What Churches Don't Teach About Forgiveness
I spent 30+ years in church and could write a book about everything important I didn't learn there. Here's what I never heard anyone teach about forgiveness.
About 10 years ago, I walked away from church, probably for good. It’s kind of shocking how much I’ve learned outside of churches that I should have learned in them but never did. Pastors frequently use words like sin, repentance, forgiveness and reconciliation; but they don’t seem to understand how they all work together. They teach them as if they are all separate things, rather than different components of a single system.
People are flawed and imperfect. They regularly cause damage and pain to others and it is this damage and pain that is what Christianity calls “sin.” Although Christians love to create long lists of things that are “sins,” the truth is a sin isn’t a sin unless it causes damage and it is up to the individuals involved - and only them - to determine the extent of the damage.
This also means that there are all kinds of sins being committed in churches that they don’t want to admit to because they refuse to believe they are causing damage! Churches are like an older sibling that hits a younger sibling and says “that didn’t hurt.”
Damage, or hurtful actions (“sin”) create a debt and the payment of that debt is called forgiveness. Repentance and forgiveness are essentially two sides of the same coin, as both are a means of paying a debt. When and if the debt is paid, it can open the door to reconciliation but reconciliation is not always a given.
What is forgiveness?
There are four elements to this process or cycle, which are all interconnected.
Sin: To create a debt
Forgiveness: When you pay a debt
Repentance: When the offender pays a debt
Reconciliation: Something that can happen once a debt is paid
Most of us have heard many, many times how important forgiveness is, but it’s almost always taught as something you just “do” with little to no instruction as to how to do it. Imagine there was no such thing as money. How would you pay off a debt if there were no currency to do so with? This is what most churches teach about forgiveness. They tell you it’s important to do, but they never quite tell you how.
Imagine that you live in a house made of glass, as is everything inside of it. As a child, you have very little control over who can and can’t come in your house, which means you have very little ability to set boundaries. In addition, we are very trusting as children, which means we eagerly invite people into our “homes” (our interior worlds) and show them our most valuable treasures.
Some people may treat those treasures with care, but many do not. They stomp them; smash, break and shatter them. In addition, people throw rocks at us from the outside in the form of cruel words and hateful ideas. They tell us we are fat, ugly, stupid, and call us words like n-gger, raghead, chink, spic, dyke, fairy, bitch... Words we may not even understand but fully grasp the hate behind them, without ever knowing why they hate us so much.
Every word is like a rock that shatters windows and doors. As our house slowly shatters around us, we have no idea how to fix it. Eventually most of us end up looking something like this:
We’re all just these broken empty shells walking around - and sometimes even isolating. Over time, all those broken and shattered windows can leave our interior life looking something like this:
Sometimes, people learn how to create a false facade. They slap a lot of paint on the outside of their house and put up some clear plastic to hide their shattered windows. But behind the facade, they are still the same broken down, empty shell of a person as everyone else.
Part of the reason we have an opioid crisis is because we are a nation in PAIN; because we refuse to acknowledge any type of wounding except to the physical body.
While these photos might be pictures of houses, imagine they are pictures of your soul. The truth is, pain is pain and emotional, psychological and spiritual pain are registered by your body in the exact same way as physical pain. But we live in a world that only acknowledges pain and damage to the physical body.
If you break your arm, you would most likely be taken almost immediately to a doctor who would scan your arm, see that there is damage and take corrective action to fix it. But what about wounds to your heart or your soul? How are we fixing or addressing those?
If you broke your arm and didn’t receive medical attention what would happen? Eventually the bones would grow back together in some form or fashion, but they would be out of place and would cause all the surrounding tissues and ligaments to reform improperly as well.
Not only would this inhibit your ability to function, it would most likely cause you pain. What modern medical science is showing us is that not only is the pain of a broken heart real but we also literally feel it in the same way we feel the pain of a broken arm. Even more importantly when people say that pain is “all in your head” they are not wrong but that also doesn't make it any less real.
If you were laying on the ground with a bone sticking out of your leg, the pain you feel would be real but you also feel it in your head not your leg. Every time someone says something to you that shatters your soul, it’s like someone breaking a leg or an arm. Unlike a broken leg or arm, however, we don’t receive treatment for the wounds to our hearts and our souls.
When left untended those wounds do the same thing that leaving a broken bone untended does. We may heal but we heal incorrectly and it leaves us emotionally crippled and in pain. If the wounding happens early enough we may not even recognize the injury for what it is and may just live every day in chronic pain that we think is just normal. Until one day, we take something that is mean to alleviate physical pain and discover it also alleviates the emotional pain we never knew we had.
