Abuse in the Church: A Review of A Cry for Justice

Every pastor that has ministered for any length of time is familiar with abuse.  Some pastors or pastor’s wives grew up in abusive situations.  Others see kids or spouses in their community that are abused.  We understand that in our sin-soaked world, abuse happens and we compassionately do our part to minister, care and rescue those in abusive family situations.

             

But one of the things we pastors don’t think much about is abuse in our churches.  I am not talking about sexual predators that all churches should be on guard against.  Rather, I am talking about seemingly ordinary families in our churches, people perhaps in leadership or in ministry that are secretly either abusers or victims of abuse.  This is the topic of Jeff Crippen and Anna Wood’s book A Cry for Justice:  How the Evil of Domestic Abuse Hides in your Church.

            

I do not know either of the authors personally.  A couple in my church gave me the book, sharing with me that Jeff Crippen was an ex-pastor of theirs in the years before they moved to our area.  Jeff has a background in law enforcement and has been a pastor for 20 years.  Anna Wood is an abuse survivor who writes and blogs to help other victims of abuse.

            

A Cry for Justice is a powerful book.  It is obvious that the authors feel passionate about their subject.  Anna dealt with it first-hand as a victim, Jeff as a pastor of a church with abusive families.  It is a call for believers, and especially pastors, to open their eyes to the fact that there may be families in our churches who outwardly appear normal, but in reality are hidden centers of abusive behavior.  The book is a hard read, because it is a hard topic.  Jeff and Anna delve into the mentality of the abuser – their motivations and thought processes.  They present a clear picture of the ugliness of sin and the true depravity of man.

             

The authors argue that the serial abuser has a mentality foreign to our understanding.  While pastors deal with sinful people all the time, we can often see that solid biblical counsel, confession, prayer, forgiveness and the work of the Holy Spirit in their lives can bring true life change.  For the serial abuser, that is not the case, mainly because the authors argue that the serial abuser, even the one who holds a leadership position in the church, is not a believer.  They argue that:

While every Christian can certainly hurt, mistreat or be insensitive to another person, and more frequently than we think, it is impossible for a Christian to be what we have defined as an abuser in this book.  That is to say, Scripture makes it plain that a person whose very mentality and habitual practice is that of entitlement, power, control, and justification, does not know Christ, nor does Christ know him. (p. 241)

The authors argue that when we see the serial abuser who he really is, as someone who does not know Christ, we are able to see the abusive situation as it really is.

            

The book is a valuable resource for pastors.  In addition to chapters on how the abuser thinks and operates (which are very disturbing), there is good counsel about the effect of abuse on children, how the church can help an abuse victim, how abuse often continues after separation and how the church should deal with abusers, especially those who are on a quest for power in the church.  I am not sure I agree with the authors on every point.  They argue that abuse qualifies in Scripture as abandonment (1 Cor. 7:15) and thus enables the abuse victim to pursue divorce without sin.  Another controversial point they make is that pastors should be reading secular experts in the subject of abuse; men and women who have made is a specialty to delve into the mentality of abuse.  I for one am not totally convinced on these last two points, but I do plan to hunt down some further resources to pursue these questions in greater depth.

             

Despite the fact that it contains truths that are hard to read, pastors should read this book.  Jeff Crippen and Anna Wood have done a service to the church.  They have lifted the lid off something we do not want to talk about and have shed the light of the Scripture upon it.  While it should not prompt us to see abuse under every tree and bush, it should equip us to recognize the signs when we see it, and have the tools to compassionately and justly care for the victims of that abuse.

Read This Book!

I read a lot of books.  Some of those books are fine, but when I get a chance I trade them in at a local used book store, knowing that I will never read them again.  Others are better and are books I want in my library because they will be a valuable reference to me.  Still others reach a higher plane, becoming books that I know I need to pull off my shelves every few years and read again.  Dangerous Calling:  Confronting the Unique Challenges of Pastoral Ministry by Paul David Tripp is one of those books.

I will admit, I was not keen on reading this book at first.  While I have been impacted by Dr. Tripp’s writing and speaking over the years, I was not sure I wanted to read another book on ministry.  But when a friend suggested we read it together, I agreed and I was so glad I did.

