When the Marginalized Are Our Prophets (TAW056)

The person who truly understands “what’s going on” in any room is often not the one in charge. Instead, it’s usually those on the margins—individuals whose lives and survival depend on recognizing the hidden structures of power—who see things most clearly. In her new book, Jenai Auman shares her experiences as a Filipina-American woman in the Evangelical church in the American South and challenges us to adopt a more inclusive way of being.

• Othered: Finding Belonging with the God Who Pursues the Hurt, Harmed & Marginalized
• The Subtle Power of Spiritual Abuse, Johnson, et. al.
• Lisa Oakley, UK Spiritual Abuse Researcher

• Scroll down for a full transcript of this episode.
• You can also watch and share the video version on Youtube.

More about My Conversation Partner

Jenai Auman is a Filipina-American writer, artist, & storyteller living in Houston, TX with her husband and two boys. Drawing on her years of church ministry experience, education, and trauma-related training, she writes on healing, hope, and the way forward for those who have experienced spiritual abuse and religious trauma. Her work has been featured on Christianity Today’s Better Samaritan Blog, She Reads Truth, and The Fallow House. Her people are those who feel “othered” and unwelcome in traditional Christian spaces. As a trauma recovery-focused spiritual director/companion, she also serves as a story-holder & space-maker.

• Find Jenai at https://www.jenaiauman.com/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/jenaiauman
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jenaiauman

• Not Just One More Thing: Spiritual Growth for Busy People – a ten-week on-demand course to help you move into a practical spirituality that fits into your busy life.

Marc Schelske 0:00
Hey friends, I’m Marc Alan Schelske, and this is The Apprenticeship Way, a podcast about spiritual growth following the way of Jesus. This is episode 56: When the Marginalized Are Our Prophets.

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INTRODUCTION

In any room, who’s the person most likely to understand what’s really going on? Who sees the hidden relational dynamics, the power issues, and the emotional triggers first? Is it the person in charge? The one who’s used to getting what they need? Or is it possible that it’s the person whose life depends on seeing these things?

You’ve probably heard me talk about the developing direction of my theology, which I summarize by calling it the way of other-centered co-suffering love. One aspect of this perspective is that it challenges me to listen carefully to the experiences of people who are not like me. Most of my mentors, teachers, pastors, and theologians I was encouraged to read look a lot like I do in one dimension or another. White, male, middle class, many of them American or at least English speaking.

And I’ve come to understand that my experience and what I’ve learned from these voices is not the only experience; it’s not the canonical experience. I’ve lived and I’ve worked inside organizations largely structured for people like me, assuming that our view was the right way. But this created an enormous blind spot where we disregarded people with different experiences, especially when they contradicted or challenged what was comfortable for us.

A book I read recently that helped me in thinking about all of this is called Othered: Finding Belonging with a God Who Pursues the Hurt, Harmed, and Marginalized. Janai Auman is a Filipina-American raised in the American South. She initially found welcome in the Evangelical Church. Her passion led her into leadership, but as she was drawn deeper into the ministry machine, she experienced how her value to the community was really based on conformity.

And so when she asked for respect as a biracial Filipino woman when she pointed out issues in the system that were a problem, not just for her, but for others, the response was harsh. She violated the expectation that she would be a quiet worker supporting the male leaders. She was asking folks to stretch in ways that were new and uncomfortable for them. She was challenging a controlling hierarchy that others in the community took for granted.

Ultimately, that system and those in charge had no room for her, and she was forced out. This painful experience and the long recovery work she went through, as a result, led her to focus on how the Church can be more welcoming and can avoid doing harm, partly by listening to those in the margins. There’s this dynamic in Jenai’s story that I’ve seen in many corners of the Church. Here’s a way to think about it.

When a person, especially a child, has to fight for their basic needs, they learn intuitively what they must in order to survive. They become experts in reading the culture of their family or their community. The same dynamic functions in larger groups, communities, churches, and even whole cultures.

Folks in the margins often see things about the majority culture that insiders cannot see as quickly or as easily. You see, for their own survival, folks in the margins have to become PhD students of the majority culture. In this book Othered, Jenai wrote, “When we ask our congregations to read their Bibles and the stories of our spiritual ancestors, it should come as no surprise that many students of scripture become well versed in distinguishing Christlikeness

from the corrupt forms of faith that are often labeled good and right today. And when these students see the schism between the character of Jesus and the character of the church, when they ask questions and speak to the disparity, they become prophets. They are those who have the boldness to say, this is not the way of Jesus.” So I asked Jenai to talk about the ways she sees people on the margins — those who’ve been hurt, women, people of color, LGBTQ people — speaking as prophets to the majority church.

