Spiritual Abuse

The woman came to my house, accompanied by her friend. I had first met her a couple of months earlier, when she turned up in my church. I spoke to her after the service and welcomed her. She turned up a couple more times after that and then she appeared with her friend. She must have been in early twenties and her friend was probably about ten years older. Again I spoke to them and they asked if they could come and see me. We fixed a date. Now they had arrived at my house and we sat together in my sitting room. It was obvious that they were a couple. The younger woman was clearly distressed, indeed she seemed bowed down in pain. Her friend was a deeply concerned about her. They began to tell their story. The younger woman was a Christian and, while her friend was not, she respected her partner’s faith and had come with her to see me about the issue that was causing such distress. The younger women had grown up as a Christian, indeed she was devout and committed in her faith. Now she had fallen in love and they were planning to enter a Civil Partnership. Yet, ever since she had become aware of her sexuality, she had been taught that she was evil and detested by God because of her sexual orientation. She was being torn apart by the pain of her situation, having found her life companion, yet at the cost of the condemnation that she had been taught was God’s judgement on her. I asked her what she thought the bible had to say about her situation and she launched into a detailed list of every biblical text that proved the condemnation that had been piled upon her. I listened to her and I empathised with the pain and wounding that had been imposed on her by the churches to which she had belonged. I marveled at her faith, a faith that had withstood such an onslaught, and the brokenness that that ‘Gospel message’ had imposed on her life. She talked herself out and looked at me in astonishment as I told her that not all Christians would interpret those texts in the way that she had been taught. I spoke to her about the God who had created her as the person she was and I told her that she was so loved and precious to God that Jesus had given his life for her. It was simply the Gospel that has transformed and healed my own life that I shared with her. As I spoke it seemed as if chains were falling off her and a crippling, so systematically imposed on her by the Church over the years, was being healed before my very eyes. It brought to mind the healing stories from the Gospels. Here was a miracle taking place before me. It was nothing I had brought about, except to speak of the Gospel message of God’s transforming love that had been revealed in Jesus. She left my house as a changed person and I said I would pray with them when their big day came. Would I have blessed them? It is God alone who blesses and indeed, for this couple, he had  blessed them by his grace and through my ministry.

In recent times the Evangelical Alliance has expressed concerns about the use of the term ‘spiritual abuse’. I would not want to suggest that their member churches are engaged in any such abuse, but they seem to display an instinct that some aspects of their teaching might somehow be labelled by others as abusive. Coming, as I do, from a culture (both church and education) in which safeguarding is now at a premium, I know that abuse comes in many forms and that spiritual abuse is one of the categories of abuse. The woman I have spoken of was, in my opinion, the victim of serious and systematic abuse over many years. What she had been taught had utterly crippled her and given her a sense of being beyond redemption. In saying this, I am not putting forward the argument that all those who disagree with me are abusive. What I am saying is that there can be a stark, hardline attitude to matters of belief that can cripple, rather than heal; destroy, rather than liberate. The biblical text which epitomizes this for me most clearly is the scene of angry men lined up to stone an adulterous woman. What drives such a passion to cripple and destroy? It has to be a deep desire to protect their position, culture, doctrine, beliefs or law. There is something deeply imprisoning in such a frantic urge to buttress and fortify one’s cherished and dug-in position. Jesus takes a different position and he sets the woman free. The experience of my own life leads me to interpret what happened, not as a letting-off by Jesus, on condition that the woman did not sin again, but a liberation of forgiveness which transformed her life so that she was now released from her tangled web of broken relationships and given the grace to live a renewed life. Spiritual abuse is real. It happens all around us. Far from distancing ourselves from this category of safeguarding, we need to be challenged to ask ourselves if what we practice and preach seeks to enslave the lives of others, or to set them free.