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| "Friendly Fire" |
I don't agree with every minor detail of this
blog post,
A High View of Marriage Includes Divorce, but I do wholeheartedly agree with its central, long-overdue
message: In the interest of maintaining a high view of marriage,
Evangelical and Reformed officers/churches/believers often further
victimize spouses who pursue a Biblically legitimate divorce. Over the
years, I have witnessed this tendency first-hand many times, privately
counseled many such wounded and bleeding sheep, and I have personally
experienced some o
f this pain myself
(since I'm the spouse of a believer who obtained a divorce through a
legitimate church court in the OPC). Inadvertent as some of it may be,
Evangelical and Reformed officers/churches/believers have their ways of
issuing emotional sanctions against legitimately divorced believers,
whether via overt messages of rejection or shame, subtle marginalization
(e.g. treating them as though they were invisible), or putting such
believers in a glass room, as it were, with a limiting glass ceiling and
walls, lacking any doors, thus thwarting their ministerial influences
and opportunities. At the end of the day, such is nothing less than a
form of "friendly fire," to a borrow a military concept; the church
often shoots yet another bullet into an already severely wounded brother
or sister.
Thank you Rebecca VanDoodewaard for speaking up for some of the "least of these" in this post.
