When church hurts, the hardest part is often knowing what the hurt means. Is this place doing something wrong, or did it press on something that was already sore? Dr. Monique Gadson, a clinical mental health counselor who has spent about 16 years on a church staff doing most of its counseling, says both happen and they are not the same. A toxic church harms people through what it teaches and how it uses power. A triggering church touches an old injury it did not cause. The clearest way to tell them apart is to watch what happens when the hurt is named.
The feeling alone can’t settle the question. Pain from a fresh wound and pain from an old one can arrive with the same force. So the answer has to come from somewhere other than how strongly you feel it. It has to come from what the church actually does, and from an honest look at what you brought in with you.
What does it mean for a church to be toxic?
Gadson starts with a definition. She uses the word toxic for something harsh, malicious and harmful, something that works like poison. A poison is serious because, as she puts it, “it can be capable of causing serious debilitation or even death.” She means this in a spiritual and emotional sense, but the weight is intended. A toxic church is not one that annoys you. It is one that damages people.
Asked what can make a church that way, Gadson gives a sobering answer: “I say almost anything can.” Then she gets specific, and the first thing she names is not a scandal. It is a set of ideas.
The clearest one comes from her own life. She grew up as a pastor’s kid, in church all her life, and she absorbed a teaching about prayer that nearly broke her faith. “I can remember being told that if things did not happen, as I pray for them to happen, that it was a sign that I did not have the faith.” She took it seriously. If a mustard seed of faith was enough, and her prayers still went unanswered, then something must be wrong with her. She describes comparing herself to other believers who seemed to have more faith and more blessing, down to the most painful comparison of all: their child lives, mine doesn’t. People eventually helped her see it as false doctrine, and told her that if she kept thinking that way she would fall away from the faith.
Jesus did speak of faith as small as a grain of mustard seed moving mountains (Matthew 17:20). Read in its setting, the saying answers the disciples’ failure to cast out a demon and points them to God’s power, not to a formula that makes every request come true if the believer squeezes hard enough. Gadson’s point is that a church can take a true verse and build a false promise on it. Name-it-and-claim-it preaching does the same. When the promised thing doesn’t happen, the system has only one place left to put the blame: on the person who prayed.
Lisa Fields offers a starker example from outside the counseling room. She describes a mother, a friend of a friend, who brought her sick son forward for prayer. A popular prophet told her God would raise him up and make him a great man of God. The boy died that same night, and the mother would not go back to church. Lisa calls it an extreme case. It shows what happens when someone claims to speak for God and is wrong about something that matters this much.
Gadson names other toxic philosophies too. Some churches define manhood as total control and womanhood as total submission. When a marriage struggles, the explanation becomes that the wife isn’t submitting, and a woman can end up held in an unhealthy relationship by teaching that sounds biblical. She also points to something quieter. In her church’s risk management work, she screens everyone who works with children and youth. She has seen voices push back and ask whether all of it is necessary. A doubt like that can spread through a room until protecting children starts to look like overreach. That, too, is how a toxic environment forms.
Lisa adds the leadership problem: “just because you’re a good preacher doesn’t mean you’re a good leader.” A gifted preacher can still misuse people, shame them in public or apply rules unevenly. She mentions the familiar double standard: the young woman who gets pregnant and is made to sit down from the choir, while the man involved keeps his place. Lisa is careful to say these failures are not unique to Black churches. They happen in churches of every background.
Then what is a trigger?
Here is the distinction Gadson most wants people to hold. A triggering space is one where something said or done stirs up a painful past experience. In her words, “That does not have to mean that that is a toxic space.”
Her example is a hard one. Over the years she has counseled people who were sexually abused by their own fathers. Some of them ask how they are supposed to pray to a God called Father when the only father they knew was destructive. When a preacher talks about a loving father, that person may feel the old pain come rushing back. Nothing wrong happened in the sermon. The image of God as Father is biblical. And it still hurt.
