Responding Wisely to Domestic Abuse in Your Church
There is much that is expected of pastors and church leaders, much for which they have often been inadequately prepared. At various points most will find themselves having to respond to situations that involve domestic abuse. This could be a woman coming to them and pleading for protection from her husband, it could be an allegation coming from a third party who observed something alarming, it could be an abuser confessing sin and seeking reconciliation. Few people know how to respond well, respond confidently, respond helpfully.
It is for exactly this reason that Jeremy Pierre and Greg Wilson have written When Home Hurts: A Guide for Responding Wisely to Domestic Abuse in Your Church. “[We] wrote this book to help you be the kind of church leader, church member, friend, parent, sibling, or neighbor who responds wisely. We want the Church to be a new normal for those grown accustomed to abuse—a home that doesn’t hurt those inside, but instead welcomes them into the tender care of the Lord.” The book is, then, a guide for church leaders (or others) who wish to help people who are suffering under domestic abuse.
When Home Hurts is divided into three parts. In the first part, the authors explain how to understand abuse and do this by explaining the reader’s role as an agent of God’s love. Love, they say, “is the reverse of abuse because it builds others up at cost to self, rather than builds self up at cost to others. But love is not an equal opposite—it’s far more powerful because, unlike abuse, love is sourced from the eternal depths of God’s heart. You are an agent of a love much bigger than you.” They then explain the dynamics of domestic abuse and offer important considerations about terminology: “Terms like abuse, abuser, victim, and survivor each have a variety of meanings in domestic abuse literature. These terms can be helpful, but only as circumstantial identifiers, not core identities. Helpful uses of these terms are simply circumstantial descriptions of a person in relation to the abuse that occurred. Unhelpful uses are identifiers that define a person entirely by their relation to the abuse that occurred.” They describe abuse in this way: “Abuse occurs as a person in a position of greater influence uses his personal capacities to diminish the personal capacities of those under his influence in order to control them.” They then offer a framework to discern those abusive dynamics in real-world situations.
In the second part of the book they provide guidance on responding after an initial disclosure of domestic abuse. Over three chapters they tell how to care for the victim, how to confront the abuser, and how to consider the inevitable collateral damage. “To put it simply, we first care for the victim(s) and do all that we can to ensure their safety. Only after the victim’s safety is assured, and with her advice and consent, do we begin working with the person who is acting abusively. Only after those two tasks are well underway can we consider the possibility of a third. If the victim is safe and willing, is healing from the trauma of the abuse, and the abuser is no longer exhibiting abusive patterns and is responding well to ongoing accountability, then efforts at reviving or reconciling the marriage will be much more successful. You must neither get this triage out of order nor fast-track it.”
In the third and final part, the authors turn from the initial response to long-term care. They want their readers to help the person who has suffered domestic abuse to advance from being a victim to being an overcomer and to help the person who has committed domestic abuse to advance from being an abuser to being a servant. They want church leaders to lead their congregation in such a way that it responds with wisdom and compassion, that it offers true and substantial hope, help, and healing.y
A series of appendices offer counsel on a number of further issues such as false allegations; separation, divorce, and remarriage; finding trauma counselors; taking advantage of national and state domestic violence resources; and those occasions when more typical roles are reversed so that a husband finds himself a victim of his wife’s abuse.
When Home Hurts is exactly the book I had hoped it would be when I picked it up. It is a book that will do what it promises—help well-meaning but inadequately-trained Christians to respond well to very difficult situations. It will give them confidence that they can be truly helpful in truly crucial times. I suggest reading it through once outside of a given situation, then keeping it on-hand to serve its purpose at those times when you are called upon to walk alongside a victim.
“We want you to be sure that God will be with you as you enter into this situation,” say the authors. “We know it’s not easy being a pastor, church leader, family member, or friend facing such a difficult situation. But rest assured, the Lord desires that we respond wisely, and He will supply the wisdom to do so. In fact, you get the privilege of displaying the heart of God— kind, stable, self-giving—to people who’ve had the opposite displayed to them. You get to be an agent of God’s love for someone who may have forgotten what real love is—and what it looks like in the family of God.” It’s for these very reasons that I give this book my highest recommendation.
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A La Carte (August 31)
May the God of love and peace be with you today.
(Yesterday on the blog: The Kingdom of Heaven and the Kingdom of Space)
The Parachurch in Light of the Church
Jared Wilson: “My new friend fumbled around for an answer. It turned out he was more of a ‘freelancer.’ He had a very clear idea about how his work would benefit the Church with a capital C, the universal church. But he was less clear on how it served any particular body. And therein lies an important matter for the future viability of many parachurch models and the churches they aim to support.”
The Gold Mine in the Local Church
This article encourages you to look for the gold mine that can be found in the local church.
Small Acts of Faithfulness
“Why am I so concerned about personal success?’ I crave accolades for my teaching, mentoring, writing, even my ministry in the church. I long for and expect God to use me in big ways. But what I’m realizing is that God is not interested in what we think of as success. In fact, he most often loves to use weak, obscure people to accomplish his purposes.”
The Liturgy Of Social Media
What is the liturgy of social media, how does it form us. That’s the question this article answers.
Hell and the Lake of Fire?
