An Interview with Aimee Byrd

AIMEE BYRD is author, speaker,  blogger, podcaster, and former coffee shop owner. Aimee is the author of  several books, including The Hope in Our Scars, Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, and Sexual Reformation. Her articles have appeared in First Things, Table Talk, Modern  Reformation, By Faith, New Horizons, Ordained Servant, Harvest USA, and Credo Magazine and she has been interviewed and quoted in Christianity Today and The Atlantic.
 
ZA: : Tell us about the metaphor of the “face” you use throughout the book—where did that imagery come from and why is it so poignant for you? 

BYRD: The face symbolizes not the mere outer features we each uniquely wear that make us both distinct and recognizable, but the encounter we have when we behold one another. If we can get behind the countenances that we project, we find what Emmanuel Levinas calls the naked face, a vulnerable self that beckons goodness. In the encounter with a face—with our own “self” or one another—we sense a calling to be known, to love, and not to harm.

I’m working with this imagery from Levinas’s philosophy of the face, the symbolism C.S. Lewis uses of the face in his novel Till We Have Faces, the work of contemplatives of the faith, and descriptions in Scripture. Our faces are mirrors for others to find their own. We come to know ourselves and God through the face of the other. This is how God made us, as we long for that ultimate blessing to have his face shine upon us. 

ZA: So many books about disillusionment in faith or harm in the church discuss how the church needs to change. You do not ignore those issues, but this book is tied to an internal journey with God and with ourselves. Can you speak to what has drawn you to shepherd others in this direction?

BYRD: Spiritual abuse is destabilizing. My writing and my personhood provoked hatred and cruelty from many leaders in the church. It was disillusioning to find myself in a system/church that enabled this. It is one thing to name the harm done to me and try to clear  my name, but I had to ask myself why I was attracted to such a church, denomination, and theology in the first place. How was I so  disillusioned? How was I being led by my own fears? I had to do my own inner work. I realized I was looking for a faux certainty and security expressed through a type that Christians are to be rather than the personhood God is developing in each one of us as we grow into the reality of who we are in Christ.

Facing trauma provoked me to examine my own story. In this, I am able to walk in the invitation of beauty that Christ is calling us to. If we are willing to tell our own secrets to ourselves and face our regrets, we can begin to learn what the cisterns of our souls hold.

ZA: What might you hope pastors and those training pastors might take away from your book that might be different than the average reader?

BYRD: One of the most disillusioning parts I suffered through with the church was learning how many leaders were emotionally and spiritually immature—not only the ones intentionally harming me, but even those impotent to help. I realized there are many leaders who have not done their own inner work—parsing careful theological statements while missing the love and dynamism behind them—and unable to see Jesus in my face. Isn’t church the place where we help one another to see Jesus? What if the leaders are missing him in their own faces, how are they going to see him in ours?

 Jesus is hanging out in our secrets, waiting for us. We are even bringing Jesus to one another as we encounter our otherness. What was my face drawing out of these leaders? I think there is something to Emmanuel Levinas’s saying that “theology begins in the face of the neighbor.” Saving Face will help church officers see the act of God in the awakening to love provoked by our neighbor’s face. As Levinas teaches, “God descends in the ‘face’ of the other.”

“Aimee uses words as a mirror to see ourselves as God sees us in the gaze of his delight. This brilliant, compelling, and transformative book is a vision of what it will be like to be fully captured by the face of God."

—Dan B. Allender, Professor of Counseling Psychology and Founding President, The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology

This interview was originally published in the Spring 2025 Zondervan Academic Catalog. View our most recent catalog at ZondervanAcademic.com/ZACatalog.