[Editor’s Note: This is a letter from a member to her church explaining the reasons she left a church she loved after being a member for eight years. We are publishing the letter anonymously to avoid publicly impugning anyone’s integrity and to allow the content of the letter to be read on its merits.]
I pray for God to send a Spirit of healing to work among his church. And that moving forward, there will be a stirring of the Spirit to turn our attention to the condition of our own hearts, rather than to try and discern the condition of the heart of the person sitting next to us. Scripture describes our hearts as stony ground, and God’s Word as a plough. I urge you, as I urge myself: Do not shrink back from Christ’s hand at the plow in your own heart. It is from Him that true enlightenment of the heart (i.e., love) comes, not from humanity, not from cultural sensitivity, or anything else.

To the Beloved at My Home Church,
It is with considerable trepidation that I take this opportunity to inform you, my brothers and sisters, that I have left my local PCA home church. The reasons why I have left are relevant to this collection of essays; therefore, although I am no longer a member among you, I hope I might be given a voice alongside you, to describe my experiences at my PCA church which have led me to this point.
After having been a member/regular attender at this PCA church for close to 8 years, I began seeing a lot of changes in our preaching and worship that seemed to detract from the message of God’s free grace, and instead place more and more emphasis on issues of black and white relations. In particular, I felt a sense of antagonism towards white people coming from the pulpit. Many unfair assumptions were being made about a broad group of people based solely on one physical attribute: their skin color.
I acknowledge that sin can be passed on generationally. However, I put forth that it is from Adam whom I have inherited my flesh. And it’s because of my union with him that sin comes to me. He was the first fruit of death and condemnation and, before I was saved, I was merely a seed after his kind. I know almost nothing of my own “white” heritage; but I don’t need to know whether or not my ancestors were involved in American slavery, or segregation, or racism, to fathom my sin. I already know that I stand utterly condemned under the federal headship of my first parents in the Garden.
This is Truth, and it is irrespective of skin color. Black people and white people are the seed of Adam. We are all guilty. Therefore, based on what I know of scripture, any clamor for “justice” is a fool’s errand. We think we want justice, but if we got what we thought we wanted, we would all stand rightly condemned, with no hope, before a God whose real standard is complete, perfect holiness. Who among white people or black people could measure up to this standard? God’s holiness will not be satisfied with changes in our worship music, the racial demographics of our congregation, or our church’s culture. No; the standard is complete, perfect holiness–nothing less will meet God’s requirements. And His requirements are just.
We all desperately need to hear assurance of God’s grace. His grace for sinners. I don’t want justice for myself, because I don’t want to receive the just penalty for my sins. I don’t want justice for a person who’s been victimized, and I don’t want justice even for a person who is a victimizer. Because I can’t say, “God’s marvelous grace for me, but justice for somebody else.” What we all really need is to hear grace preached; not to be assured of our condemnation but to be assured that there is a covering for our sins in the precious blood of Jesus. We ourselves satisfy none of God’s demands for holiness; but the precious blood of Jesus satisfies them all.
We cannot usher in the Kingdom of God through our own merit, our own agendas, our own efforts. If we, as believers, are truly sensitive to the Holy Spirit of God, then He will teach us how to love our neighbor, black or white. If the leadership of our PCA church feels strongly that the congregation does not love our neighbor, then one must ask: Why not teach us how to become re-sensitized to the gentle whispers and promptings of the Holy Spirit? Why not preach and pray for revival in the Church, and acknowledge the need for a super-natural refreshment that only The Spirit can provide? Why focus on trying to guess whether or not the white individuals at our church are loving enough towards black people, when we could together beseech the Holy Spirit (Luke 11:13) who alone has the power to move the hearts of men?
When Paul went to Athens, and (supposedly) engaged with the Greeks by using their own culture to reach them, we see that it was not because Paul respected or valued their culture. It was because he was deeply troubled by all the idols he saw there (Acts 17:16). This was not the sentiment of a man who felt that all human cultures have something valuable to give, and that a worshipful knowledge of the True God should be based out of a culture comfortable for those Athenians. Paul merely pointed out that their culture acknowledged the True God completely by accident. And he used that observation to open their eyes to their own idolatry-riddled surroundings. That, I believe, is an apt description of all human culture. Culture reflects the idol-prone human heart. And to make culture such a large focus from the pulpit of a church of the Trinitarian God of the Bible leaves so much to be desired.
Now we come to me. I never wanted to cause conflict. So, I sat with my troubles for many years, and attempted to discern if what I was hearing was really true….. was I secretly a racist because my skin is white? After much soul searching and investigating the scriptures, I believe the answer is “no”. I do not feel this is a self-deception.  My conscience confirms it through the Holy Spirit.