George Sinclair says, “I was part of the Anglican Church of Canada for many years. This sometimes led me into some odd and surprising conversations. Once I was at a day-long ‘teaching’ event. During one of the breaks, a fellow sought me out in conversation. Given some of the things I had said in our small discussion group, he suspected that I was, in his language, a fundamentalist.”
Why You Should Preach the “Family Gospel”
Kendra Dahl: “My parents endured several years of suffering as I wandered away from my faith. My feelings towards God ranged from ambivalence to hostility as I questioned everything I’d been taught to accept as true. But even as they prayed for me and spoke the truth to me, calling me to repentance and faith, they also did something else. They made sure I knew I could always come home.”
Flashback: War, Women, and Wealth
God, through his Word, calls us to find our reputation and protection in him, to be strong in him even if that makes us weak in the eyes of the world.‘Fear NOT.’ There is no qualification, no exception, no modification; it is as plain a command as, ‘Thou shalt not steal.’ —Frances Ridley Havergal
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A La Carte (December 23)
Good morning. Grace and peace to you.
(Yesterday on the blog: The Way I’ll Be Reading the Bible in 2022)
Can You Feel the Incarnation?
“I don’t know about you but I cannot grasp that grace of the incarnation.” Chap Bettis offers a neat illustration of it here.
When a Good God Seems Far From Good
“Have you ever stood before a spiritual fork in the road? One where you know the ‘godly answer’ to your painful circumstances, but there seems to be an impenetrable wall that stands between your head and your heart? It’s the tension between knowing something to be true but struggling to believe it when the evidence seems stacked against it.”
Founding Myths and the Second Great Awakening
This is a really interesting (and extensive) article on the history of the church in America.
The Lost Art of Humility
“This is our great problem: we think too highly of ourselves, or too frequently about ourselves. We wonder what other people think of us, and in this era we are desperately aware of cultivating image. But a thin verbal veneer of humility is more fleeting than the sound waves which carried it.”
Just Call Me Old-Fashioned
Here’s a celebration of an old-fashioned kind of Christianity.
On Not Fighting Like Gauls
This article tells why you shouldn’t fight like the Gauls did.
Flashback: The Essential: Incarnation
This is what Christians mean when we speak of the Incarnation: the joining together of God and man in “one divine, mysterious person,” the Lord Jesus Christ.God is pleased to do great things for souls, when friends and relations are moved to pray for them. —J.C. Ryle
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God Has Found You Faithful
The Parable of the Talents is one of the best-known and best-loved of all the parables Jesus left us. It tells of a man who is going on a journey and, who, before he sets out, distributes his wealth among his servants for safekeeping. To one he gives five talents, to another two, and to another just one. (A talent, for sake of context, is about 20 years’ of wages for a laborer.) It tells how each of these servants responds to what is entrusted to him: Two of the servants invest the money wisely and double it, while the other simply buries the money and then later returns it as-is. The first two receive their master’s approval while the third receives his condemnation.
This parable leads to many legitimate applications and often challenges us to be faithful with what the Lord has entrusted to us, whether that is the gospel itself, or the gifts, talents, money, responsibilities, or opportunities we have been given. God entrusts us with so much and it falls to us, as his servants, to be faithful with it all. We can expect that as we are faithful, we will know God’s approval and reward. “For to everyone who has will more be given, and he will have an abundance.”
Hidden in plain sight is a simple observation: the servants are never offered a choice in their stewardship. The master does not come to them to ask, “How much of my wealth do you think you’re capable of handling?” He never checks in to inquire, “How would you feel about being given the full five talents? Do you think you can handle five, or would you prefer to have just two?” He doesn’t have them go through an application process and doesn’t pull out the Enneagram to make sure he is dispensing his wealth according to personality type. Rather, he simply assigns an amount to each of them as he sees fit. He dispenses his wealth and expects that each of them will prove worthy of the responsibility he has given them.
Yet surely the one who receives the five talents feels particularly honored. Surely it is a sign of his master’s trust, his master’s confidence, that he is given so much. Surely the master is not being rash or hasty in giving that one servant two-thirds of his wealth. Surely this one has already proven himself faithful and on that basis is now being given the opportunity to prove himself faithful with even more.
And with that in mind, I wonder if you are carrying a heavy burden right now. You may have been entrusted with weighty responsibilities. You may be bearing deep sorrows and fierce pains. You may be wondering why so much has been given to you, why the path you must walk is so narrow, so rocky, so difficult. You may be wondering why God’s Providence seems to have been applied in so painful a way.
From the Parable of the Talents you must see the hand of God in it all, for he is the one who has entrusted all these things to you. And behind the hand of God, you must see his confidence in you, his trust, his optimism. God is the one who has called you to walk this path, and he is the one who has called you to walk it faithfully. Yet he has not judged you wrong or set you up for failure. He has not been flippant in his decisions or reckless in his wisdom. No, he has found you faithful in small things and has now entrusted to you this very large thing. You have been faithful in little and now you have been set over much.
In that way your master’s confidence is a blessing, a reward all its own. He made no mistake in dispensing five talents to you, and he will never leave you nor forsake you as you bear it for his sake, for his cause, for his glory. Let his trust spur you on to prove yourself faithful, his confidence motivate you to prove yourself worthy—worthy of the weighty responsibility he has placed into your hands.
