How to Overcome Church Hurt and Stay Rooted in Christ with Natalie Runion

0:00 Church hurt is a real thing that we have to deal with as believers in Jesus Christ. And if you believe in Jesus and you are walking with Him, then you are going to a church and you're a part of that. And when there's other people involved, there's opportunity for offense left and right. With us today is Natalie Runion, and she has written the book, Raised to Stay. And it is persevering in ministry when you have a million reasons to walk away. And there's a lot of reasons to walk away, Natalie. And I'm glad that I've stuck them through and my family has stuck them through growing up. And it's great to be able to talk to you about how God has shown you how to deal with offense in the church.

0:45 Oh, it's so good to be with you, John. Thanks for having me today. Yeah. So, Natalie, I've heard this joke a while ago, so I'm going to just start with this, OK? There was once a guy that was on a desert island and he was stranded. And a boat came and finally rescued him. And the captain of the boat saw that there was these three houses on the island. And so the first one, he asked, well, what was this? And he said, oh, that was my house. That's where I lived and that's where I stayed for these last several years. And he said, what about this other one? And he said, oh, that's my church. And that's where I go and that's where I worship. And the captain of the boat said, well, what about that third one over there?

1:26 And he said, oh, that's where I used to go to church. And so he was the only person on the island that are still an opportunity for church hurt. And I think that is very appropriate for our conversation today. That's good. So let's talk about church hurt. I mean, it is not something that we want to deal with in our personal lives. And we know that it exists. But how do you deal with it whenever it comes to you? I used to think it would just end. You know, being a pastor's kid growing up in it and then going into ministry right out of college, I kept thinking, well, surely when I become an adult, everybody will just magically grow up and will be kind and there won't be all of this that I saw as a child.

2:09 And I was actually wrong. The older we get, the more into church we get, the more leadership roles we take. But ultimately, the more people we love, the more people we let in, the more people we are in community with. That hurt ratio to relationships and all of that, it grows because anytime we love, we are at risk for being hurt and hurting other people. So, you know, for me, it's just been a journey of accepting the fact that hurt people will hurt people, but healed people will also help us heal as we go through life. And so rather than running from the church, running from community, embracing this reality, I'm most likely going to get hurt, but I have learned and I'm going to continue to believe that the risk is not going to be nearly as great as the reward we're going to see for loving God and loving his people.

3:02 Soterios Johnson Yeah, for sure. You know, there's plenty of stories I'm sure that we could tell and opportunities, you know, but it's when you're dealing with people, you're dealing with offenses. And it's differences of opinion, you've got issues, you know, shoulder to shoulder, but then you've got leadership issues. And recently, there's been lots of documentaries like Shiny Happy People or the Hillsong documentary. And it just highlights things that are wrong that happen in church. And anytime you have any type of organized anything, you're going to have different levels of authority and abuse in different ways.

3:46 But how do you deal with certain things like that? Soterios Johnson Well, years ago, I mean, we're talking 20, 30 years ago, things like this were happening in the church, they just weren't being documented. There weren't social media pages or weren't ways for people to communicate what was happening within these churches and organizations, short of a courtroom or anything like that. And so now, thanks to social media, and honestly, movements that have had some validity like hashtag church to things like that abusers are coming out, and they are being prosecuted, they're being dealt with. And people who were abused, honestly, truly abused by those leaders and organizations are getting help and they're getting their day in court.

4:26 And they're able to say what actually happened to them without the shame and guilt that was often tagged on abuse victims from the church in the 20, 30 years ago. However, what it's also done is it has caused a little bit of what I call second hand church hurt in that the more we sit in our homes, isolated from community watching these documentaries and letting that fear creep in that well, if it happened to them, it's going to happen to me. We now have an uphill battle as the church as people are coming in expecting to be hurt based off what they're seeing in these documentaries that are probably one sided that probably aren't sharing all of the information. I would like to separate shiny happy people from Hillsong documentary, documentary in that shiny happy people situation that is one of the most vulgar and gross abuse situations I've seen come out in the public.