The title of the book – Dangerous Calling – and the graphics suggesting warning and danger on the cover of the book led me to believe that this was a book about the outside pressures, temptations and dangers that confront pastoral ministry.  I was wrong.  Rather, the emphasis of this book is internal.  Dr. Tripp forces the reader to focus on the attitudes, the assumptions and the motivations that all too often guide, and misguide the average pastor.

There are two themes that can be found throughout the book.  The first is a negative one – Dr. Tripp is persistent in giving us a glimpse of the dark underbelly of pastoral ministry.  What does it look like when a pastor has theological knowledge but lacks a heart for God?  What happens when a pastor divorces himself from the church community?  What occurs when the minister does not recognize that the calling they have is a calling to a spiritual battle, a war?  What is the result when a pastor is motivated by pride or a sense of arrival?  What goes wrong when we settle for mediocrity in preaching or seek our own glory rather than God’s?  Over and over again, I found myself searching my own soul, as the words and the personal testimonies of this book revealed my own struggles, my own temptations, my own personal ugliness.  It was not a pleasant experience.

At the same time, another theme persists in the book.  Without this theme, Dangerous Calling would likely be the most depressing book I have ever read.  This positive theme is found in a simple statement – pastors need the truths of the gospel as much as anyone else.  You see, the key to solving all the struggles inherent in pastoral cultural and all the temptations that come upon a sinful person in church leadership is found in the gospel.  The gospel reminds us that our value comes from God, freeing us from feelings of unworthiness.  At the same time, it reminds us also that everything in our lives comes from God, freeing us from pride.  The gospel tells us that all glory belongs to God, not us.  The gospel reminds us that we are sinners, but also has the solution to our sin.  The gospel is about grace and transformation, enabling a flawed instrument to be used by God.  The gospel reminds us of God’s profound and loving care for us.  I could go on and on.  Every ailment in the heart of a pastor can be solved by honestly and carefully preaching the gospel to himself before he preaches it to his congregation.  We can never think we are above the basic truths of the gospel, or begin to believe that they are applicable to the flock but not the shepherd.

So if you are in ministry, read this book.  It will hurt, but the gospel truths in it can heal.  If you are not a pastor, prayerfully read this book yourself and then pass it on to your pastor and perhaps your church leadership.  Pastors are involved in a dangerous calling.  Let’s make sure they are strengthened by and equipped with God’s truth in the midst of it.  Anything less will spell disaster.

Do We Understand New Life in Christ?

This is the last in a series of reflections on the messages at the recent Shepherd’s Conference put on by the Rocky Mountain Bible Mission.  Joel Van Hoogen was our main speaker and he spoke on Removing the Rubble from the Wells of our Salvation.

Joel sees our life as a well, with the life of Christ in us as the refreshing water in that well; water that is necessary for our life as a believer.  Rubble in our well blocks our access to that water.  In our lives, the rubble in our wells is often the doctrines of the Christian faith we lose hold of.  We fall into doubt and unbelief.  We distance ourselves from the authority of the Word of God.  And last, we lose sight of the power of regeneration.

Regeneration is part of the salvation process in which the Holy Spirit of God brings new life or a new creation to us.  Sin springs from spiritual deadness – apart from Christ, we are spiritually dead to God.  We cannot earn our way into His presence or manufacture a reconciled relationship with Him.  Being spiritually dead, a person is actually blind to God, sick in mind and soul and deaf to His truths.

All that changes at salvation.  We become brand new persons.  Sure, we all recognize that sin still infects our lives, but the Bible assures us that at the core of our being, we are new people in Christ.  As the apostle Paul notes, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.”  (2 Cor. 5:17, ESV)

When we are regenerated, we are given new life in Christ.  The life of God resides in us.  As a result, every Christian, as time passes, should reflect that new life in increasing measure.  If we are a new creation at the core of our being, we should increasingly live like one.  This is what sets regeneration apart from another wonderful event that happens at salvation – our justification.  Justification is the divine act in which a holy God makes sinful humans acceptable to Him.  Justification happens by grace through faith.  But justification, though it is vital in salvation, is really invisible.  We do not see the fruits of justification.  But we do see the fruits of regeneration.  You see, regeneration leads us directly into sanctification, the process of the believer becoming more like Christ.  Sanctification is the outworking of our new creation life.  The life of Christ in us enables us to be more like Christ.

