(Editor’s Note: What does it mean for a church to be a place of refuge? Throughout Scripture, Jesus consistently restores the dignity of those who have been marginalized, excluded, or harmed, while the earliest Christian communities became known for their radical hospitality and care for the vulnerable. In Part 2 of “Becoming a Safe Church,” Liz Cooledge Jenkins explores how Scripture and church history invite today’s churches to become communities where people experience protection, healing, and genuine belonging, not by avoiding difficult truths, but by embodying the compassionate way of Christ. Find Part One here.)
Jesus Restores Safety, Dignity, and Belonging
In a story recorded in the Gospel of John (8:1-11), religious leaders interrupt Jesus in the middle of his teaching and force a woman to stand before the crowd who has gathered. They accuse the woman of adultery and ask Jesus what he says about applying the Mosaic law that she should be executed via stoning. With zero concern for the woman’s physical safety — let alone her emotional, social, or spiritual safety — these (presumably male) leaders want to use her to test Jesus. They are trying to catch him in a trap, forcing him to say something condemnable.
Jesus, though, is having none of it. He refuses to speak.
Instead, he bends over and writes with his finger in the dirt. Perhaps he is defusing the religious leaders’ hostility by buying time, hoping to de-escalate the situation on the woman’s behalf. I picture his attention directed toward her, even when he is looking at the ground.
I imagine Jesus wondering: Is this woman okay? How can I serve her holistic well-being in this moment? How can I respond to this situation in a way that best honors her dignity and agency as a human being? What does she need from me? What actions can I take to advocate for her?
Such different questions from the ones the religious leaders seem to be asking: How can we villainize Jesus? How can we use this woman to our advantage, especially in her current state of physical and emotional vulnerability? How might she serve our goals?
When the time is right, Jesus responds to the religious leaders’ ongoing attempts to engage him in a fraught conversation, one that rests on the assumption of this woman’s dehumanization. Is it appropriate to stone her? You tell me, Jesus says. If any one of you is sinless, let that person throw the first stone. One by one, they walk away.
The mortal threat has passed. Jesus has addressed the woman’s physical safety first.
But now she still stands humiliated and exposed in front of the crowd, and there is more work to be done. There is the restoration of her emotional safety, of her social status, of her sense of acceptance and belonging. In front of everyone, once the men with murder on their minds have left, Jesus talks with the woman. He tells her, in the clear hearing of all who have witnessed this entire scene, that she is not condemned.
In many churches, safety is not regarded as a high value, if it is valued at all. Christians are sometimes led to believe that if we truly trusted God to protect us, we wouldn’t worry about our safety. If we were spiritually-minded enough, we wouldn’t concern ourselves too much with earthly, bodily matters like getting sick, or getting others sick, or lacking access to healthcare, or being at risk of detention or deportation, or being at the mercy of an unjust justice system.
“Faith over fear,” Christians sometimes say.
I remember when this phrase was used as an excuse not to abide by reasonable COVID-19 restrictions, not to wear masks or reduce indoor gathering sizes. People employ it now to justify not worrying too much about government policies that violently impact our lives or the lives of people in our communities — often immigrants, people of color, and materially poor people.
But the Christian scriptures and church history tell a different story. The biblical psalmists, for example, are actually deeply concerned with safety. One psalmist pleads,
“Hide me in the shadow of your wings, from the wicked who despoil me, from my deadly enemies who surround me.” (17:8, NRSVUE)
Another prays fervently,
“Deliver me, O Lord, from evildoers; protect me from those who are violent, who plan evil things in their minds.” (Psalm 140:1-2, NRSVUE)
The Psalms bear witness to our very human, very valid fears. They don’t ask for “faith over fear” or deny the reality of violence and oppression in our world. They ask for protection, for peace, for safety. For an end to harm.
This is what so many of us are looking for when we walk into faith communities. We need communities that acknowledge harm rather than spiritually bypassing it. We want sanctuaries of refuge from violence, and from those who perpetrate this violence. We are looking for places where a sense of trusting in God is not pitted against our legitimate needs for spaces that feel — and are — safe.
Spaces where people in positions of power do not abuse their power. Where people see and empathize with others’ pain. Where people listen closely and with open minds to those who challenge their ways of doing things, who urge them to address the real and urgent justice issues impacting their communities. Where people do not stick to their own homogeneous friend groups and cause others to feel excluded, like they don’t belong.
Protect me from those who plan evil things. Hide me. Keep me safe, we might join the psalmists in praying.
The Church Has Always Been Called to Be a Refuge
While often sidelined in present-day, white-dominated, evangelical churches, social and emotional safety was central to the earliest Christian communities. In A People’s History of Christianity, historian Diana Butler Bass writes,
“…to ancient Christians hospitality was a virtue, part of the love of neighbor and fundamental to being a person of the way. While contemporary Christians tend to equate morality with sexual ethics, our ancestors defined morality as welcoming the stranger.”[1]
Many churches today articulate and enforce sexual ethics in ways that are laced with shame, which is antithetical to emotional safety. In stark contrast, the early church placed its focus on welcome, hospitality, belonging, and unconditional neighborly love — practices that honor each person’s need for social safety.
What did early Christian practices of hospitality look like?
