ABOUT
Unbuild is not a brand, a network, or a church plant. It is a place to put words to something a lot of people feel and can't say out loud in the lobby: that they still love Jesus and can no longer do Sunday.
I'm Joshua Witt. I’ve been married to my wife, Julie, for thirty-one years. Together, we’re still knee deep in the multi-decade melodrama of raising our eleven children (seven boys and four girls). Yes, they’re all ours. Yes, we know what causes it. Yes, we did it on purpose. The irony of my crazy life is that being a father and a husband are the jobs I feel least qualified to hold. They are also the ones I struggle with the most. Every part of me knows there are ways that I could do better. My family and I long for REAL shared purpose and REAL shared experience. We're missing the community of REAL Christian believers - not just folks that show up for the Sunday matinee of their preference. I'm not writing as an outsider throwing rocks. I sat in the church seats, gave to the budget, volunteered on the teams, and believed the strategy. I am not interested in tearing anything down for sport. I am interested in what is still standing when you take away what was added.
If you're here after being hurt by a church, you are welcome exactly as you are. Nothing here requires you to be over it, or fair about it, or ready to try again.
Not a program, a personality, or a building. “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” (John 14:6). Everything on this site assumes that the center is a person, not an institution.
We would rather say a hard true thing plainly than a comfortable thing beautifully. Conviction is not cruelty, and clarity is a kindness.
Being wounded by people who used God's name does not make you faithless. Naming what happened is part of healing, not a detour from it.
Deconstruction that never rebuilds is a slower way of walking out. The point is not an empty room. It is a smaller one, with real people in it.
Dr. Hillary McBride is a therapist, researcher, and writer based in Vancouver, BC. She holds a PhD in psychology and has spent years working with people recovering from religious and spiritual trauma. Her work is clinically informed, deeply compassionate, and unwilling to rush the hard parts of healing.
Her book Holy Hurt: Understanding Spiritual Trauma and the Process of Healing names what church hurt actually is, how it affects the body and relationships, and what a path toward healing can look like. It does not ask you to pretend the wound was small. It offers a way to understand what happened so you can take the next step without having to go back and pretend everything was fine.
Jesus said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”
If you want the plainest possible version of that claim — what it means, how someone comes to believe it, and what it has to do with church hurt — some friends have written it out far more directly than we do here.
Read jesusistheway.com