ‘advancement of the Kingdom’ as their other so-called gifts like charisma or good public speaking or musical ability. I really want to stop pretending that people who are arseholes are anything but. I want to stop trying to polish turds because ‘God’s grace’ and all that nonsense about not criticising leaders.
Like I said I was a leader in a past life. I was part of a house church leadership, and I led worship for years and years. I even mentored someone and genuinely enjoyed it. Back when I wasn’t bitter, cynical and quite so hurt, I had a lot more time and emotional capacity for people. I’m not fit to lead anything or anyone right now, obviously. I’m also self-aware enough to know it. Not all leaders are and some of them should be far far away from the stage.
Becoming a better person is hard
Re-reading my words, they look harsh, self-pitying, self-centered, blaming everybody but myself. I understand if someone read this and concluded I was selfish, lazy and inconsistent myself, urged me to take some responsibility and stop accusing leaders of letting me down when I won’t even tell them I’ve been hurt. That’s fair. I know how it looks. It’s where I am right now, and I dearly hope I can come out on the other side.
I’ve been in situations when issues I raised were turned around as an opportunity for my motives and ‘heart’ to be examined, when I was basically gaslighted for having misgivings and negative emotions. Unsurprisingly, this has made me wary of just being honest with people when they hurt me. It’s true I have unresolved issues with leaders and I am not able to seek resolution. I don’t feel safe to do so. It’s a messy situation to be in and it’s hard to move on in a meaningful way. My past is not an excuse but it is an explanation. So there’s that. Happy 2020 revelation.
The real hard part is that I do this even now, I back off and ‘drop out’ of my relationships out of habit to protect myself when I don’t feel safe, even close ones with people I genuinely like or love. I know that these habits are not serving me very well because my emotions are RAW all the time for not coping with people’s imperfections and freaking out about my own. I am completely irrational about it and I know it. It happened earlier in the lockdown with a friend who is one of the loveliest people I know but whose imperfections were offending me at a basic level and I realised how ill-equipped to deal with it healthily. Because, I think, whenever someone’s imperfections rub against me and hurt me, however unintentionally, my instinctual response is to assume that they don’t actually like me for real, and to trust them a little less. It is not rational and very self-centered. Somebody who is not me doing something I don’t agree with is not a direct affront to me and does not mean they are being careless about my feelings, I mean, it is nothing to do with me at all. Even if it has to do with interpreting the lockdown rules. I know that, but it doesn’t feel any less real.
I am naturally quite an open person. I struggle with platitudes and small talk so when I talk to people I usually go straight into sharing my opinions liberally about everything. But I don’t know how to continue to be my normal self with someone whose imperfections have offended me and made me believe they like me less, and still protect and retain the friendship. To be my true self who shares her opinions freely, I have to tell them that I was offended and hurt by their actions. Do I? Don’t I? Does it matter? If I don’t tell them, am I being truly authentic and real, or am I just giving them the filtered Instagram version of myself? These are honestly questions I have been asking myself, because I really like to torture myself into knots.
When I’m hurt or disappointed because people don’t live up to my expectations of who I thought they were, I am quick as a flash to close the door, but I really don’t want to do that. I really want to preserve and persevere in my friendships, I mean, I have so few of them as it is. Of course I could also just go silent for a week or two until the feelings go down and brush it all under the carpet. Bloody hell I am such a mess.
Conclusion
This book made me think about things that had little to do with the topic. Is this a book review? Is this a missed opportunity for a session with a shrink? It felt relevant but who knows.
I can’t remember if Nadia Bolz-Weber is supposed to be a controversial Christian or not. Nothing looked controversial to me, but I’m a liberal snowflake, not likely to be offended by a gay priest or a well-timed f-word. Is Nadia still my ‘tribe’? Yes and No. As a human, she sounds like a multi-facetted person I can admire because she found her ‘thing’ and she is actively trying to make the world better for the worse-off. Does it make a difference that she is doing what she does as a Christian? A bit. I don’t care two hoots what she believes in, I’d actually be more impressed if she just did what she does because she cares without it being an extension of a religious belief. But I like that as a Christian she aspires to be a different kind of leader to the ones I’ve known. She self-reflects. She bares herself to public scrutiny. She shows she is just as complex as the rest of us. In providing this level of transparency, she shows a desire to flatten the power imbalance between leader and congregation in a way that feels freeing. I appreciate that.
Another thing I’ve gained from reading this book: I need to get some counselling done and maybe also a few sessions with a life coach.
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