THE INTERVIEW

Jenai Auman (06:51)
Hmm. Yeah. I think prophets are ultimately those who speak the truth of the Word of God and those who point to the corruption happening within God’s people. That’s what we see in the OT prophets and how they were reminding people of the goodness of God and why the things that are the way they are today don’t have to be that way. We’re actually called to something more. And I do think that people on the margins can have that kind of insight.

So, by that, I mean folks who are marginalized in our cultures for any reason. People can be marginalized not only for racial status or ethnicity or the language they speak. They can also be marginalized for not having the right amount of education, quote-unquote, the right amount. They can also be marginalized for having the wrong address, for growing up on the wrong side of the tracks, for being a low-income family, and for not wearing certain things. Think of middle school, you know, like the tables at middle school and how cliques and little things form.

Marc Schelske (07:36)
Mm. Right, right.

Jenai Auman (07:55)
Folks can be marginalized for any reason, and I think that there is wisdom for those who have lived in the margins for a long time, in that they can look from the outside in. They can actually see how a machine is made. So, for instance, I’m familiar with hurricanes in Houston. That’s kind of our MO. If you’ve ever seen a forecast for folks going through a hurricane, there’s the guy at the weather desk who’s giving you facts and information on the hurricane. He’s, you know, however many miles away from the hurricane and safety in a building telling you, “This is the wind speed. This is how fast it’s moving. This is where the eye is.” And then sometimes they throw it to the man or the woman in the field, and they’re, you know what I mean? They are in the middle of the storm, trying to…

Marc Schelske (08:40)
Right. Yeah, Right. Their situation looks a lot different than the dude with the data.

Jenai Auman (08:47)
Yeah, yeah, but the guy who is at a distance, kind of from the outside looking in, can actually name the machine or the mechanisms of the hurricane, the facts and figures. It’s an imperfect metaphor. In a similar way, when you are distant from the machine that’s wreaking havoc on a culture, and that havoc becomes normalized, those who are unable to conform to the machine, to the mold that the machine creates, are able to say, “this is actually what’s fracturing people.” And they say that from a place that says, “This is how it’s fractured me.” As they heal from those fractures, they can see, “It’s actually not only fracturing me, it requires the fracturing of every other person,” but that fracturing has become so normalized and people have been more easily assimilated, other than marginalized folks, people who are disabled, and who don’t fit those molds, have a hard time assimilating and conforming to the mold. And so these folks are better able to see the havoc of what quote-unquote normal behavior in a church does to a community.

Marc Schelske (09:57)
Right. it’s sort of the deal where I wear a certain pair of shoes, for instance, that I really love, and they’re really comfortable for me. And I declare their wonderfulness and recommend them to friends. And then you go buy a pair of those shoes. And because your feet are a different shape than mine, there’s a place in the shoes that rubs on your feet uncomfortably. And every time you walk in them, you’re feeling that pain. I don’t know that pain exists because the shoe fits my foot. And if I’ve been part of helping create the shape of the shoe, or creating the shape of the system that I’m part of, of course, it’s going to fit me because I’ve already done the work to get rid of the rough edges because that’s what we do as humans. We want life to not have discomfort. And so, whether it’s through power or over the course of time through generational practice, we’ve shaped the shoe that we live in in a certain way. And when somebody else is in that, they’re like, “It only ever gives me a blister on this one spot. Can you do something about that?” And then I say to you, “It does not, it doesn’t give a blister. It’s been perfectly designed to not give a blister for me.”

Jenai Auman (11:00)
Yeah, it’s kind of the distinguishing factor between relative truth or experience versus absolute truth being defined by a very, very specific relative experience. And that’s so damaging when other people don’t fit into that sort of narrative.

Marc Schelske (11:14)
Right. In another spot in Othered, you wrote this sentence that caught my attention, and I think it would be good for you to talk about it a little bit. You said, “Marginalization is a form of taking God’s name in vain.” All right, so open up that package for me.

Jenai Auman (11:41)
It’s kind of rooted in the idea of how we’re made in the image of God. So, some folks might see marginalization as part of the gospel because their view of being made in the image of God only includes those who ascribe to their sort of belief, who are quote-unquote saved into a specific denomination. Whereas I believe that at the dawn of creation, God made all of humanity in his image and that every person walking the earth is made in the image of God, in that they can also fulfill the cultural mandate to be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth, and bring goodness to the earth. So If every person is made in the image of god regardless of what they are able to earn or achieve or ascribe to or intellectually ascend to, if every person is made in the image of God, and the systems of our society say some people are worth more than other people and therefore because these people are worth more, the other people have to go to the fringes, then you are actually devaluing the image of God in someone else who could actually bring goodness and cultivate goodness within your community. And you’re saying the nutrients that they bring to our soil are actually toxic, and it’s not actually inherited goodness.