5:18 Whereas when you have a lot of these church documentaries come out, you are getting more of kind of a one sided lens of what actually happened. So those, we know that people always like a controversy. People want to, it's like the real crime podcast or TV shows, but with the, with the focus on the church, you're looking for the who done it. Do you, did this thing really happen? And so, yeah, it's people want there's that intrigue there and it's not always good. No, and I think it feeds a narrative that the enemy wants fed. That is you can't trust leadership. You can't trust the church. You can't trust each other. So the goal of the enemy is to divide the church, to divorce the church from within so that we don't have a chance to be that light on the hill that we're called to be.

6:06 And so while I don't think that these documentaries are necessarily bad, we do need to deal with the abusers and deal with what we're seeing. But we also need to turn our gaze onto Jesus who also saw persecution, who also saw the ugly of what it looked like to be on mission in a fallen world and remained on mission despite the Judas that sat at his very table. So I believe that those documentaries are informative, but I don't believe that they are part of our formation, this biblical formation that is to remain on mission of going and making disciples. Yeah. So when you're talking about making disciples, I'm thinking about the first step is somebody needing to come to Jesus and repent of their sins and turn their life over to him.

6:58 But now we're seeing a lot of people going public with their deconstruction or their deconversion, and it seems that a lot of that is due to some sort of church hurt. And you can, at least from the people that I've talked to or the other stories that I've heard, it seems that there was some sort of church hurt that was the catalyst that got the ball rolling. And you mentioned a term earlier about isolation that those two things seem to be hand in hand in pulling somebody away. Can we talk about that for a little bit? In my foreword, Lisa Bevere says that deconstruction is just destruction if you have no framework to rebuild what it is that you've deconstructed.

7:42 And we have to remember that Jesus loves a good wrestle. I mean, even the disciples, the apostles, there were people throughout all of scripture who were looking at the things around them. And Paul was so honest in why do I do the things I don't want to do and why can't I do the things that I want to do? So there is a constant wrestling in this faith of detangling and detaching from some of these religious things that the world placed on us, that maybe religious people placed on us that weren't even biblical. And so when we talk about deconstruction, it can't just be, well, this is a popular word, so I'm just going to use it to describe what I'm walking out. If you're not, you know, deconstructing is healthy if you have a plan to rebuild.

8:22 But if it's just destroying everything that we know to be true of God, that's when we start getting on dangerous territory if we don't have disciplers, if we don't have mentors to help us walk that process out to completion. Yeah. And you mentioned that you went through a kind of a deconstruction in yourself, but you were able to rebuild as well. So what's a healthy way to go through some deconstruction? We have to allow ourselves and allow each other to ask the hard questions. And for me, I was part of Campus Crusade for Christ at Miami of Ohio. And even though I wasn't going to church on Sundays, because I really had no desire to go back into a church building after being a pastor's kid for so long, I got involved with this campus organization and I was having coffee with people who let me get mad, who let me get frustrated, who didn't try to defend the church, didn't try to defend the church, didn't try to defend toxic leaders, but sat with me in this ugly space of just wailing and weeping my way through trying to know who I was in Christ.

9:30 And they didn't make me feel guilty for that. They leaned in, they listened, they challenged me. And part of my deconstruction was coming out of the shame of wearing only one-piece bathing suits and a lot of that 90s Christian purity culture that really didn't help in a lot of ways. I think it was people willing to let me wrestle without trying to gaslight me and try to defend an organization that did hurt me. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So you mentioned I was actually going to bring up gaslighting. You just said it there. I mean, I believe it was last year or maybe the year before that it was actually the word of the year. And I've gone through gaslighting and sad to say I didn't realize it when it was happening until somebody, a close friend, I was talking with them about what was going on and they're like, you're being gaslit.

10:23 And I was like, what? They had to explain it to me, but I was like, oh my gosh, this is really going on. This is happening to me and I did not know that. What are some signs of gaslighting that you would point out that could help somebody that's like, I feel this way, but I don't know what I'm feeling. Like there's this, I could definitely say that there was a frustration in me. But I couldn't voice it somehow. Well, that right there, the confusion, you know, it says in the word of God, that God is not the author of confusion. And yet, you know, we sit in offices and church staff, we sit in even our secular jobs and we bring something to an oversight. We bring something to a leader and we say, this is what I'm concerned about.

