This is my third post in a row pointing to other places I’m writing. I haven’t abandoned Words on the Word, but I am excited to have started a new blog that had been an idea for months: Healing Pastors.
What it’s about:
Healing Pastors helps pastors bring greater trauma sensitivity to their congregations, while also helping pastors process and heal from their own trauma.
Substack has paid subscriptions available. Anyone can become a “paid subscriber” to Healing Pastors, which as of now offers the sole benefit of supporting the work. Everyone can read everything there for free.
And more will follow. (Now writing: Where are the Psalms of Bathsheba?)
Find it all here, and feel free to subscribe to have future posts delivered to your probably already overcrowded inbox, but I hope that Healing Pastors emails/posts will be life-giving to you!
I’ve been focusing especially on spiritual abuse in church settings—recognition, prevention, response, and healing. I’ve been privileged to join my friend Mindelynn in launching her Website and Substack, The Broken Road. There we seek to offer resources and connection to folks who have experienced harm, especially in church and religious settings.
Substack is new to me. It’s both a blog and an email newsletter subscription. The subscribe link gives you paid options, but for now everyone can access everything free.
Each post has something Mindelynn or I have written, followed by a collection of resources we are fans of. Here are the posts where I’ve written the lead article:
First, my review of Stollar’s book, The Kingdom of Children: A Liberation Theology, is published in print and online at TheChristian Century.
Second, the Century was kind enough to interview me about the review and child liberation theology more generally. That is linked here and below at the thumbnail:
Third, I interact with Stollar and Jesus and Rabbi Irving Greenberg and others in Currents in Theology and Mission. Best part: a cameo paragraph by my pre-teen daughter. The article is free to access, linked here. It’s called: “A Burning Child in the Midst: The Promise and Power of R.L. Stollar’s Child Liberation Theology.”
What I’m most excited about in all of the above is my daughter’s writing. What I’m next-most excited about is my realization that Jesus’s healing of a child in Mark 9 directly and literally satisfies Rabbi Greenberg’s halting claim: “No statement, theological or otherwise, should be made that would not be credible in the presence of burning children.” I want to expand on this later.
I have come to see the Kingdom of God anew through the lens of childhood and actual children, which has influenced how I see and interact with the world and people around me. The above three pieces will give you just a taste.
Effective leaders coach. They view colleagues as experts of their own experience, and they challenge and support their colleague’s thinking.
“Open-ended questions” have pride of place in this approach: what? and how? instead of yes-or-no queries. Michael Bungay Stanier, for example, says in his book The Coaching Habit:
Instead of moving into advice-giving, solution-providing mode, you ask the Focus Question: “What’s the real challenge here for you?”
Giving advice has its place. Someone may explicitly want our advice. And the world is full of contributors and leaders whose expertise–however much drawn out–is not sufficient to the tasks at hand. So I wrestle with this tack.
But I also know how valuable it is to be coached where my intelligence, experience, and problem-solving skills are respected. And I remain convinced, with Paulo Freire, that a “banking model” of imparting knowledge has limited effectiveness.
As I move more deliberately into the practice of coaching, I am taking seriously the power the coachee has to frame the issues, explore the points of leverage, and effect change. As Bungay Stanier says, “The essence of coaching lies in helping others and unlocking their potential.”
Sometimes when we lament a problem to another person, we want help finding solutions. Other times we want to be heard, seen, understood. We want to know another person is really there with us.
More than that, there’s power in knowing that what we lament, someone else laments too. That messed up reality I see? You see it too. I hear you say with me, “Yeah… that’s not okay!” Such solidarity brings comfort, validation, and even strength.
The apostle Paul addresses “the sufferings of the present time” in Romans 8. He points us to glory and calls us to hope, but not without deep empathy as he considers our current pain.
In response to suffering, there are three groaning parties in Romans 8:
All of creationgroans as it suffers under the weight of its “bondage to decay” (vv. 21-22).
We ourselves—“who have the firstfruits of the Spirit” groan within ourselves (v. 23).
The Holy Spiritgroans in wordless intercession for us (v. 26).
