Church Gworl Maroon

What follows this note is a piece I first wrote in 2016. I am republishing it here not because it is finished, but because the conversation it started is not finished — and because I am a different thinker now than I was then.

Church hurt is not a feeling. It is a structural condition — the particular injury that occurs when the institution that gave you your framework for understanding harm is also the source of the harm you are trying to understand.

This is not a deconstruction blog. It is not an ex-vangelical space. It is something older, and harder, and more honest than either of those — a space for people who cannot simply leave and who refuse to pretend that staying is the same as compliance.