For nearly a decade, Kimmoly LaBoo poured herself into her Baltimore-area church, completing leadership training and mentoring others. But when her marriage began falling apart, she said she encountered misunderstanding and blame-shifting from church leadership instead of the support she expected.
During counseling sessions, LaBoo says she initially withheld details of her husband’s emotional abuse to protect his dignity, only to have the pastor privately blame her for the faltering marriage.
Even after LaBoo finally disclosed years of explosive tirades and property destruction that required police intervention, the church never adjusted its response to her.
Instead, a writing ministry she had developed was indefinitely postponed while leadership questioned whether her troubled marriage made her unfit to lead. Meanwhile, her husband continued to lead lay worship and direct the senior choir.
“How could I be removed from teaching a writing class while the person creating the chaos at home remained in front of the congregation every week?” LaBoo says. “The church has to know when a situation is beyond Bible study. If leaders aren’t equipped to help, they have a responsibility to refer people to someone who is.”
LaBoo’s experience reflects a broader, troubling pattern. While the Black church has long upheld marriage as a sacred covenant, interviews with divorced church members, therapists, and ministry leaders reveal that many congregations struggle to respond when those marriages collapse.
A growing body of research shows that while Christian couples frequently rely on shared faith to sustain their marriages, divorced members — particularly women — often feel isolated, overlooked, or quietly stigmatized in congregations where marriage remains the spiritual ideal. Whether a member experiences compassion or condemnation frequently depends less on theology than on local church culture, leadership maturity, and whose story gets believed first.
Marva Jones, a veteran couples counselor and family therapist who relaxes rigid church counseling mandates, believes these painful endings often stem from a lack of structural support.
Jones, the founder and president of Tree of Life Counseling and Training Center in Ohio, argues that churches often spend too little time honestly preparing couples for marriage and too little helping members heal after a divorce.
“People divorced with children is a different group than people who are divorced without children,” Jones says. “They’re trying to heal … but they’re seeing their children every day and they still have to interact with this person.”
Too often, Jones notes, churches emphasize that God hates divorce, but they fail to adequately confront the abuse, violence, or infidelity that may have triggered it. She says leaders sometimes minimize a husband’s or wife’s misconduct at home because it is hard to reconcile with a member who is active and faithful in the pews. Furthermore, women frequently bear a disproportionate share of judgment during a split.
To fix this, Jones recommends churches create specialized ministries for divorced parents, build referral partnerships with licensed therapists, and establish grief support groups that treat divorce as a significant emotional loss.
Not every story ends in rejection, however. When her marriage to a pastor ended, Roxanne Freeman said members of her denomination rallied around her as they gradually recognized the reality of what had happened behind closed doors.
“They always supported me,” Freeman says, though she acknowledges her experience is unusual. “I have seen other people … leave the church. They embrace the people who they like … and the other one kind of flees.”
Ultimately, ministry experts say congregations must change church norms around divorced couples, learning to love members through their brokenness rather than treating the end of a marriage as a permanent spiritual scar.
“That’s our responsibility,” Jones says. “To love.”
This article originally appeared here