Cultivating ACNA 2.0
by Heather Griffin
As sorrowful as it is to be confronted with our failures, we believe that these exposures are an invitation from God to grow and become what he has always wanted us to be. We would not be doing this if we lacked hope. We do not want to waste this opportunity to become more like Jesus and to be a denomination in which those who do not know Jesus yet want to meet him because we manifest his character. We are excited about this opportunity. We would like to sketch out a vision of some things that could help move us away from needing an #ACNAtoo as we move to an ACNA 2.0 characterized by safety, health, and the continual pursuit of maturity in Christ.
The ACNA can not move from an unhealthy adolescence to healthy maturity overnight anymore than an unhealthy child can become a flourishing adult overnight. With some forms of change, “slow is fast” and attempting to do too much too soon leads to overwhelm, fatigue, discouragement, and an inability to master any one skill because we are trying to master too many of them at once.
The ACNA needs many more “tools” in her “toolbox” to mature. We hope that even as we invite you to join us in the difficult work of telling the truth of where we currently are, we will also be able to invite you to join us in the joy of becoming who God made us to be. We are never too old to receive more of God’s love and become more excited about the goodness of Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit to set us free and give us abundant life beyond what we knew to hope for or ask for in the past. We all desire to love and be loved more fully, even if we have not allowed ourselves to feel those longings out of fear of being disappointed yet again and remaining “stuck” in our pain or immaturity.
We believe that Jesus has compassion on everyone’s starting point. Many of us do not know how to do things because we were never trained to do them and no one we knew or trusted knew how to do them either. Some of these deficits go back generations and are never solely the “fault” of the individual who finds themselves often quite far in life and is confronted with the reality that there are many that we still need to learn and experience to become more like Jesus. Our own responsibility lies in being teachable and willing to walk in the truth when we the people that we love tell us that they need us to grow with them so our relationships can be grounded in the reality of Christ.
We cannot change simply by intending to change. We need wise guides. We hope to share with you many wise guides to help us get the tools we need to eventually, with steady practice, mature into the ACNA 2.0.
Most importantly, we need tools that will help us tolerate the shame we all experience when we realize we have failed and damaged our relationships, especially if our failures were exposed to others. Without a greater capacity not only in individuals but in communities to deal with shame well, we will attempt to bypass the process of justice, healing, and restoration by either minimizing the sin of the offender in order to keep them in community; or demonizing those who have sinned because we do not have the skills, capacities, and wisdom to help them grow. When it is no longer considered shameful to not know how to do things yet or to have gaps in our maturity, we are free to receive the mercy and love needed to grow in our areas of weakness without needing to pretend to ourselves or others that we are more mature than we actually are.
Much of the harm people experience in the church is not simply due to the mistakes of individuals, but to the sinful patterns that emerge as we manage our own shame and that of others by pretending to be more healthy and mature than we actually are. ACNA leaders like Scot and Kristen McKnight and Laura Barringer offer us much wisdom on what it looks like when church communities are characterized by goodness and health. We invite you in the coming months to join us in reading A Church Called Tov: Forming a Goodness Culture That Resists Abuses of Power and Promotes Healing by Scot McKnight and Laura Barringer. In reading this book together, we hope that we will form a common language through which we can see the world and name it rightly as we walk with Jesus into the Kingdom of God brought to earth when he vanquished our sin with all of its shame on the cross.
We need the wisdom of ministries both inside and outside ACNA that can equip us to address our own gaps in maturity and to disciple others into Christlikeness. We hope that as we first seek to address our own gaps in maturity, we will become communities that are continually growing in practical wisdom. Instead of our churches primarily serving those who are already fairly comfortable and healthy by the standards of the world, we hope that we will become communities in which the most broken and vulnerable will be able to come for safety and the resources to heal as they encounter Jesus through his church. Every church has a range of people that they are currently competent to help, and we hope that our churches will be places where that range is always growing as we become more excited about Jesus’s ability to transform even the most broken among us.
Any person that is trying to help wounded people who are often neglected or abandoned by the church and the world is going to discover that despite their best intentions and efforts, we have wounded the very people we were trying to help. When you try to help people that no one else is trying to help, you make mistakes that no one else in your community is making. These mistakes can be devastating, especially when we lack the capacities to repair the relationship so that trust can be rebuilt. Any time there is a discrepancy in power, the mistakes of the more powerful person have more potential to cause harm. This is intensified when the person causing harm, however unintentionally, represents the name of Jesus and the authority of His church. For many relationships to be repaired, we need access to third parties mutually trusted by all involved in the damaged relationship or relationships and who are more mature in their capacities to repair the damage that has occurred. This is necessary to tolerate the shame, anxiety, hurt, and feelings of betrayal that occur when we harm each other. In the presence of people who are able to mediate reconciliation, those who we have harmed no longer assume the burden of managing our shame and pain at having harmed them by inflating how much healing has actually occurred so we no longer feel badly and are able to connect with them again. Most of us have relationships that we need help repairing. It will take time to build this wisdom and capacity in our communities so that even relationships that have been profoundly damaged can be restored.
