Grieving Systems of Shame
Tuesday, March 17, 2026
Theologian Yolanda Pierce grew up in a church that offered her a sense of belonging. She grieves that churches often fail to follow Jesus’s example of welcoming and including everyone:
I grew up in [a Holiness-Pentecostal] church, and in the space of those wooden pews, which were lovingly dusted and polished by the church mothers, my gifts were affirmed and room was made for my talents….
It is only with an adult’s deep gratitude that I can appreciate a space that never shamed me for what I couldn’t do well, never humiliated me for my failures, and also managed to extract gifts I didn’t even know I had. Not a single soul told me that I sounded like a hoarse frog when I sang. No one told me that I missed a line in my Easter speech.… I was simply aware that I could try anything in this church and it would be a safe space to land.
So it grieves my spirit that so many churches, so many religious spaces, have been sites of humiliation and shame for individuals and groups. I mourn that a place that taught a little Black girl that she could go to a college no one had ever seen before is the same place that tells someone else they are going to hell for who they love or who they marry. I lament the private and public humiliations suffered by those whose truths and identities are mocked from the pulpit. I grieve with those whose humanity, vocational calling, or salvation seems under debate by way of narrow-minded sermons and poor biblical exegesis….
These hierarchies, in which those with power and privilege—or those who simply wield the microphone—shame and blame others and reinforce their “superior” social standing, diminish the radical equality God promises in places like Galatians 3:28. These hierarchies fail to recognize that we are all one in Christ Jesus and that our work as Christians is to exalt God, not to shame our neighbors….
I grieve that a place that loved me and propelled me to a rich, full life has been a space of condemnation and castigation for others.
By relinquishing the tools of shame, we become God’s beloved community:
Here is the holy lesson that I have learned: there is no progress unless the wounded among us—those broken in heart and bruised in spirit—have space to tell their stories and share their burdens. Justice is only possible if the ones cast outside of the camp, the city, or the church are lovingly brought back into a changed and transformed community. The discarded and forsaken must be given the lead if we are to move forward in building God’s beloved community…. We build a new foundation for justice and love by releasing the power of the tools of shame and humiliation used by those who try to break our souls. After all, is it progress if we leave the most vulnerable behind?
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Thoughtful faith, progressive theology, and a gospel that’s still good news.
Silence in a Culture of Hot Takes
Part 5 of the Lenten Series: The Season We’d Rather Skip
| BEAU STRINGERMAR 17 |
Everybody has an opinion about everything now. And not just an opinion but an urgent, fully formed, publicly stated opinion that needs to be shared within the first fifteen minutes of any event happening anywhere in the world. A politician says something controversial and within seconds your feed is a wall of hot takes. A celebrity makes a statement and suddenly everyone you know is a cultural commentator. A tragedy happens and before the facts are even clear there are already a thousand threads telling you exactly what it means and who is to blame and what you should think about it.
We are drowning in words. And I don’t think most of us realize how much it’s costing us.
I read somewhere recently that the average American consumes somewhere around thirty-four gigabytes of information per day. I don’t even know what that means exactly but it sounds like way too much. We wake up and reach for the phone before our feet hit the floor. We fill the car with podcasts. We scroll through lunch. We fall asleep to Netflix. Every available moment of silence gets stuffed with content and noise and opinion and commentary until there is literally no space left in the day where we are just quiet. Just still. Just existing without someone else’s words in our heads.
And the church has bought into this completely. Pastors feel the pressure to make public statements about every cultural moment within hours of it happening. If you don’t post your take fast enough, people assume you either don’t care or you’re on the wrong side. Social media has turned ministry into a never-ending press conference where silence is interpreted as complicity and thoughtfulness is mistaken for cowardice. The hot take has replaced the sermon as the primary unit of pastoral communication and I think we’ve lost something enormous in the exchange.
My Commute
This Lent I made a commitment that sounded simple and turned out to be one of the hardest things I’ve done in a while. I decided to drive to and from work in complete silence. No podcasts. No music. No phone calls. No audiobooks. Just me and the road and thirty minutes of nothing each way.
