Online Conversation | Redeeming Power with Diane Langberg

[Music] welcome to all of you joining us for today's online conversation on redeeming power i also just want to add our thanks to our collaborators at brazos press who are co-hosting this online conversation with us it's always a pleasure to work with you if you are one of those new or first-time viewers or new to the trinity forum in general we work to create a place and resources for leaders to discuss life's biggest questions in the context of faith with a hope of ultimately coming to better know the author of the answers and we hope this conversation will function some small taste of that for you today this is actually our 49th online conversation since the pandemic started and in that time we've tackled all sorts of topics ranging from the rise of conspiracy thinking to the advent of crispr technology to reading and quarantine to the lessons of lincoln on leadership to loneliness but today the question that we're going to grapple with is both sobering and of extraordinary importance how do we understand the purposes and forms of power recognize its potential for both redemption and for abuse and respond to abuse in a way that encourages hope and healing these are questions that are often avoided in polite company but have an increasing urgency to them a growing body of research indicates that abuse and trauma are almost shockingly pervasive even in the two places that ought to be the safest home and the church but in the words of our guest today what happens in families also happens in the family of god moreover many churches or christian institutions have responded to reports of abuse with denial dismissal or even denunciation prioritizing the protection of the organization or the leader over the victim the fallout has profoundly damaged a number of victims a great number of victims but not only them but also their families their communities institutions churches even entire denominations so how do we in the words of our guest today come to understand power and learn how to use it wisely to bless and not to harm and like our lord to lay it aside to cross divides and reach out with love to those who are vulnerable whose power is little or trampled bestowing benedictions as we go it is a challenging and a desperately needed summons and it is hard to imagine someone who can make it with more real world experience expertise or eloquence than our guest today dr diane lingberg diane is a psychologist and a counselor globally recognized for her nearly 50 years of clinical work with trauma victims she directs her own counseling practice in pennsylvania is a board member of grace which stands for godly response to abuse in a christian environment and co-founder of the global trauma recovery institute at mission seminary in philadelphia as well as co-chairing the american bible society's trauma advisory council she has received numerous awards for her work and written several books including counseling survivors of sexual abuse in our lives first on the threshold of hope and her latest book redeeming power understanding authority and abuse in the church which we've invited her to discuss today diane welcome it's great to have you thank you it's good to be here so as we start off i would love to hear part of your own story you have been a pioneer in recognizing understanding and caring for victims of trauma and abuse doing this for almost 50 years which was before you got your start before many of the the titles the categories that we now use to understand abuse were even coined or recognized so i'd be interested in hearing what got you into this work this very difficult work and why have you dedicated a half century of your life to it i got into it in the early 1970s having finished a master's degree starting a doctorate and i began working under a psychologist in during that time there were very few women in the field and so oftentimes when clients would come to the office they would ask to see me at 22 so it was certainly not because i knew a great deal but because of my gender and so i began meeting with women and girls over time and they would say things to me in a coded manner for example one woman took her long hair and threw it over her face and just said my father used to do weird things to me i had no idea what that meant it was not in my world i never heard anybody talk about anything uh abuse was not a topic of conversation and so i learned from my clients who were courageous and who began to tell me uh their stories little by little i went to a supervisor who labeled what was happening in hysteria and told me not to listen obviously i didn't listen to him which probably says something about me but um i i chose to listen to the victims i was also at that time just because when it was working with vietnam vets i'm the daughter of an air force colonel and i have a soft spot for vets and what i began to realize was that the women and the vets had the same symptoms and so eight years later they came up with the diagnostic category of post-traumatic stress disorder um but during those eight years there was no category for what either the women or the vets were experiencing yeah so we're talking today about redeeming power and so it probably makes sense for us to start with at least a common understanding of what we're talking about and i'd love at this sort of the outset for you just to sort of give us your working definitions of what power is abuse and vulnerability as well as the dynamics between them well power is simply the ability to influence um so every human being has it and if we go back to the book of genesis we see as we were made in the image of god who holds all power you know he gave us power and told us to rule and subdue the earth not each other but the earth so it's just part of being an image bearer of god to have power and when people think they don't have any i remind them if they've had a child that if that child at two