11:05 This is what I'm seeing. This is what I'm discerning. I'm sensing. And it's always flipped back around to, well, you're imagining that or you're part of the problem or you're lucky you have me to help defend you in this. And if I could, I could get you fired, but I won't. There's a lot of kind of placing that concern back onto the one bringing the concern rather than that leader taking ownership and investigating in a healthy way, the things that we're bringing to them. This is hard because as church people, we do as Christians, we have discernment. We know when we walk into a church and we see that something is not right or a leader is unhealthy. And so not only are Christian leaders really good at gaslighting, but Christians ourselves are really good at gaslighting ourselves and saying, oh no, that was just, I'm just being emotional or I'm just having anxiety or I'm just the problem.

11:56 I'm always the problem. And that's where we can't get discernment and suspicion confused. I'm just a sinner saved by grace and you never get beyond that. Exactly. And that's my authority figure. That's my pastor. He must know better than me. And we were taught in the 80s and 90s that our pastors were kind of where the buck stops. And because of that, a lot of us did stay in unhealthy, toxic churches because we felt loyalty to a person and not to God. Mm-hmm. So how do you, I mean, your book is called Raised to Stay. Okay. So how did you deal with church hurt head on without running away? Because that's how most people deal with it.

12:37 It's called, it leads to church hopping. And people go from one place to another, to another, to another. And oftentimes the biggest issue is the common denominator, which is there's an issue that they didn't deal with, but there's oftentimes, for a lot of times actually, the issues are real, but they just kind of match up with those. And it's like they get reconnected all the time. How did you deal with that and what advice would you give? Well, a lot of people in our generation saw our parents get hurt by the way they were getting hurt by the church and then just continued to get abused by those same churches and leadership. And so we thought that's not going to happen to us. We're not going to be the whipping post for these church leaders anymore.

13:20 And so we came out swinging. The minute anything looked familiar, like what we saw our parents walk out or another church, we ran, we were, it was fight or flight. It was like, I'm not going to let my family go through what I went through as a child. And so it's almost like this trauma response of I'm not going to let them hurt me again. And for me, I had to be so deeply in love with the people God had called me to serve that they were worth fighting for if I was simply hurt. Now, when I found myself under abusive leadership, when I found myself under a leadership that was harming me spiritually, that was when I had to go. And I talk about in the book that there's a difference between packing up our toys and just leaving and then knowing that God is calling us out to go because we can't continue to grow and produce good fruit and unhealthy soil.

14:11 And so for me, I really had to know, I love the people, I love the Lord, but I also know that my soul and my heart matters to the Lord. And he is not asking me to stay somewhere where I am being abused or hurt. Yeah. So how do you, I mean, obviously discernment is going to be a key part of this answer, but how do you know, like, I need to deal with this versus I need to leave? Yeah. John, you know, I love John 15 because it talks about this whole abiding in Christ, this remaining in Christ and that when we remain in Christ, when we stay in Christ, he will produce good fruit in us and through us that we can accomplish the work he's called us to.

14:51 And what I've learned is that when I'm in a church and I am abiding in Christ and I am honoring leadership, but there is no opportunity for that good fruit to come from me because I am being abused or I am not being honored or I am not in a safe place anymore. And I noticed that my own fruit is not growing on the vine. That is my first indicator that it's time to start asking the Lord for strategy for the next steps. That doesn't mean I just quit my job that day. It doesn't mean that I just pack up my family and say, we're going to a different church, but we really start to ask the Lord, search me first. Is there anything in me that needs to be weeded out or dealt with?

15:32 And then show me, are we supposed to stay and contend for healthy culture? Are we supposed to stay and be a voice in the wilderness or are you releasing us to go somewhere where we can be in healthier soil? And this is an individual conversation with God. It's not, there's no textbook to tell you to stay or go. And I think that's what people want. I think they want somebody to say, you just need to go, which is why social media has such a great rap because social media will often times commiserate with the miserable. Whereas a lot of times Christian community will say, Hey, contend for that community until the Lord, until that cloud moves. And it takes a lot of perseverance to stay. So Natalie, you know, it takes a lot to be on record and talk about church hurt and abuse and to write a book that you call raised to stay, which I heard in another interview, you said, you know, if you could have named your ministry raised to abide, you would have done that, but raised to stay really is a good name too.

16:31 But what caused you to say, I need to write this book. I was watching friend after friend, not just leave ministry, but leave Jesus. And I'm 43. So I am a millennial gen X hybrid. And we saw some of the most explosive evangelical movements in the eighties and nineties. We lived through, I'm Pentecostal. So we saw revivals, miracles, signs and wonders, but we were also extremely gifted in worship and extremely gifted in the arts because that is where a lot of those movements were birthed out of were in the nineties where worship suddenly came to the focus.

