Finding Emotional Healing Elsewhere, and Leaving the Church

The church so often numbs and ignores emotions. Is it any wonder people leave when they learn to feel, attend to, and even trust their emotions, when being “emotional” stops being, by definition, wrong?

Do you see this happening? What are the consequences you see?

And in 2020 people experienced multiple societal traumas.  If churches don’t take this seriously, then yes, people won’t come back.

Don’t Get Angry (Emotional) With God!

A famous preacher from Minneapolis told me this as I sat in chapel at seminary.

I was 23. And I had barely started my own journey of discovering and living with my emotions.

But I had read the Psalms (being a good Bible Church fundamentalist).

And the Psalms have plenty of people, and plenty of verses, dedicated to being angry with God, telling God how unfair it was that they were suffering, giving God a “below average” job report, or otherwise pouring out their “negative” emotions to God about how they’d been betrayed from the inside or attacked from the outside, and all the other situations and emotions of life.  

And the Psalms don’t view any of this as “a lack of faith.” 

It is their act of faith to bring it all to God.

But God is Love

Certain segments of the church read emotions right out of the Scripture, and right out of God. 

And we are worse for it.

Sure they might still talk about God’s love, but this is very dispassionate.  Love for these pastors and theologians is just an inverted economic transaction where love and grace are just when you get stuff for “free”, rather than when you “earn” it, like we all earn sin and death (Rom. 6:23, and see the bridge illustration). 

Emotional Deliverance Outside the Church

When people finally make an emotional breakthrough, finally face an abuse or trauma that had been eating up their lives, finally find deliverance for chronic stress, or finally get practical tools for a troubled marriage—all of which tend to deal honestly with emotions—is it any wonder that more often than not these people drift from the church?

Over time, it seems possible that these churches will eventually have the least emotionally honest, and therefore the least mature, people attending—and leading.

Emotional Integration and Honesty

I’m not saying that pastors and churches should just exchange the gospel for modern psychology.  A thoroughly therapeutic culture won’t be good for any of us in the long term (but that’s for another post). 

But I am saying that pastors and churches need to take emotions seriously, mental health seriously, trauma seriously, and abuse seriously.  

We need to be honest about emotions.

Scripture and church tradition already have abundant resources for engaging, affirming, and transforming emotions. 

And if we are created in God’s image, and God has created all things, then science is a proper window for understanding human behavior and recovery. 

This isn’t a question of pitting one gospel (psychology) against another (scripture).  It is about integrated them holistically. 

And if we don’t, we shouldn’t be shocked that people keep quietly leaving the church.

Do you see this happening too? What are the consequences that you’re experiencing?

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