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Volume 4 · CenteredLesson 44About 23 minutes

Divorce

Is the church stricter or softer than Jesus on divorce?

Centered edition for believersSwitch to Honest Heretics (for skeptics)

Read the lesson
The center · Mark 10:9
9What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate.”

In this lesson

Most lessons in this series find the church harsher than Jesus. This one runs the other way. In many churches today divorce is treated as a private matter, sad but ordinary, and his words about it are seldom preached. In others, divorced people are quietly shamed, kept out of leadership, or made to feel like second-class believers.

If you are divorced, read this gently, the way it is written. It looks honestly at what he said, and at how gently he treated people whose marriages had come apart. You don't need anyone's permission to follow him, inside a church or outside one, and that includes after a divorce.

Measured against the center

A contradiction
Treating divorce as a casual, no-fault matter contradicts one of the few subjects he addressed directly, and shaming divorced people contradicts how he treated the woman at the well.

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