Month: April 2017 | Page 2 | Spiritual Abuse Blogs

The “place” of a woman

A woman’s place in the church and in the home… I’ve had Ephesians 5 quoted at me so many times, and frankly it’s quoted all the harder at those women who are intelligent and capable, not “rebellious” or “unsubmissive.”

I don’t feel comfortable with women pastors. It’s my personal preference; I condemn no one for having a different opinion. However, that’s where my agreement with complimentarianism ends. I don’t disagree with Ephesians 5, but I do disagree with the too frequent misuse of it and a few other verses to condone abuse within Christian homes and communities.

Submission. It’s a term that has been yelled at me, preached at me, a term used to condemn and manipulate me and to relegate me to the sidelines not because I’d done anything wrong, but because I was born with two X chromosomes. Because of how God made me, I’ve been taught that the following were acceptable behaviors toward me and other women:

physical abuse
sexual abuse – such as rape of a wife by her husband
verbal abuse (referring to women as heifers, discussing them as housekeepers, extra income, child bearers and keepers, and objects, but never as people to love and collaborate with)
child neglect (the man and his desires have precedence over any other person in the household- the wife is to submit and the children to obey)
stalking (if I didn’t want it, I should have married)

The problem with these is that when this is the “love” demonstrated by the church and “godly” men, when they go on to say that these are acceptable because if the women enduring these things would only submit more (meaning put up, shut up, and take whatever was done to them), God would surely step in and prevent more harm, when these are allowed or ignored, they undermine the rest of the passage in Ephesians, for if Christ loves the church and gave himself for it, if he loves the church truly and completely, but will only stop abuse if the woman accepts it and says nothing, does nothing, and if the husband who does this to her moreover is also supposed to be demonstrating the same love for her as Christ does… then she is doomed, because neither loves her well. She is relegated to the position of slave, with only what value someone else – her abuser, her accuser – places on her.

Consider this: In the church, which happened first, the church’s submission or Jesus’ love? He loved first and he loved well. The church still struggles with submission. If this is the case, then in marriage, if it can be compared to the relationship of Christ to the church, the husband should love without demanding submission in any form. Submission can’t be commanded anyway. If, though, the husband loves well, submission from the wife will come. She will trust the one who loves her more as she learns more about that love.

What is a woman’s “place?” The same as any human’s. Not in some certain hierarchy of worth or lack of worth, not “under” a man, not in a certain role. A woman is not a threat to man that she should be put down or destroyed. She is to be loved. That is her place, and it will not be found in abuse, in hierarchy, or in any relegation to a lesser role than she is capable of. Love promotes growth and encourages the one loved to be all that she can be. It values the person as she is, without demand or expectation, without condition, while still encouraging her to be more than she could expect of herself.

Church Submission Teachings

I sat in church this morning trying to convince myself that it was going to be OK, that the verses being read were not meant the way I’d heard them preached. I succeeded for awhile, but the more we read, the more concerned I became. Why were we reading about God’s wrath the week after we read about his resurrection? What was happening? The verses read still don’t make sense. The songs were poorly chosen, too… and all I know is that the main song leader was out, so perhaps it was just a bad day.

But then the preacher got up. He read Ephesians 5. He began with a verse that I’ve heard yelled and preached too many times: “Wives, submit to your husbands as unto the Lord.” He didn’t stop there, and to his credit at least he did continue to read through the part about “men, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself for it…,” which was so little read in the unhealthy church I came from that many men didn’t recognize that part of the passage, even though they quoted the first (about submission) to women often.

The boys would actually sit in the narthex and tell passing women two or three times their age to do things and then say they were unsubmissive if they didn’t, not understanding that the verse didn’t say women were supposed to be subject to all males. A man would follow me around the church, and even off church property, muttering in tongues and saying I was rebellious and unsubmissive for not marrying him. We’d never been on a date. One woman confided that her husband raped her and both he and the church said it was OK, because he was her husband and she should submit.

In Sunday School the pastor’s wife laughed until she cried telling the single young ladies about the man who spanked his unsubmissive wife with a frying pan and another who came home and threw the supper she’d made in the trash, telling her to start over because he wanted something else. The pastor’s brother meanwhile would stand behind the pulpit calling women “loud-mouthed heifers” and other derogatory terms. They were not to take offense, but to submit to that.

And finally one overstepped the line by saying that women were things, because a verse says “he that desireth a wife desireth a good thing.” Therefore, women, in his mind, were things. Objects to be used and set aside, automatons to do the men’s biding without a word. If a woman was to speak her mind at all, it was to be done as entreating her husband, begging and/or flirting until he might consider what she said.

I know that isn’t what the preacher meant this morning. But it was way too close. Talking about how he used to want his wife to be like someone else, asked why she didn’t do this or that like someone else… he said she did speak her mind when it was best for the family now, but he didn’t say he respected or loved her for it. He said it (to my hearing) as a necessary evil of being and staying married. I hope it was just that what he said was filtered through years of abuse. I hope he didn’t mean what I heard. But I can’t shake it.

