Cover art/graphic by Kyle T. Webster

October 20, 2009 | Editor’s note: A version of this story appeared in the Fall 2009 issue of Divinity magazine.

They show up every Sunday like penitent churchgoers bearing guilt, regret or worry, seeking the release of confessing before a presence they cannot see.

They are not churchgoers. They are postcards sent anonymously to a man named Frank Warren. He gets them by the thousands. Every Sunday, he presents those he finds most compelling on his website, PostSecret.com.

The cards are usually artfully designed with a photo or a drawing. The wording, often cut and pasted like a ransom note, is sometimes just as blunt and urgent. A few of the revelations are hopeful and grateful. Some are wry and funny. Most are dark. Since the site went up in 2005, it has drawn more than 250 million visits.

Warren, who doesn’t attend church, nonetheless posts only on Sundays, a day he says is appropriate for “reflection and gravity.” For ministers, that choice of day can seem a direct challenge. As worshippers gather in churches each Sunday, others log on to Warren’s cyber venue to read iconic cards shining against a black background like stained-glass windows. Some visitors want to see if their secret is one of the 20 or so featured. Others seek a comforting echo of their own troubles.

PostSecret’s popularity isn’t limited to the weekly postings. The site sells books of secrets, too. The latest, “PostSecret: Confessions on Life, Death, and God,” just went on sale. When Warren visits college campuses, students turn out to hear him speak about the healing power of sharing what one has long withheld.

For ministers it can seem that Warren and other social media not only dominate the Sabbath, but threaten to usurp one of the church’s traditional functions. Thousands of people, most of them young, are disclosing their fears, worries and sins to a website instead of their pastors.

In an interview, Warren insists that no competition is intended. He said PostSecret is more of an artistic expression than a religious one.

“I don’t try to connect PostSecret with religious belief, but many of the secrets I receive do have a spiritual nature,” he said. “I like to think of the project as art.”

Whether it is art or something else, the PostSecret phenomenon raises questions for ministers, particularly those who work with youth: Are churches failing to provide an outlet for the need to confess? And, if so, are they also neglecting another spiritual hunger -- the longing for forgiveness?

A need for forgiveness

For McKennon Shea, admissions director at Duke Divinity School and long involved in youth ministry, the answers are “yes” and “yes.”

“PostSecret put the church on notice that we have lost a sense of confession and what goes with it, that absolution, that forgiveness,” Shea said. “It’s something we lost in the Reformation. It may have been done away with in the life of the church, but nothing changed in human beings. We still have that need for forgiveness.”

Elyse Gustafson, a regular reader of PostSecret, agrees that the site taps a desire the church tends to ignore.

“The popularity of PostSecret might be in part due to Protestant America’s disinterest in confession,” Gustafson said. “All that guilt and shame has to go somewhere, even if the church won’t take it.”

Acknowledging the desire to confess is one thing, but deciding how churches should respond becomes complex, particularly for Protestants.

Shea believes churches can provide time and space for confession -- responding in a way that helps heal a broken relationship with God -- without exclusively claiming the power to absolve sins.

“We have the tools to respond, to reclaim what we lost,” he said. “It doesn’t mean ministers have to go and build a confessional booth. But we have to find a place where people can hear the story of a God who forgives and loves and listens to secrets that we can atone for.”

Kelsey Merison, a medical student at The Ohio State University, thinks young people prefer confiding to a pastor they know well, but only up to a point. “It can create barriers when the young person is worried about what the minister will think of them.”

Merison, who grew up Catholic, said she never felt close to her priests. “To me, confessing the sins just felt like I was talking to a stranger.” While she thinks Protestant churches should consider carefully how they listen to youth, she senses that none of her friends are interested in something akin to the Catholic confessional.

Today’s young people may not have a greater need for confession than previous generations, but they are making the need more apparent as they explore -- and are sometimes isolated by -- a world of instant messaging, tweeting and social networking sites. Some pour out sad or embarrassing information on Facebook. Others confess anonymously on PostSecret or blogs. Some open up suddenly in group discussions.

Fred Edie, faculty director of the Duke Youth Academy for Christian Formation and assistant professor of the practice of Christian education at Duke Divinity, notices that more young people are revealing secret concerns.

“One thing I note is either a generational or cultural tendency toward self revelation,” Edie said. “At our Youth Academy, for example, it has become relatively routine for students to share stories or incidents of significant wounding (of themselves or from themselves to others) as they grow to trust one another in Christian community.”

As Edie and his staff weigh how to respond to these disclosures, they’ve developed approaches -- both communal and one-on-one -- that go beyond simply accepting the cathartic value of confession. They try to make it a process for emotional and spiritual mending.

“Unlike PostSecret, the point of confession for Christians is not just therapeutic relief of one’s own existential pain,” he said. “It is to enable reconciliation between themselves and the party or the parties to that pain.”