Shame.

There may be no condemnation in Christ, but there certainly is condemnation in many of our churches today.

This is a quiet but pervasive illness that’s plaguing our collective church body. It is a pandemic of epic proportions, catalyzed by the divided and aggressive culture we now find ourselves in: we demand excellence, expect perfection, await conformity, and condemn anyone who does not live out or reach up to our own personal standards. Should someone’s struggle look different from ours, we enter into attack mode, often criticizing the person instead of the struggle.

This condemnation creates something even more toxic and destructive than guilt: shame. There is a distinction between guilt and shame -- guilt says I feel bad about something I’ve done. Shame says I AM bad, period. That the church should be capable of producing either emotion in anyone is upsetting enough, but the fact that more and more people are leaving the church due to shame-inducing doctrine and exclusion is downright frightening.

Church, what are we doing?!

In her blog post titled “15 Reasons Why I Left the Church,” the late author Rachel Held Evans gives several reasons for why she and her husband left the church. These range from feeling like she was participating in a cult one day and a country club the next, to the assumption that everyone in her congregation voted Republican, to the fact that she was asked to plan baby showers, and never bible studies.

Pew Research suggests that there are more people than we may have initially thought who share Evans’ skepticism towards the church -- four out of ten Americans ranging in age from 23-38 claim to be religiously unaffiliated. Then, according an article from Barna Group’s blog, millennials are leaving the church for multiple reasons, ranging from the church’s antagonistic view towards science, to its “simplistic, judgmental” stances on sexuality.

We find ourselves in the awkward position of wondering where everyone is, and driving them away. This behavior is a learned one. We adapt to the energy in the room rather influence it. We, as humans, tend to fall in line with the masses, rather than adopt views or opinions that may be different than the majority’s. And as a result, we learn how to shame without even having a name for what we’re doing. If you’ve not been a reciprocant of this in church, you probably know someone who has.

Growing up in small town Mississippi, I remember going to church and having my pastor yell at the top of his lungs, before every service, “GAY IS NOT OKAY!” This would be followed by a ten minute tirade about how any one who believed otherwise was bound for hell. This condemnation also was applied to those who dared to suggest the earth was older than 5000 years, that interracial relationships were okay, and that women could pastor churches.

At this point, some of you may be thinking that I am just a young liberal espousing my own agenda. That since my opinions and interpretations fall more on the progressive side of the scale, this means that I am actually being as small-minded and judgmental as I’m intimating others in the church can be. Why is she painting the entire church in such a negative light? you ask. Author and activist Shane Claiborne put it this way: “The Church is a lot like Noah’s ark; it stinks while you’re in it, but if you leave, you’re dead.”

What the church is called to be and who we actually are being are two totally different things, right now. And people are leaving in droves because of it. Out of all the studies and speculations done on WHY people are leaving, the truth I believe can be summarized in that one word -- shame.

When the pulpit becomes a platform to espouse criticism, and our bible studies become cliques, we find ourselves falling into sin nature and shaming those who look and act differently than we do. We may think that our comments and judgements are harmless, but the truth is that there are thousands of Americans who hear it every single day, and they respond by leaving the church altogether.

Now that I am shepherding a group of teenagers, I feel the weight of this truth acutely.

Jesus, please don't let me do or say anything that would cause my students to experience the damage of shame. Help me to point them to the truth of Your love -- that there can be no shame here. That you invite ALL of us to the table. That You make room for us, in all of our messiness, all of our brokenness.

We can no longer afford to expect our brothers and sisters to fit into our preconceived boxes of what "good" Christians look like. We can no longer afford to judge "outsiders" -- because our insiders are seeing this, and wondering how we can praise Jesus on Sunday morning, and then go home and blast people on our social media platforms a couple hours later.

We absolutely must treat the hurt, lost, and broken with gentleness and graciousness rather than condemning them to a life of shame.

There is far more mystery in our faith than we like to allow. But our God is a wild one, friends. He is not contained. He does not fit our mold. And the second we start to draw lines in the sand of "us vs. them," He crosses over and proves us wrong.

Instead of driving our tribe away with hateful judgement, condescension, and hypocrisy, we should be focusing on making heaven crowded by loving others well. We have too much to lose. There's too much at stake.