Becoming a safe church

In my heart I wanted to write an article about the small things the church could improve to make it easier for people with cPTSD to be there and feel safe. Things like a careful use of the ‘laying on of hands’ so people won’t get touched without giving consent. Or maybe preachers using a calmer voice instead of yelling at the audience. Pretty solutions to get communion without having to stand in a crowd of people. And it is true, the church needs to press into the basics of acting safely and offering a safe space. Being a safe person in a relationship should be the standard of how we interact with each other. Don’t leave here without looking into these concepts and reflecting on the situation in your church and what could be done to improve it.

I wish that was all I had to say, pointing out the small, practical issues. But there are deep issues that need to be addressed and it wouldn’t make sense to fix behavior on the surface and not look at the roots of our convictions and teachings that lead to abuse within the church.

It is not a coincidence that so much abuse, including sexual abuse of children, rape (even within marriages) and domestic violence is flourishing within the church. The reasons for that are in our teaching, and our lack thereof.

 

 

Start talking about mental health

A lot of churches have mainly male preacher and some of them don’t like all the weird emotional and vulnerable stuff women always talk about, some even call it hysterics. They like things to be logical and clear. A lack of female preachers puts teaching out of balance.

The avoidance of talking about emotions and needs leaves people in the church clueless about how to manage them. The result is a congregation who is incapable of telling the difference between sadness and depression or anger and hyperarousal. We are good at managing our spiritual needs, ok when it comes to physical needs, but we don’t know a thing about emotional needs or how to get them met. If needs are not met by coincidence we are often taught to supress our soul when it starts to signal having a need (‘just tell the soul to be quiet and worship God’) or we spiritualize everything and try to fix it with more Bible study and prayer and proclaiming things over our life. That way our needs will have to twist out of their healthy shape and they take on very unhealthy forms like sickness, addictions, manipulation, legalism or a crossing of boundaries that is abusive.

We need to start talking about emotions and how to regulate them as well as normal emotional needs and how to behave in relationships to get them met in a healthy way. If we don’t, we will see people forcefully take what they need in a way that is unhealthy for everyone. We need to start talking about maintaining mental health.

 

And it should not be a taboo to talk about difficulties with that. Every human being has mental health issues. Everyone. Some more, some less. We need to get informed about the nature of these problems and stop pretending that they are a spiritual problem. Depression develops when the body and brain chemistry is out of balance which causes the emotional symptoms. It is a very physical problem. I won’t say that mental illness never has a spiritual reason, but we need to stop ignoring that most of the time there are physical, emotional and social causes. If all we have to offer is deliverance ministry very few people will receive true help. I myself have been to weekly deliverance sessions in the hope that it would stop my self-harming behavior but it wasn’t until I learned self-regulation skills outside the church that I finally managed to overcome this behavior.

Relying on deliverance as a panacea because we don’t know a thing about mental health is incredibly harmful. It keeps people from seeking proper help for their problems because we are pretending that we have the right solution. If we started to actually learn about mental health we could offer real help. I would recommend looking into Christy Wimber’s work on ‘Wholeness’ for a start.

Especially people with a chronic trauma history and high levels of dissociation suffer tremendously from deliverance ministry that isn’t based on proper understanding and discernment. Read more

We need to stop ignoring mental health topics or spiritualizing them. It makes the church a dangerous place for people who struggle, that actively keeps them from getting better.

 

Our church counselors need to learn when to send people to see a specialist. They should not take on the role of a therapist unless they are trained to do so. The church has powerful tools for emotional healing like theophostic prayer or sozo, but sometimes that won’t be enough. There is no sin in seeking professional help. When we are sick we go to the doctor and take medicine. We need to stop pretending that mental health doesn’t need therapists and medicine at times. If you believe that doctors and medicine are from the devil I trust you to ask God about this in private.

 

We tend to over-emphasize prayer and under-emphasize personal responsibility and actions. Jesus didn’t pray for the vendors to leave the temple. We can’t teach that prayer is enough and it will solve every problem. Miracle healings happen but they don’t happen for everyone. Sometimes it needs steps of obedience or responsibility. If we have people come to church for years to get prayer for a mental health issue and that is all they ever try to fix it, something is going wrong. Especially with cPTSD but also with other mental health problems there is a deep sense of helplessness and powerlessness, so we cling to the idea that a miracle has to be the solution.

