Why Would I Want Anything to do With the Church When I've Been Hurt by It?

The sermon text for today is 1 Peter chapter 5 verses 1 through 7.

1 Peter 5:1–7

You can find this passage in the Blue Pew Bible on page 1850.

Listen as I read God's word.

To the elders among you, I appeal as a fellow elder and a witness of Christ's sufferings, who also will share in the glory to be revealed.

Be shepherds of God's flock that is under your care, watching over them, not because you must, but because you are willing, as God wants you to be, not pursuing dishonest gain, but eager to serve, not lording it over those entrusted to you, but being examples to the flock.

And when the chief shepherd appears, you will receive the crown of glory that will never fade away.

In the same way, you who are younger, submit yourselves to your elders.

All of you clothe yourselves with humility toward one another, because God opposes the proud, but shows favor to the humble.

Humble yourselves, therefore, under God's mighty hand, that he may lift you up in due time.

Cast all your anxiety on him, because he cares for you.

Here ends the reading.

If you've already forgotten, my name is John.

I serve as the lead pastor here at Elmwood.

If you are newer to Elmwood, whether today is your very first Sunday or whether you are new-ish, new adjacent to Elmwood, uh I want to one more time invite you to something that's coming up next Sunday, and that is called the Welcome Party.

Uh, this is for those of you who are newer to Elmwood, it's a chance to just meet other people who are newer to Elmwood.

It's a chance to hang out with some of our uh staff members and leadership uh here at the church, and a chance for you uh to learn about next steps and ways to get connected with uh what's happening here at Elmwood.

Uh it's gonna be right after the service, right back in that room for about 20 minutes.

It's a short thing, it's not a full meal, but there's gonna be cupcakes and there's gonna be snacks, and it's just uh a really fun time to connect with others who are newer to Elmwood.

Uh if you would be so kind as to RSVP for that, we'd be super grateful so that we can know how much stuff to prepare for that and how much to bring.

You can do that through the uh digital bulletin or um yeah, do it through the digital bulletin.

That's the only way to do it, actually.

So do it that way.

Uh we'd love to have you uh join us for that if you're newer to Elmwood.

As we come to uh these verses today, let me ask you to join me in a word of prayer.

God, we thank you for being our good shepherd.

We thank you, God, for the ways that you love us and care for us and provide for us and protect us.

We thank you for revealing your heart to us in the person of Jesus and in the cross.

And God, we ask that as we uh think about a difficult subject this morning, that you would enable us to uh have a clearer picture of your grace and your love for us through Jesus.

Be with us during this time.

We ask in a unique and special way.

Transform us, we ask so that we leave here different people than when we came.

Help us to see Jesus, our good shepherd, and to love and trust him alone.

We ask this in his name.

Amen.

About a month ago, there was an FBI raid on a church facility in Florida, along with the raid of a very, very large mansion that was owned by that church's pastor.

What had happened was someone called in at nighttime when it was dark outside, inside the building was lit up, so you could see inside, and they called to report that it looked like there were people that were being held against their will inside of this church building.

And what investigators found is that the people who were working in their call center, who were collecting financial donations over the phone on behalf of the church, were in fact being held against their will, and some of those people were not allowed to sleep until they met their quota of donations for that day.

It's a sickening thing to think about, and as it turns out, the Kingdom of God Global Church really had nothing whatsoever to do with the kingdom of God.

Unfortunately, you don't have to look long or hard to find examples of abuse in the church.

Find examples of church hurt.

Now, of course, it's not always on that scale, okay?

Thank the Lord.

Uh it's not always on that scale, but stories come out all the time about pastors or ministry leaders who are involved in sexual abuse, or who are caught cheating on their spouse, or who lose their ministry because of abusive or domineering leadership.

We see examples all the time of widespread scandal in churches or denominations.

We see examples of financial corruption.

We see examples of church leaders and leadership teams that uh that protect pastors or leaders who do really bad things because if it came out in the open that this pastor was doing this, it would damage the church.

And so to protect the church and the organization, they overlook certain sins in the life of the pastor.

Pastors in churches like this leave a wake of wounded people behind them.

And the worst part of it is that oftentimes these things are never discovered in the first place.

These things are never brought out into the light, and from a human perspective, these people are never held accountable for what they have done.

Some of us here today bear the scars of church hurt.

Some of us here today have been deeply hurt and deeply wounded by the church.

Some here today have been disillusioned by the church and left confused.

Some of us have experienced emotional abuse in our church history.

Some of us have experienced spiritual abuse and manipulation.

Some of us have been sexually abused by a pastor or a leader or someone who is a person of standing in a church.