The idea of regeneration is so important to grasp hold of because it changes how we approach the Scriptures.  Every believer knows that the New Testament epistles have a lot of material on how a believer should live.  The apostle Paul alone dedicates chapter after chapter on what we tend to call ethical teaching. Unfortunately, reading those chapters can be discouraging for believers, because we assume that they are lists of what we need to do.  Frequently they are guilt-inducing in our lives.

Regeneration calls us to look at those chapters differently.  Rather than ethical demands written down to make us feel miserable, we should look at them as a description of the new creation in Christ.  These are the changes new life in Christ can make in us.  They are the pulsations of the regeneration life in us.  They become the things we want to do, and no longer the things we need to do.  If we are truly a new creation in Christ at the core of our being, we should desire to do these things, not out of guilt but out of a true response to who we really are. (And if we do not want to do these things, we need to take a hard look at where our walk with Christ really stands!) So the commandments of God in places like Ephesians 4-5 or Romans 12 or the book of 1 John are not demands, but enablements.  It is as if God, through the apostles, is saying, “This is a picture of the life of Christ in you.  I am waiting to enable you to look just like this.”

Do we understand that we are truly new creations in Christ?  And if we do, our lives should increasingly reflect that reality of that new creation.

The Problem with "What does the Bible mean to me?"

This is the third installment of a series of reflections on Joel Van Hoogen’s messages at this past year’s Rocky Mountain Bible Mission Shepherd’s Conference.  Joel spoke on removing the rubble from the wells of our salvation.  The rubble is the dispossessed doctrines of the Christian life.  The well is the refreshing life that comes from Christ.

The first type of rubble the enemy would like to see in our wells is doubt and unbelief.  We discussed this problem in a previous blog posting.  A second type of rubble that finds its way into the wells of our salvation is a distance from the authority of God’s Word.

The fact is, people approach God’s Word, the Bible, in an increasingly subjective manner.  They approach the Bible with a subjective purpose – to find out what it means for them personally.  This type of attitude appears in all kinds of shapes and forms.  Recently a gal sat in my office talking about her struggling marriage and she said to me, “I don’t believe God wants me to be unhappy.”  In other words, her temptation was to approach God’s Word with the purpose of making her feel better and perhaps giving her personal justification to walk away from her marriage.  Again, we come to the Bible with an attitude that says, “What does the Bible say to me?”

Don’t get me wrong.  The Bible has an awful lot to say to each of us personally.  But when we approach the Bible with that attitude, we become sovereign over the Scriptures.  We become the authority, not the Bible.  We decide what the Bible means.  We read the Bible only for personal application.  We craft the Word around our felt needs.  Pragmatic emotionalism trumps any sense of the rational authority of God’s holy word.  There is no sense of approaching the Bible because it is God’s revelation of Himself, His salvation and His plan and purpose for the world.

As a pastor, I feel this temptation as well.  Not necessarily to approach the Bible this way personally, but rather to pander to this idea in my messages.  Churches and ministries tend to grow large and prosperous when their leaders speak to felt needs.  That is what people want to hear.  Of course, I am not saying that proper application should be absent from messages.  Personally I work very hard at applying the passage I am preaching, first to my own life, and second to the lives of my congregation.  For me, application is probably the hardest part of the sermon process.  But proper application and a purely subjective approach to the Bible are two different things.

So how do we make sure that when we open God’s Word, we do not fall into the trap of distancing ourselves from the authority of God’s Word?  Here are some things to keep an eye on:

1.         Make sure when you read the Bible, you take your seat before the Almighty God as a listener, not a reader.  You have no authority over the text.  It is not yours to do what you want with it.  The text – and the God who stands behind the text – has the authority over you.

2.         Be careful not to read it as a personal word for yourself – rather listen to the voice of our Master.  The Bible is first and foremost God’s revelation of Himself to the world.

