Author and podcaster Aimee Byrd has often asked hard questions of the church. She has also suffered at its hands; after publicly questioning the definition of biblical manhood, in 2020, she became the subject of online bullying from church members. In her latest book, Saving Face: Finding My Self, God, and One Another Outside a Defaced Church (Zondervan, Apr.), she wonders whether we should be seeking the presence of Christ in our own reflections.
How did your difficult experiences within the church bolster your resolve to find your self again and write Saving Face?
One of the most disillusioning parts of going through spiritual abuse was seeing how emotionally and spiritually immature the leaders were. How could these ordained shepherds of God’s people resort to such crude name-calling and harassment, why were they so fragile, and why was I such a threat to them? This all made me question what attracted me to this church denomination in the first place—what was I looking for? I realized there was a persona of certainty and elitism in this denomination that gave me a sense of security. But it was a faux certainty. What is the real face of the church when we get behind what she is projecting? Do we see God there? Here I was in my forties, our children getting ready to launch into the world, and somehow we had raised them in a church that was missing the heart of the matter—Christ and his love for the church. This made me want to do my own inner work—what have I been striving for, what do I value, how do people receive me? Do they see Christ in my face? What does my face draw out of you, and what does your face draw out of me?
What can the metaphor of “saving face” mean to those who are disillusioned with the church at large and/or their own denomination?
I realized we are busy trying to hide our faces, mask them, conform them to the face we think is acceptable—clamoring to discover what that is. We are, in a sense, terrified of our own faces, frightened to discover who we really are and, even more, to reveal who we really are to others. We are stuck in the hustle, and therefore we are only looking at the outside of things. The outside of our face and the outside of the face of the other. We have an unspoken agreement: I’ll accept your mask if you accept mine. Ironically, it can be described with the idiom "saving face."
It turns out that pain, fear, and shame are working hard to strangle and malnourish our longings that need to be blessed. They trick us into believing that we cannot share our secrets, even with ourselves. We need one another’s faces to excavate and nourish these powerful longings. And we need the true saving face of Jesus Christ, who holds up the mirror for our own faces to emerge. “For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I will know fully” (1 Cor. 13:12).
Where can church disillusionment come from? Where did it come from for you?
It’s easy to just blame disillusionment on the leaders, to look behind the curtain and blame it all on the wizard and the institution that upholds it all. And there is much to say about that. But I had to examine my own expectations about what church is, how we grow in Christ, and what I believe spiritual formation and spiritual maturity looks like. As Orual proclaims in C.S. Lewis’s novel Till We Have Faces, “I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?”
Finding our face is an abstract concept. Lewis wrote about learning to speak with our own voice, rather than the borrowed voice we put on, learning our real desires rather than the ones we imagine we are supposed to have, and removing the metaphorical veil we wear over our face.
We can go our whole lives and not get to our bare face, never freeing ourselves to listen to our own voice or express that real ache inside of us. What lies in the center of our souls that needs cultivating while we are too busy with all the other things we believe we should desire? What do we say idiot-like over and over? It’s so hard to get to the center, and many people are just plain terrified of it. Do we listen to the information our wounds are giving us? This will help us see reality more clearly.
What advice can you give to those who have been harmed by the church to reframe their faith and their identity within the church?
First, we need to find ourselves in the love of Christ. We need to learn how Christ sees us and direct our desire toward him. The Song of Songs gives us such a picture of this throughout, but just imagine Christ saying to you, “You are altogether beautiful, my darling; there is no flaw in you” (Song 4:7). These are his words to us right now.
Even so, Jesus teaches us, “Truly I tell you, that unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains by itself. But if it dies, it produces much fruit” (John 12:24). I am learning this. I had to die to many of my expectations, shed the husks of “shoulds,” and even die to many good things—like my reputation and longing for a strong community of believers. I had to let them fall to the ground where I felt pretty clobbered by it all. And yet a funny thing happens there in the underground. You look to the left and to the right, and there are others there doing the same. Maybe church doesn’t look like the packaged assemblies we see on Sunday mornings with all the shiny, happy people. Maybe it looks a lot more like Jesus described in the beatitudes. For now. Through it all, Christ is faithful to his people. He is the treasure.
How can we rediscover our identity as God followers after church wounding?