I am just beginning to appreciate how the Holy Spirit is standing in solidarity with us, specifically by groaning.
The “groan” roots are all there in Greek. (“Sighs too deep for words” in the NRSV is beautiful, but obscures the “groan” language.) But I missed the connections until reading a compelling essay this morning from Richard B. Hays’s Reading with the Grain of Scripture: “Pneumatology: The Spirit in Romans 8.” In considering what the Holy Spirit does, Hays makes powerful intertextual connections to Ezekiel, Isaiah, and especially Israel’s exodus narrative.
Hays says that all this groaning in Romans 8 is “describing creation’s bondage to death as analogous to Israel’s slavery in Egypt.” The groaning we hear and make now connects to the Israelites’ groaning under slavery in Exodus 2:23-24. Paul is now “envisioning the eschatological redemption of all creation as a new and final exodus, in which the whole created world will share in Israel’s experience of redemption and freedom” (p. 216, my emphasis). A “new and final exodus”? Yes, please!
In the meantime—and it’s a very long meantime, isn’t it?—we’re all groaning for freedom from suffering, “like a woman in labor”:
All creation groans
We children of God groan
The Holy Spirit groans
Hays shows these three as existing in a sort of chain of solidarity: (1) Creation groans, and (2) “the children of God share fully in creation’s suffering and agonized groaning.” The children of God groan, and (3) “God’s Spirit joins in the groaning.”
By groaning, the Holy Spirit is passionately expressing solidarity with God’s children and with all of creation.
The Spirit’s wordless groans are not just disconnected intercessions. I don’t think Paul is making an interesting but stand-alone point about how prayer really works. He’s saying that the Spirit’s groaning is God joining himself in active solidarity with an already-groaning creation and with an already-groaning family of children who are exhausted from their bondage.
The great I AM is also with us as the great I GROAN. “I will be with you” includes “I will groan with you.”
Just as Yahweh rescued Exodus, Paul speaks of hope and deliverance in Romans 8. God’s children and all of creation will be liberated, brought into freedom and glory! Thanks be to God.
Until then, we have a great fellow-Groaner who laments with us in the waiting.
Marley’s Ghost, by John Leech, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
After casting an unclean spirit out of a boy, Jesus takes his disciples away privately. Where does Jesus direct their attention after a triumphant encounter? Surprisingly, he points them to his own death:
And going out from there, they passed through Galilee, but Jesus did not want anyone to know, because he was teaching his disciples and saying to them, “The Son of Man is to be handed over into the hands of people, and they will kill him, and—despite being killed—after three days he will rise again.” —Mark 9:31-32, my translation
The repetition of “kill” is fascinating. Here’s a wooden read of the Greek, where the verb for kill (ἀποκτείνω/apokteinō) is repeated:
…and they will kill (ἀποκτείνω/apokteinō) him, and—being killed (ἀποκτείνω/apokteinō)—he will rise again.
The first use of “kill” is an active indicative verb: “they will kill him.” Jesus is the object of that verb, the recipient of the action of killing.
The second use of “kill” is a passive participle, with Jesus the subject, translated something like: “and despite his being killed….” Here Jesus is grammatical subject, not object, because he is also the subject of the main indicative verb that the participle modifies: “he will rise again.”
I draw two conclusions from this:
First, Jesus has gone from passive recipient of a heinous action (“they will kill him”) to active agent that overcomes it (“despite being killed, he will…”). As my friend Mark used to say, “That’ll preach!” I think of the oft-used protest mantra, that I preached about the other week: “They tried to bury us; they didn’t know we were seeds.”
Second, Jesus is repetitive in saying, “they will kill him… and being killed he will….” I think Jesus is emphasizing his death on purpose.
Mark and Jesus don’t need to use “kill” (ἀποκτείνω/apokteinō) twice. In fact, in Mark 8:31, when Jesus predicts his death to his disciples, even a similar verbal formula uses “kill” just once. Perhaps because you can only kill a person once! Dead is dead.1
And yet in Mark 9, Jesus says “kill” twice. Maybe it’s because the disciples didn’t understand his impending death in Mark 8. So Jesus recapitulates the prediction here and adds some emphasis in hopes that they’ll get it this time in Mark 9.2 Maybe Jesus also wants to highlight the power of his resurrection—that he rose from the actual dead. He didn’t wake up from a merely “mostly dead” state:
In Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol it says, “Old Marley was as dead as a doornail.” Dickens could have just said “Old Marley was dead!” Dead is dead. You either are or you aren’t.
