Healing from church hurt rarely starts with a breakthrough. More often it starts with one plain sentence about what happened, said out loud, followed later by another. This guide offers a seven-day practice built that way. Each day you name one layer of the wound, give it a voice, and hand it to God before you move to the next. You can do it alone with a notebook, or with two to five people who agree to listen without fixing. The pace is slow on purpose.
The method comes from Dr. Monique Gadson, a licensed professional counselor, speaking with Lisa Fields about church hurt. Gadson described wounds stacked on older wounds and said “the only way that we’re going to start being able to heal and address that is by peeling back one by one.” Then she named what every layer needs first: “And the way that we have to do that is we have to bring voice to it.” This guide turns those two sentences into a week.
Before the first layer
Some church hurt is disappointment, neglect or a betrayal of trust. Some of it is abuse. If what happened to you was abuse, this guide is not enough on its own. Tell a safe person who is outside the situation. If you are being harmed in a relationship, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is available at 1-800-799-7233. Nothing in this week asks you to reconcile with someone who abused you. If at any point you have thoughts of ending your life, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline.
One small task before you begin. On an index card, finish this sentence in your own words: Healing from this would look like… Do not polish it. Put the card away until the end of the week.
A first observation: the wound came from inside
Read Psalm 55:12-14 slowly, twice.
For it was not an enemy that reproached me; then I could have borne it: neither was it he that hated me that did magnify himself against me; then I would have hid myself from him: But it was thou, a man mine equal, my guide, and mine acquaintance. We took sweet counsel together, and walked unto the house of God in company.
This is a psalm, a prayer written as poetry. It describes what David felt and said to God; it does not command you to feel the same way. Still, notice three things in the text before you turn to your own story.
- David says what he could have endured. An open enemy would have been bearable. What makes this wound different is closeness.
- The betrayer was a companion in worship. They “walked unto the house of God in company” (Psalm 55:14). The place of the friendship is part of the injury.
- David does not explain away the betrayal or guess at the other person’s motives. He says what happened, to God.
Scripture contains a prayer about being hurt by someone you worshiped beside, and God received it. You are allowed to begin where David began, with a plain description.
Reading Mark 5 one verse at a time
Now read Mark 5:25-34. Then go back to verse 26 and read it on its own.
Mark says the woman “had suffered many things of many physicians, and had spent all that she had, and was nothing bettered, but rather grew worse” (Mark 5:26). That one sentence holds the suffering itself, the money she spent, the hope she placed in each new physician, and the fact that the people who should have helped left her worse. Her wound came in layers.
Next, watch what Jesus does after she is healed. He asks who touched his clothes (Mark 5:30). His disciples point out that a crowd is pressing on him from every side (Mark 5:31). He does not accept that answer. “And he looked round about to see her that had done this thing” (Mark 5:32). Then the woman, “fearing and trembling, knowing what was done in her, came and fell down before him, and told him all the truth” (Mark 5:33). Only after that does he say, “Daughter, thy faith hath made thee whole; go in peace, and be whole of thy plague” (Mark 5:34).
Gadson points to that stopping. Jesus, she says, “could have kept moving, but he stopped and he acknowledged somebody here in this crowd has touched me.” The woman was not given time for the short version. She told all the truth, and the one who heard it called her daughter.
Gadson also speaks to the person who is hurting. With a crowd of church members around, some of whom made things harder, she describes the woman’s resolve this way: “I just have got to get to Jesus.” She adds, “my focus has to be solely on Jesus and Jesus alone.”
Hold the passage honestly. Mark describes one woman’s healing. He does not promise that your wound will close by Friday. What the story does show is that telling the whole truth to Jesus belonged to what Mark presents as being made whole. That is the model for the practice ahead.
Why layers, and why some of them are hidden
Gadson made a candid remark about her own training. She had to go to counseling herself, because “some of the issues that come to me may trigger things in me that are unresolved or even unknown.” A trained counselor needed a counselor of her own to find layers she could not see. That is one reason Jude 3 Project holds that seeking therapy is not a failure of faith, and that God works through trained counselors and clinicians. A person can carry a layer of pain without knowing it is there until something presses on it.
Lisa Fields made a similar point about the people who walk into churches. Many arrive already carrying family trauma, sexual trauma and the trauma of violence in their neighborhoods, and she said plainly, “And inevitably you’re gonna be triggered.” A wound from a church often lands on top of something older. Part of this week is noticing which layer belongs to which story.
One more distinction keeps the practice honest. Gadson used her own body as an illustration. Her doctor found arthritis in her right knee. That does not make her whole body arthritic, and the health of the rest of her body does not mean the knee is fine. “It’s not an either or,” she said. You can say a church harmed you without deciding that every good thing in that church was fake, and you can admit good happened there without shrinking the harm. The same logic runs one level higher. Jude 3 Project holds that the failures of leaders are real and grievous, and that they are not the same as the failure of Christ. The injured knee is real, and so is the one who stopped in the crowd.