How many people have gone to doctors complaining of chronic pain only to be told the doctor couldn’t find anything physically wrong and therefore the pain is not real? What if, instead of dismissing people’s pain as being “fake” just because we can’t find a physical reason for it, we trust that people who are not in pain do not claim that they are. Maybe if a person says they are in pain, they are.
Medical scientists have often wondered why some people take opioids just fine and never develop an addiction, while others become hooked almost immediately. There are many reasons for these differences, but this is a big one. People who do not experience any other type of pain prior to taking opioids are less likely to develop a dependence on them. When you grow up in pain, you just think pain is normal. Until you take something that suddenly takes it away. Then you become dependent on the thing that takes away the pain you didn’t know you had. People who are not in pain do not need painkillers.
How do we heal?
I said that forgiveness literally means to pay a debt. So, imagine someone broke a window in your literal physical house. Obviously, for it to be fixed, someone has to pay to replace it, right? Forgiveness would mean you would pay to replace the window yourself. Which you would do because it’s your house and you have to live in it! The same things that are true of your physical body are also true of your mind, heart and soul.
Imagine someone breaks your arm. No matter how sorry they are, you are the one that has to go to the hospital to get it tended to. You are the person that has to endure the pain and possibly even months of rehab to get your arm working again and it might not ever be the same again, which you have to live with.
The same things that happen to your body can also happen to your heart, mind and soul. “Forgiveness” is the process of healing. Every time you go to rehab or exercise your arm, you are “forgiving” the “debt” or injury. When the debt is fully forgiven, you are fully healed.
Many people refuse to forgive because they think it lets the offender or abuser off somehow. But refusing to forgive is like refusing to go to the hospital to get a broken arm fixed or refusing to go through rehab to get it working again because the initial injury was not your “fault.”
While it is true someone breaking your arm is not your fault, if you refuse to get it fixed or go through rehab to get it working again, you are the one that pays the price for that every single day. Too many people are waiting around for the person who injured them to fix the damage they caused. Unfortunately, rightly or wrongly, that’s not how it works.
Obviously, there are some injuries you can literally just “forgive” on the spot. If someone were to accidentally slap you or hit you in the head but there is no injury, you can literally say “it’s okay” because it is. But there are other injuries that may take years to heal from - or forgive - and will require a long process of healing. You can’t just say “it’s okay” and move on, which is unfortunately what most churches seem to teach about forgiveness.
Repentance is when the person that caused the injury “pays” for the damage, but repentance can only go so far. For instance, if someone caused you a physical injury, they can pay your hospital bills but they can’t suffer the pain of the injury for you, they can’t go to rehab for you and they can’t do all the hours and hours of exercises required to be whole again.
What’s interesting to me is that the dictionary definition of repentance - as is often the definition used in most churches - is nothing but a feeling or a “change of mind.”
If “sin” is the creation of debt or the initial action that caused a debt to be made, the simply “feeling” regret or contrition is not going to repay the debt. I find it mind boggling that churches teach about sin, forgiveness and repentance, yet seem to completely miss the direct correlation between them.
Repentance as a “feeling” does not even begin to come close to satisfying the initial debt. But that’s what churches teach, right? When you do something wrong, you “feel bad” about it for a while, maybe even apologize for it and move on.
But that still leaves the windows shattered.
It is also ironic that Christian churches theoretically claim to model themselves after Jesus, yet they miss the very significance of what Jesus came to do. The message of the gospel is that Jesus paid our debt. He “repented” for us, so we could be “clean.” And how did he do that? Did he come to earth and “feel bad” - or did he literally give his life to pay our debt?
Too many Christians believe that since Jesus paid our debt, we don’t have to, but I don’t believe that’s the message of the Bible. I believe Jesus paid our debt with God, but we are still responsible for our debts to each other. It’s also interesting that Christianity seems to focus on our “sins” against God - which are already paid for - but not our sins against each other or to other people.
True repentance means paying a debt to the person you have wronged or “sinned against.”
The problem with the church and dictionary definition of repentance is it does absolutely nothing to compensate others for the damage and harm we cause them. Perhaps a large part of the reason for this, however, is that churches literally do not know how to repent.
Again, how do you “pay” a debt for which there is no currency? While I might be able to pay money to have a literal window replaced in your house because we have currency for that, how do we “pay” for damage done to someone else’s soul?