And of course, the pain of those experiences runs so deep because these are people that we thought we could trust.

The church is a messy place.

The church can be sometimes a downright ugly place.

So why would I want anything to do with the church when it's a source of so much hurt and disillusionment?

We are in a series of messages called Asking for a Friend.

And what we're doing over the course of these weeks this fall is we are exploring these questions that you have submitted to us.

Questions that either you have or people in your sphere of influence have about God or faith or the Bible.

And today we are exploring the subject of church hurt.

To organize our time together today, I want to suggest three things that we must do when we see or experience church hurt.

Three things that we must do when we see or experience church hurt.

And spoiler alert, we will.

Number one, we must grieve deeply, but never be surprised.

We must grieve deeply, but never be surprised.

There's a really good podcast series that was put out by Christianity Today and hosted by Mike Cospert, and the name of the podcast is The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill.

And what this series of podcasts does is takes you through the uh the birth and the uh very rapid growth of a church in the city of Seattle that started there, turned into a multi-site megachurch, both in Seattle and in other places around the country, this church called Mars Hill.

And uh it tells not only about the birth and the growth of it, but also uh the implosion of it and how the wheels fell off and the whole thing fell apart and the whole thing dissolved into these autonomous churches.

And as you listen to this, you see that the main reason why the whole thing fell apart was because of the character of the lead pastor.

The reason it fell apart was because of the verbal, emotional, and spiritual abuse of the lead pastor of that church.

And throughout the series, as you listen to Mike Cosper interview these different people who were in the leadership circles of the guy who was the lead pastor there, who got an ability to see into his life in a way that other people didn't from a distance.

One of the things that you pick up on is that there was a point in each of these leaders' lives where they stopped being grieved by what they saw.

There was a point where, you know, at first they were troubled by things that they saw or things that this person said, and they kind of had this like, whoa, that seems weird for a pastor to do that or for a pastor to say that.

And so there was this initial moment of like, whoa, that that that's surprising, and I'm troubled by this.

But they all basically tell the same story of how uh soon those feelings of unease were sort of glossed over because, well, just look at the fruit.

I mean, sure, this guy is hot-tempered, and sure he's egotistical, and sure if you cross him, he will bury you.

And he's maniacal and all these different things.

But man, look at how many people are being baptized.

Look at how the church is growing.

Look at how many thousands of people are coming to our church, look at how many new campuses we have.

And at some point, those leaders stopped being appropriately grieved by the lack of Christ-like character that they saw inside of their lead pastor.

And they justified it because, well, there's all this evidence of fruit.

Every time we see a church or a pastor or a leader or another person in the church who lives in a way that would produce church hurt, we must be grieved by it.

It must pain us internally to see when people live that way.

We must guard ourselves against becoming desensitized, like so many of those leaders were.

We must guard ourselves against becoming desensitized to the lack of character that we see that would lead to church hurt.

So we have to.

We must grieve, and at the very same time, we must never be surprised.

Now, I want to be really careful about what I'm not saying here, okay?

I'm not saying that we should lower our standards.

I'm not saying that we should expect less of the church.

I'm not saying that if you've been hurt by the church, well, it's maybe not as bad as you think it was.

I'm not saying that it's okay to overlook the sins and the faults that are in the lives of those who are pastors and leaders in the church.

I'm not saying that.

What I'm saying is that we need to remember what the church is in the first place.

The church is a collection of people who have admitted that they are so deeply and so thoroughly corrupted that only an act of God can save them.

That's what the church is.

It's a whole bunch of people who recognize the depth of their brokenness and recognize the depth of their sin and the idolatry that lives inside of them.

It's a group of people who have been deeply formed by years and sometimes decades of doing what is right in their own eyes and living how they want to live instead of following God's instruction.

And the only requirement for being a part of this thing called the church is you recognize just how messed up you actually are.

That's the only requirement, is you recognize your brokenness and you come to Jesus in faith.

And so if you take all those people with all their sin and all their sharp edges and all their life experiences that have formed them into the people they are, and all their personal woundings and the scars that they carry, and you put all those people in close proximity in a church, there's a 100% chance that people are going to get wounded.

There's a 100% chance that you at some point are going to be wounded and hurt by someone in the church.

And so we have to grieve deeply when we see anything, any kind of behavior, any kind of character that would ever lead towards something like church hurt.

And we must never be surprised when it happens.

So when we see or experience church hurt, we must grieve deeply, but never be surprised.

Secondly, we must look to Jesus.