However, I was still hearing preaching from the pulpit which condemned me for this reason. When I tried to express my concerns to people of authority over our worship services, as well as in my prayer group, I received more pushback and more slights against my character. Had I been a stranger among you, I might not have been so surprised or so hurt. But these were people to whom I had made myself intimately known over many years. People whom I considered my brothers and sisters in the most real way possible. Very few took my own conscience, or my own relationship with the Holy Spirit, seriously.
I could have engaged more (as I know some of you are now attempting to do in my absence) to take a stand against the party spirit that is seeping into our PCA church from the surrounding culture. But I am not strong. I do apologize to you, for my weakness and my cowardice. I found I couldn’t stand against even a little persecution and exclusion in my own church. So, under the advice of Godly men who know me and know my limitations, I decided to leave. But this has been a confusing and difficult experience. I can’t stop loving you as my brothers and sisters, and it is hard for me to understand and accept why I can no longer be with you.
If there is no unity in Christ, there is no unity. If some “thing” is destroying our unity in Christ, whatever it happens to be, perhaps pursuing it is not good. Even good things can become idols.
My last words will be of blessing and caution to you. I pray for God to send a Spirit of healing to work among his church. And that moving forward, there will be a stirring of the Spirit to turn our attention to the condition of our own hearts, rather than to try and discern the condition of the heart of the person sitting next to us. Scripture describes our hearts as stony ground, and God’s Word as a plough. I urge you, as I urge myself: Do not shrink back from Christ’s hand at the plow in your own heart. It is from Him that true enlightenment of the heart (i.e., love) comes, not from humanity, not from cultural sensitivity, or anything else. Once our own hearts are broken by the Word, the Holy Spirit will grant us the loving unity with our brothers and sisters that we are longing for.
It is for the Lord to discern the hearts of men…. and when people attempt to discern the heart of their brother or sister on a human level, I can testify from my personal experiences at my PCA church over the last few years: there is a lot of room for error and hurt.
1 Corinthians 4:1-5:
This, then, is how you ought to regard us: as servants of Christ and as those entrusted with the mysteries God has revealed.  Now it is required that those who have been given a trust must prove faithful.  I care very little if I am judged by you or by any human court; indeed, I do not even judge myself.  My conscience is clear, but that does not make me innocent. It is the Lord who judges me.
 Therefore judge nothing before the appointed time; wait until the Lord comes. He will bring to light what is hidden in darkness and will expose the motives of the heart. At that time each will receive their praise from God.
I miss you all, and I love you. I am praying for God to comfort you during this difficult time.
With Love in Christ, I Remain Your Sister
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The new creation mandate that Jesus gives to his bride is to go and make disciples of all the nations: it turns out that all along, the childless woman has been Eve, come again. Eve, the mother of all living. The barren one has become the mother of us all (Galatians 4:26,27). She is the church. And all her children are miracle children — born when their mother was desolate, carried to her on the shoulders of kings and queens (Isaiah 49:20-23).
 
And it happened, as He spoke these things, that a certain woman from the crowd raised her voice and said to Him, “Blessed is the womb that bore You, and the breasts which nursed You!” But He said, “More than that, blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it!” ~ Luke 11:27,28
Those tedious bits of the Old Testament, the genealogies, make a final incursion in Matthew and Luke before they disappear from the Bible (Matthew 1:1-17; Luke 3:23-38). All the difficult-to-say names, often of obscure children born to obscurer parents, culminate here. They are bewildering, breaking up the narratives — but each name represents two hands gripping a promise. A promise to Eve, and later to Abraham, of a child (Genesis 3 & 15). Miraculous births, beginning with the birth of Isaac, whispered of this miraculous baby to come (Galatians 3:16); but I think Israel’s hope in the coming child is especially poignant in the book of Ruth.
Ruth begins in a time of famine — a woman loses her home and country, then her husband and sons, until finally, past childbearing years, she straggles back to Bethlehem. She has no future — no heir, no one to redeem the land heritage that used to belong to her. She has only a bereaved and childless daughter-in-law, for whom she cannot provide. When women from her hometown come out to greet Naomi, she tells them not to call her by her name, but by a name that means “bitter”: “Mara” — “I went out full, and the Lord has brought me home again empty… the Lord has testified against me” (Ruth 1:21).
But somehow a tale that begins with flat tones of famine and a parched life ends in the rhythms of harvest — and in greetings of blessing from the same women to whom Naomi spoke of the Lord’s curse (4:14). What has taken place between the beginning and the end, that transforms the story? The same thing that took place unobtrusively in the first chapter, in the land of Judah, transforming it into a land of plenty: the Lord has “visited his people” (1:6). The form of the Lord’s visitation (as the tale winds up with a genealogy) is a child.
I can almost trace Naomi’s features through the genealogy in Matthew. The people in that list successively sinned away their blessings until they scattered in exile. They lost the Davidic monarchy, and had no one to redeem their heritage. But the lineage straggles back to Bethlehem, and culminates in a miraculous birth.
