There’s a tension here that we don’t talk about enough: the church is supposed to be the safest place for wounded people… and sometimes it’s the place that deepens the wound. Not always intentionally. But impact matters.

Psychologist Diane Langberg has spent decades trying to get the church to hear this: trauma is not just about what happened to someone. It is about what happens next. Especially in spaces that claim to represent God. Because when the response is silence, or minimizing, or pushing people toward forgiveness before they have even been believed… the harm does not just continue. It multiplies.

History does not let us off the hook here.

In her book Suffering and the Heart of God, Langberg writes about visiting Cape Coast Castle, where hundreds of thousands of Africans were held before being loaded onto slave ships. In one of the dungeons, nearly 200 men were packed into a single space for months. Three months. Barely able to move, surrounded by disease and despair and death. And right above them? A chapel. Worship happening overhead while image-bearers were being crushed underneath it.

That should shake something in us. Because it means you can have church… the whole thing… and still completely miss the heart of God.

Langberg says the church has gotten really good at doing church in ways that do not require anyone to actually face evil. That still happens. We learn the language well. Grace, redemption, forgiveness. But presence is a different thing altogether. Actually sitting with someone in the reality of what they have lived through is harder, and a lot of the time, we skip it.

Trauma-informed faith does not do that. It does not rush past the hard stuff or tidy up pain to make it more comfortable to be around. It looks like slowing down enough to really see someone, believing people when they speak, and choosing integrity over image every single time. Because the church is not called to look holy. It is called to be holy. And that has always required truth-telling, especially about suffering.

If we miss that, we become the chapel above the deck while people are still suffocating underneath.