Now, uh, this this point here is especially for those of you who have been wounded by the church, who carry uh wounding and uh things with you because of your church experience.

When we look to Jesus, what we see is this we see he knows what it's like to be hurt by the religious establishment.

It doesn't take very long at all.

This is very easy to see by doing a simple survey of Jesus' life in ministry, and very quickly you see, it took all of about 17 minutes for him to get into ministry before he had two warring political factions that hated each other, in the Herodians and the Pharisees, who all decided that, well, we hate Jesus just a little bit more than we hate each other.

So they decided to work together and come up with a plan to have Jesus killed.

It was the religious establishment and the religious leaders that accused Jesus of blasphemy, that accused Jesus of violating the Sabbath, that accused Jesus of collaborating with Satan.

It was the religious establishment that questioned his authority, that sent delegations of people to try and trap him in his words and to test him and to question his authority.

It was that religious establishment that falsely accused him and put him on trial when they had pre-decided what they wanted the outcome to be, and they were searching for a crime to fit the punishment that they had in mind?

It was the religious establishment that stirred up the crowd to demand that Jesus be tortured and executed, even though Pilate said, I can find nothing in this guy to warrant the death penalty.

It was the religious leaders who stirred up the crowd to demand his torture and execution.

And as he was executed, he was mocked, he was ridiculed, he was insulted.

The point is that Jesus knows what it's like to be hurt by the religious establishment.

And if you're here today and you carry the scars of church hurt, what I hope you can see is that in Jesus we have someone who knows what it's like to be hurt by the religious establishment and to be hurt by other religious people.

So he knows.

He knows what it's like.

Not only does he know what it's like to be hurt by the religious establishment, he hates church hurt more than we do.

He hates church hurt more than you do, more than I do, and more than all of us combined together.

In other words, he is not indifferent to the ways that we have been genuinely hurt by the church, and he is not indifferent to the ways that we have been hurt by those in positions of spiritual or religious power.

In Ezekiel chapter 34, we read God's word of judgment that he has for his people, specifically the leaders of his people, who he calls the shepherds, those are the ones he appointed to be leaders over the people.

Ezekiel 34 · chapter mention

And they had failed at their task.

And so he speaks this word of judgment against them and says to the leaders, he says, Woe to you, shepherds of Israel, who only take care of yourselves.

Should not shepherds take care of the flock?

You eat the curds, clothe yourself with the wool, and slaughter the choice animals.

But you do not take care of the flock.

You have not strengthened the weak, or healed the sick, or bound up the injured.

You have not brought back the strays or searched for the lost.

You have ruled them harshly and brutally.

He then would go on to say, I am against the shepherds, and will hold them accountable for my flock.

It's a scary thing to hear from God, isn't it?

To hear God say, I am against you, is because they did not take care of the flock.

They did not strengthen the weak, they did not take care of those who were vulnerable, they did not search for those who were lost or wandering and bring them back.

They ruled them harshly and brutally.

Their heart for the people did not reflect God's heart for the people.

And as a result of this, when God sees the ways that those in his flock, when he sees the way that his sheep have been hurt by those in positions of leadership, his response is to say to them, woe to you.

Woe to you.

I am against the shepherds.

I will hold them accountable.

What this shows us is that God is not indifferent towards his people who have been hurt by the church.

Those in positions of spiritual leadership.

He is not indifferent towards those who hurt his people.

If you're here today and you have been wounded by the church, I want to encourage you to remember that the failure of the church is not the failure of God.

The failure of the church to embody everything that God has called the church to be is not the failure of God.

Those failures by the religious establishment and from the church and from religious people who operate in God's name do not reflect fully and truly his nature and his character and his heart.

And we know this because in Ezekiel 34, he not only gives this word of judgment against those who are taking advantage of his sheep and leading them poorly.

We also see then that God says, okay, I'm going to come and shepherd you myself.

I'm going to remove these shepherds, I'm going to come and be your shepherd.

I'm going to care for you.

I'm going to love you.

I'm going to protect you.

I'm going to provide for you.

I'm going to be for you what all of those so called shepherds were supposed to be and have failed to be.

So God says, I'm going to come and be.

Your shepherd.

And then if you fast forward the tape from where we are in Ezekiel, go all the way forward to the life and ministry of Jesus, you see Jesus, who's God Himself in human flesh in John chapter 10 says, I am the good shepherd.

John 10 · chapter mention

And what does the good shepherd do?

The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.

And so to see the heart and the nature and the character of God, we don't look at the church, we look at the cross.

Because the church so often is a poor reflection of the nature and the heart of God for his people.

