Lie #1 – I Am Expendable

from Helena Sorenson Aman:

Lie #1: “I am expendable. It’s the institution that matters.”

There’s nowhere else to begin, but this one is tough. It’s tough because, for many of us, our experience of Christianity is two-fold. There’s the stated reality, the thing we’re all ostensibly here for. And then there’s the unspoken reality—the stuff we absorbed in our bodies, the information we gathered by reading between the lines. The unspoken reality is ambiguous—often tricky to uncover, difficult to name, powerful by virtue of its deniability.

You are probably a Christian because you believe that God loves us (so we love God back) and God loves people (so we love people, too). And that stated reality is on the letterhead and the church bulletins and the colored banners hanging in the sanctuary, and it is there in the verses and the songs. But should a living, breathing, loved-by-God human being present a threat to the church’s agenda or its leaders’ reputation or the seamless progress of the status quo, it suddenly becomes clear that the person is not a person but a hindrance to the “advancement of the kingdom/gospel/insert-Christian-word-here.”

And the thing is: I knew it. As a little, bitty girl I knew that the pastor mattered more than me. I knew that, whatever the cost, the show must go on.

As though there is any show worth sacrificing people for.