Yet often the true healing demands that we learn skills for ourselves and in relationship and grow as a person and this kind of growth usually needs time and effort on our side, we might not be able to maintain a miracle healing without that. Intercession is actually not our sharpest tool when it comes to mental health. By all means, pray! But don’t let it be the only thing you do.

Don’t teach people that if they had enough faith their prayer would work and they would be healed. It is rarely a lack of faith that is keeping us back. We desperately believe. Don’t you dare judge our faith. That is a form of spiritual abuse.

 

 

Being human

Especially leaders are often put on a pedestal and everyone expects them to be perfect, holy and never ever make a mistake. This is ridiculous. Leaders are humans too. They have a mental health that they need to take care of, they have their own needs that have to be met in vulnerable relationships. If we deny them their humanity, they will have to hide it. It creates extreme stress and loneliness that will sooner or later twist into unhealthy behaviors like addiction, control, legalism or any form of abuse. Leaders need a safe place where they can be less than perfect.

Just demanding accountability is not enough, we need to open our hearts for our leadership and not treat them like they don’t belong with the rest of the congregation. If you cannot imagine your leaders sitting in a home group as a guest instead of a leader, sharing openly how they are doing, something is wrong. There is a direct connection between how high our pedestal for our leaders is and the chances that they will sin in hiddeness or that their needs will twist out of their god-given form. At best they will burn out. You know enough scandals to imagine the worst.

 

The church is full of hurting people. In their pain they sin against love. If we don’t have skills to deal with sin in love, we don’t have any people skills at all. This is the most basic people skill we will ever need. We do harm when we tell people to stop sinning without ever going to the root of the behavior, the pain. Our judgment of sin means that people will have to hide it and hide the pain it is causing them and their stuck state. Is there a lonelier place in the world than to be hurting and not having a place to go to? We need to stop judging people for being human. We can’t help the people we judge, judgment does not bring forth healthy fruit in anyone’s life.

I have heard it many times that victims of abuse were told to renounce their victim mentality because their toxic relational skills of manipulation are a form of witchcraft. Statements like that show a deep lack of understanding of the pain that causes toxic behavior. If we aim for holy behavior without the healing of the heart, all we will get is white washed tombs full of bones of the dead. We need to stop looking at people like they are robots who just need to be taught the right behavior so their toxic coping strategies will stop. Jesus has never been that superficial when he met with sinners. He always went to the heart issue behind the behavior and so should we.

We need to lose our fear of sinful behavior so we will stop trying to control it and search for the heart connection instead. If people cannot have problems in our church we condemn them to silence and hiding. That is how toxic fruit grows in darkness. Problems can only be brought to the light if that is a safe place to make mistakes and to be merely human. We need to stop avoiding conversations about sin like it was contagious.

 

 

Confrontation and repentance

Whenever Jesus faced a person whose heart was not in a good place he confronted that. I have studied confrontation in the Bible and I can highly recommend it. Jesus confronts mindsets and heart issues all the time. He points out the behavior that results from it, but he always goes down to the real problem, what is inside, not what is seen on the outside.

We somehow lost that within the church. I am not sure how it happened.

Some of it might be a false understanding of love covering a multitude sin. We are not supposed to let our brothers and sisters in Christ sin against us without a boundary and consequences. This is not what ‘covering with love’ means. It means that we don’t hold judgment against them but cover their brokenness in love. Never the harmful behavior. Never the heart issue behind the harmful behavior.

That would be teaching forgiveness without repentance. That was never what Jesus did. (We will talk about confrontation in a separate article)

 

We developed a false understanding of forgiveness and the need to forgive. It doesn’t mean taking away consequences of behavior. If that’s what we do we take away any motivation for true change. There is research that shows that the most severe domestic violence in the US happens within the church and through men who claim to be christians but rarely go to church. Their wives get taught to forgive the abuse and endure it as suffering for God. We were meant to suffer for our faith, not from our husbands. God does not support abuse in marriage. If we teach wives to endure domestic abuse and pray harder for their husbands to repent, we are empowering abusers. Men get battered too. They are in an equally bad situation, the pressure of expectation is just a different one. They are expected to be head of the family and provide for them. Failure of their marriage seems like failure of their mission. Prayer doesn’t work against the free will and choice of another human being. 

