A few years ago, I would have said unequivocally that as a general rule, forgiving others is the best thing to do.
I think I might still believe that, at least for a lot of circumstances. Maybe?
But I’m not sure anymore.
I’m concerned that the church may have caused a lot of damage over the years by the way we think and talk about forgiveness.
When churches and pastors talk about forgiveness, a lot of them tend to focus heavily on the need for Christians to radically forgive even the most horrific of slights.
And to do it quickly.
I’m not blameless in this. I’ve said these exact things things in sermons and conversations over the years.
We focus in on Jesus’ proclamation: “If you do not forgive others, neither will your heavenly Father forgive your trespasses.”1
We want people to feel an urgency to forgive.
To forgive quickly.
But in the process, I think we might be inadvertently stifling people's healing and growth.
Very few would say that “Get better now!” is an effective form of motivation.
People can’t “get better now.” It takes time. It takes work. There’s a process.
But is pushing people to quickly forgive their enemies kind of the same thing?
Maybe?
Probably?
I wonder if imploring people to quickly forgive their exes,
or those who have taken advantage of them,
or those who have bullied them,
or those who have backstabbed them,
has forced them to bypass the stages of grief and the process of healing.
A few years ago I was furious with a select few people. We had some pretty heated disagreements about the future of our neighborhood.
At the time I wrote about feeling the need to forgive them for the ways they hurt me.2
I thought about every sermon, every youth group lesson, and every book about forgiveness that I’ve absorbed over the years. And the message was clear.
Forgive your enemies.
Do it now.
For your soul.
For the sake of the world.
God wants you to.
And you’re a pastor, so you especially need to do it.
Quickly.
People are watching you. They expect you to.
So I tried.
But it’s a few years later, and if I’m being honest, I’m just as angry now as I was then.
Probably more.
I didn’t go through any kind of a process of grief or emotional/mental/spiritual work.
I just stuffed the pain down and tried to pretend it wasn’t there anymore.
Publicly I acted like I was doing great.
Like people’s comments about me and about our church rolled off my back.
I tried to convince myself that people’s comments didn’t hurt me.
I never talked with my therapist about the hurt, because I didn’t feel I needed to.
There was nothing to work on.
I was fine.
After all, I’d forgiven these people.
It was done.
And now I needed to be okay.
But I wasn’t okay.
Stuffing down the pain and hurt doesn’t get rid of the pain and hurt.
When you stuff down the pain and hurt, the pain and hurt is still there.
A friend was in my office a few days ago and asked about my ordination certificate.
As I showed it to him, I pointed out that two of the four people who signed it eight years ago would likely never sign it today.
They’d never support me being a pastor.
They likely wouldn’t even call me a Christian at this point.
And it’s fine. They don’t have to think of me as a pastor. Or a Christian.
But it still hurts whenever I think about the disagreements that led to these folks thinking of me in those ways.
Again, I didn’t do any internal work to try and heal.
I just tried to let it go.
But I couldn’t.
It’s been years, and I’m still angry.
Still hurt.
Still upset.
There’s a lot of healing I haven’t done over the last few years.
I still feel all of the wounds.
I’m hurt by the comments that folks in our neighborhood have made about me; about our church.
I’m hurt by those who ordained me and now consider me a heretic.
I’m hurt by Christian friends who have ghosted me after I said something that skirted outside of the bounds of their dogma.
I’ve never healed, because I’ve never tried to heal.
Because I thought I shouldn’t need to. Shouldn’t want to.
I saw quick forgiveness as mandatory for the Jesus follower. Especially a pastor.
I worry that others have a similar story.
I worry that a bunch of us have avoided the process of grief and healing because we were taught to forgive and forget.
Some of you reading right now are probably thinking “The process of grief and healing are a part of the forgiveness process.”
And yeah, you're probably right.
But I've never heard a sermon where the preacher says “Allow yourself to be angry for a while. It's part of the process of forgiving a person.”
Have you?
I hope so.
I kinda doubt it.3
A far worse problem is the way that some Christians use forgiveness as a weapon.
A story was told on that Mars Hill Podcast from last year about a woman who was strong-armed into immediately forgiving her physically abusive husband because he repented.
The abuse was from the night before.
Forcing someone to forgive her abusive spouse by using God and/or the bible is awful.
Forgiveness shouldn’t be used that way.
It’s abusive.
It’s manipulative.
While that example showed forgiveness intentionally being used in a problematic way, I wonder whether I've inadvertently given a similar message.
I look back on the many, many sermons I’ve preached on forgiveness over the years, and wonder now how they’ve been heard.
In my ignorance, did I make the case for someone to forgive and get back together with their abuser?
Did I accidentally implore people to skip past the process of grief and healing, and to push down any hurt or pain?
Or worse, have my messages about forgiveness given abusive people the confidence to manipulate their victims into forgiving them?
Maybe I’m overthinking this. Maybe pastors talking about forgiveness isn’t hurting anyone.
But I think it might be.
I think over the years I’ve personally missed some healing and growth because of my desire to forgive quickly.
I wonder if in general, Christians have taken Jesus’ “if you don’t forgive…” instruction to an extreme.
Jesus never mentions a timeline.
And in a lot of situations, forgiveness doesn’t happen quickly.
Maybe it shouldn’t happen quickly.
The abused shouldn’t be forced to immediately forgive their abusers.
Maybe they shouldn’t ever have to.
Maybe we’ve taken words that Jesus said as a general rule and weaponized them.
These are thoughts in process. Still thinking, praying, conversing, and wondering about them.
Honestly, that's been one of the hardest parts of my deconstruction: feeling as though I had to have a solid conviction before talking publicly about a piece of my faith shift.
I'm working on it. Trying to deconstruct a little more publicly these days.
This substack is, and will always be, free.
I have zero plans to ever put anything I write here behind a paywall.
But if you want to financially support my writing, you’re welcome to do that.
Supporting me won’t get you anything tangible.
But you’ll make me smile.
And you’ll probably incentivize me to keep writing.
Mt. 6:15
I reread that little book recently and I think I still approve of like 80-90% of it. That's pretty good, right? 🙂
And if you have, your church sounds cool. Can I come?
Definitely NOT overthinking. I am with you here. And there is a HUGE difference between forgiving the action (you can’t change the past) but that doesn’t mean those actions haven’t left permanent scars that never seem to fully heal and with the right triggers, those scars can burst open and fester all over again), and forgiving the offender(s). Forgiving them does NOT mean you have to bring them into your personal space now or ever again, or respect them, or ever, Ever, EVER have to accept the damage done as your own guilt. Being violated, which is what offending truly is, regardless of the method, needs time to grieve. Everyone grieves differently with no timeline. For some, that may be a lifetime.
I agree, you’re not overthinking. This is an excellent article. Thank you.