As a counseling professor, I’ve sat with countless people who’ve walked through suffering. Sometimes that suffering has been at the hands of people within the church. Though I’ve been doing this now for more than a decade, it never gets easier. The longer I’m in this field, the more frequently I seem to pray, “Come quickly, Lord Jesus.”
Diane Langberg’s book When the Church Harms God’s People: Becoming Faith Communities That Resist Abuse, Pursue Truth, and Care for the Wounded promises to be a helpful resource for dealing with church hurt. Langberg is a practicing psychologist who spends her days ministering to those who’ve experienced trauma and abuse. She uses social media to bring awareness about the realities of helping people through trauma. Her books, specifically Suffering and the Heart of God and On the Threshold of Hope, have been useful as I counsel others and prepare the next generation of leaders within the church.
And yet a nagging question comes up in my mind: Why are books like this even necessary? The theologian in me immediately thinks of Genesis 3 and the realities of sin. But I still wonder, Are they really necessary? Langberg answers that question: they shouldn’t be. Yet books like this are necessary to help church leaders both prevent abuse and minister to the abused, because it helps us understand how inconsistent abuse is with God’s design for the church.
True Church of Christ
Let’s step into the theological discussion for a moment. What is the church to be? According to Langberg, “The body of Christ is to be like Christ as individuals and as a gathered body of those who are one with him.” She continues, “Anything that does not look like Christ is not the church” (16). The church is to mimic Jesus in both its individual and corporate dealings, pointing to him. Langberg writes, “A body that does not follow its head is a very sick body” (5). The church, under Christ’s headship, should follow its head as it seeks to represent him. Otherwise, we’ve got a real problem.
Churches follow Christ, in part, by working to prevent abuse before it happens and acknowledging its reality if it does. By doing this they “display [Christ’s] beauty, his compassion, his truth, his purity, and his great love” (16). Yet since the church is the body of Christ, abuse within the congregation is foreign to its nature. It can feel like a failure to admit there is abuse within the church, as if dealing with the problem publicly will bring shame to Christ.
This is why the questions I asked earlier keep nagging at me. Abuse within the church is so contrary to the person of Jesus that it causes irreconcilable tension in my mind. Langberg recognizes that same tension. The words “abuse” and “church” should never go together.
Langberg doesn’t argue that the church is past the point of redemption, though she recognizes that churches have failed to deal with abuse well. However, she shows that hope for redemption doesn’t allow us to gloss over failings. Instead, redemption requires churches to face the reality of sin and deal with it humbly both corporately and individually. The tension between what is and what should be must remain.
Nature of Deception
One of the most difficult elements to sift through in cases of abuse within the church is the intent of those who cause harm. To label a situation as abuse, would we require that the harm be intentional? Of course not. The outcome is more significant than the intent.
Abusers don’t just wake up one day and decide to be abusers. Self-deception often precedes the deception of others. The slippery slope of successive small decisions, justifications, and minimizing leads to someone becoming an abuser.
Within the church, self-deception can grow into systemic deception. Langberg says loudly what many would want to whisper: “Institutions, whether prestigious universities, respected health care facilities, or revered churches or Christian organizations, have a self-preserving ethic” (73). Anyone who has worked in one of these contexts knows that to be true. On the surface, this ethic isn’t entirely bad. But when preceded by self-deception that harms other believers, institutional self-preservation is a breeding ground for systemic deception.
When preceded by self-deception that is harmful to other believers, institutional self-preservation is a breeding ground for systemic deception.
This process is gradual. Within churches, in particular, we tend to believe the best about others, overlook offenses, or justify in our minds that so-and-so wouldn’t do such-and-such. We want to believe that those who lead us are good, so we filter their behavior through that lens. Unfortunately, that view has sometimes led to gross abuses of power that go unchecked for years.
Change the Question
Abuse within the church is an unfortunate reality. So how can we move forward? I can sit with counselee after counselee and ask why, but that does little to bring comfort. What would the Lord have us ask instead? What would he have us do? Three answers stood out to me in light of Langberg’s book.
First, we should grieve that our brothers and sisters are mistreated, many in the name of faith. Jesus wept over the judgment that was coming to Jerusalem (Luke 19:41), knowing destruction loomed because they rejected him and the leaders mistreated those in their care.
Ministers of the gospel should defend the least of these as mirrors of Christ, point them towards his own compassion for them.
Second, leaders in the church must humbly acknowledge both their calling and their limitations as shepherds. They mustn’t be wolves, seeking to devour. Instead, ministers of the gospel should defend the least of these by acting as mirrors of Christ who point toward his compassion for them.
Third, as Langberg notes when talking to abuse victims, the Bible speaks directly about the exaltation of the crushed, abused, and afflicted in passages like Isaiah 61. In his justice, God promises a “double portion” for those mistreated in this life (v. 7). They’ll build up the temple and shout for joy to the Lord. Our God cares for those who are abused, and he’ll redeem even those dark moments.
When the Church Harms God’s People is a sobering reminder that we still live under sin’s curse. Though sin is the answer to my why question above, that’s not enough. Until Christ returns and brings justice and judgment, we’re responsible to speak on behalf of the powerless, grieve the injustices that occur within our midst, and call to repentance those who malign Christ’s name by crushing those he loves. This book is a valuable resource for helping church leaders practically as they minister to the abused and build systems within their ministries to prevent abuse.
The Gospel Coalition