Church hurt cuts deeper than most pain because it rarely stays a wound between people. It gets fused to faith itself, so that a harmful leader or a cold congregation starts to feel like evidence about God. It deepens when Christians answer the pain by hurrying to the positive instead of letting it be heard. Healing starts where that hurry stops: the harm gets named, someone stays long enough to listen, and the hurt person gets real help, including professional care when it is needed.
Dr. Monique Gadson brings an unusual vantage point to this. She describes herself as a licensed professional counselor with research work in marriage and family therapy, and she says she has counseled within the church for sixteen years. In conversation with Lisa Fields, founder of the Jude 3 Project, she named two reflexes that turn an injury into something harder to heal: the defensive minimizing of the hurt, and the habit she calls spiritual bypass. Both reflexes usually come from people who care about the church.
Why Does a Wound From Church Reach So Far Down?
People are hurt at work, in families and in friendships, and those wounds can be severe. What sets church hurt apart is where it lands. Gadson says Christians bring distinct dynamics into counseling, because they come to talk about “issues that are surrounding our faith, that even have us questioning our faith at times.” A wound from a coworker raises questions about the coworker. A wound from a pastor, an elder or a congregation can raise questions about God.
The reason lies in what the church is supposed to be. The New Testament calls it the body of Christ, the community through which his care is meant to reach people with actual hands and voices. When that community does harm, it is not a stranger failing you. It is the very place that was meant to show you what God is like. So the injury and the belief get tangled, which is why Fields uses the phrase faith trauma, a term she credits to BJ Thompson.
Fields describes where that tangle often leads. People re-traumatized in church conclude, in her paraphrase of their reasoning, “I’ll pray and read at home. I don’t need the church.” She believes church hurt drives more departures from the faith than intellectual objections do. Whether or not that holds as often as she thinks, the logic is plain. When a wound and a faith are fused, walking away from the people who caused the wound can feel like the only way to stop hurting, and walking away from them can mean walking away from God.
What Does the Quick Defense of the Church Protect?
Fields is candid that her own first response to stories of church hurt used to be a deflection: people get hurt in other places without leaving, and look at all the good the church has done. She came to see that this was not helpful. She compares it to answering “Black Lives Matter” with “All lives matter.” The second statement may be true in general, but it changes the subject away from the specific harm being raised. Her conclusion is the hinge of the issue: “Those two things can be true at the same time that the church could be extremely helpful and the church could be extremely harmful all at the same time in one church.”
Gadson reads the deflection as a defense mechanism, and she asks a counselor’s question about it: “And then we have to ask ourselves what is it that we are feeling the need to defend against?” Her answer is fear that one bad story will erase every good one. She voices the worry this way: “Will it be like this black smear that just totally blocks out every other good aspect of what the church has done?”
She answers that fear with her own body. Her orthopedic doctor found arthritis in her right knee. Does that make her whole body useless? Does the health of the rest of her body mean the knee is fine? “So do I now say my whole body is arthritic?” Neither conclusion follows. The knee is hurt, and the body is still a body. “It’s not an either or,” she says.
Her image comes from 1 Corinthians 12, where Paul describes the church as one body with many members. Paul’s point there is not that suffering members should keep quiet for the sake of the whole. It runs the other way:
“And whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it; or one member be honoured, all the members rejoice with it” (1 Corinthians 12:26).
A member’s pain belongs to the body. Defending the body by denying the pain misreads what kind of body it is.
What Is Spiritual Bypass, and Why Does It Make the Wound Worse?
The second reflex is specific to communities of faith. Someone says, I was hurt at church. The reply skips straight to the spiritual good: what God is doing, what the church still offers, what lesson might come from it. The pain is acknowledged in a sentence and then covered over. That is spiritual bypass, and Gadson locates the failure precisely:
“And what we don’t do is we don’t create space, and we don’t hold space long enough for people to share these experiences and these encounters. And we don’t allow ourselves to be uncomfortable with their discomfort and their hurt.”
— Dr. Monique Gadson
Notice where she puts the problem. It is not in the hurt person’s story. It is in the listener’s inability to tolerate discomfort. The bypass protects the one listening from feeling helpless. The cost falls on the one speaking.
Because church hurt is already fused to faith, this is where bypass does its deepest damage. If a person was wounded in a religious setting and religious language is then used to move past the wound, the lesson they absorb is that faith talk is the tool that keeps their pain from being heard. The spiritual words may be true. They still arrive as another closed door. The wound now carries two injuries: the original harm, and being silenced by the very vocabulary that was supposed to carry God’s care.
The damage does not stay with one person. “And that’s usually to the detriment of that individual. But what we don’t really understand is that if the body is many parts, we’re also doing this to the detriment of the body.” A church that bypasses one member’s pain trains every member to keep theirs hidden.
Bypass can also happen at the level of a whole institution. When a leader is known to have harmed people and is still allowed to lead and preach, the people he hurt experience the silence as a second offense. Gadson’s explanation is not flattering, but it is honest: “Sometimes when we don’t know what to do, we do nothing.”