There is a classic abuse cycle. Abuse happens, there is a superficial form of reconciliation where the husband promises never to do it again, she forgives without a consequence, there is a honeymoon phase where everything looks good. Then tension starts to build again until there is the next incident of abuse. Telling us ladies that we just need to forgive and pray keeps us prisoner in this cycle.  We must not teach forgiveness that eliminates consequences. We cannot teach forgiveness without teaching true repentance. It makes the church, our small groups and even our families within the church a terrible place to be. These things need to be confronted properly in a way that leads to repentance and true reconciliation. We cannot keep things so superficial that we only address behavior. Jesus always addresses the heart issue. Forgiveness is the smaller problem here. For some reason we tend to put the burden on the victim without properly confronting the abuser.

 

Repentance is not saying ‘I am sorry’. Sorry for what? For getting caught? For having this conversation? For being in trouble? The true meaning of repentance is to change the way we think in our heart. It means that we need to explore the thought we had about the person we hurt or the situation we were in. The truly harmful thing is not the action, the heart issue is what brings forth toxic actions. If we only confront the behavior there will just be a different kind of toxic behavior based on the same heart issue.

I find it helpful to ask ‘what is the problem’ and then go down to the root of it. The problem is never behavior. The problem can be in a lack of connection and empathy. Often it is rooted in a lie we believe about God, ourselves or others. I have heard plenty of people in church proclaim their helplessness in the face of self-regulation, saying that their anger cannot be controlled or that they are incapable of stopping sinful behavior because their flesh is so weak. We are indeed very weak when we don’t know the nature of the problem we are facing. (And we often don’t know it because of a lack of teaching about emotions and needs…)

If we don’t have a culture of confrontation and leading people through true repentance we are not the church of Christ. This is what he did. He healed people and led them through repentance.

And even then true repentance doesn’t take away consequences. We are not doing people a favor if we do it.

 

Everyone in church needs to be confronted at times. It is not impolite, it is necessary. And we are not doing the mentally challenged people in our congregation a favor if we don’t confront their behavior and heart issues. Through abuse we often learned to believe terrible things about God, ourselves and other people in relationships. We need people who point it out in love, otherwise we can never learn that what we believe is not the truth. It needs to happen in love, with respect and mercy. And it has to happen with an understanding that sometimes the lies we believe are tightly intertwined with the memory of trauma and we cannot face one without facing the other. Our nervous systems might not be strong enough to cope and we need the help of a real therapist to work on that. We need to be kept accountable in our journey to healing, but there is no repenting from symptoms.

If the tools used on us when we make mistakes is control or punishment it will confirm our trauma world view. Worse, it will teach us that this is how God will deal with us. It leads to a culture of hiding problems. If you can’t confront without using control or punishment to ‘solve’ the problem you shouldn’t try, you are not doing it right. If you secretly judge, you shouldn’t try either. We need a culture of confrontation and restoration, not one of controlling sinful behavior through punishment. That is what old testament law did. When Jesus gave us an example of how to do it he never punished anyone. The judgment is His alone when the day has come. Until then we shouldn’t pretend we had that right.

For details on confrontation and repentance look into Danny Silk’s ‘Unpunishable’ or join the Loving on Purpose Life Academy.

 

 

Boundaries

Somehow the thought that we are all brothers and sisters in the Lord often leads to major misunderstandings of personal boundaries. Just because we go to the same church does not mean that we have a close relationship. It is not normal to greet and treat everyone like we are family. If there is no base within the relationship there is no reason to expect any form of intimacy. Even in church humans still need to pay attentions to the circles of relationships and offer their resources accordingly. Church cannot demand our time or resources under a spiritual threat of not taking the Kingdom seriously enough. That is how you recognize a cult. People from church cannot demand our time, resources or intimacy just because we are in the same church.

Relationships happen by choice. Nobody can choose to be in a close relationship with me unless I agree to that. Being christians in the same church should not change that fundamental concept of consent. Nobody has a right to my life simply through joining a church. That is not what Jesus was teaching in his pictures of the church. If we don’t have boundaries we cannot have unity. We just get terribly enmeshed and things become abusive.