And so I think marginalizing folks and then using God’s name to justify the marginalization, it’s almost like double jeopardy. This is really bad. Marginalization of any kind, ascribing some value to some people and then less value to other people, is just counter to what I see in the person and work of Jesus for sure. And not only that, even in the Old Testament, even in the Deuteronomic laws the instruction is to welcome the stranger, welcome the sojourner to your door. And so, even in the law itself, to welcome people who were on the margins, that was was the story from the beginning. So marginalizing other nations or other nationalities or other ethnicities has never been justifiable. I mean, people certainly found ways to justify it, but it was never, never God-sanctioned and Christ-ordained.

Marc Schelske (14:03)
Right, right. Of course. There’s a really awful betrayal going from “I don’t like you and don’t want you in my group” to “God has said you’re not worth being in my group.” That is such a power move. How are you getting to any kind of transformative understanding of the gospel or a loving picture of God with that starting point?

Jenai Auman (14:34)
It’s a power move and also a lack of ownership. I can’t tell you that I don’t like you, and I’m not ready to own the fact that I don’t like you, so I’m gonna draw on God’s name and scapegoat god…

Marc Schelske (14:44)
Right, right. I get to stay righteous. I get to stay a good person. I’m just doing what God wants.

Jenai Auman (14:47)
Yeah. I mean, it’s kind of like the thing I do when someone comes to the front door and is trying to solicit whatever they’re trying to sell. And I’m like, I need to talk to my husband about that. You know what I mean? But that’s the funny version. The very unfunny version is saying, “This is what God told me. And God told me that you’ve got to get the hell out of here.” You know, and it just scapegoats God and it enables the person who’s scapegoating to be absolved of personal responsibility. I don’t need to take ownership. I’m just saying this is what God told me to do, and I’m just following orders.

Marc Schelske (15:25)
Right, that opens up another topic in your book because if the person who’s doing what we just talked about, if that person is in leadership where they have stewardship of a community, where they’re part of the group, the committee or the pastors or whoever that get to decide things like, who do we hear from? Who do we see on stage? Who do we serve? Who do we welcome into community? If you’re part of that group, and you’re functioning in the way you’ve just described, where you’re gatekeeping access, that’s not just a rude preference. That’s where we begin to enter into the realm of what can be talked about in terms of spiritual abusiveness. So let’s talk about that.

You gave a definition of spiritual abuse that I thought was really helpful. Abuse is kind of vague and is used in a lot of ways in our culture. Anytime somebody feels like they didn’t get what they wanted or a situation felt uncomfortable, it’s easy to say that situation was abusive or toxic. And so you narrowed the beam, and you said, “My working definition of spiritual abuse is a misuse of power that leverages trust within a spiritual or faith-based context, thus dehumanizing and marginalizing those who bear the image of God.”

Jenai Auman (16:43)
I do draw on the definitions of the folks who wrote The Subtle Power of Spiritual Abuse and Lisa Oakley, a spiritual abuse researcher in the UK. And I thought how do I condense and distill this information to something that we can digest? I really wanted to empower people. I share bits and pieces of my story of working on a church staff. As many church staffers can attest to, once you start working behind the counter, you see how the sausage is made, and you realize there is a disparity between what we preach on Sunday and how we program what we preach on Sunday. And I hate, I hate that. I hate that programming is a whole thing for the church. It just sounds very mechanical and industrial, you know, and it takes something very garden-oriented. God uses a lot of garden-oriented language and metaphors, and we take the garden and make it a machine. I just feel icky.

Marc Schelske (17:26)
Yeah, sure.

Jenai Auman (17:38)
But seeing spiritual abuse within a staff context was–and I wouldn’t have called it spiritual abuse. because in spiritual abuse, so often you’re disempowered, and not only are you disempowered, but you’re conditioned not to ever have power. You’re constantly asking people for permission. Is this what happened? Is this what happened to me? I know how difficult it is to reach for those words and to say this is what defines my experience.

But on my church staff, I became a good soldier. Until I realized that the soldiering that they wanted me to do, the sort of workload they wanted me to keep up with, actually required my burnout. Our whole program and our whole church schematic was not restful. So no wonder we’re having these questions about how to rest when we don’t have it injected into the life and mission of our church. But the spiritual abuse that I experienced, I would say, had more to do with me being a female in that church. How to be a faithful woman in that church was to be a champion for my own subjugation.

Marc Schelske (18:26)
Yes.