or three days old wakes up at 3am screaming because he's hungry two big adults who are exhausted jump out of bed that's power and so you know we have it from birth vulnerability is when you can't make things happen yourself and utterly rely on others like this infant so that when you are in pain or need or something like that others must come alongside and help you vulnerable simply means you can be wounded so it covers all kinds of things that can happen to humans and all human beings also have vulnerability we have power and we are all vulnerable one of the impetuses for abusing power is the fact that we don't like to be vulnerable and so we look for ways often crushing others to feel powerful in ways that are destructive to others an abuse simply means to use wrongly so when we use another human being in any capacity um we have been uh abusive to them so our we can do that with words we can do that with physical things uh we can do that with emotions do that with the word of god yeah use people wrongly in many ways you know one of the fascinating well there is so much but one of the fascinating things in your book right off the bat is that you said that whenever there is abuse or misuse of power there is always deception that deception both precedes and then protects the abuse of power could you kind of untangle this um this ball of deception and abuse why does it necessarily why does deception necessarily precede the misuse of power well again i would have to start with genesis because our twisting of power came through deception from the enemy we chose to believe that deception and so what he essentially did was use god's words to call humans to do something ungodly and we did and we still are and so deception is how we get used to things that we would normally not do so for example um if you look at something like a pornography addiction you know it starts out with somebody showing you something or you're only going to look at it once and then you're not going to do it anymore or it's the things we tell ourselves to make things that are blatantly ungodly okay yeah and then as we practice that the deception grows and our capacity to see it lessens and so we actually believe ourselves you know if i do this whatever i'm not hurting anybody when i hit my wife it's only because she deserved it and if she would be oh you know she would do what i asked it wouldn't happen and it's okay because i'm the head of the house or whatever those are the deceptions that permit someone to begin doing something ungodly and they support it so that it can grow and make deeper roots and so we deceive ourselves we defeat others and we become convinced that what we're doing is okay when in fact it is death yes yeah you uh along those lines you had mentioned that often one of the first or the early stage forms of deception is labeling things inaccurately and even just picking up on something you said earlier where some of the early victims that you had met with were described as hysterical and one of the things that's interesting is that trauma victims until well you mentioned there wasn't even the title or the category of ptsd until recently before that it was shell shock or it was hysterical women it was essentially labels that largely indicated that the victims were themselves either weak or histrionic and i guess one question is why did it take so long for us to come up with truer categories for trauma and abuse that weren't inherently disparaging to those who have suffered from it well part of that is collective deceptions i think um things that we want to believe are true that that a home is the safest place there is that church is a sanctuary um and so we have things that we want to be true and long for and when something shines a light that suggests that it isn't true we find a way to deny it so it's very difficult to get right labels for things if it doesn't happen right and it's much easier to believe it's the other person's fault i mean we do that when we drive you know i speed because i'm late or i'm driving this way because of the stupid person in front of me you know and so we do it with ordinary things and when things are more threatening we're even more likely to do that find a way to label it to make it not mine and to make it okay we want it to be okay yeah how widespread of an issue are we talking about here and one of the reasons i ask is you know it can be hard to get statistics that seem to have you know widespread agreement but one of the interesting things i saw just in the process of kind of reading your book and doing a little bit of research for this conversation is what a significant disconnect uh there is between say surveyed pastors in their perceptions of you know how pervasive abuse is uh and say you know uh certainly advocacy groups or even what the cdc the centers for disease control uh says so how big a problem are we talking about well one of the standard uh numbers is one in four women and this is the united states one in four women and one in six men are sexually abused before the age of 18. so when i'm speaking to groups particularly in a church or whatever i say okay now you think about your women's group they're sitting in the pews or in a circle and you count them off one two three four one two three four that's how many in that group have been abused and the same thing with men one is six um and then i just i think it's like one in seven marriages or so experiences domestic violence it's sitting all over our pews it's in our schools it's where our children go you know they they are going to school with kids who are being abused yeah and is there a difference in incidents between the church and the broader culture in terms of the pervasiveness i have not found one everything i have read and certainly what i have seen is that the statistics hold for churches as much as they hold for any place else yeah and um you know as a christian yourself who has spent you know her life in the