As Stephen Mansfield concludes Chapter 1 of Healing Your Church Hurt, he discusses three important factors in finding the way out from religious offense syndrome.
1. We need to know how to be clean and free from what we’ve done to ourselves via our church hurt. This is not an attempt to fix the body of Christ. The author wants us to fix what we are able to in ourselves so that God can fix the rest and restore us to the body of Christ.
2. When we’re in pain, multiple voices are playing in our heads. As the author puts it, ” a riot is taking place in our souls when we hurt.” We’re easily distracted. We need someone to cut in and silence the storm.
3. We can’t choose to love Jesus and hate his people, as Stephen succinctly observes:
“When we think we are loving Jesus but hating his people, we are actually loving Jesus so little that his people don’t matter anymore.
Finally, the author stresses that while we may want to talk about the facts of our ministry downsizing or vocation loss as we see those facts, getting the facts right never will set us free.
Today’s question: Which of Stephen Mansfield’s factors resonate most with your current situation? Please share.
Tomorrow’s blog: “The companionship of common experience”
