The Church Was Supposed to Be the One Place You Couldn't Get Rejected
Rediscovering the church God designed before the one that hurt you
I’ve been in church my entire life — and I mean that literally.
My mom has been a member of Liberty Baptist Church since 1960. My parents adopted me at birth, and my brought me there every Sunday while my dad worked nights. She taught first-grade choir on Wednesday evenings and coordinated Sunday school, which meant I was there every time the doors opened. I didn’t choose the church. The church was just the water I swam in.
In fifth grade, I prayed the prayer, as all my friends did. Empty words. I knew it when I said them.
My dad died the following year. I was in sixth grade, just entering the rebellious years, and his death tipped me from nominal to hostile. I wasn’t an atheist — I believed God existed. I just hated him for what he’d allowed. My mom kept bringing me anyway, through more than a year of active rebellion, every Sunday, every Wednesday, because that’s who she was.
Towards the end of seventh grade, the church held a revival. I wanted nothing to do with it. I was in the overflow room with my friends, looking for any reason not to pay attention. Then something started happening to my friends. They wanted to respond. They wanted to go into the main auditorium. They wanted me to come with them.
I went begrudgingly. And in the hallway between the two rooms — not at the altar, not during the sermon, in a hallway — God got me. It was like an invitation I suddenly understood was addressed to me. I surrendered. For real, this time.
The church was the place where God found me.
I spent the next seventeen years giving the church everything I had. I began leading worship in 2008, moved into student ministry and production, and pursued staff roles. I earned a bachelor’s in biblical and theological studies in 2016. I left vocational ministry in 2018 — not because the calling left, but because something else did. I kept studying anyway. Last year, I finished a master’s degree in theological studies with a 4.0 and published my first two peer-reviewed articles.
The church didn’t get less of me after the wound. It got more.
Which is why what happened next cut so deep.
No matter how hard I strove to be part of the body, the body rejected me.
That’s the only way I know to say it. I showed up. I served. I contributed when asked and when not asked. I consulted, I forgave, I passed over things I had every right to name. Every time I put myself out there — every open door, every application, every moment I extended something of myself — I was stonewalled. The organ-rejection metaphor is the most accurate I have. It wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t a single moment. It was a slow biological process. The body simply would not receive me.
I cannot recall a single time anyone on staff made me feel genuinely loved and cared for.
It took me a long time to say that without softening it. Not most of the time. Not especially in hard seasons. Every single time. The place that was supposed to be the body of Christ — the one institution on earth whose entire reason for existing is that people belong to it — made me feel like I didn’t belong.
That wound didn’t make me an atheist. It made me something possibly harder to recover from: a believer who stopped expecting the church to be what Jesus said it was.
You probably know the shape of that story, even if the details are different.
Maybe yours was the pastor who didn’t have time for you unless you were giving. Maybe it was the small group that welcomed you warmly and then gradually stopped texting back. Maybe it was the committee that made the decision before the meeting, and you sat there watching the conversation perform itself. Maybe it was something sharper — a real betrayal, a real injustice, a moment when the person who was supposed to represent Christ chose power over faithfulness and nobody said a word.
The fastest-growing religious demographic in America right now isn’t the “nones.” It’s the dechurched — people who believe something, maybe a lot of things, but have decided that organized Christianity costs more than it gives. Researchers estimate somewhere between 40 and 65 million Americans who once attended church no longer do. Most of them didn’t leave because of intellectual objections. They left because the body rejected them.
What’s interesting — and what I think we miss when we frame the dechurched crisis as primarily a doctrinal or cultural problem — is that most of these people are not angry at God. They’re angry at us. They wanted what the church was supposed to offer. They didn’t get it. And after a certain number of rejections, they stopped trying.
The question underneath all of that isn’t why did those churches fail? The question is: what was the church supposed to be in the first place? Because if we don’t know what it was designed to be, we have no framework for diagnosing what went wrong, and no vision for what we’re trying to rebuild.
That’s what I want to do here. Not relitigate the wound — yours or mine. But go back far enough to find out what the church God had in mind actually looks like, so we can name the gap honestly, and live toward something better.
What the church was meant to be
This is where Redemptive Correlation does its necessary work — not by accommodating the cultural wound to make theology more palatable, but by bringing the cultural wound under Scripture’s gaze and asking: what does the story say?
The method moves through four acts. Creation establishes what the thing was designed for. Fall diagnoses what went wrong. Redemption names what Christ has done about it. Restoration points toward where it’s all heading. Applied to the church, the arc is devastating in the most clarifying way possible.
The church was designed as a body, not a building.
Paul’s most sustained image for the church in 1 Corinthians isn’t an institution or an organization. It’s a body. “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ” (1 Cor. 12:12, CSB). He spends three chapters in the middle of that letter developing what this means, and the argument is more radical than most of our ecclesiology has room for.
In Paul’s vision, the foot cannot say it doesn’t belong because it isn’t a hand (1 Cor. 12:15). The eye cannot say to the hand, “I don’t need you” (v. 21). And in the most surprising move of the entire passage, Paul says the members of the body that seem weaker are actually indispensable, and the parts we think are less honorable are the ones we clothe with greater honor (vv. 22–23). The logic is inverted. The body functions not by elevating the visible parts, but by protecting and dignifying the ones nobody sees.
The church was designed so that “there would be no division in the body, but that the members would have the same concern for each other” (v. 25). The Greek word there is μέριμνα — anxious care. The same word Jesus uses in Matthew 6 about worry. The church’s structural DNA was supposed to produce mutual anxious care — members preoccupied with each other’s flourishing, not their own.
Before the Fall, this was the logic of the garden: every part of creation oriented toward the other, the strong serving the vulnerable, abundance flowing outward rather than hoarding inward. Paul’s body metaphor isn’t a metaphor about management. It’s a metaphor about the way things were meant to work before they broke.
