The issue of abuse in the church: When the healer refuses to heal

Photo by Melanie Wasser on Unsplash

To the abused: 

You know how they say it takes great strength to leave an abusive relationship?

I think it takes great fear to stay in an abusive relationship.

Fear is the currency abusers trade with, the misappropriation of the power they have in a relationship. Because at the end of the day, that is what abuse is.

It is the misappropriation of power.

For men who name themselves Christians and abuse the women in their lives, the power given to you is one that is meant to be gentled. True power is knowing that you have the ability to destroy everything but deciding to protect and grow the weak things around you. It is not identifying weaknesses and using that as a spear to thrust through the side of the woman you have already pummeled into a shadow of their former selves.

It is not using the same mouth that is meant to produce God-life to speak death into the life of the woman with whom you are meant to reveal God.

When you abuse your power as a man over your wife, you are misappropriating the authority Abba gave you and you will account for it. It is inevitable, because the power was never yours in the first place.

Dear Church leader,

You fail the women over and over again.

The women come to you with their bruised bodies and broken spirits sometimes not understanding what is going on and sometimes knowing perfectly what they are mired in…and you fail them.

You stand in the authority that is given to you by Abba and you use it to dig graves inside gardens. You do not address the misappropriation of power when she tells you that he uses his words to contradict what Abba says about her. You do not address the breaking of the oath when she tells you that he shares his body with other women and defiles the marriage bed; you do not address the abuse of power when she tells you that he exerts his strength against her body, the temple of Abba's presence, the body that is a part of the church. You do not address the contradiction of the nature and character of Christ in his body.

Instead, you tell her to build altars on the coals of hell fire and to pray to the God whose body is being abused so that he can arrest the abuser. How do you, church, appropriate the power Abba has given you? How do you return his power to him and ask him to judge when he has given you the authority to reveal him to his body? How? No one demonstrates boundaries more than God himself and yet, you dare to tell God that his boundaries are flawed with the handling of the abused in his body.

You do not reveal the heart of the Father to the wounded in the times they need it and you wonder why the wounded wonder away from you. You wonder why they stray into the world looking for someone to show them a sliver of the Father’s heart. When you fail to judge the matter of the abuser and abused in a way that reveals Abba’s character, you become an enabler of broken cisterns and patterns.

If we expect that the contradictions in the life of a member of the church be addressed, then the body should address the issue of a member attacking it. Because that is what happens when you refuse to look the abuser in the eye, single him out and address the inconsistency that is his actions; you allow an attack on the body. But somewhere at the back of your mind, covering it with the altar of prayer, placing the woman at the front of the battle to face the possibility of death, is protecting the image of the church. 

Abba has not called us to protect his image, he has called us to reveal him.

Dear Church,

It is time. The call is to come up higher, deeper. The call is to reveal him to a world that sees so little of him. It is time to stop wounding the wounded and heal them.