The practice: one layer a day
Each day has the same three movements. Give each one about fifteen minutes.
- Name it. Write the day’s layer in plain sentences, the way you would describe something you witnessed. Do not rush to interpret it.
- Voice it. Read what you wrote out loud, to God, to one trusted listener, or to both. Saying it aloud is the point.
- Release it. Fold the page, put it in an envelope, and pray one honest sentence, such as: Lord, this is what happened, and I am handing this part to you.
- Day one: what happened. Write only the events. Who was involved, where it happened, what was said or done.
- Day two: what it cost. Use Mark 5:26 as your pattern. List what you lost: time, money, friendships, a ministry role, sleep, or your sense of being safe on a Sunday morning.
- Day three: what happened afterward. Who did you tell? Who listened? Who changed the subject to the good the church does? Was anyone held accountable? Lisa Fields described watching a man who had deceived and manipulated people keep preaching, and asked, “where’s the accountability? Where’s the justice”. If silence afterward was its own wound, name it as a separate layer.
- Day four: what it did to your picture of God. Did God start to feel unsafe, distant, or on the side of the people who hurt you? Write that down without correcting it. Then read Mark 5:32 again and notice who stopped and looked.
- Day five: what it touched underneath. This layer is optional. Ask whether the church wound pressed on something older. If you do not know, that is a real answer.
- Day six: what you need now. Write what you need, not what you think you should feel. It might be distance, a counselor, a different congregation, one honest conversation, or rest.
- Day seven: rest. Do not open the envelope. Read Psalm 34:18: “The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit.” Then take out your card.
What this practice cannot do
Two fair worries deserve a straight answer. The first is that writing a wound down and reading it aloud can reopen it instead of settling it. That can happen, especially with trauma that runs deep. For some people a counselor’s office is the safer place to do this naming, and the seven days can stretch over seven sessions or seven months. Others find that naming a wound once is enough for now, and they stop there. Both are faithful ways to use this guide. If a layer opens something you cannot carry, stop writing and call your counselor or a trusted person that day. A layer you stopped is still a layer you named.
The second worry is that “release” sounds like forgiving on a deadline. It is not meant that way. Releasing a layer here means giving it to God instead of carrying it alone. It does not declare the harm acceptable, settle what should happen to the person who caused it, or require you to feel ready to forgive. The practice cannot promise that your pain will be lighter by day seven, or that the church will respond well if you speak up. It offers something smaller: each part of the wound will have been said in full, to someone who can bear it.
For groups: listening without fixing
If you meet with others, read this agreement aloud each time. Each speaker gets about five minutes without interruption. Listeners may say thank you, repeat back one phrase they heard, or ask Is there more? Listeners may not defend the church, offer a verse to wrap things up, give advice, or answer with a story of their own.
The rule exists because of a pattern Gadson named. When someone shares church hurt, she said, “we don’t allow ourselves to be uncomfortable with their discomfort and their hurt”. If you feel the urge to defend, use the question she asked of that reflex: “what is it that we are feeling the need to defend against?” Ask yourself silently, and keep listening.
Whoever facilitates should protect three things: no one has to share, what is said stays in the room, and silence is not a problem to solve. If someone discloses abuse, do not try to mediate or arrange a meeting with the person who caused it. Follow your church’s safeguarding policy, help the person connect with professional care, and make sure they have the hotline number.
Questions for reflection or discussion
- In Psalm 55, David says an enemy’s attack would have been easier to bear. Does that match your experience, or was your wound different in kind?
- The woman in Mark 5 told “all the truth” (Mark 5:33). What makes the whole truth harder to tell than a summary? What would someone need to offer you before you could tell it?
- Read your day-three entry against Gadson’s knee illustration. Did anyone you told respond as if the healthy parts of the church cancelled out your injury? Did you yourself treat the injury as proof the whole body was ruined? What would you rewrite in that entry if both the knee and the body were real?
- When you have listened to someone else’s church hurt, what have you usually said first? What do you think that response was protecting?
- If you stopped partway through the week, what told you to stop? What would a safer setting for that layer look like?
- What would it take for a congregation to become a place where a hurting person did not have to push past the crowd to reach Jesus?
Coming back to your card
Read what you wrote before day one and compare it with what you now know. Perhaps you pictured healing as forgetting, and now it looks more like being able to say the whole truth aloud. Perhaps the card still says exactly what you mean.
Gadson ended her conversation with Lisa Fields by saying “we have to learn how to be comfortable with being uncomfortable.” She was speaking about life in the body of Christ until God comes back for his people, with its tensions and unfinished business. She was not telling anyone to stay where they are being harmed. For this week, take her words to mean something smaller. You do not have to be finished. Some layers are still unnamed, and some are still unknown. The next step is to choose the next layer, or the next person who will listen without fixing, and set a day for it.