3.         Ask yourself – what does this passage reveal to me about God Himself?  The goal of reading the Bible is to know God better.  When we know God more deeply, we will increasingly know how to live for Him.

4.         Do not neglect the doctrine of illumination.  God’s Holy Spirit is willing and able to illuminate the Scripture to us.  We should believe that He is able to use the Word to speak to our hearts.  We should both study with our intellects and trust the ability of the Spirit to illuminate meaning. 

5.         Approach God and His Word with a hungry heart.  Listen to wise words from Proverbs:

My son, if you receive my words and treasure up my commandments with you, making your ear attentive to wisdom and inclining your heart to understanding; yes, if you call out for insight and raise your voice for understanding, if you seek it like silver and search for it as for hidden treasures, then you will understand the fear of the Lord and find the knowledge of God. (Prov. 2:1-5, ESV)

The Rubble of Doubt and Unbelief

This is a continuation of some thoughts springing from the Rocky Mountain Bible Mission’s Shepherd’s Conference, held April 16-18 in Missoula.  Speaker Joel Van Hoogen spoke on Removing the Rubble from the Wells of our Salvation, based on Genesis 26:12-18.

After challenging us to pursue a deeper life in Christ, Joel went on to explode some of the rubble that the enemy would love to use to fill the wells of our salvation. 

The first type of rubble he discussed was doubt or unbelief.  This is a failure to reckon on an all-powerful, active God.  When we are caught in this kind of thinking, God becomes an intellectual or even a sentimental notion to us.  He becomes an abstraction, rather than a personal God. 

What we are missing here is the idea that God is active in our world and that we live every day for His glory and under His gaze.  In the midst of doubt or unbelief, we miss that He is personal in our lives.  That He is able to act beyond what we can fathom with our human minds.  That He is sovereign in His purpose and plan for our lives and our world.  We become like the audience of the book of Hebrews who were warned against an evil, unbelieving heart that can lead a person away from the living God. (Heb. 3:12)

So, how do we know when the rubble of doubt or unbelief is starting to fill the wells of our salvation?  First, it will show up in your prayer life.  Your prayer will be rote and unfeeling.  It will be a recitation or an obligation.  It will be casual and ordinary.  It won’t be an entrance into the very throne room of God.  It won’t be filled with awe and reverence.  It won’t be overwhelmed with the glory of God or by the fact that we have the privilege to enter into the very presence of God through the shed blood of Jesus Christ.

Second, this rubble will show up in our private life.  Are you concerned if someone knows about your private life?  Is there anything you would like to hide from them?  Are we concerned with the opinion of others?  Are we more concerned about the opinion of others than we are of the opinion of God?  Are we unconcerned about a lack of holiness before God in our life?  Have we become like the elders of Israel, sinning in the dark, in private, thinking that God does not see their sin or that God is unconcerned about their sin? (Ezek. 8:12)

And third, the rubble of doubt will show up in our expectations in life.  It will show up in the solutions we offer to our problems. It will show up in how and where we direct others who come to us for counsel and advice.  You see, when the rubble of doubt and unbelief is starting to pile up in our well, we no longer really believe God is a life-changing God.  We no longer really believe God can transform us or those around us.  We would rather trust “tips” for a better marriage or “lessons” in integrity than the life-altering, soul-transforming power of God.  In essence we have given up on God and His ability to change – both ourselves and others.

Can you relate to any of this?  If so, there is hope and it is found in the truths of our salvation.  In 2 Peter 1:3-4, the apostle tells us that:

His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence, by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire.

God is active in our lives.  As a result of our new life in Christ, we have been granted all things for life and godliness.  Because we are a new creation, imparted with a new life in Jesus, we partake of the divine nature.  We are not gods, but we do have the life of God in us through Jesus.  As a result, we have escaped the corruption of the world.  We recognize sin still clings, but our real identity in found in our new life in Christ.  It is a life that can and will empower our prayers, bring holiness to our lives and change the way we see God’s work in our lives and the lives of others.

It is time to remove the rubble of doubt and unbelief from our lives through repentance, allowing the refreshing life of Christ to bubble up in everything we do.