The first few days were brutal. I’m not exaggerating. The silence felt physically uncomfortable, like an itch I couldn’t scratch. My hand kept reaching for the phone. My brain kept racing to fill the gap with something, anything, because apparently I have trained myself over the years to be incapable of sitting in a quiet car without external stimulation. That realization alone was worth the experiment.
But somewhere around the end of the first week something started to shift. The noise in my head began to quiet down. Not all at once and not completely, but enough that I started to notice things I hadn’t noticed before. Ideas I didn’t know I was carrying. Convictions I’d been too busy to feel. Creative thoughts that had been waiting patiently for a gap in the noise to slip through. Some mornings the Holy Spirit showed up in that silence in ways that genuinely surprised me. Not in a dramatic, clouds-parting kind of way. More like a quiet nudge. A thought I didn’t generate on my own. A gentle correction I probably would have missed if I’d had a podcast filling the space instead.
Five hours a week. That’s what an hour of silence a day during the work week adds up to. And I can tell you honestly that those five hours have been more formative than most of the content I’ve consumed in the last year, because it turns out you can’t hear much of anything when you never stop talking.
The Ministry of Shutting Up
James 1:19 might be the most ignored verse in the entire New Testament. “Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry.” Quick to listen. Slow to speak. Read that again and then open any social media platform and notice how completely we’ve inverted that instruction.
We are quick to speak, slow to listen, and angry about everything all the time.
We have built an entire culture around the exact opposite of what James is telling us to do and then we wonder why everything feels so exhausting and fruitless.
Henri Nouwen understood this. He wrote that “silence is the home of the word” and that “without silence, the word loses its power.” I’ve been sitting with that idea during these quiet commutes and I think he’s right in a way that goes deeper than just personal devotion. Our words have lost their power because we’ve multiplied them beyond all reason. We speak so much and so fast and so constantly that nothing we say carries weight anymore. Everything is content. Everything is a take. Everything is noise piled on top of noise until the signal is completely buried.
Nouwen spent significant time living in monastic communities and what he discovered there wasn’t that monks had figured out how to escape the world. It was that they had figured out how to be present in it. Silence wasn’t just the absence of something, it was the presence of something. It was the space where God’s voice could actually land because someone had finally stopped talking long enough to hear it.
What Silence Isn’t
I want to be careful here because I don’t want to over-spiritualize this. Not every silent commute ends with a divine revelation. Some mornings I just drove to work and thought about what I was going to have for lunch. And that’s fine. Silence doesn’t have to be productive. It doesn’t have to result in a spiritual breakthrough or a creative epiphany or a moment of profound clarity. Sometimes silence is just silence. And in a world that demands constant output and constant engagement and constant noise, just being quiet for thirty minutes is a radical act all by itself.
But I will say this. The days when something does break through are the days that remind me why this matters. There is a version of my life where I fill every available second with sound and stimulation and never once create enough space for God to get a word in. I’ve lived that version. Most of us have. And it’s exhausting in a way that has nothing to do with physical tiredness and everything to do with spiritual depletion.
You can be busy for God and completely deaf to God at the same time.
I know because I’ve done it.
Try This
This week, find your silence. You don’t have to join a monastery or go on a retreat or sit cross-legged on a cushion for an hour. Just pick one space in your day that you normally fill with noise and leave it empty. The commute. The morning coffee. The walk to pick up the kids. Whatever it is, let it be quiet. Don’t fill it. Don’t optimize it. Just sit in it and see what happens when you give your soul a few minutes without words.
You might hear nothing. You might hear everything. Either way, you’ll be practicing something the church has known for two thousand years that our culture has almost entirely forgotten.
Sometimes the most faithful thing you can do is close your mouth and open your ears.
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Individual reflection: Think of a space in your life — a relationship, a community, a season — where you were free to fail without being shamed. What did that freedom make possible in you that you couldn’t have accessed otherwise?
Group discussion: Pierce grieves that the same community that made space for her has shut others out. Stringer suggests we’re often too noisy to hear the people we’ve marginalized. Where do you see those as the same problem — and what would it actually cost us to practice the silence that makes room for those Pierce calls “the discarded and forsaken”?