For pastors, deacons, and other leaders who are only too aware of their own mistakes and fear public shame, we assure you that we are excited to learn from wise people who can help us repair the damage we have done to those who we were trying to help. Very few people in ministry have never spiritually abused someone in some way, particularly in overwhelming and challenging situations in which our skills and energy were exhausted and we became fearful, resentful, controlling, or unavailable in an effort to protect ourselves or try to get someone else to take the process of growth seriously. Most people who spiritually abuse others are trying to help them and do not have malicious intent, but they still cause harm that is difficult to repair because of imbalances of power between spiritual leaders and those they are called to serve. Most of these mistakes are not disqualifying for ministry, but they trouble us when we realize we have caused harm and we don’t always know what to do to make things right. We hope to introduce you to wise guides that help us all become spiritual leaders who can afford to tell the truth about the harm we have done because we have well-founded confidence that Jesus can help us become people who can repent, repair, and receive restoration. We also hope to have conversations about spiritual abuse and about structures in which leaders can be held accountable by those with less power instead of dismissing or deflecting concerns (assuming those who have been wounded feel safe voicing concerns in the first place!).
We invite those of you who have grown up in the church your entire life and struggle to pray and read scripture. For many of us, this has been a source of shame and we have thought we were bad Christians that just didn’t love God enough to pray or read scripture. For many more, prayer and scripture reading have been associated with trauma and abuse and we are no longer able to engage in these practices without hearing the voices of our abusers or the anxiety that we may encounter a presence like theirs if we open ourselves up to connect with Jesus. For most of us, we were told to do these things but never taught how in any substantial way. We thought we should just know how to do them if we trusted God and that there was something wrong with us. We may have been told to “read the Bible and pray more” as the solution to every challenge, walking away from the people who were trying to help us feeling only more ashamed and discouraged than when we risked reaching for them for help. There are many ways to pray, including ways that help people with deep religious trauma that has hindered their capacity to form a safe and lifegiving connection to God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We invite you to release yourself from the shame of not knowing how to do things you were never taught to do. We invite you to learn with us without condemnation how to gradually build practices in prayer and scripture reading that are appropriate for each of our starting points.
We invite you to stop trying to control your behavior through shame out of fear of what you will do if you stop hating yourself. Many of us have, without realizing it, used self-hatred and shame as a means of trying to control the sin that controls us. We thought that Jesus talked to us that way, so we didn’t notice that it wasn’t actually the real Jesus speaking. The true Jesus brings freedom from compulsive behavior, and that freedom does not come through the false gospel of distorted shame. That freedom comes through receiving more of God’s love, who has more compassion on us than we can imagine and more power to help us than we have dared to hope for most of our lives.
Many of you have lost hope that you can ever experience freedom from your places of deep pain and shame. Many of you have been stuck for so long in the same patterns that you have given up hoping for more in this life. Deep change will not happen at once, but the shame at having failed gets quickly forgotten when we get a taste of the freedom that God has for us and get “unstuck” for the first time from sinful patterns or deficits that have held us captive for years. For many of you, it has become too costly to hope because risking hope means more disappointment. Jesus has mercy on those whose faith and hope are hanging by a thread or have been extinguished entirely because they have not experienced the freedom and transformation promised in scripture. Jesus knows how to reach each one of us in our particular starting places and knows how to unlock every barrier of self-protection that has blocked us from connecting with him, even though we built those barriers to protect us from more pain.
We invite you to borrow our hope that the Jesus that the ACNA worships is better than we have imagined. We invite you to ask him to build hope in you that he knows how to get you unstuck and wants to show you that he sees you and loves you at your current starting point. We invite you to ask Jesus to grow your range of trust in him just a little in the coming weeks by showing up in your life in ways that make you feel seen by God by moving in ways that do not involve you “trying harder to mean it more,” but encountering a living God who actively does things in the world outside of our heads.
Jesus knows how to help. Right now, Jesus is telling the ACNA that she is not well. If we can acknowledge the truth of what He is saying, we can become people who can receive his healing power. He does not wish to heal the wound of his daughter lightly (Jer 8.11). He wishes to bring her resurrection.