With thanks to Zondervan and Saving Face for sponsoring this post

When I was seven years old I used to go on walks with Jesus.

I was the only child of a single mother, and I was often quite lonely. But I took Jesus at His word when He said, “I have called you friend.” I figured if He was my friend then He would want to know all about me! And so I would walk to school telling Him about my friends, and my fears, and my hopes and dreams (it was the 70s; kids walked by themselves!)

I always felt so close to Jesus.

Until…

Until I started the work I’m doing now.

When I began to realize how toxic evangelical marriage books are, I was floored. Devastated. Betrayed.

The first book we analyzed was Love & Respect, and when we realized how it enabled abuse, we reached out to Focus on the Family, where I had been a guest three times (they’ve since scrubbed me from their website), because we hoped they would care.

They didn’t.

And over the next few years, as The Great Sex Rescue and others were published, I was blackballed by evangelical organizations and former friends, because I asked authors to care about women. I asked people to care that they were hurting women.

They didn’t.

They said they loved Jesus. They quoted and studied the Bible. And yet they were hurting people and didn’t care.

I didn’t know what to do with that, because how do you talk to Jesus like a friend when so many around you are twisting His words to cause abuse?

No one in our circles has been as bullied, maligned, and attacked as Aimee Byrd.

Aimee and I swam in the same Twitter circles when it was still Twitter. I was fascinated by her attempts to get her denomination to care about women.

She wanted her denomination—the OPC, a very conservative Presbyterian complementarian denomination—to make more space for women to study and learn theology.

Ironically, she was merely asking for 1 Timothy 2:11 to be lived out—“Let women learn.” But this denomination which shouted 1 Timothy 2:12 from the rooftops ignored the previous verse.

And Aimee was left bruised and bleeding, as pastors and elders who were supposed to care for the flock instead spread horrible lies about her and coordinated attacks on her. She wasn’t even pushing for women to teach men; she was merely asking for women to matter.

And that was a step too far.

Aimee’s new book Saving Face tells us how she recovered—and invites us on a deep, healing journey with her.

Because as Aimee listened to the church court case where they were discussing her (though they wouldn’t let her speak), she knew she was done in that denomination. But it wasn’t enough to just find another church. She had to address the trauma she had suffered. And she had to start asking some hard questions.

• Why was she drawn to such a rigid denomination in the first place?
• Why had she spent so much time concentrating on the head side of theology, and not the heart?
• Why did she stay so long when people treated her so badly?

Aimee realized that theology doesn’t save us and theology doesn’t transform. Though I don’t know any other woman who is so well-versed in theology than Aimee—she knew that wasn’t it.

Theology matters.

But our stories matter more.

That’s what Aimee Byrd is crying out in Saving Face.

She opens the book saying:

I explained it this way in my endorsement:

Aimee shares her Scripture meditations, her journal entries, even her book snippets of her childhood and adolescence, as she went through this journey of transforming faith from just being “right” to being about cultivating wonder, curiosity, imagination, mindfulness.

One of the most powerful juxtapositions in her book is the story of watching her ecclesiastical trial and seeing her new pastor preach for the first time.

Aimee and her family spent years trying to find a new church, but nothing felt right.

She was making herself sick worrying that she’d never find real community.

Until they walked into a more mainline church. They attended for a little while, but hadn’t met the pastor, who was on maternity leave.

The day Katie, the pastor, came back was transformative in Aimee’s life. She explained it on the Bare Marriage podcast with me, and she tells the story in her book. She walked into church and saw the pastor with a baby strapped to her chest, and she wondered when the pastor would take off the baby to lead the service.

But Katie didn’t.

She led a whole service and preached a sermon with a baby strapped to her.

And Aimee thought about how, at her previous church, all the women would get the children out of the men’s way. How everything was about making it comfortable for the men, rather than including the rest of us, the reality of who we really are.

Aimee wrote about that experience on her Substack, and it hit the news.

See, Aimee’s gone woke! We told you she’d end up at a church with a female pastor!

A reporter figured out what church Aimee was talking about, and released the name of the pastor. And Aimee thought, here we go again. I’ve brought these people down on this lovely pastor who didn’t deserve it.

And she explains what happened:

At Aimee’s previous denomination, no one showed their faces.

At this new church, they didn’t hide. And they reflected Christ’s face, too.

You were allowed to say that you were angry. You were allowed to feel like you were being victimized. You were allowed to tell the truth—because your pain was reflected in the faces around you, in a beautiful way.

Once you’ve experienced church hurt it becomes harder to paper over the difficult stories in Scripture.

Like the concubine, in Judges, who is raped and murdered and isn’t even given a name. Like the women who are mistreated, forgotten, ignored. I know I’ve had such a hard time with much of the Old Testament since my own pain with the church. It’s so messy.

But Aimee shows how the messiness is the point. How we don’t have to tidy up things for God. How we’re invited to look at the messiness full in the face, and let it affect us. Even let it break us—just as Jesus was broken.

Quite frankly, I needed that.

Near the end of the book, Aimee writes,

I found myself weeping so often in the book, feeling Jesus call to me again that all the ugliness I saw was the defaced church, not His face.

That it was okay to walk away from that and go deeper into the places where people weren’t hiding.

That I didn’t have to hide too, and that I could ask the hard questions.

For someone who has struggled so much with Scripture for the last few years, and who has struggled with forgiveness for those who taught me to love Jesus but did the exact opposite—this was what I needed. An invitation to something new, more real, more messy.

And now, I think I’m going to go for a walk.