church to what do you attribute either the lack or um the deformation of our spiritual formation that enables the church to have roughly the same incidence of abuse as the broader world well i would say first that it's been there forever i mean that's why ezekiel talks about wolves among the um and so and you know there's talk about wolves among the sheep in the new testament as well and so there there have been things going on that are evil in sanctuaries from way back when and part of the reason for that is that if an exploiter such as a wolf is hungry you go where people are vulnerable and aren't looking for you and people in churches aren't looking for you because everybody there is nice and so it's it's easier to find food in places like that um they also go to those who are little and not necessarily in size and age though certainly that but also in their own power and capacity to take care of themselves or fight for themselves or whatever so we go to places where people think they're safe and then they stop looking one of the the fascinating studies that you mentioned in your book which speaks to kind of the ongoing impact of abuse and trauma is uh you cited a study that showed that i think it was at least 300 percent oh well of the grandchildren of holocaust survivors there was a referral rate to psychologists or psychiatrists that was 300 higher than the general public such that essentially the trauma not just of the generation before but of two generations before in at least you know by appearances was was passed out and transmitted to multiple generations how does that happen how does trauma get transmitted throughout generations that study was originally done in canada and it was quite fascinating when it first came out just to see that indication i certainly had encountered it in my office so i would often be working with uh women who were incest victims not only of their own fathers but of most of the men in the family and often trafficked as well um by men in the family and so when i began to ask questions i learned that their mothers were incest victims and their grandmothers were incest victims it was all anybody knew and i worked with women in those situations nobody ever told them that what happened to them was wrong i was the first person to tell them and you have to learn a whole different way of life when you begin to think like that and it's terrifying and full of pain and everything else but i've also had the privilege of working with incest victims who have raised unabused children and i've told them over the years it's like turning a massive ship and the first turn seems so little it's never going to make a difference in the way the ship is going but you keep turning the ship and your children will be facing a different way than you did maybe not as far as you want but different and they'll turn the ship and your grandchildren won't even know what sexual abuse is and i have seen many women go through that hard work and time and watch the generations completely shift the direction they're in yeah yeah in some ways that leads to another argument that you have made within the book that often abuse and trauma is not limited to um individual bad actors but can actually be enmeshed within um communities even systems what does it mean for a system to be abusive and how does one respond to an abusive system as opposed to an individual the word system means together stand so when we think about a system of any kind whether it's a government or some kind of organization or the church which is a system it's people standing together usually for a particular goal or purpose or whatever and so what people want to do is maintain the system because of what it gives them so if you come along and say the person who's running that system is a wolf and is devouring the sheep nobody wants to hear that because if that's the case then the thing that they believe in that keeps them safe isn't safe that's terrifying and so oftentimes the system whether it's a family again or a church or whatever will deny and make a scapegoat of the one who tells because to do that is to break the system which indeed it is which is what jesus reaction was in jerusalem with the synagogue they were not that that was a corrupt system that used god's name and he went and turned it upside down that was his response that's what's supposed to happen but we protect the systems because it makes us feel safe we're not but we want that feeling are there particular um i mean this might sound too pat and tidy but are there are there tells you know in part of what you have been describing is um not just a wolf descri disguised as a sheep but a wolf disguised as a shepherd you know which is um is even more disorienting but wolves who disguise themselves as shepherds how do um how do the earnest sheep detect them what are the how can they see through the disguise well oftentimes when people look back they realize that this was somebody who never took criticism weren't allowed this was somebody you couldn't say no to which is a form of bullying you can't say no and so they would see the smaller things that had been going on for years and then when they were told the bigger thing they didn't believe it because they had covered up or ignored or said well that's just the way he is or he works really hard and he's tired or whatever and so we excuse the smaller things because we want the system to be okay because it keeps us safe or makes us feel good or whatever and so we deny the smaller things and excuse them which is a form of deceit that's quite contagious because the person who's doing those things is already deceiving themselves and then when it blows up bigger we say that can't be true but actually the path indicated that that was coming yeah just to press on that for a moment um you know one of the challenges is that there is so often um you know the hard charging leader the one who will not give up the one who will not say no who