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For the church that let you down, and for the faith you are trying to keep hold of separately from it. Scripture is on your side here more than you may expect.
Choose the prayer closest to your situation. You can pray it as written, change the words, or begin with a single line.
Maybe you still drive past the building on the way to the shops. Maybe you left two years ago and nobody has rung you since. Maybe you are still there on Sundays, sitting near the back, quietly working out how much longer you can keep this up.
Church hurt is strange because the people who hurt you are the people who prayed with you. That is what makes it hard to name, and harder still to explain to anyone who was not in the room. The words you were given for God have somebody else's voice in them now.
We are not going to tell you to go back, and we are not going to tell you to stay away. These are prayers for where you actually are tonight, whether or not you have worked out yet what you think.
18 prayers on this page, and 9 Bible passages with notes on what they mean.
For Sunday mornings when your body will not carry you through the door, and for the guilt that arrives with the car keys still in your hand.
God, I got as far as the car park. I cannot make my hands open the door. If that is all the worship I have in me today, it is what I have. Stay in the car with me.
It is Sunday again and I am not going. I do not know whether that is fear or wisdom. You know. I am not asking you to send me back. I am asking you to be here, in this kitchen, where I am.
God, I am not in a building. Meet me here.
My body knew before I did. The smell of the coffee, the sound of that door. Thank you for the warning it keeps giving me. Help me listen to it without hating it.
For the rage that turns up at odd hours, and for the worry that being this angry means you have failed at being a Christian.
God, I am angry. Not sad, not disappointed. Angry. I am told to bring you everything, so here it is, all of it, without me tidying it up first.
I want them to be found out. I want someone with authority to look straight at what they did and call it what it is. I am not going to pretend otherwise in front of you. You are the judge. I would rather want this where you can see it.
It is three in the morning and I am furious. You are awake. Sit with it.
Some of this is aimed at you. You saw it. It went on for years and it went on in your name. I have nowhere else to take that, so I am taking it to you.
For the phone call, the long email, the safeguarding meeting, and for the days afterwards when you cannot tell whether anyone believed a word of it.
God, I have the number written on the back of an envelope. Give me enough steadiness to say the first sentence. If I cry the whole way through it, let it still be heard.
They listened, and then they closed ranks. You know what happened. You were in the room. Hold what I said, even if the minutes of that meeting never do.
It is out of my hands now. Keep me from checking my phone all night.
For prayers that now sound like somebody else's voice, for songs you cannot sing any more, and for the question of whether God was ever separate from those people at all.
Every phrase I know for talking to you, I learned in that room. I do not have any other words yet. Take these ones back off them and let me use them again.
The book is on the shelf and I cannot pick it up. It has their notes in the margins. I am not going to force it today. I am here instead, which is something.
God, I still want you. I am just done with what they said you were.
Was any of it real, or was it only ever them. I am asking honestly and I have no answer. If you are there, I am still asking.
For the friend still sitting in that church, for the relative who cannot see it yet, and for your own children, who were in that building too.
She is still there and she cannot see it yet. Keep me from shaking her by the shoulders. Put someone in front of her she will actually listen to. Guard her while she works it out at her own speed.
They were in that building too, and they were small. I do not know what they took in. Whatever is sitting in them, be gentle with it, and let them tell me when they are ready to.
There are decent people still in that church who saw it and did nothing, and I do not know what to do with that. I am not ready to forgive it. Look after them anyway.
What each passage meant where it was written, and what it does and does not offer you now.
The diseased have ye not strengthened, neither have ye healed that which was sick, neither have ye bound up that which was broken, neither have ye brought back that which was driven away, neither have ye sought that which was lost; but with force and with rigor have ye ruled over them.
Ezekiel 34:1–16: read the chapter
Ezekiel was writing to people already scattered and a long way from home. What God says here is a charge sheet, read out item by item, against the men who were meant to be feeding them. Notice where the scattering is never laid. Verse 5 gives the reason without hedging: they were scattered because there was no shepherd. Judgment does fall inside the flock by the end of the chapter, but read which way round it goes. The same sentence that binds up the broken and strengthens the sick is the one that goes after the fat and the strong. When this chapter is used to warn people against leaving a church, it has been turned round the wrong way.
Therefore thus saith Jehovah, the God of Israel, against the shepherds that feed my people: Ye have scattered my flock, and driven them away, and have not visited them; behold, I will visit upon you the evil of your doings, saith Jehovah.
