Welcome to the Gospel Coalition podcast, equipping the next generation of believers,

pastors, and church leaders to shape life and ministry around the gospel.

Let me pray for us, and then we will get into the conversation.

Father, we thank you for this time.

We thank you for this gathering of women from local churches all over the country and around

the world. Lord, we know that you have established the local church for the good of your people

and it is your church, but it is also a place where sometimes we are hurt, Lord, where sin still impacts us

and where we have wounds. And so, Father, we bring that heaviness and that hurt before you in this

time and ask that you would send your spirit to work among us, God, that he might speak through us

up here, that we might be able to offer some

encouragement to these women, and that you would be doing your healing work in each of our hearts.

We pray all of this in Christ's name. Amen. Well, as we move into the conversation, we just want to

give a few clarifications. This is a big topic, and so we want to give you some context

for how we're thinking about it and what our approach is for this short time. The 45

minutes goes faster than we expect sometimes. So, you know, church hurt could range from a one-on-one

interpersonal conflict all the way up to some sort of very public scandal of a

celebrity pastor. And we can't really engage all of the ends and outs of those things. And so for

the purposes of this conversation, we thought it would be most helpful to keep it in the realm of

a local church or maybe denominational level. So that's kind of the context

that we're envisioning. And our conversation will stay in the realm of hurt, not abuse. And so we want to

be careful to make a distinction there and to say, you know, we are not professional counselors.

We, and so some of the things that we might say could look different in the context of abuse.

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