powers through you who has an indomitable will who has great charisma uh you know this is a a type um you know that we both within the church and outside the church as a society value and admire and often aspire to and you believe that this is in many ways what makes for a successful leader yes um you know we've kind of made many of those qualities almost synonymous with leadership um and so i guess one question is you know many of the people who are listening today we we serve on boards we serve within organizations we serve within institutions um is there a way or to to operate um you that helps you know inoculate might be too strong but fortify an organization or institution against the the abuse or misuse of what can be helpful leadership traits of um of persistence and vision and passion and enthusiasm from being misused from allowing that deception that you've spoken of to start and take hold well to say that seeing that in the church today and seeing it globally is probably one of the greatest griefs that i have because what i think is is happening is that we are measuring what leadership by external qualities and results what should measure a good leader is likeness to christ he's not what you described and he didn't live like you described and we have lost our way and so somebody charismatic and uh brilliant and articulate and the numbers go up both money and people and all those things we applaud as a good shepherd but our god says the fruit of his spirit is things totally different from that those are not measures of his the presence of his spirit and so we have followed the externals and counted on them we have not looked at the character and we have not required that the character be christ-like it's supposed to a person in leadership is supposed to carry christ in a way that shows him to others and teaches them how to show him to others which is not what we're doing and so we're on it's not just that we're completely on the main on the wrong track when we do that you know there's not a special thing to look for to know that somebody's a good leader or a bad leader other than christ likeness in their character day by day over time not they're just in words yeah you know they can use words and be totally impatient and cruel and angry and all those things and we excuse it because of the gifts we can we confuse gifts with character they're not the same we're going to go to questions from our viewers in just a second but before we do statistically speaking there are people who are watching today who have been victims of abuse both by abusers and you know perhaps again by the ways that their they have been treated within um their family or their church when they went forward and so i i wanted to ask you to to those people who are watching who have been abused mistreated and then hurt further by their churches indifference or disbelief what counsel and encouragement you would offer well i guess the first thing i would say is i am so sorry that it happened that it's wounded you and that some people have done it and covered it up in the name of god as they have lied about god when they've done that i would also remind you that when we're told in the scriptures about our good and great shepherd we are told things like he was reviled he was rejected he was pierced he has borne what victims have borne and so he knows and he listens i would also say that the victims i have known who have taught me so much have also demonstrated incredible courage anybody who tries to speak the truth about these things is a courageous person and that is a gift to the church and it is frankly my personal opinion having dealt with this for so long and dealt with it around the world not just in the u.s that the voice of the victims the sheep that have been wounded is actually a prophetic voice to the church it's the voice that says it's not right things are rotten in the house of god that's what their cries say to us and any prophetic voice that points to truth and to god is from him and we as his people in not listening to you not sitting at your feet not helping you be safe and find healing have avoided and shut up the voice of our god even as we say we continue to serve thank you diane uh we have a quite a few questions that have come in and if this is your first time joining us uh you can enter a question for diane in the in the q a box you can not only ask a question but you can also like a question and that does give us a better sense of what some of the the questions that have uh the most interest are and i know we won't be able to get through all of them but we will we'll try to get through quite a few diane hannah asked what are the unique gifts and perspectives that victims bring to their communities and what can we learn about the heart of god from their stories well they bring courage they bring truth and light even when it's ugly we're not called only to speak nice truth we're called to live in the truth um they bring insight into things that we are blind to and they can teach us much uh both about evil and what it looks like and how it's deceiving us and they also can teach us much about god himself one in terms of how he became wounded on our behalf and what that really means yeah we've lost sight of what that really meant for him but also that those wounds are there to show us that he's cared for our wounds and that we as his people are to look like him in listening to those we would normally discard or think or not telling the truth he has sent them to us to listen to walk with and we'll be walking longer than anybody wanted to including the victim yeah so we have several questions that have come in about deception i'm going to just bundle a few of them jane glendenning and maureen mcknight both ask a version of this your interpretation of deception is similar to that of addiction is there information about addiction being a factor in deception or is deception at the heart of addiction and similarly benjamin