Are you disillusioned by the Church? Have the actions or inactions by church leadership, or other Christians cause hurt, confusion and pain? In this honest conversation Gina and Loisa Matthys talk about the journey of hurt and bitterness. How Jesus can meet us there if we let Him, and the road to healing and restoration. Loisa is on staff at Gateway Church in Dallas Fort Worth, TX. and serves as a worship leader, pastor, writer and producer.
When Church Hurts
Gina:
Loisa, I can’t believe I’m sitting across from you. I’m so excited. You and I have some history. It’s been a while though since we’ve hung out; we haven’t been in the same space together for about five years. We’ve led worship together. You worked for Norm and the Art of Groove and all of his stuff.
Loisa:
So many DVDs, so many bubble mailing packets.
Gina:
You helped watch my kids. You are like a sister, daughter, friend.
Loisa:
You walked me through some dark seasons for sure. Here we are.
Growing up in Church
Gina:
You are a deep well. A deep well, spiritually and relationally. You are one of the most talented people I know, and you’ve been through a lot and we’re going to talk about that. God has a calling and anointing on your life. He’s positioned you and given you authority in a lot of different areas.
The last several years, you’ve been the Choir Pastor at Gateway Church, which is an enormous church. A behemoth of a church in Texas, which is appropriate because the state is an enormous behemoth thing. You did that for a long time. You’re just now transitioning more into content creation and doing some other things.
There’s so many things we can talk about. We’ve talked a little bit since I’ve been here, about all of the possibilities, but before we get into all these rabbit trails that we could go down (and they would be important rabbit trails) but I would love to start with your story.
I love your upbringing, actually it is pretty amazing. I would love for you to talk, give a little history about yourself, first of all, where you come from, and then our journeys intersected at a pretty crazy time in ministry for both of us. We walked through some pretty crazy things on church staff. I wasn’t even on staff yet, but I may as well have been. We were like volunteer staff. We walked through some pretty crazy stuff, and that had a huge impact on you, and on your faith journey and your walk.
Loisa:
I was raised in a faith-driven home. I saw my parents have an actual walking relationship with the Lord, and it was never not real to me. That’s always been. I don’t know of a time when I did not see authentic faith being lived. But we lived on the road and my parents, my sister and I traveled and sang in churches across the United States, in an RV, in a motorhome.
Gina:
Your dad looked like Wolfman Jack, If you’re old enough to know that reference, and your mom looked like Wonder Woman, Linda Carter.
Loisa:
Paint that picture in your head, Linda Carter and Wolfman Jack in an RV with their two kids. That’s my childhood till I was about six. When people ask me, “Where are you from?” I don’t always know what to say because my first home, when I think of my childhood home, I think of this motor home that really didn’t stay anywhere for very long. I have great, great memories of that.
It shaped me in a lot of ways, just learning to be friendly right off the bat, and be friends with whoever’s in front of you and be ready to move on. Sad in some ways, but also really awesome. We moved a lot growing up, from one ministry opportunity to another. I have so many memories in my childhood of being in a dark church sanctuary, while my parents were rehearsing something and I’m coloring on the floor.
Being raised in church was very much my childhood. Again, thankfully it wasn’t just the building, it was a faith that was in my home. I had a very real relationship with the Lord starting at around age 10. I remember learning, and starting to really get excited about truth in the Word, and actually walking with the Lord around 10 years old.
The Pain of Humans Not Being Perfect
My first job was at church. I got hired for the week-night daycare that they had, when I was 15. I had to get a petition signed to even be allowed to work that early. A lot of my early work was working in the church. I’ve seen a lot in the church, and what you’re specifically referring to was during my twenties.
I’m not going to say everybody goes through this, but I know I’m not the only one who has gone through this, where church becomes not the safe place that you were raised hoping it was, and believing it was. Where you find out that humans are part of it. It’s very disillusioning and very disorienting.
It’s really an important season of life. It’s incredibly painful. But for me, it was really important for my faith to truly become my dedication to the Lord, and not to a building, and not to a leadership, and not to a role that I was playing, but truly pressing into God Himself.
