Wounded by Christians: When the Church is the Source of the Wound

Some of the deepest wounds a person carries can be inflicted by Christian people, or even a particular church. Is this true for you? Is there a pastor who betrayed a confidence? A community that circled the wagons around the wrong person? A friendship that evaporated the moment you needed it most? A leader whose private life turned out to be nothing like his public one?  

These types of scenarios are not uncommon. I have heard versions of them repeatedly over the course of my life, and they are always painful to sit with. 

If you carry one of those wounds, I want to say something clearly up front: what happened to you was wrong. You are not oversensitive for being hurt by it. You are not spiritually weak for still feeling it. Your pain is real, and it deserves to be dealt with as such. 

But I also want to say something else, because I think it matters just as much: the person who hurt you does not get to decide what becomes of the rest of your life. That part is still yours. 

The Honest Difficulty of Forgiveness 

Lysa TerKeurst, in her book Forgiving What You Can't Forget, writes something I have never been able to shake: “I am a soul who likes the concept of forgiveness — until I am a hurting soul who doesn’t.” 

That is one of the most honest sentences I have read on the subject. Most of us believe in forgiveness in the abstract. We affirm it theologically, because we’ve heard sermons on it and we know what Jesus said about it in Matthew 18 and what Paul said about it in Ephesians 4:32. But then something happens — something specific, involving a specific person who should have known better — and the concept of forgiveness suddenly feels impossible. 

That gap between what we believe and what we feel is not necessarily a sign of weak faith. It is a sign that you are human and that you were genuinely hurt. The question is not whether forgiveness can be hard. Often, it is. The question is what we do with the hardness. 

Scripture never minimizes betrayal. David wrote about it in the Psalms with raw, unguarded grief. “Even my close friend, someone I trusted, one who shared my bread, has turned against me” (Ps 41:9). Jesus himself was handed over by one of his own twelve. The Bible is a book many of whose authors had been betrayed by those closest to them, and who found that God met them in that place of betrayal and pain. 

What Forgiveness Is and Isn’t 

One of the reasons people get stuck is that they misunderstand the true nature of forgiveness. They think they need to sweep the injury under the rug, pretending it didn’t happen, or restore the relationship to exactly what it was before, or feel warmly toward someone who has not acknowledged what they did. None of those things are what forgiveness actually requires. 

To be clear, forgiveness is not the same as reconciliation. You can forgive someone fully and still maintain a boundary that protects you from further harm. Forgiveness does not require you to place yourself back in a situation that was damaging. It does not require you to minimize what happened or manufacture feelings you do not have. 

What forgiveness does require is a decision — repeated, sometimes daily — to refuse to let resentment become the organizing principle of your inner life. TerKeurst puts it plainly: “My ability to heal cannot be conditional on them wanting my forgiveness, but only on my willingness to give it.” The other person’s response, or lack of one, does not control whether you get to heal. That is actually good news, even when it doesn’t feel like it. 

There is also a practical reality that forgiveness addresses. The Bible is quite clear that bitterness rots the soul, and it seeps out into our lives, ruining one aspect after another. Unresolved bitterness spreads. It colors how we read new relationships, how we enter new communities, how we respond to new leaders. The writer of Hebrews warns about a “bitter root” that grows up and defiles many (Heb 12:15). He is describing something any honest person who has carried a wound for years already knows: bitterness does not stay in one place. 

The Longer Work 

Healing from wounds inflicted by Christians is rarely quick, and anyone who tells you otherwise has not sat with enough people who have been through it. It is slow work, and sometimes it feels like two steps forward, one step back. Some days feel like genuine progress. Others feel like you are back at the beginning. 

What I have seen over many years is that the people who come through it tend to share a few things in common. They allowed themselves to grieve honestly rather than rushing to resolution. They did not isolate, even when isolation felt safer. And at some point, they made a quiet decision to stop defining themselves primarily as victims. 

That last one is harder than it sounds. When someone wounds you inside the church, it can reshape how you see yourself, how you see God, and how you see the community of faith. Untangling those things takes time and usually takes help from a trusted friend, a counselor, or a pastor who has earned your confidence. 

But it is possible, because the God who allowed you to walk through it has not finished writing your story. What happened to you is part of your story, but not the whole of it. You are more than what was done to you. And with God’s help, and in His time, the wound that someone else caused can become the very place where your faith grows its deepest roots.