Jenai Auman (18:48)
And women are pitted against one another. So there are some women who are more than happy to be a champion for their own subjugation. They are more than happy to do every single thing that the men in the church tell them to do. Because it’s really nice to have somebody tell you what to do, and you can execute it and you can kind of give yourself a pat on the back. And when I’m measured up against someone like that and I’m more vocal, I have more questions, I will ask you why I’m doing this. And also I did not have the privilege of making this decision. No woman in our church had the privilege of being a part of this decision-making. So please let me understand why you’re asking me to do this and also explain to me why you’re asking me to ask others to do this because if I’m trying to sell this to other people, I need you to tell me. I wanna believe in why this sort of volunteer workload is worth it. So those sorts of questions get you in trouble when you don’t fall in line and there are other people who are falling in line.

Marc Schelske (19:35)
Mm-hmm.

Jenai Auman (19:54)
Ultimately sticking up for myself over and over and over again, as you can imagine, they called me harsh and abrasive. I was harsh and abrasive for asking questions and for advocating for myself, and I wouldn’t quote-unquote learn my lesson, and it had me booted from the church And so I realized they had leveraged their trust and their relationship with me. And these folks that I knew for a very long time. You know that app on your phone that’s like on this day eight years ago, on this day 11 years ago, and you see like birthday photos and photos of folks holding your kids and stuff? Those are the people in my photos. We had a lot of life experiences and loving moments with one another before I went on staff. I was at the church for eleven years and it was only the last three years when I was on staff. So I had a lot of familial connection with them, a connection that I had chosen, I opted in. And so when they leveraged that trust, and they hoped for my silent complicity, I would not relent. And obviously, I wouldn’t give in because I wrote a whole book on it. So I would not go silently.

Marc Schelske (20:45)
Yeah. well, first off, it’s so frustrating to me that that happened, and it’s sad to me that it happened to you. It shouldn’t have happened that way. That’s not the way that I think a church following the way of Jesus would treat people.

You know, there’s this very bizarre mechanical process where those people who come in and experience love and belonging and transformation and demonstrate their passion. They become leaders, and the leadership demands are high, and it burns them out. They end up having to graduate from their church if they’re gonna be healthy because it’s not possible to do the kinds of things that maturing spiritual life requires in a world that’s all about fast-paced content production and community management. And it just sucks because that’s the model that is so popular right now.

Then on top of that, we have this abusive element that you’ve talked about, which what you described–if you were describing a corporate workplace, I think the same exact dynamic we would call toxic hierarchy or toxic patriarchy or even a particular toxic leadership community where a certain group of bros who all guard each other’s back and demand compliance. But then you put that in the church and now those people are doing the same thing, but they’re saying explicitly or implicitly, “This is God’s will,” right? Like it’s God’s will because we’re the ones who’ve been elevated to leadership. So God chose us, and it’s God’s will.

Jenai Auman (22:39)
Yeah.

Marc Schelske (22:46)
In complementarian theology, it’s God’s will and your design as a woman. And the accusation of being, you said, and abrasive, right? So if I were to say, okay, you’re accusing someone of being harsh and abrasive. What’s the thing you want them to be? Do you want them to be soft and compliant? Okay?!

Jenai Auman (22:56)
Yeah.

Marc Schelske (23:09)
What does that say about you and the system if that’s what you need people to be? I’m so sorry.

Jenai Auman (23:15)
Yeah, well, it was their way of making me the problem. In my advocacy of a better workplace, better systems, and even better work-life balance, I pointed out the problem. These are the problems within the system. This is the group dynamic that we’ve made normal. And I’m saying it shouldn’t be made normal because I wasn’t the first person in my position. They cycled through many people in my position, and they burned people out. And I kept thinking, “This is actually a doable job.” Like this is, I could see how, you know, boundaries and safeguards could be put in place so that this job becomes doable and you stop burning through people. Instead of looking at the problem and helping me address it, they made me the problem; they could pluck me out and then return to homeostasis. Unfortunately, that also wasn’t the case because I kept talking about it. And then I got on social media and started talking about it because they wouldn’t let me talk to members. So, members were following me on social media. So I kept talking about it. I never let them return to homeostasis. And I don’t feel guilty about that. I think Jesus came and he came to bring peace, and he came to be a compassionate presence in the world, and I think he also came to be a good troublemaker, and so I endeavor to be a good troublemaker when places of toxicity hurt people.

Marc Schelske (24:40)
When you talked about this situation, you identified the central marginalization as being a woman in this community that structurally and theologically saw women in a subservient role. They would say a complementarian role, you know, different gifts, but apparently, one of the gifts that they want to see manifested is being quiet and not upsetting our apple cart. I don’t know that that’s a spiritual gift. I don’t see that in there anywhere. Talk briefly about the dynamic for you as a woman in that environment. And maybe, how could women see more clearly what was going on in this community and what this community needed in ways that the leadership just couldn’t see?

