You can tell the whole truth about what a racially compromised church did to you, at a pace you can bear, and still keep hold of Jesus. The real risk lies elsewhere: letting the people who hurt you go on deciding who Jesus is. This study helps with two slow tasks. You will look at your own wound without minimizing it, and you will notice how that wound has been shaping the way you read God and Scripture.
You can work through it alone with a notebook or with a small group you trust. Nothing here requires you to tell anyone your story. Every prompt that asks for disclosure is an invitation you are free to decline. If a section is too much today, skip it and come back.
A word about safety first
Some church hurt is disappointment. Some of it is abuse. If what happened to you involved abuse, or if you are still in danger, your safety comes before any study. Tell a trusted person. In the US, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233. If your pain has turned toward thoughts of ending your life, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Seeing a counselor alongside this work is a sign of care for yourself. God works through trained people, and looking after your mind is part of stewarding the life he gave you.
Start with what you notice
Before reading anyone else’s argument, take a few minutes with a blank page. Write down one verse, sermon line or church phrase that now makes you brace when you hear it. Next to it, write what you were taught it meant, and who taught you. Then write one word for what you feel when you read it now.
Leave that page open. You will come back to it twice. For now, simply notice that your reading of the Bible has a history. Particular people, in particular rooms, handed you certain meanings, and some of those meanings came bundled with harm.
Scripture that makes room for pain
Read these three passages slowly, out loud if you can.
Psalm 62:8 says, “Trust in him at all times; ye people, pour out your heart before him: God is a refuge for us. Selah.” This is a song for worship, and it pairs two acts we often separate. Trusting God and pouring out the heart happen together. The worshiper comes with feelings still untidy.
Psalm 13:1 is sharper: “How long wilt thou forget me, O LORD? for ever? how long wilt thou hide thy face from me?” This lament sits inside the Bible’s own prayer book. Someone accused God of forgetting him, and that prayer was kept and sung. Lament is one of the ways faith talks.
Then read Matthew 23. Jesus is speaking to the crowds and his disciples about the religious leaders of his day. In verses 2-3 he tells his hearers to heed what those leaders teach from Moses while refusing to copy their conduct, because they do not practice what they say. Verse 4 names the harm: “For they bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men’s shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with one of their fingers.” The passage describes a specific first-century conflict, so it should not become a slogan about any church today. Still, watch what Jesus does. He names religious harm in public, and he separates God’s word from the conduct of the people who claimed to carry it.
For quiet observation: In each passage, who is speaking, and to whom? Which line gives you the most room to be honest? Which line is hard to read right now? You do not have to explain why.
Grace that can survive the facts
Many people carrying racial harm from a church have been told to forgive, stay quiet and protect the church’s witness. Lisa Fields raised this in her conversation with Dr. Christina Edmondson and Ekemini Uwan. She noticed how quickly church people dismiss criticism, and she put the issue simply: “in order to repair something, you have to realize that it’s actually broken.”
Edmondson, the other host of the Truth’s Table podcast, who comes from psychology and higher education, answered with a sentence worth reading twice: “there is enough grace to tell the truth. And I think that when we avoid truth, it is an indictment on our belief about grace.” Her reasoning runs through hope. Christians know where the story ends, so they can be honest about the middle of it. Of her own truth-telling about the church, she says, “it’s not gonna shatter what God has promised for us.”
On her account, the people urging silence have the logic backward. Their quiet treats grace as fragile, as though God’s promises might break under a true sentence. You can say what happened, and the promises will hold.
Who is holding the pen when you read?
Edmondson uses the term trauma hermeneutics for the way real harm affects interpretation. She says “trauma shifts the way that we see the world,” and she adds that this “doesn’t mean that we’re somehow untrustworthy.” Some things really are traumatizing, and hurt people deserve to be believed.
Her warning concerns what happens when the shift goes unnoticed: “then it will be fear that does our theological interpretation.” Fear, as she describes it, reaches for black-and-white thinking and treats every passage as a danger sign. She calls the result “a fear-based interpretation when we’re called to a love-based interpretation of Christianity.”
That phrase connects to 1 John 4:18: “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love.” John is writing to believers about confidence before God, the assurance that grows from God’s love toward them (4:16-17). He describes the direction God’s love moves over time. A frightened reader can take that as a promise and leave the demand aside.
Here is the uncomfortable part. A church that used Scripture to belittle you may have trained you to read defensively. If you now scan every passage for the next threat, the people who hurt you are still quietly helping you interpret the text.
The practice: sorting your readings
Return to the page you started at the beginning. This practice takes most of a week, a little each day. Stop whenever you need to.
- Read it twice. Look up the verse you wrote down, or a passage related to the phrase. On the first read, write the meaning you assume and the feeling it brings. On the second, write only what the text says: who is speaking, to whom, what kind of writing it is, and what comes just before and after.
