The Power of Naming What Was

 
I remember the day they asked me to take it down. Not because what I wrote was false. Not because it was unkind. But because I had named the church.
It wasn’t public scandal. No denomination-wide fallout. Just a small, tucked-away congregation. The only ones who knew I was speaking of that church were members of it. The place I had preached. The pulpit I had stood behind with love and gravity. And the question I had dared to ask: Is the pastor gone again?
The post was measured. Honest. A reflection, not a rebuke. But it struck a nerve. Truth often does. The elder board, newly reassembled. The pastor, already drifting away. They demanded silence, framed it as care. But it wasn’t about protecting the sheep. It was about preserving appearances.
I refused.
Not to provoke. Not to punish. But because to erase what I wrote would be to erase what I saw—and what I saw mattered. Not to everyone. But to those who showed up expecting presence and found absence week after week.
I had already stepped back from membership. Quietly. Cleanly. The threatened removal was redundant. What hurt most wasn’t the disconnection—it was the refusal to acknowledge why it had come.
That pastor is gone now.
And the associate—the one who stayed, who watched, who waited—has begun to lead with a different posture. There’s hope there. Quiet, unfinished, but unmistakable. The kind of change that doesn’t come from a post. It comes from presence. From someone choosing to stay, not out of obligation, but out of care.
I still hold the memory. Of writing something true. Of being asked to disappear it. Of choosing instead to remain visible. Not for notoriety. Just for integrity.
The church I named still breathes. And now, perhaps, it’s beginning to listen.