How Not to Minister to Divorced People
I have a lot of respect for Russell Moore. He’s the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the public policy branch of the Southern Baptist Convention. He speaks out on a variety of ethical issues with thoughtfulness, care, and respect, as well as a firm grounding in the Bible and Christian theology. He’s even been personally insulted by Donald Trump for speaking out against moral decadence, so you know he’s a solid guy.
That said, I had a hard time listening to Moore’s Signposts podcast on ministering to divorced people last fall.
A listener wrote in, asking how churches should minister to divorced people so that they don’t feel like second-class Christians. Moore offered three main pieces of advice:
- Determine, as a church, where you are on the morality of divorce, “where divorce is allowable and where remarriage after divorce is allowable.”
- Take accountability for the marriages in your church, through premarital counseling, mentoring married couples, and intervening when marriages are falling apart.
- Provide opportunities for confession and, where possible, reconciliation for those going through divorce or already divorced.
None of that is bad advice, really, but if that is how you think about your divorce ministry, you’re not going to minister to divorced people.
Consider for a minute how an actual divorced person might respond to a church that built its divorce ministry around these three principles. Suppose I walk into that church and hear a sermon on divorce, focused mainly on when divorce is and is not allowable. Well, I’m already divorced with no hope of reconciliation, so what can I do with that? Feel terrible for being divorced? Feel judged by a church that wants to determine whether my divorce is one of the “allowable” ones? I’m not coming out of that sermon feeling welcomed.
But let’s say I come back after that sermon. I learn that the church has a great premarital counseling program, another program that matches young marrieds with older married couples for mentoring, and caring elders who work with marriages that are in trouble. That’s great. It’s also not helpful to me since I don’t fall in any of those categories. Good stuff, but not actually ministry to divorced people.
I persist, however, and eventually decide to place membership. Here’s what Moore shares in his podcast as an example of how a church might interact with new members who are divorced:
“I’ve known of a church where, when a person who is divorced comes to that congregation and applies for membership, one of the things that the church leaders do is to say, ‘What went on with the divorce? Tell us about what happened with the divorce.’ And in some cases the church would say, well this is a situation where you are the innocent party or you were the guilty party but you’ve come to repentance for that.”
Um, what? Does this church question all new members about terrible things that happened in their past to determine if they were the sinner or the one sinned against? That feeling I had after that first sermon, when I worried this church was out to judge me? Confirmed. At this point, I’m out of there.
The problem is that Moore only talks about divorce through the lens of sin. For instance, when advising churches to explain their beliefs about divorce, he recommends pastors preach against divorces that are “unbiblical,” to talk about God’s “judgment” and “mercy” when it comes to divorce. When discussing how a church might intervene in a failing marriage, Moore talks about “someone who is being wronged” and “holding the erring partner accountable.” And when he finally lands on ways a church might reach out to divorced people, particularly those for whom reconciliation is impossible, he frames that conversation entirely in terms of confession. “Maybe you’ve been sinned against,” Moore says, “and you’re having trouble handing that over to God, or maybe you were the guilty one and you have a conscience that is continually accusing you.”
If you want to minister to divorced people, you can’t just talk about divorce as sin.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t deal with sins that lead to divorce, or the sins that result from divorce, or divorce itself as sin. Divorce is terrible, full of hurt and brokenness and a rending of something that was meant to be forever. I don’t want to minimize that. Lord knows I’ve walked through that valley, and I’ve had to take responsibility for my role in my failed marriage, as well as the seismic impact of a broken relationship. But if your only message to divorced people is that you want to identify and deal with their sin, you’ll make a lot of people feel exactly like second-class Christians.
Don’t interrogate a divorced person to determine if they were the “innocent” or “guilty” party, or if their divorce was “biblical” or “unbiblical.” That kind of binary thinking is reductionist, failing to consider the complexities of hurting relationships. And it usually only serves to make the one judging the situation feel superior. Divorce is such a painful, brutal experience; one shouldn’t have to go through that, only to be met with an inquisition into their sin status.
I know it can be really hard for happily married people to wrap their minds around divorce. I’ve known people who responded to my divorced status the way they would respond to me having a third eye or a robot arm. They just don’t understand how such a thing can be. And, sometimes, it’s easier to try to box divorce in, to determine what kinds of divorce count as sin and what kinds don’t, than to deal with the messy complexity of broken relationships. But putting people in boxes isn’t ministry.
If you want to minister to divorced people, then love them, care for them, and accept them. Most divorced Christians I know struggled heroically and prayerfully to save their marriages. Affirm that. And if a divorced person didn’t do that, love them anyway. Find out what their needs are, physically or emotionally or spiritually, and reach out with kindness and compassion. Maybe they need confession and repentance, especially if it was their sin that destroyed their marriage, but don’t assume they do. A lot of divorced people are just as right with God as their non-divorced brothers and sisters.
If you want to minister to divorced people, then welcome them into your church, just as you would welcome anyone. We’ve all been hurt, we’re all broken. Help the people in your church, whatever their marital status, heal from their hurt, mend their brokenness. Know that marriages are complicated, relationships are complicated, life is complicated. Look for ways to include divorced people in the life of your church, for ways to meet their needs and to love them. That’s how you minister to divorced people.