Matthew and Luke write the last biblical genealogies because the last name they record is the name of the promised child. The Lord “has visited and redeemed his people” (Luke 1:68 ).
The dilemma of the barren or childless woman disappears with the genealogies. It is associated throughout the Old Testament with the theme of the miraculous birth. Surely there were many childless women in Israel in Jesus’ day, but the gospels contain no record of anyone coming to him to lament their childlessness — though he was the place where God tabernacled with men, the place Hannah went to lament her childlessness. Perhaps women did come to him with this trouble: what else should we do with troubles? And God has a special care for the heartache of being childless (Psalm 113:9). But it has no further episode in the Bible, after Jesus comes.
Because the longing for a child in those Old Testament stories is all mixed up with the longing for this child. The joy of the miracle birth is all mixed up with this joy. Mary’s Magnificat (Luke 1:46-55) is like a voice carrying back through time in a hall of echoes (1 Samuel 2:1-10, Psalm 113).
When Jesus comes, we read about him interacting with women without even being told if many of them have children: we presume the singleness of several. Their lack in this area never arises between him and them. It is not something they are recorded as being disturbed with in his presence. It is a point made as unobtrusively as the visitation of the Lord which changes everything, in the opening verses of Ruth.
Jesus never took a wife, nor did he father children. Not in the Old Testament sense. But the creation mandate takes on new aspects in the second Adam, when Jesus speaks of fruitfulness for those who abide in him. This is not the fruitfulness of natural fertility, per se. Motherhood is the image of fruitfulness in that which is female (the church) to Christ; and one of the forms fruitfulness takes in individual women (1 Timothy 5:10). But the fruit of the Spirit is “love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control” (Galatians 5:22,23).
This may and often does take the arduous and devoted form of bearing and rearing children; and it may and often does take the form of bearing eternal children. So Ann Judson had only two little ones, both of whom died very young; but she helped to share the gospel with unreached people.
Yet the fruitfulness of abiding in Jesus does not necessitate being able to bear children, or traveling to distant lands. It is more immediate and spiritual, more immanently eternal: it is Jesus’ image formed in us. His miraculous life born in us even though we were dead in sins, already erupted into our bodies with a quality of resurrection. The Lord has visited his people.
Childlessness was a reproach because it was a dead end. It was the bitterness of Naomi, cut off from her inheritance in the land; her children buried without issue, without hope of any further part in the promised one. These shadows are swallowed in substance when a child is born to us (Isaiah 9:6), and we inherit God (Psalm 16:5,6).
So even David in the Old Testament can say that the greater blessing than children is to awake in God’s likeness (Psalm 17:14,15). And the reproach in the New Testament is not for the widow who has never given birth, but for the widow who is “dead” while she “lives” — living only for what makes her feel alive in this world (1 Timothy 5:4-6). The true “dead end” is spiritual unfruitfulness: every branch that does not bear fruit is removed (John 15:2).
I have been married a couple decades now, and am unable to have children. It is doubtful if I can adopt, and I won’t credit myself as the agent of anyone’s salvation. Over the years, I have been told in general and even in particular that my childlessness is a reproach in God’s ongoing economy. I’m grateful for my church family: unless I bring it up — my childlessness never arises between them and me. That is one way my brothers and sisters are like Jesus.
After wrestling through some hard years, I have nothing but delight in other women’s joy or in their children that race around me. We all have our fair share of sorrow (it is poignant to think of the sorrow that came to Rachel, Rebekah, to Samson’s mother, to Elisabeth & Mary even after they had children). But the above truths have comforted me. And there is a further wonder, which I would have liked to share with those who told me the childless woman still stands in the church as a symbol of reproach. We no longer overhear her prayers or her praises, but the childless woman doesn’t exactly vanish from the New Testament. She is transfigured. In one of those bewildering reverses of grace, the Old Testament shadow shifts, and she becomes the symbol of a miraculous hope. It is she whose inheritance Jesus redeems. This is the woman Jesus marries (Isaiah 54:5).
Maybe that’s the thing you stand for in your community, if you are a reader who wonders why God works in other women’s bodies but not in yours; why God hears other women’s prayers, but not yours; why you should stand there year after year overlooked, and whether you will have to die childless (& for many, husbandless). Maybe you are standing there in the midst like a symbol of more staggering hope.
The new creation mandate that Jesus gives to his bride is to go and make disciples of all the nations: it turns out that all along, the childless woman has been Eve, come again. Eve, the mother of all living. The barren one has become the mother of us all (Galatians 4:26,27). She is the church. And all her children are miracle children — born when their mother was desolate, carried to her on the shoulders of kings and queens (Isaiah 49:20-23).
Because of the sensitive nature of this article, the author asked to remain anonymous; we’ve granted her request. However, if any reader would like to send her a message, please send it to [email protected] and we will forward these messages to her.
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