A Better Way to Handle Abuse

As promised earlier here is the first of several upcoming posts on handling abuse. Whether you are the abused, the abuser or someone who knows of abuse. Please read this it could save someones life….spiritually and physically.

These new materials have three core components: • Inspiring – Model sermons and background teaching for your pastor to set a vision for what a culture of peace looks like in your church. • Teaching – An eight-week small group study to enable your entire church to learn the basic principles of personal peacemaking together. • Embedding – The resources needed to establish a Peacemaker Team and make peacemaking an ongoing and vital part of your church’s life.  more info

Sexual abuse in the church does not have to end in broken lives, agonizing lawsuits, and divided congregations. When people follow God’s ways and words, these terrible incidents can result in healing, justice, and healthier churches.

When victims of abuse first come forward, I have found that most of them are seeking four reasonable responses. First, they are looking for understanding, compassion, and emotional support. Second, they want the church to admit that the abuse occurred and to acknowledge that it was wrong. Third, they want people to take steps to protect others from similar harm. And fourth, they expect compensation for the expense of needed counseling.

As national headlines reveal, many churches have unwisely ignored these legitimate needs. Instead, like many other institutions, they have blindly followed their lawyers’ and insurance adjusters’ textbook strategy to avoid legal liability. They try to cover up the offense and deny responsibility. All too often they distance themselves from the victims and their families, leaving them feeling betrayed and abandoned.

Many frustrated victims eventually talk to a lawyer who tells them they could win a million-dollar damages award. Soon everyone is locked in an adversarial process that reopens wounds and generates even more pain and anger. Whatever the verdict, both sides lose, since money alone can never heal the wounds of abuse.

There is a better way.

God is a redeemer and a problem-solver. He has designed a powerful peacemaking strategy for dealing with offenses between people, including sexual abuse. When churches follow it, as I will show later, the cycle of abuse is broken and restoration can begin.

Compassion – If there is one place that victims of abuse should find understanding, compassion, and support, it is among people whom God commands to respond to suffering with tenderness and selfless love: “Be kind and compassionate to one another…. Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit…. Each of you should look not only to your own interests but also to the interests of others” (Eph. 4:31; Phil. 2:3-4). Instead of pulling away from victims, churches should draw closer to them, listening to their stories, mourning with and praying for them, and bearing their burdens. Responding with love and compassion is one of the best ways to show that the church abhors abuse and is committed to serving those who are suffering.

Confession – Attorneys instinctively instruct their clients to “make no admissions.” Hundreds of churches have followed this shortsighted counsel in recent years, prolonging the agony of abuse victims, infuriating juries, and triggering multimillion-dollar punitive damages awards. In contrast, everyone benefits when people trust God’s promise that “He who conceals his sins does not prosper, but whoever confesses and renounces them finds mercy” (Prov. 28:13). When abuse has occurred, a church should express sorrow and acknowledge its contribution to the situation. It should also counsel the abuser to confess his sin, take responsibility for his actions, and seek needed counseling. These steps can prevent a court battle and speed healing for victim and offender alike. (Since an impulsive admission could allow an insurer to cancel coverage, church leaders should consult with their insurer, lawyer, and a Christian conciliator to plan their words carefully.)

Compensation for Counseling – The Bible places a strong emphasis on requiring a wrongdoer to repair any damage he has caused to another person. “Pay the injured man for the loss of his time and see that he is completely healed” (Ex. 21:19). Therefore, churches should be earnest to do whatever they can to bring wholeness to victims of abuse. As soon as abuse is revealed, the church should immediately come to the aid of the victim and his family, holding forth the redeeming power of Jesus and offering to provide or pay for needed counseling.

Change – When abuse takes place, statements of regret are not enough. Genuine repentance is demonstrated by making changes to protect others from similar harm. “Produce fruit in keeping with repentance…. Rescue the weak and needy; deliver them from the hand of the wicked” (Luke 3:8; Ps. 82:4). This requires immediately removing the abuser from his position, involving legal authorities as needed or required by law, and implementing screening and supervision procedures to prevent other abusive people from being in counseling or child-care positions. Such actions not only protect others from harm but also relieve abuse victims, who are deeply concerned that others not be treated as they were.

