Be Quick to Listen, Slow to ‘Therapy Speak’
When I went to fill out the intake questionnaire before my first appointment, I regurgitated what I’d heard. I was seeking therapy to “
establish healthier emotional boundaries because of a codependent relationship that had left me traumatized.”
It’s not like these words were entirely inaccurate. It’s that they’d become clichés, shorthand that kept me from
understanding the nuances of my own experience. I wasn’t undergoing “trauma.” But I was scared of what another romantic relationship would look like and worried about whether it would turn out the same way this one had.
But after a few sterile sessions full of the jargon I’d picked up from friends and the internet, I stopped using these terms—trauma, codependence, emotional boundaries. I was using language to distance myself from reality. I was
confusing self-preservation for emotional maturity.
I’m not alone in my use of “therapy speak.” Thanks to social media, terms once confined to clinical settings are ubiquitous in everyday conversations. A difficult roommate is “toxic”; conflict is “abuse”; every ex-boyfriend is a “narcissist”; and stress is always “trauma.” We are all “victims”; we are all “gaslit.”
Sometimes, of course, these words are warranted. With mental illness on the rise, it’s helpful to have common language at our disposal.
I was going through a breakup when I started therapy post-pandemic. My friends were telling me that I needed to work on healthier emotional boundaries. They said I was probably experiencing trauma from a toxic ex. Most likely, I’d been in a codependent relationship.
We sang “River of Life” to get warmed up, and then, to mellow the mood for the gospel presentation, “Seek Ye First.” A haunting descant rose over the melody, swelling my 12-year-old heart with grateful longing. I walked forward to accept Jesus into my heart, and a counselor prayed for me, shadows from the flames flickering across our faces.
Back home again, I needed to learn how to pray. I thought it was weird for the Lord to expect me, gangly and grappling with my fleshly nature, to carry on what felt like a nonreciprocal relationship with an invisible, inscrutable, and ineffable God—but I was willing to give it a shot.
My self-examination concluded,
I tendered other requests, like to make the premier soccer team and for a boy to return a crush. When those things didn’t happen, I swallowed a slight doubt. Perhaps James 4:3 was at play here: “When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures.” Maybe I had bad motives.
Only I couldn’t tell if I was doing it right. “God is not a vending machine,” our youth minister told us. “You have to pray according to his will.” So I
began by asking for help in various areas of self-improvement: I should be nice to my brother. I should have a cheerful attitude when vacuuming with the heavy canister Electrolux and not slam my bedroom door when I got mad. I needed to avoid Judy Blume books that celebrated masturbation and stop sneaking the M&Ms my mom hid in the freezer. God, please help me to be better.
Whichever position you might find yourself in, Rebecca McLaughlin’s new book will point you to precisely the place in the Bible where you should begin—with the gospel and Jesus. More about that in a bit.
Maybe you believe that the Bible opposes same-sex sexual relationships. Where in the Bible would you begin to explain your view? Maybe you doubt that the Bible opposes same-sex sexual relationships. Where in the Bible would you begin to build an argument for affirmation? Or maybe you are unsure whether the Bible affirms or opposes same-sex sexual relationships. Where in the Bible would you begin to inquire about the matter?
One trend is believers who experience same-sex sexual attraction, or self-identify as “gay,” writing first-person accounts about their journeys of faith and sexuality. This trend includes: Wesley Hill’s Washed and Waiting (2010); Christopher Yuan’s Out of a Far Country (2011); Rosaria Butterfield’s The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert (2012); Gregory Coles’s Single, Gay, Christian (2017); Jackie Hill Perry’s Gay Girl, Good God (2018); David Bennett’s A War of Loves (2018); and Rachel Gilson’s Born Again This Way (2020).
These writers,
each in their own style, recount their calling to be followers of Jesus and consider how to live and love faithfully and fruitfully according to the gospel. Together, they set forth a spiritual vision of holiness and righteousness that is relevant for every believer and the whole church.
The book, Does the Bible Affirm Same-Sex Sexual Relationships? Examining 10 Claims about Scripture and Sexuality, brings together two recent trends of books by evangelical writers.
On Monday, a group of ACNA clergy published an open letter expressing concern that there have not been public updates about a promised church trial for Ruch since November 2023. The letter pushes for regular updates on the trial’s progress and for information about why Ruch has not been inhibited, or limited in his duties, because of his alleged laxity in the past.
Nearly three years ago, Bishop Stewart Ruch of the Anglican Church in North America’s Diocese of the Upper Midwest admitted “regrettable errors” in handling sexual abuse allegations against a lay minister, before taking a leave of absence. An acting bishop took over the diocese and another ACNA bishop, Todd Atkinson, was tapped to assist him.
But Ruch’s absence hasn’t quelled the simmering controversy in the diocese, a sliver of the small, theologically conservative denomination that split from the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada in 2009 over those two denominations’ acceptance of LGBTQ clergy and marriage for same-sex couples.
Atkinson’s misconduct dates back to at least 2012, six years before he joined ACNA, according to the church court’s order. In 2014, Atkinson began overseeing a Canadian church planting initiative called Via Apostolica that was later grafted into ACNA’s Diocese of the Upper Midwest in 2020. The church court found Monday that Atkinson repeatedly fostered exploitative relationships with multiple women under the guise of being their “spiritual father.”
