Our Values

One of the first and most harmful effects of abuse is the stripping of our agency. Our ability or capacity to make choices and decisions on our own behalf is taken away.

At Broken to Beloved, we will work to restore that sense of agency, avoiding telling you what you "should" or "need" to do. We will provide resources and recommendations based on what we're learning or what has worked for us and others, while fully aware that it may not be the best choice or work for you.

"More than anything, abuse takes away your agency—your ability to choose for yourself. Finding that agency is an important step toward freedom and recovery."

Wade Mullen, Something's Not Right

"Disruptions to agency are characteristic of traumatic experiences and systems, meaning that finding ways to rehearse and restore our sense of choice, control, and the power to act on our lives can be central to our ability to show our nervous systems the trauma is over and we are here now."

Hillary McBride, Holy Hurt

Given the choice, we choose to include rather than exclude. We hold a posture of invitation, relationship, and calling others in. We believe that dignity and respect say "you belong here."

Our faith, while intensely personal, was not meant to be lived out alone. We were created and intended for connection and community. While there is value in and a place for solitude, we will move toward each other whenever possible.

For God has made us with desire for connection that ultimately leads to the co-creation of objects of goodness and beauty with him and others with whom we have difference, be it great or small.

Curt Thompson, The Soul of Desire

Questions are welcome here. Rather than approaching people and ideas with a closed mind or dogmatic approach, we will be guided by openness and curiosity. 

We will be a space where people are free to disagree.

God never asked us to know it all or to be sure about it all. He asked us to have faith. By its very nature, faith is a not knowing. The opposite of faith is not disbelief, but certainty.

There is a kind of arrogance that often comes with having the truth. Rather than allowing the truth to humble us, we use the truth as a weapon.

A.J. Swoboda, After Doubt

Curiosity lights our way to compassion.

Shannan Martin, Start With Hello

Is it possible the questions come not because you’re trouble, but because you see trouble? Could it be that you doubt not because you’re wrong, but because something is wrong? Are you faithless, or are you faithful to something thicker than empty creeds and heartier than temporary power grabs? Are you poison, causing dissension and division, or are you truth serum?

Erin Moon, I've Got Questions

We choose a view of humanity rooted in Genesis 1, created and called "very good." While sin distorts and devalues our identity and inherent worth, we believe that we are always Beloved.

We recognize that a theology of depravity and wickedness has done much harm with a disproportionate emphasis on sin, shame, immorality. We find it ironic that this low view of self and others leads to such a puffed up arrogance of position, and find that all too often, it lends itself to grandiosity, not humility.

 We will resist shame and nurture empathy.

Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the “Beloved.” Being the Beloved constitutes the core truth of our existence.

Henri Nouwen, Life of the Beloved

Though we are prone to sin and stray from God, it is important to remember that before original sin, we were clothed with original glory. God longs for humankind to experience the full restoration of our original glory, which we enjoyed at the beginning of creation.

Ken Shigematsu, Now I Become Myself

Carlos Whitaker often says, “Don’t stand on issues, walk with people.” More often than not, our need to defend a stance comes without a lived experience of what we are standing against.

We will hold a posture of connection and community. We will be a community that prefers to move toward others in kindness and in close proximity to the marginalized, outcast, othered, and silenced.

We are a people who will seek to build a bridge rather than draw a line.

We will build longer tables rather than higher fences. Everyone will be welcome to a seat at that table.

We will avoid a posture of “othering” for any reason, including theology, race, ethnicity, political party, gender, sexuality, or any other type of category.

If your Christianity sees kindness as weakness and compassion as compromise and treating with dignity those with whom you disagree as collaboration with the enemy, you have utterly lost touch with Christ.

Beth Moore

Othering is a means people use to center themselves, but in so doing, they marginalize, scapegoat, exile dehumanize, or attribute less worth to another human being to make themselves look better in comparison…Othering done in God’s name is deeply traumatic because it causes the beliefs that help us make meaning out of life to become a source of pain.

Jenai Auman, Othered

When we see ourselves as woven into the same fabric, one enemy is one too many.

Shannan Martin, Start With Hello

We will be thoughtful and measured in how we approach complicated and nuanced topics, living and making decisions according to these stated values.

And, we will get it wrong. When we do, we will work to set aside self preservation and defensive postures to listen and learn when possible, to repent and own complicity and action when necessary. We will grieve and lament our negative impact and make it right in a way that feels restorative.

The word integrity evolved from the Latin adjective integer, meaning whole or complete, and defined as "an undivided or unbroken completeness."

In order to live as whole people, we must integrate our full selves and with each other. If we are the body of Christ, then not one of us can or should be left out or excluded. We believe we are fully embodied and finite beings, called and created to fit together in community.

To live with integrity is to show up with your whole self. Too often, many of us feel the need to hide or suppress some part of us in different environments. Whether by choice, perception, or explicit instruction, we put away some part of ourselves, code switch in different rooms, or choose not to speak up, knowing our voice is not truly welcome.

We will be a people who invite and encourage others to show up as their whole and full selves, bringing every part of them, and living in recognition and awareness of all our light and shadows, knowing that we will be seen, soothed, safe, and secure.

I once heard Duke theology professor Norman Wirzba say that our work as Christians is to “liberate others into wholeness,” and I have never forgotten that.

Lore Ferguson Wilbert, The Understory 

In this world of brokenness, that which is broken was not always so; it is merely the outgrowth of defiled desire. And for the world to be redeemed, God does not destroy desire; rather, he resurrects and renews it while using it to renew everything else, beginning with us.

Curt Thompson, The Soul of Desire