But since Ebenezer Scrooge will see the ghost of Marley, Dickens wants to emphasize that it really is a ghost, because Marley really is dead when the story begins.
I think Mark and Jesus are doing the same thing here: “they will kill me, and—even though I’ve really been killed, dead as a doornail—I will rise again.”
Mark sets the stage here for a powerful response of awe when Jesus does rise again—from full-on, actual death, over which Jesus has authority.
Disclosure: I did not read through any commentaries before posting this, but I’m sure many commentators have seen the same thing. Fascinatingly, the NET Bible chooses NOT to translate the second “kill,” inexplicably chalking it up to “redundancy in the statement” in the Greek text. ↩
Early in 2023 I re-read the Gospels, paying close attention to how Jesus interacted with children. Going back to how much Jesus loved and honored children in his ministry has been transformative for me.
Now I’m leading a five-session Webinar series: A Little Child Shall Lead Them: A Biblical Theology of Children and the Kingdom of God. It’s free, and I’m offering it in the hopes that all of us might grow in how we understand, love, and advocate for children.
The series uses Accordance Bible Software’s Webinar platform, but you don’t need to have Accordance to participate. Details are in this one-pager; you can go straight to the registration landing page here. First session is this Wednesday (12/20) at 12p Eastern (Christmas-themed!), and then the first four Wednesdays in January.
R.L. Stollar’s new book vaulted into my Top 5 Books Ever before I’d even finished reading it. It’s called The Kingdom of Children: A Liberation Theology. (Publisher product page / $4.99 on Kindle now (affiliate link))
Book review and additional interaction forthcoming. For now: I haven’t stopped thinking about The Kingdom of Children since reading it. It’s already having the same impact on my thinking and pastoral practice as I’ve experienced from Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and from the late Sang Hyun Lee’s From a Liminal Place. I wrote more about this here, with—I hope—more to follow.
Pais is the first—and only—theologian to dedicate an entire book to a child liberation theology to date. While various individuals and organizations have explored a theology of childhood or advocated for child theology, the specific topic of child liberation theology has received very little attention. My goal with this book is to change that and bring the vital conversation about child liberation theology forward to a new generation.
Time will tell to what extent Stollar meets his goal, but I’m 100% behind it. And for what it’s worth, both theorizing and practicing child liberation theology are now front and center with me. And for that I am grateful.
New Testament scholar Michael J. Kruger didn’t expect to write a book about spiritual abuse in the church, but—a couple of chapters in to his new book Bully Pulpit—I’m glad he did.
Kruger says:
I never expected to write a book on Christian leadership. And I certainly never expected to write this one. After all, my prior writing projects have been more on the academic side of the spectrum—mainly on early Christianity and the origins of the New Testament—and not on practical aspects of Christian ministry.
But what does any of us really know about what God might some day call us to? In lines that resonate with me, he goes on:
But sometimes God leads you down pathways you never imagined you would take. And sometimes you do things not because you want to but because they need to be done.
I know the feeling: I could only write each of these posts after firsthand and secondhand experience.
Bully Pulpit’s sub-title is: Confronting the Problem of Spiritual Abuse in the Church. Here’s Kruger’s definition of spiritual abuse:
Spiritual abuse is when a spiritual leader—such as a pastor, elder, or head of a Christian organization—wields his position of spiritual authority in such a way that he manipulates, domineers, bullies, and intimidates those under him as a means of maintaining his own power and control, even if he is convinced he is seeking biblical and kingdom-related goals.