The body began to consume itself.
But Paul’s body metaphor in 1 Corinthians isn’t describing a healthy church. It’s prescribing health to a sick one. The Corinthian congregation was marked by factions and favoritism, by status games and spiritual one-upmanship, by the wealthy eating their fill at the Lord’s Table while the poor went hungry (1 Cor. 11:21). The body was devouring itself from within.
The pastoral epistles tell the same story from a different angle. Paul writes to Timothy in Ephesus about elders who must be “not a lover of money, not quarrelsome” — because the church at Ephesus had elders who were (1 Tim. 3:3, CSB). He warns about those who “suppose that godliness is a means of gain” (1 Tim. 6:5). He tells Titus to appoint elders “not arrogant, not quick-tempered, not a drunkard, not violent, not greedy for money” — which means every one of those qualities was showing up in leaders somewhere (Titus 1:7, CSB).
The Fall didn’t leave the church untouched. It entered the body and replicated the same distortions it produced everywhere else: the love of power, the protection of status, the silencing of inconvenient people. The body that was supposed to be marked by anxious care for its weaker members became a place where the weaker members got pushed out.
Your wound — and mine — is not an anomaly. It is a symptom of the Fall working itself out inside the one institution that was supposed to be pushing back.
Christ gave himself for a people, not an organization.
Here is where the Gospel does something that no institutional reform can do.
In Ephesians 5, Paul calls Christ the head of the church and names what his headship actually looked like: “Christ loved the church and gave himself for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor” (Eph. 5:25–27, ESV). The head gave himself up for the body. Not to manage it. Not to use it. To sanctify it.
And in the Gospels, Jesus is relentlessly specific about who he came for. He eats with tax collectors. He touches lepers. He lets the woman with the alabaster jar wash his feet and doesn’t stop her, even when everyone at the table is embarrassed. In Mark 10, the disciples try to send away the children who are being brought to Jesus for blessing, and Jesus is indignant (Mark 10:14, CSB). The ones the institution wanted to turn away were the ones the head moved toward.
The church Jesus died for is not the polished version. It’s the one with the messy people in it. The head of the church has a demonstrated preference for exactly the kind of person the body keeps rejecting.
The church will become what it was always supposed to be.
Revelation 21 gives us the telos — the city of God, the new Jerusalem, the Bride made ready for the Lamb. And what’s striking about that image is that it is corporate. The final destination is not a collection of isolated souls with God — it is a city, a body, a community of people who have been made whole together.
The wounds that made you stop expecting the church to be what it was supposed to be are real. But they are not the last word. The head of the church is still sanctifying it. He has not abandoned the project. The body is still being healed — slowly, imperfectly, at great cost — toward the day when the bride is presented without spot or wrinkle.
That is not a reason to minimize the wound. It is a reason to hold onto the vision even when the institution fails to embody it.
The wound you’re carrying from the church is legitimate. I’m not here to talk you out of it, and I’m not going to tell you that healing means going back to the place that hurt you.
But here’s what I want to press on: there’s a difference between being done with a congregation and being done with the church. One is sometimes wisdom. The other is letting the Fall have the final word.
If you’re sitting outside right now — watching from a distance, attending somewhere with one foot out the door, or not attending anywhere at all — I want to ask you the question underneath the wound: what did you actually want from the church before it hurt you? Because the answer to that question is probably closer to what the church was supposed to be than anything it actually became. The longing is not a liability. It’s a compass.
You wanted to belong. You wanted to be known. You wanted a community that was preoccupied — Paul’s word is anxiously concerned — with your flourishing. You wanted the body to work the way bodies are supposed to work: with the stronger parts protecting the weaker ones, with no one told they don’t belong because they don’t look like the visible parts.
That longing is not naïve. It’s Edenic. It’s the design you were made to inhabit.
The church in your city will not be the new Jerusalem. Every local congregation is a broken approximation of a perfect thing. But the approximation matters. The attempt matters. The community of imperfect people trying to enact the body metaphor together — failing, repenting, trying again — is still the primary place where the Restoration presses into the present.
Don’t let the failure of a particular body convince you that the body itself was a bad idea. That’s not cynicism. That’s letting the wound do the theology for you.
Imagine a church culture that took Paul seriously — not as a distant first-century ideal but as a live diagnostic. Imagine congregations that actually asked: Are we treating our weaker members as indispensable? Are we clothing the less-visible parts with greater honor? Is the anxious care flowing in the right direction?
Imagine the person in the back row — the one who’s been hurt before, who showed up again anyway, who is one more dismissal away from leaving for good — finding in this congregation something they’d stopped expecting: a body that noticed them, moved toward them, made room for them at the weight-bearing level, not just the welcome desk.
That is not a utopian vision. That is an ecclesiological one. It is what the church was designed to be before the Fall got inside it. And it is what the head of the church is still, patiently, inexorably, healing it toward.
The wound is real. The design is realer.
We are not done with the church because the church is not done with us. The same Christ who died for a spotless bride is the one who keeps showing up for the spotted one. We can do the same — not because the institution deserves our loyalty, but because the vision does.
The church God had in mind is still the church we’re trying to become.
If you’re processing a church wound — or helping someone else through one — share this piece with them. Sometimes the most pastoral thing we can do is name the gap honestly and point toward the design together.
If Theologetics is helping you think more clearly about your faith, consider subscribing. It’s free, it’s weekly, and it’s written for people like you.
Got a reaction — agreement, pushback, your own story? I read every reply. I’d love for you to respond with a comment and tell me where you landed.
This is really beautifully, heartbreakingly, and hopefully written at all the right points – thank you for it