[D]mergent

Opening the Door to Pain and Trust

Occasionally, someone will come to my office, anxiety etched across the brow, looking for a listening ear. When I open the door on these occasions, I don’t know what kind of pain lies on the other side. I summon my best active listening practices from Pastoral Care 101 and say, “What seems to be the trouble?”

“Well, Gladys and I have been having problems. You may have noticed we haven’t been around much lately.”

Sometimes I have, and sometimes I haven’t. I remain noncommittal: “I’m glad you’re here now."

“Let me cut to the chase.”

(That’s good. I’m pro cut-to-the-chase.)

“I think Gladys has been having an affair with a co-worker…”

And with that, we embark on an all too familiar journey into betrayal, fear, and recrimination.

I listen to another sad story, which often ends with a question. It’s a big question, one I never feel comfortable answering. People who come to see me with problems like this ask it anyway:

“What should I do?”

I know the difference between directive and non-directive counseling, between offering a way to move forward and offering the person the opportunity to make those discoveries and decisions. I often have a hard time keeping my mouth shut about what people ought to do, but in these situations, it always seems better (easier?) to go with a non-directive approach:

“What do you want to do?”

“That’s just it. I don’t know what to do. I love her, but I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to trust her again.”

There it is. Trust.

The Challenge of Trust in Personal Relationships

Trust. Relationships require it if they have any chance at being healthy. To say that “once lost, trust is difficult to recover” is, surely, to have said something everyone already knows instinctively. How long does it take to quit checking text messages and phone logs? How much time has to elapse before you believe a trip to the store for milk and bread is really a trip to the store for milk and bread?

Unfortunately, there’s no calculus capable of offering a quantifiable answer about how much time it takes to rebuild trust. However, one thing is certain: If trust is to be rebuilt, it won’t happen just because time’s elapsed. Trust takes work, hard, often tedious, repetitive, mind-numbing work. Showing up when you say you’re going to show up. Being where you said you’d be. Doing what you said you’d do. Going out of your way to reassure the other person.

No matter how strongly a person feels about having recovered or how eloquent the protestations about “turning over a new leaf,” no matter how many genuine tears are shed seeking forgiveness, there’s no shortcut to rebuilding trust.

Everyone knows that, right?

The other side of it, though, which also seems equally self-evident but often gets overlooked in the face of the pain, is that the wounded party has to want to heal and find trust again. This, too, requires work.

It’s possible to bang your head against a wall for someone who appears only to relish the sight of you concussing yourself. Tirelessly banging your head against a wall for someone who seems to find joy in the spectacle of your self-inflicted concussions is a Sisyphean task that yields nothing but pain. It’s impossible to heal when the infliction of pain becomes the glue that holds the relationship together.

Betrayal and the Congregation

It occurs to me that many churches have been wounded, whether by promiscuous pastors who took advantage, by unprincipled lay leadership, or by denominational neglect–or just because the organizational system was set up to fail. Whatever the cause, the first casualty of betrayal is trust.

Unfortunately, the lack of trust in wounded congregations is a self-destructive feedback loop of bitterness and distrust that inhibits healthy growth and creativity. Distrust in a congregational system treats all change as equally menacing and treats everything new (people, programs, ideas) as presumably hostile–until proven otherwise.

A trip to the store for bread and milk is always assumed to be a pretext for something else, something surely more nefarious.

A new Sunday School class can never be just a new Sunday School class; it’s an indictment of the other Sunday School classes or a new avenue for some hostile party to consolidate power.

A change to the worship service or the worship space is either an attack on tradition or a play to increase the power base of some dubious constituency–or both.

What gets communicated in a wounded system where trust has been lost is: “We’re not quite certain yet how you’re trying to screw us over, but we’re pretty sure you are. Therefore, we’re withholding approval and/or permission.”

Recognizing the Symptoms of a Wounded Congregation

Has your church lost trust? Here’s an informal checklist:

• Do you regularly have meetings that last longer than 2 hours?
• Do people bring dog-eared copies of Robert’s Rules of Order to board meetings?
• Do you hear at least one reference to the Constitution and By-laws at every meeting?
• Do people bring their own calculators and red pens to the meeting where the budget is being proposed?
• Do you have meetings where there are arguments about whether everybody on staff “really needs their own stapler?”
• Does rearranging the furniture in the narthex or switching brands of air freshener require board approval? (Bonus: If it’s really bad, does it require congregational approval?).
• Do you have a lot of congregational meetings?
• Does the announcement of a meeting elicit a particular kind of feeling in your stomach?
• Do you keep an extra bottle of Rolaids in your car for use before meetings?
• Does recruiting for congregational officers evoke anxiety not for fear of who will say “no” but for fear of who will say “yes?”
• Do you require a doctor’s note from staff who call in sick?
• Do you have people who regularly drive by the church to see if the pastor’s car is there?

How Can We Trust Again?

I wish it were easy. It’s not.

I wish I could point you toward “7 easy steps to recovering your trust.” I can’t.

It all comes down to this: a wounded congregation must decide to begin trying to trust again. You may get burned. But relationships are always a crap shoot.

How about this?

Healing Together: Practical Steps Towards Congregational Trust

• Call attention to and celebrate positive steps.
• Give people the benefit of the doubt. Don’t enter every new situation convinced you’re going to get burned.
• Assume people (even those who feel like the “enemy”) are telling the truth until you find out otherwise.
• Don’t get into the habit of thinking of people with whom you share the body of Christ as the “enemy.” It’s too difficult to pull back from the precipice.
• Emphasize the importance of active listening, where members genuinely try to understand and empathize with each other’s perspectives rather than simply waiting for their turn to speak.
• Make sure that the decision-making process within the congregation is as transparent as possible. This might include open meetings, detailed explanations of decisions made, and avenues for feedback.
• Create opportunities for members to engage in activities outside of the traditional worship setting, such as community service projects, retreats, or social events.

Even if trust hasn’t been restored, you’re going to have to live like it has. Fake it till you make it. Until you can live together with a commitment to restoring trust, ministry, if possible at all, can only be tenuous and fragile.

And if all else fails, remember, it’s God’s church–not yours (or your “enemy’s”).

Besides, trusting your enemy is just about impossible–although dying for your one has been done before.