Conciliation – It may be difficult for a church to implement these steps if a victim’s family is already threatening legal action or an insurer refuses to support personal contacts. These situations can still be resolved without a legal battle, however, by submitting the matter to biblical mediation or arbitration. “If you have disputes, appoint as judges even men of little account in the church” (1 Cor. 6:4). Christian conciliation by outside neutrals can provide a constructive forum to deal with both the spiritual and legal issues related to abuse. This legally enforceable process provides appropriate confidentiality and promotes confession and restitution, which help to bring about justice and reconciliation.

These five steps are not theoretical. I have seen many churches follow this process, usually with great success. In one case, a pastor discovered that a man had abused several children in the church, including the pastor’s daughter. In the midst of his own personal anguish, the pastor prayed to respond to the situation in a way that would reflect the love of Jesus. After consulting with a Christian conciliator and the church’s insurer, the pastor and his elders set out to minister to everyone who had been hurt by this dreadful sin.

They persuaded the abuser to confess his sin to the families of the children and to turn himself in to the police. He willingly accepted his prison sentence, and was even grateful that his destructive behavior had finally been stopped.

The leaders spent many hours with the families themselves, grieving and praying with them, and making sure they received needed support and counseling. In addition, the leaders improved their screening and supervision policies to guard against similar incidents in the future.

They also reached out to the abuser’s wife and children, who were so ashamed that they planned to leave the church. But the leaders understood what being a shepherd is all about. They ministered to this broken family, reassured them of God’s love, and kept them in the fold.

Instead of being dragged through an excruciating lawsuit, the victims and their families, the abuser and his family, and the entire congregation experienced the redeeming power of God. This remarkable process culminated months later during a Christmas Eve service. As the church prepared to sing “Silent Night,” two young girls came forward to light the candles. One of them had been abused. The other was the daughter of the abuser. As they finished their task and smiled at each other, the congregation saw tangible evidence of God’s love and grace.

Abuse in the church does not have to end with catastrophe. When a church follows its Lord, even this great tragedy can result in healing and restoration.

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Ken Sande is an attorney, the author of The Peacemaker: A Biblical Guide to Resolving Personal Conflict (Baker Books, 3rd Ed. 2003), Peacemaking for Families (Tyndale, 2002), and president of Peacemaker Ministries (www.Peacemaker.net), an international ministry committed to equipping and assisting Christians and their churches to respond to conflict biblically.

by Ken Sande, President of Peacemaker Ministries

This article in its entirety may be photocopied, re-transmitted by electronic mail, or reproduced in newsletters, on the World Wide Web, or in other print media, provided that such copying, re-transmission, or other use is not for profit or other commercial purpose. Any distribution or use of this article must set forth the following credit line, in full, at the conclusion of the article: “© 2005 Peacemaker^® Ministries, www.Peacemaker.net. Reprinted with permission.” Peacemaker Ministries may withdraw or modify this grant of permission at any time.

Should A Wife Submit To An Abusive Husband?

This question if from Desiring God feature, “Ask Pastor John”.

What should a wife’s submission to her husband look like if he’s an abuser?

Part of that answer is clearly going to depend on what kind of abuse we’re dealing with here, how serious this is. Is her life in danger? Or is this verbal unkindness? I’m not sure what the person who asked the question had in mind. So let me just talk about different kinds.

A woman’s submission to her husband is rooted in the word of God, calling her to be—for the Lord’s sake, submissive to him. Which means she always has a higher allegiance, namely to Christ.

Therefore Christ’s word governs her life. And Christ has many words besides “Be submissive.” “Be submissive” is not an absolute, because her Lord has other things to tell her, so that if the husband tells her something that contradicts what the Lord tells her, then she’s got a crisis of, “To whom do I submit now?” And clearly she submits to Jesus above her husband. The reason she is submitting to her husband is because of her prior superior submission to the Lord.

So if this man, for example, is calling her to engage in abusive acts willingly (group sex or something really weird, bizarre, harmful, that clearly would be sin), then the way she submits—I really think this is possible, though it’s kind of paradoxical—is that she’s not going to go there. I’m saying, “No, she’s not going to do what Jesus would disapprove even though the husband is asking her to do it.”

