In teaching the parable of the lost sheep in Luke 15, Jesus says, “there’s more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety nine who don’t believe they need to.”
I think heaven feels similarly when one image bearer discerns the reality of hidden harm in their community—and honors the beacon of conscience by leaving.
Here’s my own rendering of a recent refugee’s experience:
Something felt wrong. I kept being told I could trust the leaders and their direction. But I couldn’t shake it.
I watched this church emerge and evolve. I was there from the inception. In the beginning it felt like a community. Fourteen years later, it felt like a deceptive enterprise.
Many of my friends were stakeholders.
Every time I raised a concern, a stakeholder piped up to reassure me.
“This is just the next phase of the mission; it takes sacrifice from all of us.”
“I feel like I have whiplash,” I confessed. “The pastors want us to plow forward. They want to raise more money. I’m still trying to process the people who left.”
The stakeholders interjected again with confidence: “Some people were not willing to stay onboard. They couldn’t submit to leadership. They gave up.”
I tried to stick it out. I cared about my friends. But in the end, the alarms going off inside me only grew louder. It felt like I had slowly watched the integrity of this place dissolve for a decade. Despite my community of friends and longstanding commitment to the church, I had never felt more lonely.
Something in me felt tethered to the staff, individuals, and families who had quietly vanished in the last few years. The more I thought about it, the more I traced a common thread in their absence. These were all people who felt like rocks and pillars of the community. They were kind, strong in character, and tender to pain. They had cared for me so well.
As I reflect on the hole left in the congregation by their exits, and the reasons given by church leadership, I couldn’t square the two. When the church’s answers left me unsettled, I found myself asking different questions.
In the past I was always prompted to ask, “what do I owe to this church?” or, “how can I show up to serve?” But now I wondered, “what might I owe to the ones who are gone?”
I let myself feel the gravity of new questions. And it wasn’t long after that I left.
As it turns out, this is the testimony of someone who recently left a faith community we were part of. We were one of the families who left abruptly and quietly a few years prior. It’s been years, but soon we’ll have the opportunity to reconnect with this person because they recently reached out to us. I can already taste the improbable sweetness of the reunion.
In the acclaimed HBO series ‘Chernobyl’, the character of inorganic chemist Valery Legasov offers a prophetic rebuke to his own Soviet authorities and their cover-up strategy of a nuclear disaster. Regarding his cooperation with deception, he dissents because his integrity as a scientist required his fidelity to the facts. In a moment of stunning public courage, he exposes the coordinated deception knowing what it would cost him. Before being taken custody and sequestered away, Legasov says this:
“Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid.”
For the discerning, the truth is like a homing beacon. Despite attempts to subdue it, a voice inside continues to hound. It doesn’t relent. It tethers you to people, sometimes defying an infantry of reassuring stakeholders.
When one image bearer heeds their own discernment in pursuit of justice, it feels like the resuscitation of hope for those who’ve been grieving in exile.
Other News…
I had the honor of publishing my first print essay with Ekstasis Magazine. I wrote about a summer of survival and sorrow with dear friends a few years ago.
There are so many other beautiful essays and poems in this issue. I hope you’ll consider purchasing a copy or gifting a friend!
I am sitting here absolutely stunned.
I recently inadvertently shared my experience with a friend telling him my story of harm with a local counselor.
Unknowingly, he was also seeing this counselor and several other people in my community learned the truth and are choosing to stay or go.
People have come to me saying thank you because they can now be safer. It’s been humbling and absolutely devastating.
Devastating because of the other stories like mine that I’m hearing. This really touched me. Thank you Ryan.
My best friend shared this post with me earlier this week. I’ve been reading it every day, sometimes multiple times, ever since. My wife and I are the “recent refugee”. We had to re-read it multiple times to make sure you somehow didn’t get our story from us through some crazy means. We just walked away “officially” from our church of 13+ years back in July and our story reads exactly as you wrote it. We’ve always loved “the one’s” and it eventually lead us to becoming one of them. Thank you so much for writing this. As we begin to try to move on and heal, it helps so much to hear words like this to remind us that we aren’t crazy but we are, in fact, discerning rightly.