During the Plague of Galen in the second century, writes Butler Bass,
“Christians proved their spiritual mettle by tending to the sick. Their acts of mercy extended to all the suffering regardless of class, tribe, or religion and created the conditions in which others accepted the faith.”[2]
In contrast with manipulative uses of a “faith over fear” mantra — and here I think of the millennials I’ve spoken with who described feeling profoundly unsafe in churches that did not take COVID-19 seriously — this early Christian posture of mercy toward the sick takes human pain and distress with the utmost seriousness. It seeks to alleviate suffering where possible.
To Jesus and the early church, according to Butler Bass, hospitality meant that
“outsiders…are brought into the circle of protection and care as usual social relationships are disrupted or reversed.”[3]
In practical terms,
“Domestic hospitality included offering shelter for widows and orphans, providing rooms for itinerant missionaries and preachers, making meals for the poor, and hosting family funeral banquets and other ritual meals.”[4]
With special attention to people who were especially marginalized or vulnerable, such as widows, orphans, and those without material wealth, early Christians sought to create communities marked by safety, provision, and care.
As the Gospel stories tell it, the religious leaders of Jesus’ day once called out Jesus and his disciples for unlawfully picking grain on the Sabbath, the traditional day of rest. But Jesus challenged them back. He offered a historical example from the story of David and then argued from it: “The Sabbath was made for humankind and not humankind for the Sabbath.” (Mark 2:23-28, NRSVUE)
The questions churches and church leaders ask often hold so much judgment. There can be such a strong assumption that pastors, elders, and others in authority know the right way to practice the Christian faith, and that they have the authority to determine whether others are engaging with the Christian tradition accurately, faithfully, and adequately. But really, church and all its structures — Sunday services, Bible study groups, prayer, service, and other spiritual practices like the Sabbath — all these were created on behalf of humankind. They are meant to serve us, not the other way around.
If we find ourselves asking why people are not participating, we might turn the question back around on ourselves: Who is served well by our current practices, and who is served poorly? What might better meet people’s needs?
Even Sabbath rest itself serves as an example of God’s care for people’s spiritual, psychological, and emotional safety. As God rested on the seventh day, so we too are invited to rest (see Exod. 20:8-11). Tricia Hersey writes in Rest Is Resistance, “Resting our bodies and minds is a form of reverence. When we honor our bodies via rest, we are connecting to the deepest parts of ourselves. We are freedom-making.”[5]
God wants this for us: this reverence for our bodies and minds. This connection. This freedom. The security it takes to rest, and the security that comes from rest.
Historically speaking, safety in faith communities has never been a given.
Lisa Sharon Harper reflects on this in Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World—and How to Repair It All, examining the legacy of US chattel slavery and the faith leaders who supported it:
“The fact that Puritan revivalist Jonathan Edwards not only enslaved people but also wrote an impassioned defense of slavery in 1741 is never questioned. Instead, we are urged to think of him and others like him as products of their time. But in their time, hidden in plain sight, were witnesses of the truth like the Society of Friends who began to openly push back against slavery as early as the 1680s.”[6]
In every era of Christian history, there have existed faith communities of safety and faith communities of unsafety, particularly for oppressed and marginalized people. Christianity as a whole is not automatically collectively moving toward greater safety; rather, each community needs to make an intentional decision to move in that direction, and to keep moving.
Each generation is responsible for learning what safety means and how to embody it in our own time and place. And each community needs to center the safety of people of color, of women, of queer people, of people with disabilities, of materially impoverished people, as we do so.
As churches seek to ask better questions than “How do we get people back in church?” we might find ourselves asking: What kind of witness will today’s churches bear? Will we follow in the footsteps of the Quakers and other Christian abolitionists, who wanted a world of freedom and safety for all people? Will we follow the model of the early church’s hospitality, with special attention toward the needs of the most vulnerable people? Will we learn from Jesus’ example of prioritizing safety, restoration, and belonging when those around us want to compete in religious debates that no one wins? Will we engage in spiritual practices that affirm human dignity, that serve people, that bring rest, comfort, and well-being?
Human bodies were never meant to be counted as numbers in pews to ease the anxiety of organizations that fear themselves to be shrinking or dying. Those pews are meant to seat us, to serve us.
To be places of hope and healing. Safety is not about avoiding difficult truths or never straying from our comfort zones. It’s about pursuing dignity, honesty, and freedom from harm for all people. It’s about being a space hospitable enough for people to be fully themselves, to breathe freely, to know they are loved and not judged.
The witness of Jesus and the historical church call us to settle for nothing less.
Endnotes
[1] Diana Butler Bass, A People’s History of Christianity: The Other Side of the Story (HarperOne 2009), 62.
[2] Butler Bass, A People’s History, 59, 60.
[3] Butler Bass, A People’s History, 61.
[4] Butler Bass, A People’s History, 62.
[5] Tricia Hersey, Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto (Little, Brown Spark 2022), 26.
[6] Lisa Sharon Harper, Fortune: How Race Broke My Family and the World – And How to Repair It All (Brazos 2022), 182.
Liz Cooledge Jenkins is a Seattle-based writer, preacher, former college campus minister, and the author of Nice Churchy Patriarchy: Reclaiming Women’s Humanity from Evangelicalism. She writes regularly at growingintokinship.
