Within the small-town church culture, transparency is both very simple and very hard. You live life closely with your people, often seeing them several times a week.
In a larger church, it might be possible to hide from your church family; not so in a small church. So instead of hiding, the temptation is to embody a facade, a personality, or a lifestyle that you think they want you to have or that you want them to think you have. In our minds we may not mean to lie to our people, but in the end that’s exactly what we are doing. For me, this sin was keeping me from effectively ministering to our people. Maybe you are like I was…
When we moved to our small, farming, blue collar community, we moved into a hurting town. The church we were serving was scared, suffering, and hopeless. They had been hurt by former pastors, by other members, and by a gossiping town. We came to love and comfort these people. We knew we needed to build trust and rapport, yet I felt I was getting nowhere with the women. There was a general sense of “you’re fine, I’m fine; let’s just leave it at that.” It was an extremely frustrating time for me. I desperately wanted them to open their lives to me so that I could encourage them and love them where they most needed it. Yet, the truth was that I was being a hypocrite. I expected them to be open and honest, when I was unwilling to do so myself.
You see, my church family were not the only ones hurting. They were not the only ones that needed encouragement and love. I needed the same from them. I desired to have a church that exemplified the body of Christ, yet through my own refusal to be transparent and honest, I was crippling that effort. I was giving them a dangerous viewpoint of the pastor’s family. A viewpoint that places us above and beyond them. A viewpoint that kept those ladies from opening up because they couldn’t see how I could possibly relate.
The truth was that my own viewpoint was skewed. I had this idea in my head that my personal story – all I had gone through in the past or the real life I faced in the present – was mine alone to deal with. However, Scripture shows us that this is the opposite of how we should live in the body of Christ.
The truth is that we do not own the rights to our personal stories.
2 Cor. 1:3-4 (ESV)
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.”
God doesn’t comfort us to make us comfortable but to comfort others. There is much from our own walk with Him that can minister to the women around us.
Yet, for the heart of a pastor’s wife, this does not necessarily take away the feeling of dread or the undercurrent of fear attached to this word, this action, this living of a transparent life. We are already living life in a fishbowl! Why would we ever want to let them in to see more of our lives?
That’s what I thought because I failed to understand that sharing our lives isn’t exactly what we think it is. It isn’t always showing all the ugly, or all the scars, but it is showing that you are a real, growing, sister in Christ who struggles and lives life just as they do. God taught me this valuable lesson one weekday morning through the newest believer at our church. It is a day that will forever be etched into my heart and mind. {To be continued next week}