Jenai Auman (25:21)
Yeah, well, some of the best foot soldiers for Toxic– it’s just patriarchy, all patriarchy. I believe is toxic and hierarchical and not good for any human being, but –The greatest foot soldier for patriarchy is the woman. So when you can get women on board, they will be the loudest cheerleaders for the whole movement. So, not all women could and were able to speak to it because they were too bought into the belonging that they had opted in for. And I think in this particular regard, not only was I a woman, I was the only person of color on our church staff. I was the only person who had an immigrant for a mother.

Marc Schelske (26:10)
That’s crazy in Texas.

Jenai Auman (26:08)
Yeah, so yeah, especially in Texas. I also grew up… are you familiar with Adverse Childhood Experiences? So, my ACEs score is eight. It’s a high ACEs score. So a lot of childhood trauma, domestic violence, all these sorts of things. And so I had a very particular view on what should be normal. And over time, I think my view of normal was just safety, you know? And I also had a very particular view on what is privileged.

Marc Schelske (26:37)
Sure, right.

Jenai Auman (26:41)
Entitlement gets conflated with privilege, and I saw a lot of entitlement in our church structure. People were entitled to x, y, and z, and I thought this was not okay. We had a retreat for some leaders, and they wanted a five-star retreat almost like luxurious accommodations, and the only thing we could afford was, you know, church camps in Texas, sort of not Five Star, not the Ritz-Carlton. And you realize then that when the number of arguments internally that are happening within these deacons and leaders and what’s expected of the leadership and the leadership is so worried that we’re not making these folks happy and how they kind of bend to the whims somehow. I realized this is a very, very expensive privilege that only a very affluent church can afford.

Marc Schelske (27:07)
Right.

Jenai Auman (27:32)
Not only were we focused on this, but we were also not focused on feeding or helping the unhoused, or we weren’t actively engaged in other actually merciful ministries. From my perspective, I thought this was a luxury. I never had a vacation as a kid. When I saw that the norms were something that my family could not conform to while growing up, I realized I have a very different perspective than a lot of these people. Now I know that a differing perspective is not bad. It’s actually holistic and good and helps build a more holistic church. At that time, I would just close my mouth and realize I was the outlier. And so I would keep quiet because there was no value to my perspective.

Marc Schelske (28:14)
Right, and at some point, it’s costly, and you have to decide if that cost is worth it. You talked about how there were women who either couldn’t see or wouldn’t speak out about the situation because of the cost to themselves, right? They have a certain amount of power, they have a certain amount of social respect in that community, and to speak out against it is gonna be “Harsh and abrasive,” right? That’s a struggle for any organization.

Even if we picture in our minds some ideal church that’s doing it right, you still have the dynamic that the folks planning are humans, and humans are discomfort averse. And we then tend to plan things that are comfortable for us, even well-intentioned people, right? Like I certainly have planned retreats and been one of the people who was like, “I’m old. I would really like a more comfortable bed. Can we make that happen?” You know? But then, having somebody else in the room who can say that will make the cost inaccessible to people. Is accessibility a value of what we want to accomplish here? And then if I’m in a good space, I’m like, “Of course. Sorry, I got distracted for a moment. You’re absolutely right. What can we do?” But in an environment with no voice to say, “Have you considered this implication of that thing that’s comfortable for you?” If I’ve just constructed a group of advisors who are all sort of in my lane, everyone will nod their head and say, “Yeah, of course, that’s what we all want.”

Jenai Auman (29:47)
Yes Men!

Marc Schelske (30:10)
And, when everyone in the room nods, it doesn’t feel like Yes Men affirming my decision. It feels like common sense, right? Well, common sense is that we all want this, and everybody would like it. And to have someone in that space, whether they’re speaking from sensory issues or gender issues or whatever, for them to say, you know, “I know you like smoke in the sanctuary because it makes the lights look pretty, but this is what it does to my autistic kid,” or “this is what it does to my, sensory overload issues. How might we accommodate that?” And then I’m like, it didn’t even ever occur to me that that would be a problem, you know?

Jenai Auman (30:13)
Yeah.

Marc Schelske (30:39)
So then the issue that lies at the heart isn’t the smoke or the comfortable bed. The issue is the power structure; we had a community of people making these decisions in a way that was closed to the input of the lived experience of people that aren’t like that group of leaders, So then that immediately suggests that we should have diverse groups of leaders on purpose so that we avoid that. Is that all tracking?

Jenai Auman (30:54)
Yes, I would say, like when it’s a hive mind, and everybody thinks the same thing is on board with the same thing, dissent is not allowed. The system itself hinges on marginalization. It does marginalize that you have no other dissenting voices.

