Part 6: The Price We All Pay

THE AIR WE BREATHE Part Six: The Price We All Pay

It's easy to assume the dynamics we've been describing mainly affect only a few, other people who were silenced, sidelined, or pushed out. Yes, their experience is real and it needs to be acknowledged and responded to honestly and compassionately. But if we stop there, we've missed a massive part of the cost. When fear shapes a community, everyone inside it is affected.

Over time, communities shaped by fear tend to gather a long list of departures. Some are obvious. Many aren't. Often people simply seem to drift. A family disappears. A leader moves on. A voice goes quiet and eventually finds somewhere else to speak. What rarely gets asked is the challenging but important question: what were they carrying that we couldn't receive?

You see, it's not always the least committed who leave, but it’s the most invested too. Caring in an environment that can't receive honesty, where people can’t honestly be and bring themselves, eventually becomes unsustainable. In the end, some feel they have to leave. At the moment of some people’s leaving, there may be a tangible sense of relief in the community, remember the scapegoat? But sadly, what's been lost to everyone remaining often isn't fully understood till much later, if at all.

There's another loss that's even less visible, when the people who stay become quieter, smaller versions of who they really are. They've noticed what happens when someone speaks honestly, consciously or unconsciously. So they make subtle adjustments over time, and end up offering less of who they are. They think things that they don't say, and offer only what's safe, acceptable, to offer. And it’s that gap between what is and what could be that becomes a kind of poverty that easily goes unnoticed.

And there’s another dimension to all this. We know that the church doesn't exist only for itself, it never has. The way we live together says something about God. And people notice, not just what we say, but what it actually feels like to be among us. When people leave carrying stories of feeling controlled or silenced, those stories don't stay contained. They shape how God is seen. They often contradict the very message we're trying to carry.

There's a deeper cost too: we can end up misrepresenting God. When control gets reinforced with spiritual language, it teaches something about him, whether we intend it to or not - that you can only really reach him through the right people, special people - and that asking hard questions puts you on dangerous ground, that belonging has to be earned and can easily be taken away. But that isn't the God we see in scripture. Again and again, God speaks from unexpected places, through overlooked people, from outside the centre rather than within it.

When we stop being open to those voices, unexpected perspectives, in the end, the community itself becomes smaller, not necessarily in size, but in breadth and depth. When fear governs the culture, conversations stay surface-level, mature personal and spiritual growth slows, and love becomes tentative. Not absent for sure, but a bit careful and constrained.

When it comes to the church, and to leadership, Jesus is our cornerstone. We can see in his interactions with the disciples that the kind of life Jesus forms among people isn't built on fear. He calls, teaches and leads without needing to control. He creates space where people can come as they are, speak honestly, and be genuinely met there. Fear and that kind of love can't coexist over time. One will shape the space more than the other. In this time just now where God is calling some of these things into the light. May we respond positively to his invitation to align with the true Cornerstone. I don’t know about you, but even the invitation, feels like welcome relief to me.