Isn’t Pointing to God’s Goodness the Faithful Thing to Do?
This is the strongest objection, and it deserves a straight answer. Christians do believe that God is good and that his purposes reach into suffering. Paul writes:
“And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28).
Is it wrong to say so?
Gadson’s argument is not that the truths are wrong. It is about order and timing. She is not against prayer. Her complaint is that prayer often becomes the whole response: “Definitely. Let’s open it up, let’s close it up in prayer. But can we also open up a space for someone to come in to say, let me tell you how you can be made whole.” When a true statement about God is used to end a conversation the hurt person needs to have, it stops functioning as comfort. Romans 8 itself does not hurry past pain. The same chapter speaks of creation groaning (Romans 8:22) and of the Spirit interceding “with groanings which cannot be uttered” (Romans 8:26). Paul holds hope and groaning together. He does not use one to silence the other.
A second objection is that not every complaint about a church is fair, and some people want punishments no leader could justly impose. Gadson grants this directly: “Sometimes it may not ever be enough for people.” But hearing someone out is not the same as ruling in their favor. The moment a person first risks telling what happened is not the moment to audit their account. Listening fully is what makes fair judgment possible later.
What Did Jesus Do With the Woman in the Crowd?
Gadson turns to the woman with the issue of blood, told in Mark 5:25–34. Mark describes a woman who “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). She pushed through a pressing crowd to touch Jesus’s clothes and was healed. Jesus then stopped and asked who had touched him. His disciples pointed out that everyone was touching him. He kept looking. The woman came trembling, fell down before him and, Mark says, told him all the truth (Mark 5:33). Then he spoke to her:
“Daughter, thy faith hath made thee whole; go in peace, and be whole of thy plague” (Mark 5:34).
Gadson draws attention to what Jesus did not do. He could have let the physical healing be the end of it. “But he stopped and he acknowledged somebody here in this crowd has touched me.” In the narrative, the woman’s healing includes being seen and telling her whole story, and only then being sent away in peace with a family word: daughter.
Her application to the church is pointed. She asks the congregation to see itself in the crowd: “Are you one of the people that are hindering, could be hindering this person from getting to Christ?” That is an application, not a claim about what Mark set out to teach. Mark describes one healing. He does not promise every wounded reader healing on a timetable. What the story does show is that Jesus treated hearing her as part of making her whole. The crowd was the obstacle. Jesus was not.
That distinction matters for anyone whose wound has become fused with faith. The failures of leaders are real and grievous, but they are not the failure of Christ. The people who pressed in, pushed past or looked away are not the measure of the One who stopped.
Where Does Healing Begin for the Person Who Was Hurt?
Gadson does not offer a formula, and she is honest about limits. Even well-trained, careful people can wound someone who carries deep trauma: “And if a person has been traumatized severely over time, we have to understand that that individual may find even our attempts at help triggering and for them traumatizing.” Fields adds that many people arrive at church already carrying violence, family trauma and sexual trauma, some of it from childhood. This is not a reason for leaders to stop trying. It is a reason for the hurt person to stop blaming themselves when even kind words sting. A reaction to a trigger is not proof that you are faithless or broken beyond repair.
From there, a few concrete steps follow.
- Let the harm have its name. Gadson insists the church must speak plainly: “We have to bring voice to it. We have to be willing to say that we know among our leadership, among our lay leadership, among our congregants, there is abuse. And that there are abusers. We have to say that.” What churches must say publicly, a hurt person is allowed to say privately and truthfully, without softening it to protect anyone.
- Find a listener who will not bypass. That may be a counselor, a trusted friend or a pastor who can sit with discomfort. Seeing a counselor is not a failure of faith; God works through trained clinicians too. Gadson herself went to counseling as part of her training, because the issues people bring to her “may trigger things in me that are unresolved or even unknown.”
- Look for leaders who admit their own need. “Leadership needs to be able to say, I can’t do all of this, nor should I do all of this.” A church that has to “present this image that we are already without spot,” as Gadson puts it, will struggle to make room for anyone else’s wounds.
Gadson names abuse by leaders and by members as part of what the church must face. If that is what happened to you, it is not ordinary church hurt to absorb quietly. Tell someone safe who sits outside that church’s chain of authority, and seek a counselor or, where a crime may have occurred, the proper authorities. No one should press you to reconcile with a person who abused you.
National Domestic Violence Hotline (including abuse in a dating or domestic relationship with a church leader): 1-800-799-7233
RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Hotline: 1-800-656-4673
The last thing Gadson offers is not a resolution but a posture for the long middle: “We have to learn how to be comfortable with being uncomfortable.” The body of Christ will be marked by tension until God makes all things new, and the urge to make every difficult person disappear is its own kind of shortcut. This is not a call to stay where you are being harmed. It is a refusal of two easy exits: pretending nothing happened, and concluding that because people failed, God did.
Mark’s story points past both. The woman did not have to explain away the crowd before she could reach Jesus. She only had to reach him, and he was the one who stopped and asked to hear it all.