Marc Schelske (31:14)
Right.

Jenai Auman (31:23)
My undergrad is in behavioral health, and I was writing and studying groupthink as a phenomenon in a group dynamics class. I was also encouraged to research different scenarios in the news that might have been groupthink. There were two scenarios that I studied. One was Enron, and Enron happened in Houston. And I also studied groupthink in terms of the abuse scandal at Penn State. And I realized, yeah, there were a lot of people who could have been dissenting voices to the system, but the system was organized such that dissension was punished. And so no one brought a dissenting opinion. No one was willing to call foul because it would cost them, too. Ultimately, it costs those institutions a lot and the victims so much. And so when you have a system that actively discourages dissent or differing opinions, it will inevitably hurt someone, if not immediately, then somewhere down the line, because the system hinges on marginalization. And marginalization is dehumanizing to someone. I remember studying that and thinking, my gosh, I am living the case study for what I should be writing on, you know, but I can’t write on my church staff for this class. It was so infuriating to be living it. It probably made me seem more harsh and abrasive because I was trying to say, “this is what I’m learning.”

Marc Schelske (32:46)
Right. Right. Right. And this is why women shouldn’t learn, Jenai! Don’t you see?

Jenai Auman (32:48)
I know. There’s that line in Pride and Prejudice that Lady Catherine de Bourgh says of Elizabeth Bennet if anyone’s familiar, “obstinate headstrong girl.” And I got a shirt that says “obstinate headstrong.” I should have worn it for the interview! It is like my favorite shirt to wear to places because I now see that in cases where harm and toxicity and marginalization and dehumanization are normal, I want to seem obstinate and headstrong in those spaces.

Marc Schelske (33:24)
Okay, so that’s funny, but also, it feels like a really important thing to sit on for a minute. I think an awful lot of us are, whether by temperament or perhaps coping mechanisms or residual untreated trauma–I think a lot of us are conflict-averse. And when you put a community together, there will always be differences of opinion. So then, if It feels like sharing my opinion will result in conflict. Then there’s a calculation that people often do intuitively without even thinking it through that expressing that will hurt too much. It’s going to be uncomfortable. It’s going to be awkward. That’s a word that gets used a lot these days. And awkward just means it’s the tip of the iceberg of discomfort that I don’t want to think about any deeper than that. “It was just awkward.”

Jenai Auman (34:05)
Mm-hmm.

Marc Schelske (34:15)
You’re wearing this T-shirt that says what it says, and the reality is that if you’re in a community where the culture is, “We don’t disagree. We’re nice people. We’re good people. We’re kind people,” right? Conflict isn’t a part of what a good church would be because we’re all filled with the fruits of the spirit, and we get along. Isn’t that wonderful? And then we all collude that we will behave that way because we, of course, prefer to be thought of as nice than obstinate, right?

The trouble for me is that people listen to my voice. Because I can walk into the room in any leadership conversation in my community and immediately have some level of respect, I then can say, “it’s important to be nice.”

Jenai Auman (34:56)
Yeah.

Marc Schelske (35:06)
But somebody else in my community who doesn’t have that positional or cultural ability, that power, that privilege, somebody else… let’s say the issue is an issue of gender, and a woman wants to say, “Hey, this is my experience,” if our culture is that we all get along and we’re all nice and there isn’t conflict, then the only way that woman is going to be able to be heard is to behave in a way that our community perceives as not nice. And so then we end up with tropes like The Angry Black Woman, where a person has a reasonable complaint to make, but then because we’re conflict-averse, we’re like, “I, yeah, that’s, ew, I don’t want to have this conversation.”

Jenai Auman (35:32)
Mm-hmm.

Marc Schelske (35:45)
Why did you make me feel discomfort just now? Stop being the kind of person who makes me feel discomfort, right?

Jenai Auman (35:52)
Yeah, yeah. I think delineating between discomfort and safety is very important, and I think many people don’t know how to distinguish between the two. You can be uncomfortable, but what you really are is unsafe. As a woman who runs on the streets and jogs, I have to take care of my safety, make sure that I’m walking a safe path, that there are other people, that there are ways that–you know, Apple Watch–somebody can track me. And then there is the act of running itself. I’m fairly healthy. It’s uncomfortable running, but it’s a good challenge. So running is uncomfortable. Sometimes, it is unsafe, but most of the time, I’m just doing good training work that helps me grow as a runner. I think there’s a difference between discomfort, which is a lack of safety, and discomfort, which is actually outgrowing the pot you’ve planted in. I don’t think people understand the difference between the two.

