Becoming a Church that Sees
A Feature Review of
The Hope in Our Scars: Finding the Bride of Christ in the Underground of Disillusionment
Aimee Byrd
Paperback: Zondervan 2024
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Reviewed by Justin Lonas
At least part of the work of the Holy Spirit in the life of a believer is metabolizing the suffering inflicted on us by others who ostensibly share our faith. We can’t very well navigate the reality of forgiveness and redemption in a fallen world otherwise. But in this season (decades-long at this point), the major note of most conversations about church in the United States is pain, anger, or sorrow—from abuse, from sacrificing the wonder of the gospel to the lesser gods of political power or wealth, from theologies that aim to crush and domineer rather than lead into flourishing—and we wonder how this plays out. We need hope that God sees and knows and has healing for us.
If anyone has reason to dwell on the pain the church can inflict, Aimee Byrd surely has a claim. Over the past several years, she has been publicly slandered and privately maneuvered against in church circles in ways that many of us watched play out on social media. After such ongoing, vicious personal attacks and the repeated failure of church leaders and systems to protect her and her family, Byrd could be forgiven for wanting nothing more to do with institutional Christianity. But she isn’t running away. She is still “working to heal, and fighting to love Christ’s church” (20).
While Byrd does tell her story in unfolding bits through The Hope in Our Scars: Finding the Bride of Christ in the Underground of Disillusionment, this isn’t a memoir or redress of grievances. Where she dredges up the past, it is for the sake of moving forward. As the title describes, the scars of past wounds remind us both of what we have endured and that we lived to see another day.
Make no mistake, Byrd neither pulls punches nor sweeps evil under the rug to “protect the brand” of Christianity. She’s not even trying to persuade the wounded to return to regular church attendance or tell a story of a happy resolution to her own ordeal that ends with membership in a healthier congregation or denomination. She calls spades “spades,” to be sure, but this book attends to the beauty that Christ desires for his people. The relational marvel of being connected to Christ both heals our wounds and highlights the truly vile nature of spiritual abuse.
Drawing on the work of Curt Thompson and others in the fields of psychology and neurobiology, Byrd highlights the ways abuse and mistreatment of people in spiritual communities triggers shame. This can disrupt our communion with God and with fellow believers. Even the “orderly” process of dealing with church trauma in many settings (formal complaints, hearings, and rulings by bodies of elders or bishops) can serve to further inflict shame. Reducing relational breaches down to questions of legality or “propriety”—even if they address wrongs (not a guarantee, as church courts often end up protecting abusers and putting victims in the hot-seat)—fails to get to the root issue of treating the Body of Christ like any other earthly institution. She recognizes and names the danger of church systems in which people “constantly try to escape / From the darkness outside and within / By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good” (as T.S. Eliot writes in “Choruses from The Rock”).
Such disillusionment could lead to despair, and certainly a healthy fear of too-hasty commitments to other institutions. Byrd names this as a death of sorts, but one that—like Christ’s death—leads to resurrection. There is, in a phrase borrowed from poet Malcom Guite, a “crowded underground” here of those suffering from the failures of the church who are together longing for the life of Christ to be born in the death of a “going-through-the-motions” Christianity (99). Even so, Byrd recognizes that the way through this dark valley is one of invitation, and that not everyone moves through at the same pace. We must go gently with each other.
Byrd picks up the themes of her most recent book (The Sexual Reformation) by returning to the Song of Songs as the Scriptural anchor for healing. This may strike some as an odd selection—Hebrew poetry is notoriously hard to parse for definitive meanings, and New Testament epistles have plenty of concrete teachings on how Christians should and shouldn’t treat one another in the church. But Byrd is making a metaphysical argument, showing that the church doesn’t rise or fall on some system or other, but on recentering itself over and over again on the Lord, the giver of life, who loves his bride.
It is telling that Byrd’s journey toward this most mystical section of the Bible is launched through her season of deep pain. When the systems that purport to guard virtue instead protect abuse, we can either run away or run toward that which is truly good. The church that distracts from Christ—whose “watchmen” (cf. Songs 5:7) are too often roughing up the people seeking Jesus—is no longer serving its purpose, and it can become the duty of the faithful to leave to seek Christ where he may be found.
Her exegesis of the Song draws us back into the historical reading of the book as allegory (without some of the more imaginative flights of interpretive fancy the church fathers found there). She points us to an appropriately “erotic” connection to our Triune God (186-187)—where our deepest longings for safety and wholeness are answered by our “maker, defender, redeemer, and friend” whose mercies are tender and “firm to the end” (in hymnist Robert Grant’s phrase). It is precisely in this intimate connection to Christ that Byrd locates the purpose and goal of the Christian life, and the purpose and goal of the church must be to facilitate this connection.
Poet and essayist Christian Wiman writes in Zero at the Bone: Fifty Entries against Despair that “where there is even a possibility for change, there is hope. True hope goes both backward and forward. It can transfigure a past we thought was petrified. It can give voice to certain silences or make us more fluent in silence itself. It can turn history into tragedy.” Byrd’s work on hope is the beginning of this turn. She sees the past, with all its wounds, pointing us toward a healthier future. The “tragedy” that Wiman speaks of here is the dramatic catharsis of recognizing the death of a false sense of self (or “Church face” as Byrd names it) so that a more honest, more whole person can be reborn. In this, Byrd mostly succeeds, but the packaging of the book—part memoir, part exhortation, part exposition (complete with discussion and reflection questions)—at times seems to work against the clarity of both her storytelling and her arguments.
Byrd ends with a vision of “A Church that Sees,” looking for the institution to recapture its design as the living embodiment of Christ’s heart. She stops short of making too concrete recommendations, though. When should we leave a church? When should we reconnect? What are we building toward? What are we reaching for? It is hard to say. She avoids trite answers while firmly acknowledging that the daughters and sons of God deserve a better experience than what many have received to date. Ultimately, she bears witness to wonder and asks us to look to Christ to see where hope and healing leads. We cannot love the church fully without the love of Christ showing us what the church ought to be.
Justin Lonas
Justin Lonas is a poet, writer, cook, hiker, and amateur theologian. He holds an M.Div. from Reformed Theological Seminary. He and his wife Rachel live in Chattanooga, Tennessee with their four daughters. By day, he serves churches and ministry organizations around the world through the Chalmers Center at Covenant College. His writing often explores nature, literature, and the church's ongoing struggle to live out the way of Jesus. Justin's website is jryanlonas.com.
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