I'm Not Ashamed (But I Used to Be): Finding Liberation from Religious Shame

TONETTA LANDIS-AINA

I spent my entire sabbatical summer avoiding church, and it was one of the holiest things I've ever done.

I know how that sounds coming from a pastor. Trust me, I had a whole list of churches I wanted to visit during my time off—I'm the kind of church nerd who gets excited about different liturgical styles and innovative worship spaces. But instead of pew-hopping, I found myself staying home Sunday after Sunday, sitting in silence, listening to the gospel music of my childhood, and confronting a truth I'd been avoiding for decades: I was ashamed of my faith.

Not ashamed of Jesus. Not ashamed of love, justice, or liberation. But ashamed of the versions of Christianity I'd absorbed, perpetuated, and been wounded by. Ashamed of the times I'd weaponized theology against vulnerable people. Ashamed of feeling like an imposter in my own calling.

This summer, as I sat in my bathrobe listening to William McDowell's "I Won't Go Back" on repeat, I began to understand what the apostle Paul meant when he declared, "I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God that brings salvation to everyone who believes" (Romans 1:16). But getting there required confronting some uncomfortable truths about shame, faith, and the courage it takes to distinguish between authentic gospel and the harmful counterfeits we've often been sold.

The Art of Escaping: What I Learned by Skipping Church

My wife Bukola will tell you about our "Hot Pastor Summer"—yes, I'm calling it that, and yes, it's a dad joke, and no, I'm not sorry. We ran, we read everything from novels about Nazi-occupied Poland to lesbian zombie apocalypse romances (very holy reading, obviously), and we traveled through Turkey and Switzerland with our kids. I rediscovered my identity as the hippie artist I used to be in my twenties, bell bottoms and all.

But the most significant part of my sabbatical wasn't what I did—it was what I didn't do. I never attended church. Not once. Not our church, not any church. I was at home in my bathrobe, and it was beautiful.

"Sometimes my Sunday was marked with this deep silence in which I could just sense the fullness of God. But often it was a solitude in which I felt compelled to just sit and listen to the kind of gospel music that I grew up with."

This wasn't rebellion or burnout. It was education. I was learning something about the dance between community and solitude that marks authentic spirituality. I was discovering what some of you might already know about "bedside Baptist"—that sometimes God draws us away from institutional spaces to encounter the divine in unexpected ways. Those Sunday mornings taught me that the God of rest doesn't always require our attendance at formal worship. Sometimes the most faithful thing we can do is practice the art of escape from forces that conflate our work with our worth, even when that work is ministry itself.

Finding Kinship with Paul: The Outsider Apostle

As I sat with Romans 1:16 throughout the summer—"I am not ashamed of the gospel"—I realized I'd found an unlikely kinship with the apostle Paul. Here was someone who didn't have the credentials of traveling with Jesus, someone who was essentially self-appointed, someone who trusted his calling enough to tell people about it despite being viewed as an outsider.

Paul was writing to churches in Rome that were split between Jews and Gentiles, two groups with completely different ideas about what faithfulness looked like. He was calling them into community across lines of difference, insisting that liberation required both groups—that they couldn't have freedom without each other.

I've always enjoyed Paul's letters, but I was surprised when this particular passage emerged so strongly for me. Paul's writings can feel scary to women, Black folks, and LGBTQ+ people—we often approach his letters with appropriate suspicion. But reading Paul as the misunderstood pastor, called to preach in the heart of the Roman Empire, made his own culture consider him a traitor, I began to see him differently.

As someone who has felt called to ministry since I was a teenager but has never fit the traditional description of a pastor—and definitely not a co-lead pastor in a thriving church—I sometimes feel like an imposter. Reading Paul made me wonder if he felt that way too, and where all his confidence came from.

"Nobody else can display the good news in the exact same way that your life can. Nobody can stand in your calling but you."

Maybe you feel like an imposter too—to your calling in the workplace, in your family, in leadership, or even to Christianity itself because you don't have your theology figured out or you struggle to measure up to what you were taught righteousness should look like. Paul reminds us that we are not imposters. The universal church, Christ's beloved body, has room for all of us, credentials or no credentials.

The Story I've Never Told: When Shame Disguised Itself as Faithfulness

Let me share something I've never said from a pulpit before. When I was 21, I won a scholarship to study the Sandinista and Cuban revolutions abroad. I was the buttoned-up, sold-out-for-Jesus young person my churches had taught me to be. I rarely went out with other students—a decision I deeply regret now.