- Make three columns. In the first, list what the people who taught you did. In the second, list what they said or implied God wanted. In the third, list what the passage and the Gospels show about how God and Jesus treat people. Mark every place where the second column and the third part ways.
- Sort what you find. Some differences will show your wound supplying a meaning the passage never states. Others will show the passage saying something hard that you still need to wrestle with. Label each one. Both discoveries are worth having, and only the second calls for further study.
- Pray the sorting. Bring the page to God with Psalm 139:23-24: “Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.” This prayer asks God to examine your reading. Ask him to show you where fear has held the pen, and where your anger is simply accurate.
Repeat the exercise with a second passage later in the week if you have the strength. Edmondson describes the kind of listener worth trusting as someone able to say, “I understand why you are hurting and I hurt too.” If you decide to talk through your columns with anyone, choose that kind of person.
Keeping Jesus while you step away
The opposite pull says the whole faith is poisoned, so leave all of it. Ekemini Uwan, a public theologian and co-host of the Truth’s Table podcast, does not tell wounded people they must stay in the spaces that harmed them. She says plainly that she is not denying anyone needs time away from those churches. Her plea is narrower: “don’t throw away Jesus. Don’t let them take Jesus away from you.”
She explains her concern this way. When someone throws out the whole faith because one experience was all they knew, they give credence to “the false notion that white Christians have the corner market on Christianity.” Her argument is about definitions. If racist Christians’ version counts as the whole of the faith, then leaving it accepts their claim to own it.
Some readers will push back, and fairly. People leave for reasons of conscience, because they examined the faith and could not believe it. Others leave to survive, because staying near anything religious kept reopening the wound. Uwan’s argument does not say these people are dishonest or weak. It speaks to one specific line of reasoning: the move from “these Christians harmed me” to “Jesus is false.” The church’s record is real evidence about the church. It cannot by itself settle who Jesus is. That question still deserves its own honest hearing, on its own ground, whenever you are ready to give it one.
Paul offers a picture that fits. In 2 Corinthians 4:7 he writes, “But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us.” Paul is defending his own fragile, criticized ministry, and the treasure in context is the light of the gospel of Christ (4:6). Edmondson says something close to this: “Christ alone ensures the credibility and the perseverance of the church.” Your anger at the vessel can be fully justified, and the treasure stays a separate question.
The question underneath the leaving
Uwan connects people falling away to Jesus’ parable of the sower, where the cares of this world choke the word (Mark 4:19). She then asks where those cares press hardest: “isn’t it on life and isn’t it on love? And isn’t it on liberation that our people are falling away?” She fills in each word. Life means doubting your worth or your beauty in a racist world. Love means a failed or abusive marriage, or years of waiting faithfully with no answer. Liberation means wondering whether Black lives matter to God when injustice keeps arriving on video.
Her list shifts the problem. Faith erodes on the ordinary ground of daily wounds, and all three come down to one question she names directly: does God care? Her own reply is short: “And my answer is yes.” A church that harmed you gave you its answer to that question through its conduct. This study asks you to take the question to God himself, through texts like Psalm 13, and let his answer stand apart from theirs. Uwan points wounded Black Christians toward the Black church, which she admits is imperfect, saying “we’re all in process.”
Questions for conversation
If you lead a group, read this first. Some people in the room are not asking about ideas. They are deciding whether to stay. Do not press anyone to share a story, and never steer someone toward returning to a church that harmed them. If someone describes abuse, pause the discussion gently and help them toward safety and real help. Protect honest space and let silence happen. A person who passes on every question is still participating.
- Edmondson says avoiding truth reveals a weak belief about grace. Where have you seen silence about racial harm presented as faithfulness, and what did it cost the people involved?
- Psalm 13 accuses God of forgetting. What would change in a church if lament like this were treated as normal prayer?
- In your three columns, what did you notice about the gap between your first reading and what the passage actually said? Share only what you are comfortable sharing.
- What would a love-based reading of a hard passage still have to take seriously?
- Uwan argues that leaving Jesus because of racist Christians grants their claim on the faith. Where does that argument persuade you, and where does it fall short for people who left for conscience or survival?
- Of life, love and liberation, which carries the most weight for you or the people you love, and what would it mean to bring that question to God directly?
- What helps you tell time away that heals from time away that hardens into leaving Jesus himself?
What to carry from here
Look once more at your first page and your three columns. The harm you wrote down is still true. So is whatever you found about how Jesus treats people. Both can sit on the same page for a while, and honest faith often lives there.
Edmondson’s hope is modest and steady: “The church is not done with us, and God is not done with the church.” It promises no particular church will change on your timeline. It says God has stayed with both of you.