the Empathy List #65: Church Is Not A Safe Place

What the Evangelical Church Never Taught Me, Part 5

A quick note before we jump in: I hope church was a safe place for you. I really do. But it isn’t for many, myself included. This essay is for us.

---

Hey friend, Liz here.

One day, in high school, my friend arrived home to find his mother in tears. A youth group leader—one that my friend himself had spent time with, gone to movies with, attended missions trips with—had admitted to sexually abusing kids in their church youth group. He turned himself in, and the elders called the cops.

I tell you this because I want you to understand that I have seen the underbelly of the Christian church.

I have interned in two separate churches, once for a youth pastor one summer during college at my parents’ east coast nondenominational megachurch, and once in my current hometown of Denver, Colorado for an Acts 29 mega-plant, when I was a 30-year-old wife and mom of two.

I spent the summer internship adrift among teens, flirting with a fellow youth leader, handing out Oreos to any middle school girl whose mother dropped her at our “cookie & convo” church meeting, where I puffed out my chest and told the teens I wanted to be a “theologian” and then prayed for any girls who sliced at their wrists between class periods.

The youth pastor, only 29 himself, spent what seemed the majority of his time on MySpace, messaging his soon to be wife (and then ex-wife). He offered edgy sermons from a six-inch tall stage that pointed out how hard it was for him, being a 29-year-old virgin, but if he could wait, then so could they, the hormonal suburban teens sitting cross-legged beneath him, most of whom were so overparented that they wouldn’t have been able to manage anything more than car sex anyway.

We had no staff meetings, no goals, no presence from our depressed youth group leader, and it showed. The youth group sank like a stone.

The second internship, I spent 15 hours a week for a whole year sitting across from the saddest cases, the almost-divorcees and the still-addicteds, listening to their woes and offering condolences and practical help (Do you need a babysitter? Can we bring you a meal? Can I set up an appointment with this therapist?).

The other 5 hours I worked at the church were spent at contentious staff meetings where I understood that I was a barely tolerated presence and where I was determined to make myself indispensable despite that.

Absence is one thing. But competitive aggression? After having been barely noticed as an intern during the first go-around, this time, I was asked not to speak up in meetings, to keep my feelings to myself, to stay in my place (at the bottom).

The leading pastors and elders were all male, all white, and master micro-aggressors. When I cried, they scoffed; when I misspoke, they corrected me; when I asked questions, they talked over me; when I asked for a paid 10-hour-a-week job after the internship concluded, in order to continue my work with the congregants on the outskirts, they told me “it wasn’t a priority.” (And no, they assured me, it wasn’t about the money ;“we have the money,” they said.)

The ministry I’d poured myself for 20 hours a week, without pay, for a whole year, that ministry into wasn’t the priority. In that moment, I felt that I wasn’t the priority—not just to those leaders, but to God.

I tell you this because I want you to understand that I have known the underbelly of the Christian church.