Part One: Before the Question
Chapter Two — If You Are Being Harmed (1 of 2)
This chapter comes early on purpose.
If you are reading this book because someone in your church is hurting you, or someone you love, read this before anything else. The weighing in Part Three is not for you. Harm is not one reason among others.
Your safety comes first.
If anyone is in danger right now, call 911 in the United States, or the emergency number where you live.
If a child is being harmed, contact the police or your state's child protective services. A church's own process is never a substitute for that report. No one in a church has the authority to tell you not to make it.
If your child has been harmed. Believe your child. Tell them it is not their fault, and that telling you was right. Do not press for details or ask the same questions again and again; trained people will do that.
Report to the police or child protective services yourself, even if the church says it will. Do not warn the person who did it, and do not take it to church leaders before you report. If the harm was sexual and recent, take your child to an emergency room, and ask there what to do before washing clothes or bathing.
Other children may be at risk, and your report may protect them. In many states, clergy, youth workers and teachers are required by law to report suspected child abuse; if you are one of them, report now. Find a counselor trained in child trauma for your child. Get help for yourself as well.
What harm looks like. Some harm is easy to name, and some is not.
There is sexual abuse, of children and of adults. When a pastor or priest draws an adult in his care into a sexual relationship, that is abuse, not an affair, whatever anyone calls it.
There is physical violence. There is emotional abuse: contempt, humiliation, threats, rage, the slow wearing down of a person until they doubt their own mind. There is financial abuse: pressure to give what you cannot give, money taken or misused, a household kept dependent.
And there is the kind that hides best, because it wears religious clothes. Researchers call it spiritual abuse.
The word that carries the weight in that definition is pattern.
A pastor who disagrees with you is not abusing you. An elder who corrects you kindly and in the open is not abusing you. A church that teaches something hard is not abusing you.
What makes it abuse is control: a pattern of using God's name, God's book or God's authority to keep someone afraid, silent, isolated, or obedient to a person.
You may not be sure which you are facing. Then hear this. If you read that list and saw your church, trust what you saw. You do not have to be sure it is abuse to ask for help. Not knowing is reason enough to tell someone outside.
What Scripture says about shepherds who do this. Scripture does not treat this as a gray area. Through Ezekiel, God spoke against the leaders of His own people:
"You have not strengthened the weak, healed the sick, bandaged the injured, brought back the strays, or sought the lost, but with force and harshness you have ruled over them."
— Ezekiel 34:4 (NET)
Jesus set the rule for His own people against the way the world uses power: "You know that those who are recognized as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and those in high positions use their authority over them. But it is not this way among you." (Mark 10:42–43, NET.)
Peter, writing to elders as a fellow elder, said the same: "And do not lord it over those entrusted to you, but be examples to the flock." (1 Peter 5:3, NET.)
And Jesus' warning about those who cause little ones to stumble is one of His sternest: "it would be better for him to have a huge millstone hung around his neck and to be drowned in the open sea." (Matthew 18:6, NET.)
Paul named plainly what false leaders were doing to one church: "For you put up with it if someone makes slaves of you, if someone exploits you, if someone takes advantage of you, if someone behaves arrogantly toward you, if someone strikes you in the face." (2 Corinthians 11:20, NET.) He did not call it a test of patience. He called it what it was.
The shame belonged to those who did it.
There is a sentence in the story of Tamar, after her brother Amnon raped her, that every church should read slowly. Her other brother said to her: "Now be quiet, my sister. He is your brother. Don't take it so seriously!" (2 Samuel 13:20, NET.)
The text does not approve of what he said. It records that Tamar lived on in his house, devastated.
When a church tells a victim to be quiet because the abuser is a brother, it is saying Absalom's words.
Name the enemy. There is more in this than human sin, and Scripture does not hide it.
In the same letter where Peter tells elders not to lord it over the flock, he goes on: "Be sober and alert. Your enemy the devil, like a roaring lion, is on the prowl looking for someone to devour." (1 Peter 5:8, NET.)
Jesus spoke of the thief who climbs into the sheepfold some other way than by the door: "The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come so that they may have life, and may have it abundantly." (John 10:10, NET.)
And Paul, writing about false leaders who were exploiting a church, said: "even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light. Therefore it is not surprising his servants also disguise themselves as servants of righteousness" (2 Corinthians 11:14–15, NET).
That is why harm in a church so often wears a title, a collar, a Bible verse. The enemy prowls where the sheep gather. He has always loved the disguise of a shepherd.
Jesus called him "a liar and the father of lies" (John 8:44, NET). Every pattern on that list runs on lies. That you are to blame. That no one will believe you. That God is on the side of the one hurting you.
Two things must be said together.
Naming the devil never excuses the man. The one who harmed you chose to, and he will answer for it, before God and before the law. Of such servants Paul says their "end will correspond to their actions" (2 Corinthians 11:15, NET).