She’s going to say, however, something like, “Honey, I want so much to follow you as my leader. God calls me to do that, and I would love to do that. It would be sweet to me if I could enjoy your leadership. But if you ask me to do this, require this of me, then I can’t go there.”

Now that’s one kind of situation. Just a word on the other kind. If it’s not requiring her to sin but simply hurting her, then I think she endures verbal abuse for a season, and she endures perhaps being smacked one night, and then she seeks help from the church.

Every time I deal with somebody in this, I find the ultimate solution under God in the church. In other words, this man should be disciplined, and she should have a safe place in a body of Christ where she goes and then the people in the church deal with him. She can’t deal with him by herself.

So the short answer, I think, is that the church is really crucial here to step in, be her strength, say to this man, “You can’t do this. You cannot do this! That’s not what we allow. That’s not what Christ calls you to be.”

I can’t go in to all the details, but I would say to the woman, “Come to a church that you feel safe in. Tell them the case. Let the leaders step in and help you navigate the difficulties.”

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John Piper has done a great job in answering this question though he had no specifics. I would like to add some additional comments I believe may be helpful all around.

For Pastors, Elders and Deacons

First to the Pastor and Deacons or Elders! You must be ready to deal with this. I have never talked to a Pastor who has not run into this situation in his church. Likewise I have heard Pastor after Pastor say,
“I am not a counselor”! To which I reply, no but you are a Pastor. Is a Pastor not a shepherd? Would the Good Shepherd stand and do nothing as one of His sheep is hurt? No He would not. Maybe you are a Pastor who has an anger problem so you never “go there” when someone mentions abuse…… I know I am hitting Pastor’s hard and as rough as it seems I have no choice.

My sisters and brothers cry out.

Too many pastors turn their heads away from the sin right under their noses. Like ostrichs with their heads in the sand they carry on as if nothing is going on. So what happens:

~~Other men, who are aware the Pastor knows and does nothing, are emboldened and empowered by the lack of Leadership and Protection by the very men, God has provided to protect and provide for “the weaker vessel”;

~~This in and of itself will drive a woman to despair. I know I have been  there! When a woman who has been taught, when in trouble seek a “man of God”, does as she has been told and gets “horrible” counsel repeatedly, this can lead to a level of despair that can lead to suicide.

When you seek the Pastor and ask to talk to him because your husband is hitting you…. and his counsel is “why don’t you just leave the SOB?” and later when another pastor you seek help from tells you to “lighten up and have an open marriage” Where can you turn?

Abuse is not one sided. By this I mean women are not the only spouse to be abused. There are thousands of men who are regularly verbally and physically abused by their wives…. To this many of you would tell them to grow up…be a man… or worse yet, if she hits you hit her back! None of which is biblical.

I once knew a couple in just this situation. He was well over 6 feet tall and weighed about 200 lbs. She on the other hand was about 5′2″ and weighed about 110 lbs. Certainly your first question would be the same as mine. HOW!  The “how” is not much different then with a man abusing a woman.  Something starts an argument, it escalates, the abuser “must have control” so they use anything at their disposal to get the upper hand. When the abuser is the smaller woman she often uses a tool of some kind to inflict pain. She knows “he will never hit a woman” and thus she becomes even more brazen in her abuse. In the opposite situation the woman is physically smaller and would not think of lifting a tool (weapon) of any kind against him as it will probably be used against her eventually and she will suffer more.

So what should the submission of a wife to her husband look like?  Wednesday we will dedicate the blog to a picture of submission.

Please,  if you are an abused person, woman , man or child. Get help.  An email to cindy@word4women.com will be handled confidentially and responded to in a manner to assist.

Dear Father,

At this moment all over the world, your children are being hurt, abused, tortured, enslaved. This is NOT by your design but through the sin of a fallen world. Lord bring peace and healing to all who suffer. Raise up Godly men and women who will stand in the gap and bear this burden with them. May their help and counsel point them first anad formost to the cross on which you suffered such pain and humiliation for us all.  Amen

Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide

This past weekend, the New York Times Sunday magazine devoted its entire issue to “Why Women’s Rights Are the Cause of Our Time.” Some very sober and powerful reading there — and not what you might think upon first encountering a magazine with a title like that. In fact, these are real, global, and serious issues that should have the attention and ministry of Christians everywhere. More on that in a moment.

