[Tension & Renewal - XVII]
If the religious leadership in your life utilizes a belief system to shame, manipulate, or control you, you are not in thriving community, no matter how “successful” it is. You are in a spiritually abusive relationship that is passing as a faith community. If you find it difficult to go without those tactics, you might be co-dependent and your concept of religion rancid.
If you feel responsible for the wellbeing of your pastor or priest or faith leader… or you bear the burden of the survival of the institution your leader represents, you’re not dedicated to the community, you’re controlled by your co-dependent relationship to a person in power. That’s not faith; that’s an unhealthy dependence on being needed.
If the divine you worship changes “moods” according to your adherence, resents your bad choices, or manipulates events to work out according to their *needs*, you don’t worship the divine. Rather, you adhere to a co-dependent super-figure that you’ve projected onto you sense of the supernatural.
Renewal often looks like identifying, naming, and even calling out co-dependency when we see it.
Lasting renewal is not co-dependent. It’s marked fundamentally by a humble, grounded, life-giving sense of dependence.