Then he unpacks the definition:
“Spiritual abuse involves someone in a position of spiritual authority” (more on this below)
“Spiritual abuse involves sinful methods of controlling and domineering others” (i.e., the abuser is hypercritical, cruel, threatening, defensive, manipulative)
“Spiritual abusers seem to be building God’s kingdom (but are really building their own)”—this allows for an important intent vs. impact distinction
Kruger notes that defining spiritual abuse can be tricky, but that shouldn’t keep us from trying:
But sins that are more difficult to spot are still sins. Pride may be one of the worst sins, and yet it is remarkably difficult to prove in any given individual. Yet if such difficult-to-spot sins would disqualify a person from ministry (1 Tim. 3:3; Titus 1:7; 1 Peter 5:3; 2 Tim. 2:24), then the church is obligated to assess them even if the task of doing so requires more nuance and care. Can the church ignore these requirements merely because they are more subjective than others? One might argue that the pileup of churches wrecked by domineering leaders over the last decade shows that the church needs to do better in this area. We have ignored these requirements at our peril.
One element I especially appreciate in Kruger’s definition of spiritual abuse is that the abuser can be a person “in a position of [any] spiritual authority.” The abuser may not be in a positional of formal authority in the church, in other words. Their power may come from years of spiritual influence in a congregation. They may be a beloved church musician with informal authority but lots of power. They may be a long-serving elder or lay leader or popular Sunday school teacher who has waited out multiple pastors over the decades.
Kruger will come to focus, I think, on lead pastors or organization heads. This is as it should be, although I eagerly await someone’s book on spiritual abuse perpetuated from the so-called second chair–and the pew.
Either way, whoever spiritually abuses does so because they have spiritual power in a community, and they take drastic, hurtful measures to maintain it.
Jesus’s “Not so with you!” is a great refrain already in Kruger’s book. He will build to a positive vision of “creating a culture that resists spiritual abuse.”
For now, though, I’m grateful for his delineating what spiritual abuse is, since it offers shared, specific language for a practice that causes real and lasting harm.
I was invited to reflect recently: Why don’t people go to church?
In this post I list reasons I’m aware people don’t attend Christian services of worship.
(Note: there’s recent research on this question, which I consulted only after writing the below. I base my answers on personal experience and the experience of others.)
For a one-page printable PDF of the below, click here.
Why don’t people attend worship services? Some bullet points, in no particular order, some of which combine with and build on each other:
don’t want to
our task: to ask and learn why
maybe someone wants to go to church, but not as much as they want to do something else: coffee and read, sleep in, go to the beach, kids’ soccer, etc.
church is boring? (either actually, or perceived)
aren’t able to
ability/disability-related reasons
accessibility challenges: transport, having to work an inflexible job on a Sunday, not having a spouse or family interested in going, etc.
don’t feel safe (aren’t safe)
in particular, due to being abused by someone at/from church, whether physically, spiritually, or otherwise
church drama and church trauma—both are real and painful
burned out on the whole church experience
aren’t even thinking about church (Romans 10:14: “How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard?”)… this points to the need for sharing the good news with others
disincentivized by Christians
we may fail to be warm and welcoming
we may not be culturally sensitive or trauma-informed
we may be well meaning but say less than helpful things (e.g., “God doesn’t give you more than you can handle.”)
we may not be intentional with our connection/discipleship pathway (e.g., here)
we may not be giving people Jesus!
Church’s reputation (deserved or not)
e.g., reputation of being close-minded, shallow, brainwashing, homophobic, sexist, politically bought off, etc.
larger cultural forces
individualism: idea that “I don’t need other people to be spiritual”
“have it your way”: piece together one’s own spirituality without restrictions and commitments of a church
COVID: idea that “During COVID, I realized I didn’t really need church anyway.”
mistrust of institutional authority (and of the Church specifically)
spiritual forces
I’d want to be wise and discerning in how we talk about this, but surely there is a spiritual battle—seen and often unseen—that influences if/when/how people come to church
are there ways we churches are quenching the Holy Spirit?
There are more reasons, including ones I’m not aware of or am slow to admit to, as a long-time churchgoer and pastor! I want to be open to learning here. I asked a dear friend of mine—who doesn’t go to church anymore—why he doesn’t, and he just sent me this.
What would you add to the list above, or push back on?
Words on the Word 