Gadson explains why with a picture. If a baseball hits you in the eye and your vision blurs, the blur doesn’t mean something is wrong with you as a person. It means you were hurt. “And that is just due to the injury.” An injury can change how you see things for a while. She says this without blame. A distorted view is not a character flaw. It is the honest effect of having been wounded.
She tells a second story about her own knee, injured years ago. For a long time she shielded it whenever anyone came near. Eventually she had to realize that most people weren’t aiming for it: “everybody does not mean to injure you, but if you have been injured, that is going to be your first thought.” That instinct once protected her. Left unexamined, it can read threat into ordinary moments.
Gadson also warns against magnifying one detail into a verdict on a whole community. She mentions people who decide a church must be unsafe for abuse survivors because its leaders don’t use gender-neutral language. Her answer is that those two things are not one and the same. A trigger tells you something true about your history. It doesn’t always tell you something true about the room.
Doesn’t “you’re just triggered” let a bad church off the hook?
This is the most serious objection, and it deserves a straight answer. Churches have dismissed real harm by telling the harmed person the problem is their sensitivity. If the trigger category becomes a way to silence complaints, it turns into one more tool of a toxic system.
Gadson’s own account guards against that misuse. The same counselor who explains triggers spends much of the conversation naming genuine harm: false doctrine, controlling teaching on gender, resistance to child protection, the women in her office whose abuse makes ordinary church moments unbearable. The distinction only works if both categories stay real. Saying a church can trigger you without harming you is not the same as saying it never harms you.
Lisa Fields draws the boundary plainly. Some spaces are clearly toxic, and you have to get out of them. Lisa Fields names abuse, “whether physical, mental, emotional,” and says those are not what this conversation is about. The trigger question applies to the ordinary friction of shared life, not to abuse. If you are being abused, by a spouse or by anyone in a church, leaving is not a failure of faith, and no one should press you to reconcile with the person who hurt you. The National Domestic Violence Hotline is available at 1-800-799-7233.
The failures of church leaders are real and grievous. They are also not the failures of Christ, who never abuses his power. Holding both truths lets a wounded person take the harm seriously without concluding that God was the one who did it.
How can you tell which one you are dealing with?
There is no single rule that sorts every case. But Gadson’s material points to some questions worth asking.
First, is the pain coming from what this church teaches and does, or from what it resembles? A teaching that blames you for unanswered prayer harms you whatever your history. A sermon about a loving father hurts because of what a father did to you somewhere else. The second pain is real, and it deserves care. It just points to a different place where healing needs to happen.
Second, and more telling, what happens when you name the hurt? Gadson describes young women who came to her after surviving sexual abuse. They came to church to heal. Then, during the greeting time, a man would hug one of them and let his hand linger on her lower back, or hold her hand a little too long. She would leave feeling dirty all over again. Gadson’s counsel to leaders was simple and hard at once: tell the congregation that not everyone wants a hug, ask permission or shake hands, and make it clear that anyone using the moment to take advantage will not be tolerated. In a healthy church, Gadson says, the message is that “we at least address it.” Or as she puts it a moment later, “If you bring it to us, we will speak to it.”
She contrasts that with churches that keep painful subjects in a side program, a special month or a single ministry meeting. That approach says, in her words, “yes, we are quote unquote talking about it, but over there.” It leaves shame where it was. Lisa Fields offers her own definition that fits here: church becomes toxic, Lisa Fields says, when it stops being an honest space, “when we are not honest about what’s happening.” A church that can hear hard things and change is behaving in a healthy way, even if the conversation hurts. A church that buries the concern, protects the offender or spiritualizes the problem away is telling you what it is.
Third, turn the same honesty on yourself. Gadson knows what this feels like from the other chair. Trained to do no harm, she still finds that “people can walk outta my office feeling as though I have harmed them.” She compares it to a doctor who pressed on her side when she thought she had appendicitis. The doctor pushed exactly where it hurt, because that was the only way to find out what was wrong. Some pain in a healthy community is the pain of being examined.