In those days I was at a large church, with a large platform, and a large screen. That’s a dangerous place to walk out your faith when you’re young, and you’re still learning so much, because you’re immediately visible to a lot of people. And if you’re up there, it’s assumed that you are at a certain level of maturity or leadership just by being up there.
Gina:
Let’s go back. You sing, and you were on the worship team. When you say, “platform”, we’re not talking about this small church down on the corner.
Loisa:
No, we’re talking about jumbo-tron screens. We are talking about a big church with a large place with a wide reach. I was 15 when I led on the worship team for the students. Then when I was 16, I was put on the worship team with the adults ministry. I did both. That’s where some of the disillusioning started, which I have to say before I go further into this, that is going to happen anywhere, at any church that has humans in it.
Any person that is walking out their faith, there is always going to be disillusioning. It’s just part of things becoming real and working it out. The Lord is so kind to give us, almost like a padding when we first start, like the floor is really soft when we first start walking with Him. He lets us ease in, but that sweetness makes it even more jarring when you see, “Oh, Your people hurt each other.” and “Oh, You still let people hurt each other. Don’t You?” And that’s a hard thing. It’s a hard thing to see.
And when you’re hoping for something different, you come into this reality of who God is, and man falls so short. Repeatedly. Including yourself. And that’s where, for me, I had put way too much of my feet on the ground of things man had made, and things I had made, instead of on the solid rock of God.
It could be so many things that would cause that, for me, it was the competitive spirit that can happen on a worship team. I found myself tallying up how many solos I had versus how many solos somebody else had. I found myself comparing, and you don’t have accuracy when you’re comparing to somebody else. Because you’re either going to come out looking too good or not too good.
I had my identity in the role that I played in the church building, and for a while that was great. It felt good. And you can do that for a while, but you can’t do that forever. Then I left that place pretty disenfranchised, pretty hurt and bitter, and really, truly thinking it was that place’s fault and those people. And if they had done it right, then I’d be okay.
I hesitantly went to another place where I thought, “Well, it’s going to be better here because I’m friends with this person.” but then you watch people hurt people again. That’s where you and I were together, where we watched God’s people hurting God’s people.
Gina:
I’m so glad you said that and acknowledged that. It’s actually a trap and really easy to fall into that place of blame and accusation to vilify. It could be behavior or things that are pretty stupid and terrible. It doesn’t justify someone being a jerk, someone in leadership not honoring someone, not being loving, or whatever the case may be.
But in the name of self-protection, it’s easier for me to frame them as the bad guy, and blame, and be offended, and be ticked off, and then I’m going to shore myself up in self-righteousness and I’m going to say, “I would do it better. I wouldn’t do it that way.”
Loisa:
We do that all the time, and only sometimes are we right.
Gina:
We’re not going to go into details on the stuff that happened in the place where we were at, but there were things that happened on the leadership level and in other situations.
The other thing too, is if there’s a car accident and there’s 30 witnesses, depending on where they’re standing, they have a different perspective and a different viewpoint, and you can interview all those witnesses and they may even have contradictory testimony as to who’s at fault.
Was the light red, or was it yellow? Was this person going too fast? No, actually this person was going too fast. It’s really no different in a relationship, and in the Church. We found ourselves in a situation where people that we loved were feeling hurt by one another, and then feeling hurt by the church, and then you’re trying to navigate what the truth is.
Where’s the love in the middle of it? Where’s God in it?
Loisa:
Then when you add your identity being tied into this, you can’t have this healthy perspective. You begin to think, “This doesn’t just mean something about the church, it means something about me. It means something about what I believe. It means something about God.” For me, I could have a grocery list of incidents where God’s people were human.
That’s what they let you down. They don’t live up to expectations. I left about as angry as a person can leave a place, and they knew it, I made sure. I left my footprints firmly on the sidewalk as I walked away. I thought I was so right. I still think I was, but what was not right was how tied to my faith it was, and how personally I took it.
Gina:
You’re saying, “but I was right”. That may sound like you still think you’re right. By that you are saying, “This didn’t go down well, this was not handled right” It was done poorly. And that could be said for so many parties involved.