But there was one night when I did join the group. Everyone except me had been drinking, inhibitions were down, and I found myself alone with another student who knew I was very religious. She was openly gay, and she started asking me honest questions about my faith and beliefs.

Finally, she asked the question that still haunts me: "Do you believe that I am going to hell because I am gay?"I spent several minutes theologically ducking and diving. When I ran out of words, I said yes.

I felt like lead in my stomach the moment I said it. Something was deeply off, but this was what I had been taught to believe. This was who I thought I had to be.

There are moments in my life I wish I could snatch back, and that one ranks at the very top. It represents the countless ways I've been complicit in harmful theology, the times I believed shame was faithfulness and cruelty was conviction.

This summer, sitting with "I Won't Go Back" and Paul's unashamed declaration, I got to inventory the limitations of the counterfeit gospels I've believed and the ways I've personally hurt people by evangelizing those gospels. In God's love and mercy, I realized I feel less ashamed than I have ever been—not because I've excused my harmful actions, but because I've finally learned to distinguish between authentic gospel and the toxic substitutes I was taught.

Redefining Gospel: Freedom, Not Slavery

Shame had played a much larger role in my engagement with Christian faith than I'd realized. Shame at what I thought were Christianity's limitations. Shame when I fell in love with a woman in graduate school and realized the faith I knew couldn't put human beings above abstract theology. Shame when I discovered that white evangelicalism had no prophetic response to white supremacy, colonialism, or the suppression of women as image bearers of God.

For over 30 years, I'd been walking with the Lord with much of that time tinged with shame, disguised underneath confident missionary work, unwavering church attendance, and wordy theological debates. But this summer, I found myself writing down what I actually believe the gospel to be—not what someone told me, but what I know in the depths of my being.

Here's one thing I wrote: The gospel reminds me that God is not a slaver zealous for cargo or the master of a plantation from which there is no escape. Instead, God is "I am who I say that I am"—which means God must first be the God of absolute, uncontained freedom. We are created from freedom and are moving toward freedom.

God is not a coercive ruler wielding power over subjects regardless of their permission. Rather, God's power is that of loving influence grounded in consent and ever seeking collaborative relationships of mutual communion and action.

"Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, descended from David. This is my gospel for which I am suffering even to the point of being chained like a criminal." (2 Timothy 2:8-9)

This is Paul's gospel—not a system of shame and control, but the life-giving, right-making power of God that unleashes liberation. This is the gospel of which there is no need to be ashamed.

Moving Toward Unashamed Faith: Two Essential Questions

Our shame can be a barrier to our passion for God. It can fuel relentless anger at "those other Christians"—the very ones we used to be—and draw us into a new kind of fundamentalism. Our shame keeps us out of community, prevents vulnerability, and blocks empathy. But to get to deeper faithfulness—what Paul calls "the obedience of faith"—we need to be more unashamed. We need to know the gospel for ourselves as the power of God for liberation.

This is the kind of faithfulness we'll need to keep marching in the streets week after week, to keep protecting families as they take their kids to school morning after morning, to keep filming when we see injustice night after night.

I once heard activist Dr. Alexia Salvatierra share something I'll never forget: During the Civil War in El Salvador, carrying a Bible in public became dangerous. Being seen with a Bible would get you immediately picked up by military forces. To carry a Bible was considered a threat to the rulers because it meant you were likely part of a group proclaiming the gospel of liberation with your life. My prayer is that we would not be ashamed of this gospel and that out of our faithfulness to it, we would participate in the salvation and liberation God desires to release in this season.

The Way Forward: Embracing Unashamed Faith

I'm back from sabbatical with two questions that I believe are essential for all of us:

First: What do you know the gospel to be? Not because somebody told you, but what do you know in the depths of your being?

Second: When you consider what you thought was the gospel or currently think is the gospel, where do you feel shame?

I challenge you to spend time with both questions. Write down some of what you believe to get clarity. Consider whether your shame comes from false beliefs or simply from discomfort you need to work through.

How might shame resilience—understanding shame triggers and speaking our shame stories among trusted friends—support our faithful walk with Jesus? Our shame doesn't have to define our faith. In fact, learning to distinguish between healthy conviction and toxic shame might be one of the most important spiritual practices of our time.

The gospel isn't a system of control disguised as love. It's not a plantation from which there's no escape. It's the power of God for liberation—for you, for me, for all of us. And that's nothing to be ashamed of.