An Open Letter to The Gospel Coalition and Trevin Wax

If you haven’t read the TGC article, go HERE and read it.

While this is an open letter to TGC and Trevin, I will direct it toward Trevin.

Hi Trevin,

I’d like to start by acknowledging your impressive resume. You’ve written quite a bit and for some really impressive outlets. Your accolades seem to indicate you’re good at what you do. On a macro level, I’ll likely never occupy a platform similar to yours. Ultimately, I’m unimportant and unnoticeable in the circles of influence you occupy. However, on a micro level, I occupy a space very much in the center of what it seems that you’re trying to address in your article: a person’s decision to walk away from “the church.”

Let me introduce myself. My name is Bruce Pagano. I’m a licensed clinical professional counselor (LCPC) and a Certified Clinical Trauma Professional (CCTP), who has chosen to focus my expertise on spiritual harm and religious trauma. Additionally, I have been a pastor on staff at a number of churches and did some pastoral care and “counseling” for several years prior to becoming licensed. My decision to focus on spiritual harm and abuse is largely based on the time I spent in these two roles and my own experience with spiritual harm.

I would like to acknowledge the commitment I see in your writing to Christ and His bride. It seems clear that you’re trying to put words to and make sense of a phenomenon that seems to be plaguing our Christian institutions, specifically the dechurching of America.

With that said, it seems as though, in writing your article, you have conflated the modern model of the institutionalized church organization with the historical record of the gathered Christians called the Church. Throughout the article, you seem to interchange those conceptions of church with little acknowledgment of the differences that exist between early church gatherings and the modern American expression that we see today. I think it was Richard Rohr who said, “Christianity was originally offered in Israel as an experience, moved to Greece and became a philosophy, moved to Rome and became organized religion, moved to Europe and became a culture, and then moved to America and became a business.”

As I read your article, I found myself wondering whether you have known and/or sat with many people who have left church because of the abuse and harm that they either directly experienced or saw in the system. I think you get it partially right when you say, “There may never be a conscious choice to ‘walk away.’” I say partially because eventually, for many, it is a conscious, often excruciatingly difficult, decision.

The other statement I think you get right, but for different reasons than you note, is “…dechurching is the result of personal choices extended over time.” Often, a person’s decision to leave church only happens after years of numerous personal choices. Those choices involve decisions to believe the best in their leadership because “they’re a man of God.” It involves the weighing of the loss of important, often longstanding, relationships and friendships. It involves deciding to stay for their children’s involvement despite adult teachings that don’t always seem in line with what it means to follow Christ. It involves the decision to ignore your gut feeling because we lean not on our own understanding and instead decide to lean on the understanding of the church leader. It often involves the decision to hope for and believe the best about the organizations despite evidence to the contrary.

Sometimes it involves trying just “one more church,” because surely it’s a bug in that specific church structure and not a feature of the model. And then one day, you can’t ignore your own hurt or the hurt you see others enduring anymore. You can no longer continue to sear your own conscience by trading what seems like a clear division between what Christ teaches and what you see in the organization that claims to be His bride.

Over and above all that, your comment that confirms to me that you either don’t talk with dechurched people or don’t fully understand spiritual harm and abuse is, “But most of today’s dechurching is the result of our wayward hearts, not church leader scandals.” I’ll give you that people aren’t leaving because they see all of the “church leader scandals,” but that comment leads me to assume that you grossly misunderstand the subjective nature of spiritual harm and religious trauma. For you to speak so broadly and flippantly about the “waywardness” of a person’s heart who has experienced legitimate hurt at the hands of a religious leader and their institution is offensive to me both personally and professionally. You can not define or dictate the reality of a person’s experience. The moment you do, you lose the credibility to speak in that space.

We are not hearing more about church scandals because “people seek to justify their decision to leave.” We hear more about it because people are gaining the courage to acknowledge their own hurt and call to account those leaders who run the organizations that are supposed to represent Jesus. We’re also hearing more about those cases because people are done being complicit by being silent.

The recent dechurching is not exclusively evidence of people’s desire to simply not go to church or even a representation of their “individualistic context.” Instead, it seems to be a sweeping indictment that the single-leader church model is vulgarly flawed and continues to be a vehicle for abuse and harm, from the 30,000-person megachurch to the 12-person country church. People often leave to cling more tightly to Jesus and look for smaller, more intimate, and safer gatherings.

I would encourage you to reconsider many of your broad, sweeping statements about the people’s reasons for leaving. Maybe spend some time talking to people who have left and seek personal stories. If I could be so bold, it may also be helpful if you delineated between the institution that is the 501c3 organization and a group of people who are gathered around Jesus.

Kind regards, Bruce