Cheap Grace

I grew up in a church where everybody got along, except when they didn’t. The prevailing message was, “Everybody needs grace, so be sure you give plenty of it, and it’s your responsibility to give it until you haven’t got anything left”…and then some. So much cheap grace was exchanged in the currency of warm feelings that true grace was unrecognizable.

But people have limits to what they can take, like it or not. After that there were two options: lash out or shut down. Then the only remedy was to lick your wounds in your toxic, gossipy circles until you were strong enough – or distracted enough – to act like friends again. Bring out the warm fuzzies! It was a nauseating cycle.

I suppose it was a little better than my immediate family, where only certain people were allowed to play the lash-out part and the rest of us were assigned the shut-down part. At least at church you could take turns…

But back to church: there were many kindhearted people – and some that I remember very fondly – but I don’t recall ever seeing any fruit of repentance or true reconciliation. Nothing changed…except to grow worse. Everyone was paralyzed by the fear of hurting someone’s feelings, so no one could stand up for anything unless they were standing up against imaginary outsiders. No one had the stomach to identify evil, let alone what to do about it. It was certainly not a place where I could get help for being abused, either by father or pastor.

Standards for Superman (or Superwoman, Superperson…)

So I grew up and left my family’s church. Eventually I stumbled into a very different one, a little healthier, where the protective boundaries were like a mighty fortress “to keep out the bad”, or so it felt. I really liked that for a while, because they were aware that not everyone means well, and not everyone is going to like you, so you might as well be open about it. I felt safer, protected. The truth is out in here!

Then my PTSD symptoms started to surface, and the leaders in my new-found congregation didn’t know how to differentiate between inability and unwillingness.

Let me correct that: they tended to interpret inability as unwillingness!

Instead of helping me carry the crushing weight of memories, depression, and fear, loving me where I was and mourning with me over the awful situation I found myself in, I got continual questions about why I wasn’t talking to my mom. It was always brought up as if it was the cornerstone of change in my life: “Your mom is in a lot of pain right now. Can you tell me what you have against her? What do you plan to do about this?” I was struggling to keep my job and not quite sure if I still had my sanity, and they were primarily worried about my mom feeling neglected.

I disclosed that the thought of talking to my mom made me simultaneously think about killing myself. This gave them reason to pause. But it didn’t stop them from checking in on the same point as before. You would think they would turn their primary interest to solve the suicidal tendencies, but they continued to focus on what I could do for my mom. They would bring up the oh-so-popular blanket excuse: “No parent is perfect,” which ironically supported my parent’s practice of zero-accountability for them and all-encompassing accountability for me – so much for boundaries!

I learned that a church with high protective walls is a church with high expectations and limited ability to color outside their own lines. When you don’t live up to their expectations, they may readily assume it’s because you’re unwilling, selfish, and foolish. They will pigeon-hole you into the thoughts and motives that they can comprehend. Not even a recent death in the family will deter them from letting you know how you measure against their standards.

In that congregation, I came into contact with a long list of people who were perhaps as broken as I was. Statistically that was inevitable, but most remained very secret – a wise choice in such an environment. In God’s great goodness, I formed a few lifelong friendships while I was there, for which I’m deeply grateful.

So what I thought was protection was actually just more control, and although the stated purpose was to protect its members, it only starved them out. It wasn’t cult-like control, where God’s authority is mixed up with church authority (more on that another time); it was more like a choice between micromanagement and abandonment. If you don’t fit into the golden mold provided, well, you’re on your own; no one can hear your cries. By the time I left, I didn’t lose much more than what I had wished it could be.