Marc Schelske (36:55)
Mmm. That’s a really great distinction. I think, especially speaking as and to folks with a level of privilege in their community, it’s easy for me to say, “This is an uncomfortable conversation,” but it’s not actually threatening my position or anything, right? Whereas someone coming to me in a community where dissent is not allowed, the very act of coming to me is dangerous because it might mean getting excluded or they don’t get the opportunity. So at that moment, there’s discomfort, but because I’m the person with the privileged voice, I’m defining it as just awkward discomfort. “Can’t we all get along? Can’t you be a team player?” That kind of stuff, where that person who is marginalized might actually be addressing something where there’s a real danger to them for their well-being. For me to define that as just an issue of communication, or as a temperament issue, you know, like when they said of you that you’re harsh and abrasive, that’s saying that the problem is entirely in how you are interfacing with a system.

Jenai Auman (37:54)
Yeah.

Marc Schelske (38:16)
And the system is fine. There’s nothing wrong with the system and the people in the system, which is me, right? The problem is framed as you being abrasive rather than that leader saying, “Weird. I had hoped that the way we did things wouldn’t be hurtful to people. Tell me more about how the way we’re doing things is hurting you because, gosh, that’s really not what I hope we do around here.”

Jenai Auman (38:30)
Yeah. The church should not only be a sanctuary but also a hospital for sick people. In a hospital, if you have surgery and it becomes infected, you have to open up the wound again to see if there’s something in there that should not be in there. Often, I was the one saying, “Hey, Something is in here that should not be in here. We need to cut this open and extricate the toxin so that we can heal.” We actually have to cause some discomfort to be able to heal the system that we’re in.

Marc Schelske (39:00)
Right. Especially the longer the problem is embedded in the body. If it was a brand new thing like we’re on a leadership team and we’re discussing some new endeavor we’re trying, you might be able to say, “This part seems off,” and there’s not a lot invested in that. But if it’s like, this is how we’ve done things for 20 years, or in the case of Complementarianism, this is how we’ve done things for 250 years. I mean, it’s practically like God gave these words at Mount Sinai!

Jenai Auman (39:17)
Mm-hmm.

Marc Schelske (39:40)
At that point, there’s a lot of pain in cutting that open, right? This, I think, is part of what underlies the complexity of the deconstruction conversation for both sides. Because folks who are deconstructing often have to dig deep into stuff that was embedded in their childhood experience of faith, where people that they loved and trusted told them lies about who they were or about who God was. They have to surgically open up to get down to that stuff, and then folks on the other side that are like, “You know, my kid read a book, and all of a sudden they’re asking these hard questions,” So for them, the same thing is happening. Something very deep has to be attended to, and that’s really painful. And we’d just rather it not happen.

Jenai Auman (40:27)
Yeah, and it’s become enmeshed with our identity and our worth. And I think whenever you’re taking a scalpel to a part of someone’s identity, of course, you’re the problem. Don’t cut who I am. So I remember in a meeting a year later, after our family had already left our church, I remember telling my former pastor, “I have a lot of empathy for you because I know your story; I know your childhood also. I know the pain you’ve had to endure and I know that to address that lack within yourself, You found it in quote-unquote Jesus, but you really didn’t find it in Jesus. You found it in the position that Jesus afforded you in the church. You found it in your identity as a pastor.”

Marc Schelske (41:09)
Ooof.

Jenai Auman (41:12)
“If someone comes at you, you immediately make it an us versus them situation. It’s a me-versus-you situation when a shepherd should be protecting the sheep. And you didn’t do that with me. I gave you so many opportunities to do that with me, but you didn’t. And I think it’s because you need to protect something within you. And I was a threat to that system. And so you say that your identity is in Jesus, but it’s really in the things that Jesus has afforded you in your privilege as a man.”

So I invited him into something more, and he didn’t want it. And so I realized I am no longer responsible for this. All I can control and am responsible for is what I do now, moving forward.

Marc Schelske (41:54)
Brutal. Brutal. I bet he thought that was harsh and abrasive.

Jenai Auman (42:02)
I’m sure he did! I’m sure he did.

Marc Schelske (42:04)
It makes me think back to conversations that I had with my therapist where, now 10 years past. Sitting with her, I look back, and I’m so grateful for what she said, but man, in the moment, I was like, “Why are you so mean to me? Why are you saying this hurtful stuff?”

Jenai Auman (42:20)
Yeah. Like, how dare you?!

Marc Schelske (42:26)
So you ended that bit there talking about coming to a place of decision in your heart about how you were going to posture yourself in relationship to both the specific experience you had as a person, but then also this whole question in terms of how we as the people of Jesus behave in these ways. At the end of Othered, you offered a vision that I find quite profound, and this goes way deeper than just being able to personally move on, or it’s even deeper than personal healing. This isn’t about stopping the bleeding. You wrote, “I choose not to collude with a culture that is okay with using Jesus to hurt others.” That is incredibly strong language. Collusion–that’s a legal term for when you participate in making a crime happen. “I choose not to collude with a culture that’s okay with using Jesus to hurt others. Rather, I will continue to turn away and not use God-loaded language to make other people small. Repentance means my gaze is set on Jesus and I walk free knowing that I do not have to seek retribution for my scars.” So let’s talk about that.

