A Note Before You Read: On Returning to Church Hurt

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, and that difference matters for how the piece should be read.

Why I Wrote It

In 2016, I wrote about church hurt because I was living it and I did not have adequate language for what was happening to me. I had the theological formation, the clinical training, the personal history — but the field had not yet caught up to the specific texture of harm that happens when the institution that formed your entire framework for reality turns against you.

I was a youth pastor who had been expelled. I was a clinician trained to help others process trauma who was in the middle of my own. I was someone whose spiritual formation was so deeply Bapti-costal that I did not have a self that existed cleanly outside the tradition I had been harmed by. That is the position I wrote from.

The piece was not a dissertation. It was a dispatch. It was written for the people who were messaging me and saying: I thought I was the only one.

What Has Changed Since Then

I have completed a doctorate. I have built a typology of spiritual harm grounded in mixed methods research and narrative interviews with Black millennials and Gen Z. I have a vocabulary now that I did not have in 2016 — one that distinguishes between individual harm and structural harm, between interpersonal betrayal and institutional betrayal, between the wound of a specific pastor and the wound of a governance system that enabled them.

What has not changed is the fundamental observation at the center of that 2016 piece: that the institution shapes the very tools you are given to evaluate the institution. That is not incidental. That is design.

How to Read What Follows

Read it as the beginning of a framework, not the completion of one. Read it as a document of a particular political and spiritual moment — 2016, which is to say the Obama-to-Trump fracture line, which is to say the period when many Black Christians began to confront the ways that the church's political allegiances had become impossible to disaggregate from its theological ones.

Read it knowing that I am publishing it now, in this political moment, because the urgency has not decreased. If anything, the stakes have clarified.

And read it as the document that led, eventually, to this blog. The Maroon was not built in a day. It started with a dispatch, sent to people who needed to know they were not alone.

The piece follows below.