murray asked what are the biggest areas of collective deception i would say that deception is at the heart of addiction because you know part of uh what an addict says i'll do this just once more but then i won't do it again and so the deception feeds the addiction supports it helps it continue in a justifiable manner so to speak obviously but um i i think that deception is in every single human being and i think we can't get to the bottom of it while we're here on this earth even though we can look at it and face it and understand the what the light says when it shines on us and all those things but uh yeah i think it's core yes so we have several questions also about people who have been abused within the church and how to handle natasha prakash and apologies natasha if i've mangled your last name she writes after seeing friends who've experienced severe abuse within the church and faith-based communities who leave their faith as a result how do you reach out to these friends when they are so against anything christian and then an anonymous attendee also asked do you have suggestions for someone who has been severely sexually and spiritually abused by a pastor who cannot seem to make her way back to church even though she knows she desperately needs both guidance and community go to them don't ask them to come to church that's not a safe place and they're not going to trust and they won't come go to them and be christ don't talk about him don't teach be him with them walk with them listen to them cry with them love them speak to their courage to say the truth even when it's dangerous all of those things i have sat with people with terrible incest and and abuse histories sometimes for several years before somebody will sit down on the couch and say you know when i first came to see you i told you you weren't allowed to talk about god yeah and you've honored that yes well i think today i'd like to start talking about god but it took years he was there yeah the only way he could be there was in me so that they could get a taste of what he's really like by being with me which is so different it doesn't come by words it comes by being with in the flesh we also have a number of questions that pertain to the abuser so caroline asked how can we embody the gospel and how we treat both the victims and the abusers and jenny savage asked what does repentance and restoration look like for abusers and enablers as well as victims how can the church assist in that repentance and restoration for all three well part of what we do with abusers is if they cry and say they're sorry we say it's fine and we say that if we don't do that we haven't forgiven them and we don't know anything about grace at the same time we're saying that we're sometimes saying that about a pedophile where the state says you have to go to prison for 30 years so we're saying it's fine by a few words and tears and the states saying it takes decades you can't get to the place where you hurt a child particularly many children and repeatedly and be okay by tears and words and the way we love an abuser is to not trust them it's like working with an addict well i can go into the bar i won't drink no we're not going into the bar i'm not going to go with you the reason is because the deception is so familiar and so common in them they cannot even see the depth of what they have done and so we don't seem to realize that that believing that repentance is fine when it could be somebody who's abused 20 children over over 15 years and you only know about one but you're not loving them to say it's fine years ago a church had a little girl who was about four or five come and meet in a room alone with a man who probably weighed 200 pounds who had sexually abused her and he cried and said he was sorry and they required her to say i forgive you and they let him walk and be in church and guess what happened that's not what it looks like it's not love to do that to somebody certainly not love for the victim but it's not love for the abuser they're full of poison and we're saying it's okay we had a few questions that um you know about kind of pervasiveness benjamin murray asked do abuse numbers differ by geographic location inside the u.s e.g rural suburban or urban and scott orthy ask is abuse less prevalent in non-male only ordination churches um i do not know of any research that says how much abuse happens in different sorts of communities like rural or city or whatever um and what was the second one again uh scott's question is abuse less prevalent in churches that ordain women as well as men no i don't think so first of all many of the women who've been abused were abused before they came to church women can abuse too women can abuse children and whenever the percentages are less than men but they do it anybody in power can do that so it isn't gender it's mostly gender related because men have the power in most situations but women in power also do the same thing i'm not known of incest victims from their mothers that's who abused them yeah several other questions have come in for those who have been abused especially spiritually abused in the church under the hands of narcissists and bullies what would you recommend as helpful practices for healing well it would in some measures depend on the individual because i would want to know what would feel healing to them and that would be different from different people just like with abuse victims some of them might say i don't want to go to church and that's fine you know it has to be okay when it's been poisoned not to say to them you have to go back and they'll feel like they're just drinking the same water um and so again i i think it is the embodiment of christ in a walk alongside people and if somebody's experienced spiritual abuse part of what that often means is the word of god has been used to cover up evil or to commit it to sanction it i wouldn't use the word of god i would be the word of god with somebody