Jenai Auman (43:41)
I’ve really not heard a proper apology that took on ownership. It was always, You know, “I tried to do the right thing, and going back now, I wish I could do things differently.” It’s never been, “I treated you poorly. I did not treat you as a sister. And I did do the things that you say I did, and I’m sorry.” I never heard that. I don’t know if I ever will hear that. And I realized that my moving forward could not hinge on me, hoping to hear that one day. So, for my whole personhood, I needed to find healing in some other way. And if they weren’t going to help kind of excavate all of the harm that they had done, I thought I’m going to find another way to do it because again–petty but also stubborn. These men do not get to hold any sort of control of my faith. They don’t get to control my story. And if my life becomes all about what they did, then I start to turn into the decrepit, abrasive, harsh person that they believe me to be. And I thought I’m not doing it. I’m not playing into their game.

Marc Schelske (44:48)
Yeah. Right.

Jenai Auman (45:05)
The biblical idea of repentance, it’s not just an “I’m sorry.” It’s a total transformation into a new sort of human. I will no longer walk in the way of the world. I will walk in the way of Jesus. And so, after a time of significant mourning, that’s exactly what I turned to in the Bible. What is the way of Jesus? What did he actually do? Who did he go to?

I realized that repentance is just listening to people and caring for them. It doesn’t have to be creating a culture where it’s us-versus-them. I can avoid that. I can even avoid that in my own healing and my own pursuit of justice. I can avoid creating an us-versus-them culture. I realized I was not going to fight the machine with another machine. In every way that I can, I want to beat my swords into plowshares. I want to cultivate goodness. What I can do is cultivate goodness through the stories I tell, through the words that I write, and through the hope that I offer in those stories. And so I think practicing repentance is breathing life into the world just as life has been breathed into me by God, by the spirit of God, the breath of God that dwells within me. I want to breathe life into the world so I can heal my wound. My life doesn’t have to be all about my wounds, but in my resurrected life, I can bear the scars of my wounds and say I actually lived. Now, from this place of resurrection, I want to breathe life into others as well. That’s what I tried to do in Othered.

REFLECTION

Marc Schelske (46:44)
What happened for you when you heard Jenai’s words? I choose not to collude with a culture that uses Jesus to hurt others. Don’t let those words float by. Allow them to sink in and do their work in you. Have I colluded in harm the church has done? Maybe I just didn’t want to rock the boat. Maybe I needed the community for my own sense of security more than I needed the community to be equitable for other people. Maybe I was distracted. Maybe I was part of the sausage-making, and the truth is that in most modern American churches, the pressure to build a great program that’s never more than six days away is unstoppable. Even if I didn’t intend to harm, even if I think of myself as someone who follows Jesus and wants to care for those around me, even then, it’s possible I have colluded with the harm done.

So what now? Well, like Jenai, we have a choice. When and where we see harm being done, we can decide not to contribute to it. We can choose to raise our hand in the committee meeting and say that we’re rushing, and in our rus,h we might be overlooking or inadvertently hurting people. As a respected middle-aged white pastor, I can make sure that when women or people of color speak up in the circles, I’m part of, they’re heard rather than ignored or worse, having their ideas co-opted by other people.

We get to choose where to give our money, and we can choose to not give when it seems like the organizations we’ve been supporting are doing harm. We can speak up and say, doesn’t have to be like this. That’s what I hope I’m doing. I hope that’s what all of us in this odd extended community of Jesus followers who’ve stepped away from fundamentalist ways of holding faith are willing to do, even when it costs us. Toward the end of Othered, Jenai wrote, “Living resurrected means I not only fight for the flourishing of my own community, I seek the flourishing of the nations –of everyone. I turn away from and no longer live a life of control, coercion, colonization, or conquest.” That sounds to me very much like Jesus. And that’s the shape of faith I want to be formed in.

May you have the courage to consider the ways that you’ve participated in othering and to step away from those paths.

Thanks for listening.

If this conversation has intrigued you, I recommend you check out Jenai’s book, Othered: Finding Belonging with the God Who Pursues the Hurt, Harmed, and Marginalized. You can find it in all the book places. You can also learn more about her and what she’s up to at her website, www.JenaiAuman.com. Notes for today’s episode and any links that were mentioned can find at www.MarcAlanSchelske.com/TAW056.

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