17:14 And I watched friends who were so gifted in leading worship, so gifted in communicating the gospel one by one go through very real life experiences. And the church did not know how to be the church to them from divorce to getting pregnant before marriage, those non-negotiable sins that the church had kind of deemed the unforgivable sins. We started slapping scarlet letters on people and we started to lose very anointed and gifted people who really were being discarded because they were no longer good or they were no longer seen as sanctified or consecrated. And I think that as I watched us lose more and more of my peers, I felt this holy chutzpah inside of me to say enough.

18:03 We have a mission. We need to remain in position, but the church needs to accept the fact that they have not been good to their very own children. And then we, as those children of the church, also have to say, I've been hurt and I don't want to live a life of remaining hurt. I want to be healed and marrying that conversation of accountability and then also helping each other heal. Yeah. Wow. There's so much to dive into right there. And I'm 38, so I'm just a little bit behind you, but I know those exact times that you're talking about. And as you were talking about how so many of your peers have been lost to the world, I've just been like people like Christina Aguilera and there's several others that grew up in the church that we know that they grew up in the church.

18:55 And now they've gone the way that Katy Perry, her mother often shares her story and just seeing like there's amazing talent that because of different stories, different issues in their story, they've gone a different way. And now they're really pied pipers for the enemy in a lot of ways. And so you hit the nail on the head there, Natalie. I mean, that is so true. So how do we as the body of Christ, how do we help people get back that have been hurt?

19:37 Because I think there's different levels and you probably talk about this as you get further into the book. There's people that are on the cusp of leaving, then there's people that have left and there's people that have gone. How do we help people that have gone that we still love maybe help bring them back? I remember being young and people would just be at the altars weeping over their prodigals. There was this just desperation to see prodigals come home. And something the Lord has been dealing with me about is that we don't have to rush prodigals home. God is the Holy Hound of heaven who is pursuing his children going after that one.

20:18 And the thing that I'm learning is that we can't rush each other's return. And we need to be patient with one another as we slowly come back in and dip our toes into the water again and try to see if maybe this one is going to be different. Maybe this time it's going to be different. And so the church has an easy job. The Lord has given us the blueprint to how to receive people into the family of God. And that is to love God and to love people. And what does love look like? It looks like meeting people where they are when they show up, not trying to adjust behavior before we address belief.

20:59 And the church is so behavior focused that if we don't change the way that we do church within our own walls, we are going to continue to prove to the world that we are not the safe place that we say that we are. My sister went to breakfast with a friend of ours this morning and she called me and she was so grieved. She said, Natalie, the very church that was preaching community, that this was a place that we could be in community and we could have community. The minute that I walked out something hard, that very community rejected me. And so we have to start being who we say that we are. And the world is a ready receiver of rejected Christians. And once they get into the world, the likelihood of us getting them back in our flesh is nearly impossible.

21:46 And so we have to operate in that gift of the Holy Spirit of compassion and all of those fruits of the Holy Spirit and fruits of the Spirit to be that safe place. And trust me, it's not in our flesh because in our flesh, we are nasty Pharisees. But when we are walking in the Holy Spirit, we will be that safe place. And we have to get back there and very quickly. Wow. Natalie, we've talked about offense and you mentioned that Lisa Bervier wrote the forward of your book and her husband, John, wrote one of my favorite books, Bait of Satan, dealing with offense. And that's something that you and I talked about before we started this interview. Let's talk about that bait of Satan and that offense and how we can protect ourselves from that.

22:29 And you also mentioned about secondhand offense, not picking up somebody else's offense. Let's just dive into that. Yeah. I mean, guys, let's be real. We don't choose to be hurt. We don't pick up hurt. We don't walk into a church and say, oh, please, somebody hurt me. Hurt happens to us. Abuse happens to us. And it's violating. It is exhausting. It is a betrayal like no other when we are hurt or abused by the very institution and organization and shepherds who say they are supposed to protect us. And so we don't choose to be hurt. But offense is a choice. We choose to pick up an offense. And when I talk about offense, I'm talking about things that probably do feel hurtful.