like that because if you do those things thinking you're helping you're not you're going to build the wall higher and increase the fear he became like us so that we could become like him that's what he did that's what we're called to and we get caught up on buildings and words and systems a question from denise cunn and denise asked do we leave do we endure do we keep trying to expose the deception the behavior or the character or do we move on because no one believes us well the very most unhelpful response i can give is it depends but uh certainly speak up and if it isn't heard speak up some more to more people or whatever yes if that's what you choose to do sometimes it's not safe to do that but do keep in mind that our lord went into the temple that god designed for his people to worship him and he went in there and cracked whips and turned cables over and said you have made my father's house a den of thieves which literally means a safe place for those who steal that's what an abuser is and when our churches hide those things we have made it a safe place for those who steal they didn't listen he left he went back a second time they didn't listen he wept and he never went back he never went back so we have a question from penny forbes who asks do you believe that complementarianism which results in women being excluded from pastoral leadership in many denominations has contributed to the abuse and misuse of power domestic violence and sexual abuse well again i don't know statistics on something like that and i think that that is on a continuum just like everything else humans so you probably have people who are complementarian who are extremely authoritarian and rigid and demanding and abusive you probably also have some very kind people on the other end of the continuum so i don't think that we can we can certainly say places invited or make it easier to say such things are right that aren't right or something like that but abuse by humans of other humans has existed forever in this fallen world and long before those were categories or any other long before there were churches and systems and buildings the way we've done it for centuries so it's the human heart that's the main problem and so yes some of those things might feed it or okay things in ways that others do not they probably okay it in other ways and so i i think those things are worth evaluating but we can't hang our hats there it's not deep enough yeah this next question comes from an anonymous attendee who asks as an elder in a church committed to male only ordination i've observed that women who have experienced abuse are often understandably reluctant or even intimidated to share with us what they have suffered or to place trust in that group of men to support listen or take appropriate action what strategies would you suggest for expressing genuine care and sympathy in this context i would find some women who have shown the characteristics of being helpers comforters gifted in those ways of helping people who are suffering and i would have them do things to be trained about trauma and sexual abuse and domestic violence and i would have them always then ready to be assigned to any woman who breathes of any kind of abuse to an elder and that that woman who's a victim should never be in a room with elders without one or two of those women with her she's not going to come she's not going to say the full truth she's not going to feel sick and she has reason for that it doesn't matter how nice the men are they could be perfectly safe human beings who love god but the fact that they're men is going to scare her to death not to mention a group so train them get them to learn get them to read get them to study these things get them to find professionals to teach them so that they can walk alongside and frankly get some of the men trained as well particularly in things like abuse sexual abuse and domestic violence and things like that partly so that they know how to walk alongside somebody who beats his wife most elders don't learn that anywhere but if a woman comes and says you know he's breaking my bones and shattering everything in the house and i'm not safe she's not the only one who needs somebody to walk with her so you need men and women in the church who are trained and knowledgeable about these things to walk alongside yeah our next question comes from eva naffir and she asks the labels of hysteria or shell shock seem so ancient but you've reminded me that it really wasn't all that long ago that these accusatory labels were being applied are there any false labels currently being used to victim blame or write off people suffering with ptsd or cptsd well sure there are actually some of the same labels are still being used depending on who you talk to um but certainly in things like sexual abuse or rape or or domestic abuse um the labels are about what kind of wife somebody is or what kind of clothes somebody had on or all kinds of things that look to put at least half of the blame if not all of it on the victim and that which is basically what things like shell shock did i mean you're shell shocked because you're a weak man you know that you're flawed that's why that happened so it's always the victim's fault those kinds of labels even in those times as well jennifer briggs asked what can you say about recovering from the bible being used as a weapon by church leaders how can someone return to the bible in a healthier way little by little perhaps um you know sometimes uh with with coins i i've had them read maybe two or three verses usually in the prophets or in psalms and just read those verses put them on an index card and read them and and we pick it out together so they say you know no that one's not good yes that one's good so they have a say in it but something that they identify with something that speaks to them which could simply be a verse that acknowledges their suffering um or a verse that says basically god where are