One more thing keeps this from becoming too tidy. Gadson notes that “even in the healthiest of systems, there is still going to be some fragmentation that exists.” A church can be sound in its preaching and still have a women’s ministry meeting where you get hurt, or a marriage class where someone tells you everything is your fault. Toxic and triggering are not always two separate buildings. Sometimes both are under one roof, and the answer is to name the specific harm without condemning everything else.
Is any community completely safe?
Lisa put the question bluntly, and Gadson answered it bluntly: no. Every person is flawed, she says, as descendants of the fall, and even people who don’t intend harm will sometimes cause it. No church, marriage or friendship can promise that you will never be triggered or hurt.
That sounds bleak until you see what it protects against. If you believe a perfectly safe church exists, every hurt becomes proof that you haven’t found it yet. Gadson describes people who never learn that healing involves some pain: “they can continue to go from place to place to place seeking that safe place.” They never find it, because it doesn’t exist.
Scripture places healing among people, not apart from them. James writes, “Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed” (James 5:16). In context, James is addressing believers who are sick and suffering, calling them to involve the elders and one another in prayer. Lisa Fields draws an application from it: “Confession to man is where I find healing from sin.” That is her reading of how the verse applies. It fits James’s picture of a community that carries its members’ burdens together.
Gadson adds a caution that keeps this from being naive. Not every setting that invites confession is safe for it. She recalls speaking at a women’s event on domestic violence where survivors shared painful stories, and some listeners responded with jokes about what they would have done. The room didn’t know how to hold the anxiety. Her counsel is to share with care: “I feel like the smaller the community, the better,” ideally among people who have walked a similar road and done their own healing work.
What does healing in community actually require?
Gadson’s clinical term for it is a corrective experience. Someone hurt in an unhealthy relationship heals, over time, partly by being in a healthier one, close enough to compare and see the difference. That can’t happen in isolation. It is why she speaks of taking a walk of faith and reentering community, praying for a healthier one where healing can happen.
She is just as clear that prayer alone is not the whole process. She honors prayer and fasting, and she tells ministers that “there’s a whole lot of emotional work that has to be done beyond the fasting, beyond the praying.” Some wounds need someone trained in trauma, and she asks pastors to send people to that help without embarrassment. Her plea to them is to “be okay with advising your parishioners to do that.” Many church members will only seek counseling once their pastor says it’s all right. Seeking therapy is not a failure of faith. God works through trained counselors and clinicians, and caring for your mind is part of stewarding the life he gave you.
Gadson’s picture of the church here is a body, with pastor, counselor and congregation each doing their part to walk with a hurting person toward redemption. Paul uses the same image when he says that when one member suffers, all the members suffer with it (1 Corinthians 12:26). In a body like that, telling a toxic church from a triggering one is not a test you take alone. The church answers it every time someone names a wound and the people around them decide what to do next.
Quick answers
Can a church really be toxic? Yes. Gadson points to teaching that blames people for unanswered prayer, controlling definitions of manhood and womanhood, and resistance to protecting children. Lisa Fields adds leaders who preach well but handle people badly.
If something at church triggers me, does that mean the church is toxic? Not necessarily. Gadson says a trigger brings back an old injury and can distort how we see things for a while. The pain is real, but the source may be in the past.
What is the best sign of which one I’m dealing with? Watch what happens when you name the hurt. A healthy church addresses it and makes changes. A toxic one hides it, minimizes it or protects the person responsible.
Should I stay if I am being abused? No. Lisa Fields is clear that abuse, whether physical, mental or emotional, is a reason to get out. Talk to a trusted person or call 1-800-799-7233.
Is prayer enough to heal from church hurt? Gadson values prayer and says deep wounds usually need emotional work as well, often with a trained counselor alongside the church.
