The Healthy Church Staff Podcast
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The Healthy Church Staff Podcast
When the Congregation Carries Trauma
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When a church walks through a crisis, whether it's a leadership failure or a moral failure or even just deep division, the congregation doesn't just move on. They carry trauma, sometimes silently. And today we're going to explore what congregational trauma looks like in your church, how to identify it, and how to gently shepherd your people through healing. If your church has gone through pain, this one's for you. Hi there, my name's Todd Rhodes. I'm one of the co-founders over at chemistrystaffing.com, and I am your host right here on the Healthy Church Staff Podcast. What if your congregation is still bleeding and maybe you don't even know it? Maybe the scandal was years ago. Maybe it was a decisive pastor that left a long time ago. Maybe things on the outside look fine. But deep down, your people are still carrying wounds that maybe they haven't even named. They still don't trust leadership. They're still waiting for that other shoe to drop. And they still flinch when anything feels too familiar. Today we're going to explore how this unresolved trauma shapes your church culture and what you can do to help heal it. Okay, let's get started. All right, trauma is not just a personal experience. When churches and congregations go through the fall of a leader or some kind of internal crisis, congregations, not just the people, but congregations as a whole experience what I call collective trauma. It could be after a moral failure, it could be after a toxic leader that leaves. It could be some church discipline that got just really messy. It could be after a split, maybe, or a cover-up, or some kind of a betrayal. And often nobody ever names it. The preaching moves on, Sundays keep coming every seven days, right? The new staff settle in, but the congregation, they still haven't healed instead. There's some of this trauma that gets buried under all the new sermon series and the new signage and the new name and the new vision statement that often happens, right? So what are the symptoms? And let me tell you, we just worked with a church that had some trauma that came up with a new hire. They were getting ready to hire somebody new, and it came up that there was trauma back in the late 1980s. Yeah. 30 years ago. And people in the church were still holding on to that because it was never really dealt with. So let's talk about the symptoms of an unhealed church. Here are some of the things that you might see. Okay. Maybe low volunteer engagement or buy-in. Okay. Now this is harder to track after 30 years, right? But if it's been the past couple years, if you still have low volunteer engagement or low buy-in, there may be some unhealed church hurt and trauma there that you need to deal with. Maybe there's hypersuspicion of leadership motives. Maybe they used to trust leadership, and now everybody's skeptical. Maybe there's resistance to vision casting. Maybe there are triggered responses to leadership, style, or tone. You get attacked and you just don't even know where it's coming from. It's coming from hurt. It could be that there's just fear-based silence in staff meetings. And congregate congregants move forward. They have to move forward, but they do so sometimes with spiritual fatigue or disillusionment. Now I want to make this I want to make this really clear. And as a leader, you can confuse these, right? These are not signs of rebellion. Okay? They're not signs of people just trying to be difficult. They're not signs of people trying to take you down in most cases. They're simply symptoms of past wounds that, man, they still hurt. They still hurt. So as a leader, as a shepherd, how do you lead people and shepherd people through the pain? I've got five steps here for you. Might want to write these down. I think these are good. First of all, name it. You can't heal what you don't acknowledge. You gotta figure out, okay, where's this coming from? What's the problem? Where's where was the infraction? Where is the trauma coming from? Name it. If you can't name it, it's really hard to acknowledge it and to move on. Okay. Number two is normalize the trauma responses in your church, okay? Rather than saying sucking up buttercup, get over it. You need to lead people through this. And this is what's missing on the back end of a lot of scandal, on the back end of a lot of abusive leadership, and the back end of broken trust and on church leadership. We just tell them everybody to move on. There's nothing to see here, right? Nothing to see here. In reality, you need to normalize that a little bit. You're not weak. You're human. You have every right to feel that. You live this through as well. So step number one is name it. Step number two is normalize it and acknowledge it. Okay. Step number three, create some safe spaces for dialogue and story sharing. If you didn't do that initially, it's going to be a little bit harder to set this up now. But I've known churches that have actually called meetings a couple years after some kind of incident like this and just said, hey, we're gonna, we're gonna finally unpack this and discuss it. And sometimes I've seen leadership teams that will just come up and repent and say, hey, when this happened, it wasn't us. But we as a church never corporately repented of what happened here and shared how we're moving forward. So create safe spaces. That's step number three so that you can have dialogue and that so that you can share stories. Step number four is man, you've got to have grace. You have to have grace and you have to have patience. Those two things have to set your leadership to tone. This trauma, this hurt, this heartache that your congregation is going through corporately, it takes time to heal. They say time heals all wounds, and it it does take time, but you do need to be proactive to kind of help it along. And then step number five, if needed, okay? Not everybody needs this. Some churches do, and they just say no, it's not that important. If needed, bring in some outside help, some counselors, some mediators, some pastors that have been through this with a congregation that can come in and help you because chances are this is new, this is unique to your church. You've never seen this, you've never led through it before. And sometimes you just need some help. So the bottom line here is the goal is not just to move on, it's to rebuild trust, it's to restore safety and to rekindle joy. And until you do those three things, nobody, I'm telling you, they might say everybody's good, but nobody's gonna be able to move on. Very few people are. So you don't shepherd ideal people, you shepherd real people. And some of their some of those people are quietly carrying trauma from the very church that really should have been their refuge, but it turned out that it wasn't. And yeah, they're experiencing hurt, and it's your job to lead them through it. Has your church ever gone through something like this? What helped the most? I'd love to hear from you. You can reach out to me, podcast at chemistry staffing.com. And if there's any way that I can help you through this and to rebuild healing, I'd love to help churches in this area. If there's any way that I can help you as a consultant, as a coach, just as a sounding board, to hop on a Zoom call, listen to your story, I'd be happy to do that. Just reach out to me and let me know a little bit of your story and let's connect. My email is podcast at chemistry staffing.com. All right, that's it for today. We're here every Monday through Friday. Quick promo for going and taking. If you haven't already, take the Church Staff Assessment Assessment. We do that every year. You can get that at churchstaffassessment.com. All right, thanks so much. We will be right back here tomorrow on the Healthy Church Staff Podcast Temperature.
