I remember the first time I felt betrayed in ministry.
I had just started at my first church and I was young, inexperienced, naïve, and full of believing the best in people. I thought working in a church would be the best place ever because everyone would get along, everyone would agree, and it would be a constant party of loving Jesus and helping other people love Him too. It had never entered my mind that my biggest hurts in my life would come from the people I worked and served with.
The first big sense of betrayal happened in the first 6 months in my first position. Unknown to me, the senior pastor and the board had been going through a series of disagreements and conversations about direction. The night after a board meeting where I shared what the youth ministry was doing and how excited I was about the future, my senior pastor called me into his office and told me that I was to never talk to the board again without first checking with him. He said I had intentionally betrayed him and that he didn’t know if he could trust me anymore. I don’t know what I did, I am pretty sure that in my ignorance I had probably shared something with board that went in a different direction that he was leading. I only remember feeling wounded, betrayed, accused. The wound continued to grow and led to more feelings of betrayals over the next 12 months. My senior pastor ended up getting asked to leave the church and I felt uncertain, betrayed, and alone. My dream of working a perfect job was crushed and I didn’t know how to process what to do next.
Throughout the next 20 years, I experienced some wounds from church leadership. I have been laid off three times due to financial issues cause by leadership’s affairs, misuse of funds, and a lack of intentional planning. I have been yelled at during leadership meetings. I have felt betrayed by sharing my opinion on direction of ministry and then having it used against me. I have had volunteers talk bad about the ministry. I have had parents and students share mistruths to people around me and say I have said things that I haven’t said. I have been wounded.
I carried the wounds with me most of my life because I didn’t know how to process them. The weight of being wounded while working in the church seemed to be a complicated mess. If someone hurt me, did that make me bad or were they bad? If someone wrongs you in a church, does that mean you should just take it or does it mean that you should leave? If a leader criticizes you and tells you that you aren’t a good fit, does that mean you should never work in a church again? I ended up in a mess emotionally and spiritually.
This inner struggle of woundedness and search for identity culminated in me in 2014. I had poured over 5 years into a ministry and in the mess of an incredibly difficult season of moral failure in church leadership, leadership abuse, and relational conflict, I was hopeless, confused, and disappointed. Bitterness, anger, and distrust ruled my heart. I spent hours, then days, then weeks wrestling through my own wounds and deciding what to do next. Many times in that season I wanted to let my anger win. I wanted to run away from responsibility and compassion. As my bitterness was quickly making my heart hard and calloused, God gave me a moment of clarity where He whispered a reminder and gave me an offer.
He reminded me that He loves me and that He had forgiven me for all of the stupid decisions that I had ever made and all the mean things I had ever done. He reminded me that He sent His son, Jesus to forgive me so that I can live a free life on earth and for eternity.
And then God made an offer to me. He offered to let me choose to forgive the people that I had felt had wronged me. He reminded me that it was my choice whether I forgave or whether I would continue to carry the weight of the places where I had been wronged.
In that moment I knew unforgiveness was breaking me. I accepted the reality that it wasn’t what had happened to me that was crushing me, it was my inability to forgive. Unforgiveness almost broke me, my heart, my compassion, my influence, my identity. I am grateful that God reminded me of who Jesus is and what He has done for me and that He taught me about the power of forgiveness and the cost of unforgiveness.
As anyone who has worked through forgiveness knows, it is not easy and it doesn’t mean things work out great, but the freedom that it gives begins the healing and life that we were meant to live in. If you are struggling with unforgiveness and you feel your heart or hope slipping, I encourage you to talk to someone to get help – a good friend, a mentor, a spiritual leader. Fight against the lie that you will lose something if you forgive. Fight against the lie that the person needs to pay for what they have done to you before you can move on. Instead, learn how to fight for yourself. Fight for your future. Fight for your potential. Forgive before the weight of unforgiveness breaks you.