The Importance of Trauma Informed Church Culture Reform
It was 2020, the world was shut down, and I was serving in my first lead pastorate role with no guidebook to “pastoring through a pandemic” to guide me. The church I was serving was struggling in more ways than I knew. Attendance was low, the congregation was aging, and many relationships were contentious. If there was ever a church to diagnose as “in need of revitalization,” it was this one. So I did what any young pastor desperate for solutions does, I turned to books. I looked for any book on church health I could find and stumbled upon Scot McKnight and Laura Barringer’s book, A Church Called Tov: Forming a Goodness Culture that Resists Abuses of Power and Promotes Healing. As I read it I began to find language I did not know I needed. For while A Church Called Tov spoke to some of the history of the church I was serving, it spoke directly to my previous ministry experience at a church that would never be diagnosed as “in need of revitalization” but whose lack of health I had felt acutely while on staff. In their book, McKnight and Barringer had begun to identify what others had been sensing: a lack of health was not a unique experience of small churches, large churches who had often been left outside of the church health conversations were in need of their own diagnosis. For McKnight and Barringer the diagnosis was one of reforming church culture, a diagnosis of great importance as it widened the church health conversation beyond only small “dying” churches to include those that had numerical and outward signs of health while internally living out of a toxic and harmful church culture. The work of McKnight, Barringer, and others in identifying unhealthy church culture has been powerfully healing for many churches. Still, something is missing. Identifying toxic cultures is important, but it is essential to also determine where those cultures are coming from. This is why at Restor(y) we believe any attempts at church culture reform need to be done with a trauma-informed lens.
Like the diagnosis of “in need of revitalization,” attempts at church culture reform begin by asking the question of “what are you doing?” Behaviors and beliefs that demonstrate abuses of power are identified and used to point to an unhealthy church culture. The question that is not asked is, “What has been done to you?” However, this question is essential in moving a congregation away from a toxic church culture and towards one that is restorative and healing. While not the case in every congregation that demonstrates abuses of power and other aggressive and harmful behaviors, some local churches may be behaving in such ways due to unhealed wounds. Without attending to any collective trauma within the faith community, attempts to reform a toxic church culture will often fail or be short lived.
While we at Restor(y) are immensely thankful for attempts to undue harmful church cultures and bring healing, we want to invite the conversation around church health to go deeper so that even our approaches to church culture reform may be done in trauma-informed ways that can lead to real, transformative change. For this we offer a new diagnosis to the lack of health within the church. It is to this diagnosis that we will turn as we continue this blog series on reframing the conversation around church health.