23:15 And in the moment, it could be that we weren't put on the planning center weekend that we always are put on and we weren't given the revelation solo that we always sing. And therefore, that person who's leading that ministry must not like me anymore. I must have sang something wrong. And the enemy goes into a full on assault from that little thing that has happened. It could be as simple as the pastor not shaking your hand during the meet and greet. It could be not being invited to lead a Bible study and women's Bible study for the fall. There are so many things that if we were really to sit back in our own spirit and say, oh, I should probably investigate why that happened rather than going to the dark place of everybody hates me and everybody's against me.

23:56 And that's what's happening when we're picking up offense is the enemy is just using it to create these false scenarios. The Bible calls them high things, anything contradictory to the word of God that we're commanded to pull down as well as to shake off all those things that so easily keep us from from running our race. And a lot of us are so weighed down by not only offense, but the things that haven't even happened to us that have happened to other people that we've picked up. And God never gave us permission to pick those up. And so I'm just saying how much freer our race would be if we would stop picking up things we were never meant to carry. Hmm. That's so good, Natalie. You know, I'm just feeling led by the spirit right now to ask you in just a moment to be to pray for those that are watching, because I'm just hearing in my spirit that there are people that are like, well, they don't know what hurt I've gone through.

24:50 They don't know this situation that I've dealt with, and they don't know the people that that I have to deal with on a regular basis. And you're right. We don't know. And I'm just going to say that right now. We don't know. But we know somebody that does know we know that the Holy Spirit that the same Holy Spirit that's in us is in you. And he who can turn things around, you know, what the enemy meant for evil, God meant for good, and God will work those things for good if you let him. And so, Natalie, I just want to ask you to pray for those that are watching right now that they their their spirit is prickly because of the things that you said.

25:31 And would you just pray for them right now? God, I thank you for everyone who is listening to this right now. God, you know, even though we don't know, you see every situation. Your hand is not too far from us, Lord. Your eyes never leave us. And in every case of abuse and hurt and offense, Lord, you've been in the rooms. You've heard every word that has been spoken and you've heard the ones that have been unspoken. You have fought fights for us that we didn't even know you were fighting. You've healed us from diseases we didn't even know we had. You have gone before us and you go behind us, Lord. And I just pray that your Holy Spirit would wrap around each and every one of us, God, as we do our very best in this broken world to live this life, God, of following you and taking up our cross and going and making disciples.

26:23 You promised us that it wasn't going to be easy, but that you would never leave us. And so for those who feel isolated and alone, God, I pray that you would never leave us. That your Holy Spirit would meet them right where they are and that you would confirm to them in unique ways. God, that you see right where they are. God, I pray for unexpected community to come to them. God, that where they thought they were forgotten, that a phone call or a text would remind them today. God, that you see them right where they are. I pray for healing and reconciliation where it's possible here on earth. God, though it may not happen in the next week or so, God, I pray that relationships would be formed, God, because you are a God who wants to see your family together and unified for where there is unity.

27:03 It commands your blessing. And so I pray for households that are divided right now. God, between church stuff and church leadership stuff, I pray for unity in our homes and our families. And God, I pray that the church would rise up and be the safe place. God, that we are called to be a safe haven for the orphan, the widow, the lost God, and that we would keep our light burning and our hearts ready to be ready receivers of those looking for the living hope. And it's in Jesus name we pray. Amen. Amen. Amen. Natalie, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us about your book, Raised to Stay. And that's also your website, Raisedtostay.com. And I want to encourage people to go there to find out more about Natalie, her ministry.

27:45 She's a worship leader. If you didn't pick that up from the interview. And so she's got a very great singing voice and you'll enjoy her worship as well as her writing and speaking in different places as well. So Natalie, is there anything else that you want to leave our audience with today? You know, the first chapter I wrote out of the book was chapter six. Don't let your Judas keep you from your Jesus. And it's strange when you're writing a book because you think you'd start with chapter one. But I wrote chapter six first because I was dealing with my own Judas at the time. And here's what I would say. Just as Jesus did not allow Judas to keep him from his mission, you and I will not let the Judas sitting at our table keep us from doing the thing that God has started in us because Philippians 1 6 promises that he who began a good work in us is faithful to complete it to the very end.

28:36 Amen. Amen. Natalie, thank you so much for being here on My Charisma. Thank you so much.