Maybe we are looking for God to work in limited places. I looked to the church’s confessions and “means of grace” that my denomination highlighted as God’s main place to show up and sanctify. And these are beautiful, important elements. But I found that we weren’t encouraged to look for him in the faces beside us. As Emmanuel Levinas put it, “Theology begins in the face of the neighbor.” What does the face of your neighbor demand of you? When we get behind the countenance of a face, we find a person’s vulnerability. We see their fractures. And Levinas says this awakens us to the commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” because at that moment of vulnerability, we can liquidate that person. I have felt that liquidation when I showed my own church my vulnerable face. I believe it’s even more though. The call is not only not to kill but to love. And this is the act of following God—joining together in the Father’s love of the Son by the Spirit. Christ isn’t only in the sacraments; he is in the faces of the hungry, the stranger, the naked, the sick, and the prisoner. In these faces, we are visiting Jesus, we are smiling at Jesus, and we are welcoming Jesus. Or we are shunning Jesus. We are neglecting Jesus (Matt. 25:31–46). Our faces, as well as the faces of outcasts, are provocations to see the Lord in his goodness.
What do you want to say to the church as a whole with this book?
The church is in a state of transition. We see many leaving the church and deconstructing from harm, hypocrisy, abuse of power, and the absence of Christ and his love. It’s a time of revealing. But Christ is not absent. We need to learn how to listen and look for him together. We are learning that faith is more than propositional statements about who God is, as helpful and important as they may be.
Along with our confession, faith is a summoning to see and experience what is real and to walk in it together. The church needs to recover the value of beauty, contemplation, and relationship. We need to look at one another’s faces and learn what that demands of us. We need to develop our own faces. In doing this, our deepest longings come out of us and find their end in Christ.
Christ is preparing us for eternity. The contemplatives that went before us speak of this development. Clare of Assisi beckons a disciple with a call that beckons us today: “Place your mind before the mirror of eternity.”
Who do you see as your ideal readers for Saving Face?
My ideal readers are looking for more meaningfulness in the life of faith beyond doctrinal debates and culture wars. They are those who want to be able to feel the presence of Jesus more in their lives. Having been through disillusionment in the church, I want to help others who may be disillusioned do the work of spiritual formation, talking about the things we wish we could in church.
Along with that, there are many who may not realize they are chasing an illusion of what church and spiritual formation is supposed to be. Those who need to learn there are matters that transcend our sanitized ideals of success, power, freedom, acceptance, and influence that we think we have. Those who need disruption to see that Christ is better than the security we hold in checking the boxes and better than our image of the perfect Christian. I aim for Saving Face to disrupt them in an edifying way.
How did writing Saving Face help heal your own church wounds?
This book is deeply personal and contemplative. I open most chapters with an impactful memory from my life, doing some story work, looking into the faces from these retrieved memories. Storied memory work is vulnerable. It’s a visitation of how my mind has been holding the memory, what emotions have been clinging to it, examining how that memory has shaped me. It’s a looking into my younger face and the faces of those in the memory, asking what needs to be lamented, what needs to be blessed, and how I might relook and retell it. Why has this memory stuck the way it has? How might all this reexamining shape my sense of self, relationships, and faith? And of what I know of the divine face? Through the work of writing Saving Face, combining storied memory, creative writing, Scripture meditations, and journaling on the divine face, I am learning more about what it means for God’s face to shine upon us (Num. 6:24–26), and the meaning we get from the faces of others as we are trying to find our own.
What can we do to create a healthy future for the institutional church?
Sadly, we are all too often led by fear. Do we really believe that Christ is the anchor of our faith? Do we believe that he’s got us? And that his grace is extravagant? Do we believe the gospel? Maybe it’s time for us to echo the words of a father that desperately sought Jesus to help his son, “I do believe; help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24). Is there a more real prayer than that? Why does it take a boy possessed with demons for us to dig it out of ourselves?
Can we peel off our masks and help one another find our faces in Christ? Can we hold one another’s stories with reverence of how God is weaving them with our own and resurrecting new life out of them? Can we be patient and wait with one another, helping one another see the doors Christ is asking us to walk through and to imagine the blessing he has made us for one another? A healthy future for the institutional church is one where we help one another believe Christ is in the faces before us.
How can we help each other reclaim our self, God, and our relationship with God’s people?
We help by looking into and being awakened by one another’s faces.
I open the book saying that we are all looking for a face. It’s the first thing we do when we are born into this world. We look for a face looking at us, delighting in us.
Why is this? Because we are all looking for our own face. We come out asking, Who am I? Who loves me? Why do I matter? So we need to be seen. The first mirror we see is the face of another human. In the other’s face, we find our own.
But ultimately, we are all looking for God’s face. This is the blessing: to see God’s face, to see God’s face looking at our face, to see God’s face delighting in our face. Then we will know who we are. Then we will know we are loved. Then we will feel in our bones how we matter.
Our faces prove we were made for relationships in community. Our faces provoke a sense of meaning that calls us to hold one another responsible. Our faces summon our humanness. They show our nakedness, our need, our truth. Can we do that? Can we look into the nakedness of another human face? Can we reveal our own faces before one other so that we may learn the truth of who we are? Can we find our faces? Can we find God’s face?
