Considering the Conspiracy of Silence

I found this in How People Change this morning, and it seems all too true.

“I had an epiphany one Wednesday evening in the middle of our small group meeting.  People were sharing prayer requests, but it was the same old grocery list of situational, self-protective prayer requests masquerading as openness and self-disclosure.  I found myself thinking, Why did we all feel the need to clean up our prayer requests before giving them?  Why were we all so skilled at editing ourselves out of our prayer requests?  Why were we so good at sharing the difficult circumstances we faced, yet so afraid of talking about our struggles in the middle of them?  Did we really care more about what the people thought than we did about getting help?  Did we really think that God would be repulsed by our sins and weakness?  I wondered who we thought we were fooling.  It was as if we had all agreed upon an unspoken set of rules, a conspiracy of silence.”

David Powlison talks about our tendency to focus on our circumstance in prayer in his book Speaking the Truth in Love.  We neglect prayers for spiritual growth (which requires sharing where we are tempted and tried), and prayers for kingdom expansion (which requires that we participate and sacrifice). 

Here, Lane and Tripp, point to this conspiracy of silence as one of the reasons people do not change.  Change happens when we break the conspiracy of silence (or Code of Silence in a bad Chuck Norris movie, which are at best guilty pleasures).  They don’t go there, but I am reminded of Jack Miller’s comments on the idol of reputation.  The fact is that our reputation is an illusion for it is based on only some of the data about us.  The fact that we refuse to acknowledge ourselves as the “biggest sinner we know” means that we pretend trials don’t tempt us with great sin.  We focus on the evil “out there” and avoid the evil within our own hearts (James 1).  This is stuff that stifles the spiritual life of churches, not just individuals.  It is time to break the conspiracy of silence if it exists in your small group, family or church. 

Contrast our churches with this experience of Anthony Bradley‘s.