The lead feature was an excerpt from the forthcoming book by New York Times Op-Ed columnist Nicholas Kristof and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn,a former Times correspondent who now works in finance and philanthropy. The book is titled, Half the Sky: Turning Oppression Into Opportunity for Women Worldwide. I’ve already pre-ordered it, based on the excerpt I read in this magazine. Here’s a summary, one that includes an honest fact about abortion that I was stunned to read in a mainstream publication — a good indicator of the journalistic veracity of this book’s research.

Traditionally, the status of women was seen as a “soft” issue — worthy but marginal. We initially reflected that view ourselves in our work as journalists. We preferred to focus instead on the “serious” international issues, like trade disputes or arms proliferation. Our awakening came in China.

After we married in 1988, we moved to Beijing to be correspondents for The New York Times. Seven months later we found ourselves standing on the edge of Tiananmen Square watching troops fire their automatic weapons at prodemocracy protesters. The massacre claimed between 400 and 800 lives and transfixed the world; wrenching images of the killings appeared constantly on the front page and on television screens.

Yet the following year we came across an obscure but meticulous demographic study that outlined a human rights violation that had claimed tens of thousands more lives. This study found that 39,000 baby girls died annually in China because parents didn’t give them the same medical care and attention that boys received — and that was just in the first year of life. A result is that as many infant girls died unnecessarily every week in China as protesters died at Tiananmen Square. Those Chinese girls never received a column inch of news coverage, and we began to wonder if our journalistic priorities were skewed.

A similar pattern emerged in other countries. In India, a “bride burning” takes place approximately once every two hours, to punish a woman for an inadequate dowry or to eliminate her so a man can remarry — but these rarely constitute news. When a prominent dissident was arrested in China, we would write a front-page article; when 100,000 girls were kidnapped and trafficked into brothels, we didn’t even consider it news.

Amartya Sen, the ebullient Nobel Prize-winning economist, developed a gauge of gender inequality that is a striking reminder of the stakes involved. “More than 100 million women are missing,” Sen wrote in a classic essay in 1990 in The New York Review of Books, spurring a new field of research. Sen noted that in normal circumstances, women live longer than men, and so there are more females than males in much of the world. Yet in places where girls have a deeply unequal status, they vanish. China has 107 males for every 100 females in its overall population (and an even greater disproportion among newborns), and India has 108. The implication of the sex ratios, Sen later found, is that about 107 million females are missing from the globe today. Follow-up studies have calculated the number slightly differently, deriving alternative figures for “missing women” of between 60 million and 107 million.

Girls vanish partly because they don’t get the same health care and food as boys. In India, for example, girls are less likely to be vaccinated than boys and are taken to the hospital only when they are sicker. A result is that girls in India from 1 to 5 years of age are 50 percent more likely to die than boys their age. In addition, ultrasound machines have allowed a pregnant woman to find out the sex of her fetus — and then get an abortion if it is female.

The global statistics on the abuse of girls are numbing. It appears that more girls and women are now missing from the planet, precisely because they are female, than men were killed on the battlefield in all the wars of the 20th century. The number of victims of this routine “gendercide” far exceeds the number of people who were slaughtered in all the genocides of the 20th century.

For those women who live, mistreatment is sometimes shockingly brutal. If you’re reading this article, the phrase “gender discrimination” might conjure thoughts of unequal pay, underfinanced sports teams or unwanted touching from a boss. In the developing world, meanwhile, millions of women and girls are actually enslaved. While a precise number is hard to pin down, the International Labor Organization, a U.N. agency, estimates that at any one time there are 12.3 million people engaged in forced labor of all kinds, including sexual servitude. In Asia alone about one million children working in the sex trade are held in conditions indistinguishable from slavery, according to a U.N. report. Girls and women are locked in brothels and beaten if they resist, fed just enough to be kept alive and often sedated with drugs — to pacify them and often to cultivate addiction. India probably has more modern slaves than any other country.