you i don't see you anywhere i mean there are there's all kinds of scriptures that relate to the experience of being a victim david wrote lots of them so i would find things like that if they're ready and willing and they have to say about that and write them on something other than handing them a bible or having them pick up one and just do it in eyedropper amounts we have another question from an anonymous attendee who asked how can we remain christlike in the experience of abuse namely in the forgiveness of abusers while not downplaying the severity of the abuse or protecting the abuser well first of all jesus in the midst of abuse spoke the truth he is the truth so he never deviated from that he never excused things he never called them by their wrong name he always call things by their right name now if you do that with somebody who's being abusive to you you risk more harm yeah and so i think that the other thing that you have to think about is how to remove yourself from that situation because the person is so full of deceit and so practiced in what they're doing deceitfully and abusively that your presence is going to lead to more of that because they didn't they don't see clearly and they can't stop themselves so sometimes the best thing for example not only for her own safety which is obvious but the best thing for a woman whose wife to a violent man is to leave because then she's not there to hit which is certainly good for her but it's also good for him and so we often think that our words will somehow change things right they don't it's so deep words are not sufficient you talk somebody out of being an abuser that we there are quite a few questions pertaining to how one deals with different power dynamics within the church itself and the questions just kind of jumped around here we have one anonymous attendee who asked how can young people respect the authority of church leadership while still working for change within the church and then i'll have another related question from aaron holbrook who asks how do those who of us who get crushed by pastors in power fight and speak up when most of the processes for evaluation of our pastors are lacking and so people just wind up leaving the church deeply wounded well ask me the young person one first again yes uh that question was just how can young people both respect the authority of church leaders while working for change well i would really study the gospels because that's what jesus did you know he never met a pharisee that he didn't know was created in the image of god he spoke the truth and he risked criticism and all of those things but you you don't treat someone else in a demeaning or hostile or putting down way you tell the truth and invite them into the light in a way that shows respect for them as a human being otherwise you become like them so you don't excuse it you don't okay you call it by its right name but they're still a human being which means there's still somebody created in the image of god and you don't forget that you can't trample them and then change them any more than you know you become like them then and it's it's it's contagious it's easy to do it's very easy to become like an abuser trying to convince an abuser not to abuse did you follow that there are so many more questions we won't get through them all perhaps a good closing question comes from meredith teal and she asked how do we hold hope that power can be redeemed while empathizing with those who have suffered trauma and abuse in the church in other words how does one maintain a posture of sorrowful yet always rejoicing i don't know any way to do that except by the face of jesus christ i uh you know i i've tried to quit a couple of times in this work basically told god i was quitting i didn't even ask him obviously that didn't happen but every time i have hit a wall or felt like i couldn't hope anymore or i couldn't hear another story or whatever there's a way that he has met me in that place and given me more of himself i need to see him more clearly and understand what he has done for us what abuse he endured on our behalf and how he dealt with others and so i i don't know any other way to keep going you know is to sink my feet deeper into him and who he is because otherwise we get none or we start giving short answers because we can't listen anymore or we get hostile and start looking like an abuser on a milder scale or we pretend i mean there's all kinds of ways you can go wrong in this work and the other thing that i have you know i have a an office full of therapists who all work with trauma and part of the way we do that is each other you know we it's hard you can't i started out alone for a long time and it wasn't it wouldn't have been good had it stayed that way it wasn't a choice at the beginning because it wasn't anybody else who was doing that but but uh it became a choice later on you need companions love your lord i love you diane we could talk for a long time just so appreciate your wisdom um thank you as we wrap up diane the last word is yours thank you it's been a privilege to do this i'm just going to read a small portion of a poem by george herbert which has been a great deal to me uh in this work hast thou not heard that my lord jesus died and let me tell you a strange story the god of power as he did ride his majestic robes of glory resolved to light so one day he did descend undressing all the way the star his tire of night and rings obtained the cloud his bow the fire his spear the sun his azure mantle gained when they asked what he would wear he smiled and said as he did go he had new clothes are making here word made flesh diane thank you it has been a privilege to talk with you thank you to all of you for joining us have a great weekend

Channel: The Trinity Forum

Views: 2,231

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Id: XGT3AXDBLbA

Length: 54min 23sec (3263 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 09 2021