Faith Mending is…
Healing-Centered
Trauma is real. It’s painful, gut-wrenching, and soul-rending. We’re also all so much more than our trauma. You are more than your trauma. Following in the footsteps of Shawn Ginwright, PhD., we want this space to focus on healing. By doing this we’re committing to honoring the trauma you’ve experienced without deifying it (turning it into a god itself).
Our writing and resources seek to provide the right mix of compassion and challenge, hope and harm-reduction, what’s going on now and what might come next. We’re truly interested in where you are and how you're finding your way. This isn’t church; it isn’t dogmatics; it’s not about convincing you of one right way to do things.
It’s a labor of love born of the pain of our own deconstruction. It’s a love letter to the you you’re striving to become when all you’ve known has been willingly or unwillingly wrenched from your very being.
Belonging-Focused
We lose more than our faith when we begin to deconstruct, we lose our communities, our friends, and sometimes even our families. Belonging is an important part of what it means to be human. Being together matters and finding your people is important to any healing journey.
Belonging is also about equity. We won’t tolerate any form of patriarchy, racism, or dismissive behavior or words. We all belong. Our experiences differ, and difference makes us stronger, more creative, and more resilient.
We hope to make this a place of curiosity, and we hope you will extend that to one another. Curiosity breeds empathy, which develops connection, which grounds us to do the hard work.
Remember, we are all, at the same time – like everyone else, like someone else, and like no one else.
Spiritually-Grounded
When faith changes, it can feel very unsteady. We have experienced this and know how disconcerting it can be. We promise to write and respond with compassion, justice, kindness, and humility. Those are the spiritual values that ground us. Aside from that, we can offer little in the way of promises about where you’ll land.
Some of you might find a renewed sense of faith in Christianity. Some of you may find a home that is more spiritually fluid. Some of you may find meaning without all the God stuff. We’re okay with that. Our backgrounds are in the Christian tradition, but we’ve moved to more spiritually fluid places. And, while there is a good deal of that theology in our lives still, we’re open to where spirit calls and leads us and you.
Our sense is there is something bigger out there. That different cultures and contexts provide different names and ideologies. Certainly, abuse has happened in many of these places. However, the spirituality that we seek and see is one of compassion and equity, of love and justice, of kindness and community. We build off of these spiritual values because many of the traditions we come from proclaim the opposite.
What we expect from ourselves and others is vulnerability, spiritual seeking rather than spiritual truth, and openness. There is no one right way to mend our brokenness; no one single truth that will provide a balm. Our hope is that Faith Mending can be a place of healing. A rest stop on your journey of deconstruction, reconstruction, rebuilding, remolding, and reimagining what it means to live a meaningful life together.
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