But in that moment, the level of betrayal you personally felt, the level of violation and injustice that you personally took on, the pain of people you loved being hurt, and how you wore that, that started informing this next season you went into.
The Very Human Bride of Christ
Loisa:
So from there I left church big “C” for six years. Here I am, I have no problem with God, I have a deep faith and a deep walk with Him, but at that point I was like, “I’m done with Your bride. That’s it. I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to look anything like that, or be anything like that. I’m done.” That’s what I was thinking in my process. That’s where I was.
Thank the Lord for journeys, because that’s where I was at the time, and He let me be there. I moved out of state, and I spent the next six years pressing into God while being pretty angry, but also exploring that and letting God help me explore it, not shutting myself down and going, “Well, I shouldn’t be angry.” I let Him work me through healing; and it was here in Texas.
I remember thinking, “We’re doing pretty good. Me and You, we’re doing really good. Look at us. Look, love, joy, peace, patience, I got all that stuff. We’re doing great.” And He was like, “You have no context.” I remember very vividly this moment of really feeling prideful about how great I was doing out there on my own, and then Him going “What is patience, if you’re the only one you’re being patient with? What is that?”
It was a jarring moment and a humbling moment. He’s like, “Faithfulness, what’s that when you’re all by yourself? I didn’t call you to be all by yourself.” And what I heard Him say very clearly was, “You cannot love Me and scorn My bride.” That was a kick in the stomach a little bit in a very good way.
Gina:
I don’t want to breeze past this. I was there when you stomped away before you moved to Texas. I was there and was with you in some of this, and even to get to the journey of, “Hey Lord, You and I are doing pretty good.” You weren’t there immediately.
You had to go on a journey even wrestling through your anger with God, because it wasn’t just about His bride. It was like, “You let Your kids do this.” And so, there was toil and hurt and wrestling that you had to do with the Lord to even get to the place where you’re isolated going, “Hey, you and me, we’re good.”
Loisa:
No, you’re right. That’s absolutely true. So let’s go back to that, because I was focusing on the church journey, but absolutely. So I am highly empathetic, which is a miserable thing to be. (laughs) Literally I can’t watch a movie without feeling. I mean, it’s really hard. I have to be careful what I watch anymore, because it can wreck me for days, over fictional characters.
Could God Possibly Care More Than I Do?
Loisa:
I’m highly empathetic, and I think for most who are like me in that way, there is an element of truly believing that you care more about people than God does. You would never say that or even maybe have the cognitive thought of that, but there’s this distrust that God is not going to take care of people as well as you would. And that is something I have fought through my whole life. Because, oh man, that’s a tough one.
Gina:
I just want to thank you for even verbalizing that, because I think a lot of people, even those who aren’t as empathetic, struggle with that.
Loisa:
I mean, I looked at people who I love, who, when I pull up their scorecard, they deserve a better life than You’ve offered them. So let me do these things to make up for what You did not do. As soon as we start doing that, we put God below us. We don’t even realize we’re doing it in the name of compassion. We raise ourselves above God in the name of compassion.
If that resonates with somebody, that means that you do not understand who God is. Not really, or at least that you don’t trust him. I would not have known that that’s what that was, but that is a fruit of not trusting God.
Getting to a place where you’re leaning into Him, and realizing He’s providing, He’s restoring, He’s redeeming, and He’s doing it on His timeline, is a very difficult thing to do for someone who has a heightened sense of justice and compassion.
It gets us in a lot of trouble, because we try to take the reins, and we try to make it happen, and it backfires and then more people are hurt, and we’re the ones that did it this time. So I’ve learned that the hard way over and over and over again, and I’m learning it as I speak right now.
Gina:
That’s an ongoing journey. I think the hard thing in that, is that God is loving and good and He doesn’t need to explain Himself. He is moving, He is redeeming, He is all this stuff, but He’s not obligated to explain it all to us. My belief, resentment, or affirmation of His movement, doesn’t change the truth or who He is.
Check out Gateway Church
Check the rest of this conversation God Get’s Personal, Is God Good in Our Suffering?, Forgiveness is the Way Forward
Check out the Dwell Meditations