On the same day, Atkinson, the assisting bishop, was removed from ordained ministry after a church trial found he had engaged in inappropriate relationships with women and interactions with minors.
The Flannery O’Connor Novel
Flannery O’Connor was an inveterate rewriter, working, reworking, and deleting episodes from her stories and novels. Her archives, collected at Georgia College and State University in Milledgeville, bulge with deleted scenes and alternate versions of characters scarcely recognizable as the people who inhabit the published versions of her stories.
O’Connor spent five years crafting Wise Blood, her first novel. It took her seven years to complete a draft of her second novel, The Violent Bear It Away—and it was only 45,000 words long! (In her defense, she was simultaneously producing some of the best short stories ever written.)
When O’Connor died in 1964 at the age of 39, she left behind scraps and pieces of a third novel called Why Do the Heathen Rage?—a dozen or so episodes repetitively, even obsessively rewritten. In the early 1980s, the scholar Marian Burns described these literary oddments as “an untidy jumble of ideas and abortive starts, full scenes written and rewritten many times, several extraneous images, and one fully developed character.”
In the intervening decades, Why Do the Heathen Rage? has been mostly ignored. But in the last few years, author and Pepperdine University professor Jessica Hooten Wilson has dived into that untidy jumble, hoping to make sense of it for the rest of us. The result is Flannery O’Connor’s “Why Do the Heathen Rage?”: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at a Work in Progress, a book that alternates between Wilson’s explanatory essays and scenes from the novel that might have been.
“As alleged, Matthew Queen attempted to interfere with a federal grand jury investigation by creating false notes in an attempt to corroborate his own lies,” said US Attorney Damian Williams of the Southern District of New York in a statement. “The criminal obstruction charge announced today should exemplify the seriousness of attempts by any individual to manipulate or interfere with a federal investigation.”
A former Southern Baptist seminary professor and interim provost has been indicted on a charge of obstructing justice in a sexual misconduct case, the Department of Justice announced Tuesday.
Matt Queen, who was previously an administrator and professor at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, allegedly gave the FBI falsified notes during an ongoing investigation into alleged sexual misconduct at the seminary, which is in Fort Worth. He was arraigned Tuesday, according to the DOJ.
Queen, who was named pastor of Friendly Avenue Baptist Church in Greensboro, North Carolina, earlier this year, could not be reached for comment.
News of the DOJ investigation followed the release of a report from Guidepost Solutions showing that SBC leaders had mistreated abuse survivors for years, denied responsibility for the actions of local churches and downplayed the number of sexual abuse cases in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination.
The indictment is the first official acknowledgment by the DOJ of an investigation into the Southern Baptist Convention and its entities. Southern Baptist leaders announced in 2022 that they had been subpoenaed by the Department of Justice and promised to cooperate.
Yet I’m also persuaded it’s possible for Christians to speak faithfully in that tension, and that we do ourselves no favors by running away from the reality of social media’s influence.
There’s good reason for the church to be wary of social media influencers—particularly those who speak to spiritual matters. We aren’t wrong to be disconcerted at the idea of Christians being led by online personalities who might be more charismatic than theologically sound or more creative than credible, especially when the influencers are disconnected from church discipleship and discipline themselves. Algorithms, monetization, and viral moments create endless temptations and adverse incentives that can seduce even well-meaning creators into serving themselves and the worst elements of pop culture.
Those risks are not as new as they may seem. In John 7, Jesus’ brothers essentially tell him that he’s not maximizing his potential as a pre-digital influencer. He needed to be more outward-facing, they argued, and show off his miraculous works more frequently because “no one who wants to become a public figure acts in secret”.
I was reminded of this while attending this month’s Black Christian Influencers (BCI) Conference, where founder Jackie Horbrook succeeded in curating an atmosphere that was both aesthetically dope and substantively gospel-centered. Christian creators in fields as varied as theology, activism, and fashion came together to discuss how to use their platforms to glorify God—and how to navigate the risks that come with staying on the cutting edge of culture while centering Christ.
It’d be the biggest change to ECFA’s standards in 45 years.
For decades, the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability (ECFA) has established guidelines around financial transparency, stewardship, and governance. This year, the organization announced plans to add a new requirement to address the integrity and character of a ministry’s leaders.
The accreditation agency for over 2,700 evangelical nonprofits wants to raise its standards to address “one of the greatest financial risks” posed to churches and ministries today: moral failures by leadership.
First introduced in March 2024, the proposed standard states, “Every organization shall proactively care for its leader and support the integrity of its leader in conformity with ECFA’s Policy for Excellence in Supporting Leadership Integrity.”
ECFA members and experts in the Christian nonprofit agree with the idea of the new standard but aren’t sure exactly how to implement it.
“There’s consensus around the idea … that the board has an opportunity and responsibility to come alongside a leader to help leaders be in a position where they can best thrive,” Martin said.
In 2021, ECFA surveyed more than 800 of its member ministry leaders and board chairs, and 94 percent said leadership failures are impacting donor trust.
In an interview with Christianity Today, ECFA president and CEO Michael Martin likened the standard to a guardrail. While no written policy or accountability measure could eliminate sinful behavior by leadership—each leader ultimately bears responsibility for their own integrity—organizations can be doing more to help keep them in check.