Jeremiah 23:1–4: read the chapter
Jeremiah said this about the religious leadership of his day, as a class, with nobody let off for seniority, in a country that was about to lose everything. The verbs matter. Scattered, driven away, not visited. People often assume that criticising a church leader is off limits for a believer. Jeremiah did it with God's own words behind him, and the promise that follows is that God will go and gather the people those men drove off.
But it was thou, a man mine equal, My companion, and my familiar friend.
Psalm 55:12–14: read the chapter
The psalm is not describing an attack by an outsider. It is describing someone he worshipped alongside, which is why he says he cannot simply endure it and move on. If you have been told that what happened to you was just people being people, this verse disagrees. Betrayal by someone you prayed with is treated in Scripture as its own kind of wound, worth a psalm of its own.
His mouth was smooth as butter, But his heart was war: His words were softer than oil, Yet were they drawn swords.
Psalm 55:20–23: read the chapter
This is charm described as a weapon, which is often the hardest part to make anyone else believe. He was warm. He was funny. Everybody liked him. The verse just after it, about casting your burden on the Lord, gets lifted out of this psalm and handed to people as a way of ending the conversation. In its place it comes after the accusation, not instead of it.
but whoso shall cause one of these little ones that believe on me to stumble, it is profitable for him that a great millstone should be hanged about his neck, and [that] he should be sunk in the depth of the sea.
Matthew 18:6–9: read the chapter
Jesus is not measured here, and he is not talking about the person who was harmed. He is talking about the one who did the harming. This verse is regularly turned back on people who speak up, on the grounds that telling the truth might make others stumble. That reading requires the sentence to mean the opposite of what it says.
Yea, they bind heavy burdens and grievous to be borne, and lay them on men’s shoulders; but they themselves will not move them with their finger.
Matthew 23:1–12: read the chapter
The complaint is a double standard, not doctrine. Rules for you, exemptions for them, and a set of titles and seats that keep the arrangement in place. Christians have long disagreed about how far the lines on titles reach, and this page is not going to settle what any church may call its clergy. What the passage is plainly doing a few verses later is levelling the room, by making the greatest the servant. If you have been told to submit to a standard the person teaching it has never had to live under, you have already understood this passage.
He that is a hireling, and not a shepherd, whose own the sheep are not, beholdeth the wolf coming, and leaveth the sheep, and fleeth, and the wolf snatcheth them, and scattereth [them]:
John 10:1–15: read the chapter
Jesus separates the shepherd who stays when it costs him from the hired hand who is gone the moment there is trouble. Both were standing in the same place last year. Earlier in the same passage the sheep flee from a voice they do not recognise, and that is described as ordinary good sense rather than rebellion. Walking away from a voice is allowed here.
Not that we have lordship over your faith, but are helpers of your joy: for in faith ye stand fast.
2 Corinthians 1:24: read the chapter
Paul had as strong a claim to authority over that church as anyone in the New Testament, and this is the line he draws. Not your faith. Not yours to steer, grant or withdraw. It is a short verse and worth keeping somewhere you can find it, because the whole logic of a controlling church depends on the opposite being true.
neither as lording it over the charge allotted to you, but making yourselves ensamples to the flock.
1 Peter 5:1–4: read the chapter
This is written to elders, by an elder, so it cannot be dismissed as an outsider's complaint. The same few verses rule out coercion and money as motives. What you were told was strong leadership is named here as the thing leaders are specifically instructed not to do. You were not imagining the difference.
Quoted from the American Standard Version (1901), which is in the public domain. Every reference on this page was checked against the text. Chapter links open the same translation in our reader.
Verses about forgiveness, unity and submission get used to move people back towards someone who is not safe. If Scripture is being quoted at you to stop you reporting something, to keep it in house, or to get you into a room with that person again, that is exactly the misuse these passages were never for. Prayer is not a substitute for safeguarding. Speaking to the police, to a statutory or denominational safeguarding officer, or to a therapist is not a failure of faith, and nothing above asks you to go back.
If you do one thing after reading this, take the shortest prayer on the page and say it out loud, once, wherever you happen to be sitting. Not to prove anything to anyone, and not to settle what you think about the church. Just to hear your own voice speaking to God with nobody else in the room.
