A name appears on the teaching schedule.
The person is not a stranger. They have sung in worship, served on committees, brought food to grieving families, asked good questions in Bible study and stayed after to stack chairs. People like them. People say so. Around the table, the tone is careful, even kind.
Then someone realizes what the schedule would mean: A queer Christian would not simply be present in the church. They would be teaching.
Brett McKinley Pardue
No one raises a voice. Someone says, “Of course everyone is welcome.” Someone else says, “We just need to be thoughtful.” Then come the questions that sound like prudence but carry a different weight.
Will this divide the church? Are they making identity too central? Can they teach without pushing an agenda? Shouldn’t we move slowly? What will people think?
The room remains polite. The person has not been rejected. But something has happened.
They have been changed from a member into an issue.
No doctrine has been formally debated. No vote has been taken. No one has been cruel. Yet the congregation already has begun deciding what kind of truth can be received there, and through whom.
This is one of the most neglected forms of spiritual formation.
Silent spiritual formation
Churches often speak of formation as prayer, Bible study, worship, service, silence and community. All that matters. But spiritual formation also happens in the reflexes of a congregation: who gets patience, who gets suspicion, who is presumed wise, who has to prove they are not angry, who is heard as faithful, who is heard as political, who is treated as a witness, who is quietly managed as a problem.
“A church is spiritually formed not only by what it teaches people to believe, but by who it trains them to receive.”
A church is spiritually formed not only by what it teaches people to believe, but by who it trains them to receive.
That is why “welcome” is not enough.
A congregation may greet people kindly and still not trust them. It may put inclusive language on its website while keeping intact the habits that made certain people sound questionable in the first place. It may say “all are welcome” while teaching some bodies to become smaller, quieter, less particular, less wounded, less truthful, less themselves.
Welcome says, “You may come in.”
Trust asks, “Can you speak here in a way that might change us?”
That difference shows up before worship even begins. A newcomer walks into a sanctuary and begins reading the room. Where do I sit? Will my child’s noise be tolerated? Will my disability be treated as ordinary or inconvenient? Is the silence here a shelter or a spotlight? Is the greeter helping me, or managing me? If I do not know the script, will someone guide me without making me feel exposed?
These may sound like minor matters of hospitality. They are not minor to the body learning them. Before the first hymn, before the first prayer, before the sermon has a chance to say grace, the room already has taught a person something about what kind of belonging is available there.
“A sermon about liberation has a harder task when the room already has asked some people to shrink.”
A sermon about liberation has a harder task when the room already has asked some people to shrink.
Who do we listen to?
The same pattern becomes even more dangerous when someone tells a hard truth. A congregant names harm. A staff member raises a concern. A lay leader says a beloved program is wounding people. Someone grieving an institutional failure refuses to move quickly to reconciliation. A person who has carried a story for years finally decides to speak.
Churches often say they want truth in those moments. But many churches already have been trained to trust the calm, familiar, institutionally protected voice and to scrutinize the one whose speech arrives with anger, grief, hesitation or exhaustion.
We call this discernment. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it is fear with a church vocabulary.
This is not a niche concern. Churches are trying to rebuild trust after abuse reckonings, denominational fractures, politicized sanctuaries, arguments over LGBTQ lives, anxiety about decline and years of suspicion toward religious institutions. Many people are not asking whether churches can be friendly. They are asking whether churches can tell the truth about themselves.
That question cannot be answered with branding.
It cannot be answered with better coffee, better signage or a warmer welcome statement. It cannot be answered by announcing everyone belongs while the room continues to trust only the people who already sound familiar.
To be clear, none of this means every painful claim is true simply because it is painful. It does not mean churches should abandon Scripture, doctrine, pastoral wisdom, polity or careful discernment. Christian communities must test claims. They must ask what is faithful, just, true, wise, loving and bearable for the body of Christ.
But discernment worthy of the gospel must also examine itself.
It must ask why some people sound mature before they have said anything especially wise, why some anger sounds prophetic while other anger sounds unstable, why some grief must become tidy before it becomes credible, and why the church so often calls a person “divisive” at the exact moment they stop carrying everyone else’s comfort for free.
The gathered body
Baptist and other free-church traditions should understand both the promise and the danger here. We believe the gathered body matters. We trust the Spirit may speak through the people, not only through office or credential. We believe the community has a role in discernment.
“A church sometimes gathers in Jesus’ name with habits Jesus has not blessed.”
But the gathered body never is unformed. It already has been shaped by histories of race, gender, sexuality, class, disability, respectability, conflict, region, worship style and institutional memory. A church does not become neutral because it gathers in Jesus’ name. Sometimes it gathers in Jesus’ name with habits Jesus has not blessed.
The work, then, is not to stop discerning. The work is to bring our habits of discernment under judgment.
Before the meeting begins, who already feels they must prepare a defense?
Before the Bible study starts, whose reading of the text will be heard as faithful and whose will be heard as self-interest?
Before the apology is requested, whose pain has to be translated into language the powerful will find reasonable?
Before the visitor signs the welcome pad, what has the room already taught them about belonging?
Before the sermon is preached, what has worship trained bodies to expect from God and from one another?
These are not questions of etiquette. They are questions of spiritual formation.
A church that wants to be alive cannot only ask whether its people are praying, studying, serving or giving. It must ask what kind of hearers it is making. Are we forming people who can receive truth when it comes from the unfamiliar? Are we forming people who confuse comfort with peace? Are we forming people who require wounded witnesses to make their pain useful before it becomes believable? Are we forming people who welcome difference as decoration but resist it as wisdom?
This work will not be quick. Churches cannot undo trained suspicion with a new slogan. They cannot repair wounded trust by adding warmer language to the bulletin. They cannot become more faithful hearers simply by declaring themselves hospitable.
They can begin by noticing what they have practiced.
Notice who receives patience.
Notice who is asked to explain.
Notice whose anger is feared and whose anger is admired.
Notice when pastoral caution protects the already trusted.
Notice when the desire for unity requires the most wounded people to speak the least.
Then let that noticing become repentance. Not theatrical shame. Not institutional self-protection dressed up as listening. Repentance with a schedule. Repentance with changed rooms. Repentance with better questions, slower judgment, less possessive welcome and the courage to let unexpected people become teachers.
The church’s credibility crisis will not be healed by looking more welcoming while becoming no more able to receive. It will not be healed by making room for different bodies while refusing to receive truth through them. It will not be healed by calling people beloved while treating their testimony as a threat to the peace.
There are forms of unbelief that look a great deal like church. They look like courtesy without trust, inclusion without risk, admiration without being changed, warmth without communion.
The God Christians confess as Word made flesh still asks the church a harder question than whether all are welcome: Which flesh have we trained ourselves not to believe?
Brett McKinley Pardue is a pastor-scholar, public theologian and sacred artist whose research explores how Christian communities learn whom to trust and recognize as bearers of sacred authority. He is artist-theologian at North Raleigh United Methodist Church and serves on the Spiritual Formation Advisory Board of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of North Carolina. He has been appointed a 2026–2027 Visiting Researcher at Boston University School of Theology.