Another huge burden for women in poor countries is maternal mortality, with one woman dying in childbirth around the world every minute. In the West African country Niger, a woman stands a one-in-seven chance of dying in childbirth at some point in her life. (These statistics are all somewhat dubious, because maternal mortality isn’t considered significant enough to require good data collection.) For all of India’s shiny new high-rises, a woman there still has a 1-in-70 lifetime chance of dying in childbirth. In contrast, the lifetime risk in the United States is 1 in 4,800; in Ireland, it is 1 in 47,600. The reason for the gap is not that we don’t know how to save lives of women in poor countries. It’s simply that poor, uneducated women in Africa and Asia have never been a priority either in their own countries or to donor nations. …

Why do microfinance organizations usually focus their assistance on women? And why does everyone benefit when women enter the work force and bring home regular pay checks? One reason involves the dirty little secret of global poverty: some of the most wretched suffering is caused not just by low incomes but also by unwise spending by the poor — especially by men. Surprisingly frequently, we’ve come across a mother mourning a child who has just died of malaria for want of a $5 mosquito bed net; the mother says that the family couldn’t afford a bed net and she means it, but then we find the father at a nearby bar. He goes three evenings a week to the bar, spending $5 each week.

Our interviews and perusal of the data available suggest that the poorest families in the world spend approximately 10 times as much (20 percent of their incomes on average) on a combination of alcohol, prostitution, candy, sugary drinks and lavish feasts as they do on educating their children (2 percent). If poor families spent only as much on educating their children as they do on beer and prostitutes, there would be a breakthrough in the prospects of poor countries. Girls, since they are the ones kept home from school now, would be the biggest beneficiaries. Moreover, one way to reallocate family expenditures in this way is to put more money in the hands of women. A series of studies has found that when women hold assets or gain incomes, family money is more likely to be spent on nutrition, medicine and housing, and consequently children are healthier.

These are shocking, sinful statistics. They must be challenged and changed. For that reason, I am very grateful for the journalistic efforts of Kristof and WuDunn. For the same reason, I was also very grateful for the attention Secretary Clinton brought to the status of women in Africa during her visit last week.

But having researched the history of feminism in the Western world for my own book, I am also reminded of the course of our women’s history. In many ways, though perhaps not as extreme, we issued the same complaints. Women in the 19th century complained of men making the same poor financial expenditures on alcohol and prostitutes, that women didn’t have equality in education, and that maternal health was a neglected medical priority. But as women fought for equality, we found the fight remained long after the battles were won. Because men were identified as the problem, the gender war has never been fully resolved. Instead of unifying marriages and families, this ongoing battle continues to fracture them. So my concern is that we will import some of these same values into our efforts to help women around the world.

In fact, the opening illustration of Kristof and WuDunn’s article in my opinion illustrates this perfectly. It is about a Pakistani couple where the husband is sinning terribly against his wife by beating her and otherwise neglecting her. She is in despair until she receives a microfinance loan, which enables her to set up a small embroidery business. Soon she is the village business mogul, able to employ many others and pay off her husband’s debts. He no longer beats her because she is too valuable, and he has come around to the view that girls are just as good as boys.

And that’s where the story ends. Yay . . . but only half a yay, really. He stopped beating her, but where is the true partnership? Where is the true repentance? Only the gospel can address sin and redemption. Economic parity can’t be the ultimate solution because it can’t address the heart issues. And this brings me back to why I think Christians need to be involved. If we preach equality because it’s found on page one of the Bible, then we should be leading the charge in this area. But our solutions will be different because our end goals are different. Yes, we want to empower women. Yes, we want women to be educated. Yes, we want families to be healthier and more prosperous. But we don’t want to do this by lifting up one person in the family at the expense of another. We have to help men change, too, by preaching the gospel and teaching them to truly apply the Ephesians 5 mandate to love their wives as Christ loved the church — without concern for cultural practices or restrictions. They must fear God and His word more than the opinions of other men and the way things are currently done in their culture.

As Christians, we have an opportunity here to help families around the world by both standing against incredible injustice against women and by preaching the gospel of reconciliation. Let’s not lose any ground to lesser solutions.

(Photos: The New York Times)

This was originally posted on Carolyn McCulley’s blog Radical Womanhood

http://solofemininity.blogs.com/posts/