There’s actually a very interesting answer to that, which I believe is found in the Lord’s Prayer, where it says “forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.”
I am a big believer in the 12 steps. I believe the Evangelical church in particular has become so focused on and obsessed with “leading people to Christ” that they have forgotten that ”discovering Jesus” so to speak, is only the first step on a very long journey. Evangelical churches are about numbers not discipleship.
This is because they can brag loudly about how many people “got saved” or got baptized, but it’s kind of hard to brag about how many people grew and matured in their faith. In addition, church has become the place you go to show everyone how perfect you are, not the place where you reveal how deeply, deeply damaged and flawed you are.
Recovery groups are achieving what churches should be but are not.
Recovery groups are places where people can go and be fully transparent and honest about their struggles as well as having a framework to help keep them moving forward. That framework is the 12 steps.
One of the critical elements of the 12 steps is that of “making amends.” Two of the 12 steps direct you to make a list of all the people you have wronged and then try and “make amends” to those you have wronged. I believe this is what the Bible refers to as repentance. It’s an active process that actually involves the people you have wronged, not just a “feeling of remorse.”
I think we are a nation of damaged people with no idea how to fix or heal that damage and churches aren’t helping. But recovery groups often are. Too many people are sitting around waiting for someone to come and fix the damage that has been caused them but the truth is, I think we fix ourselves.
Some may never forgive because they find it too outrageous to be asked to “pay” for damage that was caused them but I think that also ignores the damage that we all cause to others. It’s always easier to focus on damage caused to us than the damage we cause others. I think our damage gets healed through the process of attempting to heal the damage we have caused.
Even knowing that, some people will just stubbornly go on living in a house with broken windows; slowly decaying day by day. What’s true of a house is true of you. The longer you wait to fix your windows, the more interior damage it causes. No matter how outrageous it may seem, forgiving (paying the debt) benefits you.
I once heard a great allegory about heaven. As the story goes, a person went to hell and found it filled with plenty of food, but everyone had 6-foot chopsticks they had to try and eat it with. Everyone was starving because they were all trying to feed themselves. The person then went to Heaven and found the same situation; lots of food and 6-foot chopsticks, but everyone had plenty to eat because they all fed each other.
I think forgiveness comes through repentance. I think that as we turn the focus away from all the wrongs done to us and focus instead on trying to make amends for the wrongs we have committed against others, I think our wounds begin to heal.
Reconciliation depends on repentance, not forgiveness
I believe one of the absolutely most destructive things churches teach is that reconciliation is the automatic outcome of forgiveness. Even worse, too many churches teach that you have to forgive others (pay the debt incurred against you) and then reconcile with the person that injured you!
Forgiveness is to pay a debt yourself. If someone repents - pays for the damage they caused you - then reconciliation might be possible, but not always. A lot of it has to do with how deep the damage that was done, over what period of time and their level of repentance (how much of the damage they pay for).
For instance, if you have a father who spent your entire childhood abusing you, then you forgiving them (repairing the damage they caused) does not give them the right to just come right back in and cause more damage. If, on the other hand, they spend years slowly healing the damage they caused (paying down the debt), then you might consider reconciling with them but it’s not automatically a given.
The point is, anyone who caused you damage once is likely to do it again. A person who tries to make amends for the damage they caused is showing you they recognize they caused you damage in the first place. That means there is a chance that if you let them in your house again, they may not cause the same damage again. This is where boundaries come in.
Forgiveness brings healing, which helps us create healthy relationships
If your life is a house, then there are people you might trust to be in your house even if you were off on vacation somewhere and there are people you will not (and should not) allow in your house unless you are right there to watch their every move. Then there are people that should never be allowed within 100 yards of your house.
Part of growing and maturing is learning how to determine for yourself which are which. Relationships require trust. Without learning how to determine who is and is not safe to let in our house, we will never be able to trust anyone.
As children. we were often taught to trust people that were actually untrustworthy. As an adult, it is important to learn how to make your own decisions about who you can and can’t trust. There are always going to be untrustworthy people telling you to trust them or getting angry when you don’t. It’s not your responsibility to trust everyone that tells you to, it’s your responsibility to develop your own system for deciding who you can and cannot trust and how much to trust them. Trust is not all or nothing.
Building trust, or even learning to trust again, is a careful process, which also requires the ability to forgive. If you don’t have the confidence of knowing you know how to repair your own windows if you trust the wrong person and they create damage, then you’ll never be able to let anyone in your house again. Learning to forgive (and the reality of what that means) is critical for building good relationships - or any relationships at all.