And as we look at the cross, what we see is the heart of God, the love of God for us, that he would pursue us, that he would give himself for us, that he would willingly lay down his life so that we could live.

In Jesus, we see the nature and the character of God.

The failure of the church is not the failure of God.

Before we move on, let me mention one more thing here.

Jesus knows what it's like to be hurt by the religious establishment, and he hates church hurt more than we do.

And still, he established the church as his plan A.

Isn't that wild?

He knows exactly what it's like, and he knows just how much hurt can be in and through the local church, and still the church is his plan A.

So the right response to church hurt is not to abandon the church, because Jesus loves the church.

The response to church hurt is to look to Jesus, it's cling to Jesus, and find a better church.

Find a church that more accurately reflects the heart of God for his people.

When we see and experience church hurt, we must grieve deeply but never be surprised.

We must look to Jesus, and lastly, we must fight to be the church as Jesus envisioned it.

This letter of 1 Peter, which you heard a portion of this read earlier, is written by a man named Peter who spent a lot of time with Jesus, who is the Good Shepherd.

And based on what he heard from Jesus himself, he gave these instructions to the churches that are scattered throughout the Roman Empire.

Now these are instructions that are given to the entire church community, but he spends a lot of time at the beginning of what in our Bibles is chapter 5, speaking specifically to the elders and to the leaders of the church.

Isaiah 5 · chapter mention

He says in verse 2, he says, Be shepherds of God's flock that is under your care, watching over them, not because you must, but because you are willing, as God wants you to be, not pursuing dishonest gain, but eager to serve, not lording it over those entrusted to you, but being examples to the flock.

And when the chief shepherd appears, you will receive the crown of glory that will never fade away.

What he tells these elders and leaders in this church to do is the exact opposite of what we see the leaders doing in Ezekiel chapter 34.

Ezekiel 34 · chapter mention

He says, serve the flock with a willing heart.

Not under compulsion, not under guilt.

Serve them with a willing heart because you love them.

Live with an eagerness to serve.

Not to be served, not to be a consumer, but to serve and to love the flock.

Live as an example for others to follow.

With your life, set a pattern for what it looks like to follow Jesus.

He says, remember that the flock doesn't belong to you in the first place.

He says, Jesus is the chief shepherd.

You may be under-shepherds, but the flock doesn't belong to you, elders, pastors.

It's not your church.

It's not your people, it's not your flock, it's God's flock.

He has given you some delegated authority, to be sure.

And that's a stewardship for you to exercise.

You don't own the flock.

It doesn't belong to you, it belongs to him.

And so he says, love the flock like the good shepherd loves the flock.

Love the flock like the good shepherd loves the flock.

We do this imperfectly, of course, but this is the heart of our elder team.

This is the heart of those who get to serve as elders in our church community.

We love you and we want to care for you and we want to serve you and protect you and feed you.

Of course, we do this imperfectly, but this is the heart that our elder team has for you, this flock here in this place.

The application he gives here is broader than just to the elders.

This is a whole church thing.

He says, be a church that recognizes elders and leaders who share God's love for the flock.

He goes on to say, submit yourself to godly leaders and godly elders who follow Jesus.

He says, be a church characterized by humility towards one another in everything.

Be a church characterized by humility towards God as you cast all of your cares on him.

He goes on to say, be spiritually alert, recognizing that you have an enemy who prowls around like a wild animal seeking to destroy and kill you.

Be spiritually alert, resist the evil one, stand firm in your faith.

These are all the instructions he gives to form and to shape this church community, and not just those communities in the first century world, but shape our church and our community today.

And the point is that the more our church looks like what Peter says here in these verses, the less likely it will be that Elmud is a place that produces church hurt.

The more we embody what Peter describes here, the less likely it will be that Elmud is a place that produces church hurt.

And because these instructions are given to the church community, what that means is that you have a specific role to play in us being that kind of church.

What that means is that your daily pursuit of Jesus, your walking in step with the Spirit of God day in and day out, your cultivating a life of humility before God in prayer and in confession, your involvement in genuine relationships with other people in our church community, all of these ordinary things are what guard against Elmwood being a place that people need to heal from.

Obviously, we're not going to do this perfectly.

But we will continue to fight to be the church as Jesus envisioned it, so that through us others might get to see and experience a taste of the love and shepherding heart of God.

So when we see and experience church hurt, we must grieve deeply, but never be surprised.

We must look to Jesus, and we must fight to be the church as Jesus envisioned it.

Each week here at Elmwood, we come to the communion table.

And as we come to the table, I want to invite you to take just a few moments for silence and confession, and then we will come and celebrate Christ together.