 

It is my conviction that churches need open groups for new people as well as closed groups that are based on choosing each other and consent. A home group cannot be a safe place where we can be vulnerable and trust each other with our pain and problems if there are constantly strangers coming in to visit and if we have no say in who will join the group. We need the freedom not to be vulnerable with certain people, even in the church. Trust is earned. Even in the church. Groups that are not mere Bible Studies but meant for heart connection need a different framework to be safe for everyone. They should also be the place where safe confrontation is practiced the most. These are the chosen people we invite into our life, this is where deep healing can happen in relationships. We need to protect this space, especially for survivors of abuse.

Every time we tell the traumatized that it is right that someone else can decide how close they want to be to them and that this is true christianity, we will reinforce trauma patterns and create a picture of God as someone who supports and promotes a crossing of our boundaries. For a survivor God becomes the ultimate abuser they have to submit to, the Father who does not protect them. We cannot practice Christianity without respect for personal boundaries. When people in church don’t respect personal boundaries they need to be confronted. This is a big issue that reflects back on God and I don’t think he is taking it lightly.

 

 

Upside down world

Victims of abuse are sometimes put into impossible situations within the church. The fact that they were forced into sexual intercourse outside of marriage can become a scarlet letter. We are taught that our virginity is ruined, that we have a blood covenant with our abuser through the breaking of the hymen, that we are sinful. When it was us whom it was sinned against. Why do we have to carry the burden of that sin?

It is similar for women who seek a divorce from their abusive husbands. Don’t think for a minute that there is no rape within marriage. Do we really think that people get married for fun and then get a divorce for even more fun? Are we that estranged from reality? A divorce is a failure of reconciliation, it shows that there might not have been any repentance. It is the healthy consequence for abusive behavior. We cannot put a burden of guilt and shame on divorced women or single moms. That kind of life is no fun and nobody chooses it unless the other option was a lot worse. We need to stop our superficial judgment of these situations and face the reality. We need to stop judging healthy consequences. Please dont tell people to stay in abusive relationships. And PLEASE don’t tell them that this is what God expects of them. Who is that god?

 

There is another pattern that breaks my heart.

Abuse happens within the church like everywhere else. And often both the victim and the abuser are members of the church. It is relatively easy and fast to lead an abuser through repentance. They might have to learn self-regulation or other skills to avoid doing it again out of impulse. Whatever the heart issue was, it is still relatively easy to find and to turn away from it.

But even when the abuser goes through true repentance and a change of heart, that doesn’t take away the suffering of the victim.

Abusers often pick victims who were weak or have already been victimized in their life. As survivors we don’t know whom to trust anymore, we struggle with symptoms of PTSD and they don’t simply go away when we see that the abuser repented. Healing from trauma takes a lot longer than repenting from abuse. And it becomes virtually impossible when we are constantly running into our abuser. This has nothing to do with unforgiveness and all with how the brain processes trauma and the damage done to our nervous system. We get triggered and things come up as if they are happening now. Mere exposure to the person will not heal our wounds, it just increases our symptoms.

Many times the church will tell the victim that they have to suck it up because he repented and what else could they expect. Often the victim is told that if they can’t forgive and control their symptoms they need to leave.

 

That way the church tends to protect the abusers while exposing the wounds of the abused. Victims of sexual abuse often have to find a new church because they cannot heal while getting into contact with their abuser all the time. The lessons they learn about the church and God are terrible. This is one of the most backstabbing examples of removing natural consequences. The abuser should have to find a new place and give the victim time and space to heal in a congregation that is supportive and loving and protecting their vulnerability.

I cannot think of a greater betrayal than these ways the church sometimes twists what is right and puts all the blame and responsibility on the victim. And it is not rare. It’s been only 2 years since people who had to get a divorce because of domestic violence are allowed to take communion within the catholic church. It would be better to keep the Spirit of the law than only the letter. We are systematically discriminating abused people like any Pharisee would have done it. When Jesus comes back, what will he find?

 

 

I will talk about becoming a trauma-informed church in another post, but it is all in vain if we can’t even be a safe church. These are fundamental issues we need to address. We need to repent. There is something wrong in the heart of how we interact with each other. There are vital things missing from our teaching.

 

 

 

 

About the Author

Theresa has been part of a modern charismatic church for more than 15 years and went to several bible schools. She also lives with cPTSD and DID and teaches about mental health outside the church.