He said that there is power in submission, because submission requires trust, that the women who submit are, basically, the least damaged or most healed. He does not know me. He does not know my story. He doesn’t know the stories of others I have known, who submitted without trust, whose trust was broken through that submission… not only their trust in a man, but their trust in men in general and more important their trust in God. We were told if God loved us he would protect us if we just submitted. And the abuse worsened. We tried to submit more, and it got worse yet. In “rebellion” to that we found freedom…. in rebellion to the false idea that we should accept whatever we are handed by abusive men because God said “submit”. In rebellion, too, to the false idea that we should remain silent as we see others’ pain, as we all submitted to such abuse.

So excuse me, preacher, if I tuned you out today. It wasn’t because I wasn’t married and so didn’t see an application. It was because that passage was too often applied to me without love, and with a little too much hate or apathy or just general wickedness of narcissists left with a power they didn’t deserve and was not of God.

Sunday Night Fright Night

The stage was set, the tones were hushed, – weeping and moaning could be heard – and the sweat was pouring amid the hot summer breeze blowing through the open windows. We were reaching the climax of another “evangelistic” Sunday night service at my United Pentecostal Church. The building was small and inadequate for the crowds, as was the air conditioning system. Our pastor’s preaching style was starting slowly with a scripture, a title, and then launching into various Old Testament stories and ending with stories of car wrecks, God’s impending judgement on women who didn’t follow the rules, and those waiting too late to “pray back through.”

He was a very large, imposing man and he could be very dramatic in his sermons; visually displaying how the devil had his way with Job, as he scraped his sores. He acted out the stories of Rizpah, shooing away the vultures from the seven slaughtered sons of Saul, staggering back as poor Naomi who would have to be called Mara (meaning bitter) because she went out full and came back empty; no husband, no children, and of course pitiful blind Samson, who didn’t even know when God’s spirit left him. (This thought would haunt me for the rest of my life.)

All of these sermons were meant to create a sense of urgency in the audience to come rushing to the altar benches in front of the pews at the end of the service to plead with God for mercy one more time. This scene was repeated each Sunday night in my United Pentecostal Church. The purpose this served in my life was to make me very fearful of God and not the kind of fear the Bible describes. As a young girl, the first concepts taught to me about God were that of someone who would only love me if I was good enough. If not, He would yank the Spirit right out of me or maybe like Samson it would drift out and I wouldn’t even know it. The long term effect of living with this kind of fear in my life is that I have always taken on the guilt of everything. Every circumstance that comes in to my life causes me to question “is it my fault?” I even dream up circumstances to blame myself for. And since our emotions can’t think, they tend to stick with you through life despite the facts that you know.

Fear and guilt are used as a means of gaining control over the members of these churches. You see, these are not the meek and mild ministers you see in movies, they are in total control. In fact, the churches in the area I am in are not even called by their name but by Brother So and So’s church; whoever the pastor is at the time. You are not to question his authority. These ministers make up strict behavioral rules for you to obey; how to dress and how to comb your hair. If you are going to be allowed to participate you must be following the rules.

Those who don’t follow the rules are disapproved of and seen as the dreaded “worldly.” We were told what we could listen to, where we could go, and what we could do. Fear is used to keep people from leaving the church; you are told there is no alternative, if you leave here you will lose your salvation. It was always stressed that your “church family” is really closer to you than your real family. Why would you ever leave?

But, is this God’s approach to drawing people to Himself? If God’s highest desire is for man’s love and obedience, is it won based on fear of punishment? The answer is no. God’s approach to win man’s love and obedience is love.

“…not knowing that the goodness of God leads you to repentance?” Romans 2:4b NKJV

“For God so loved the world…John 3:16a NKJV

“But God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us,even when we were dead in trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up together, and made us sit together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, that in the ages to come He might show the exceeding riches of His grace in His kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.” Ephesians 2:4-7 NKJV

^“For the love of Christ compels us…” II Corinthians 5: 14a NKJV

Another Method Of Abuse

My parents’ church, growing up, was very small and wouldn’t try anything new. They never encouraged anything for anyone under 50 to my memory. We kids couldn’t sit past the third pew on either side because a deacon’s mom sat in the third row and NO ONE sat in front of her. We had one egg hunt when I was around 8 or 10, and VBS I think about the same time. Once. Dad asked about videos during class due to reading and hearing difficulties of some. It was not considered.

They were told that mowing the church and parsonage lawn, doing a significant amount of the church maintenance, supplying all Sunday School materials from their personal budget and resources (Mom created a lot of the material herself for awhile, because the church wasn’t purchasing anything that worked for a class with an age range like they gave her.) for free was not considered in any way part of a tithe, and were not allowed to participate in decisions within the church because they weren’t giving a full 10% of Dad’s paycheck. If they’d considered how much they were giving of themselves, it would have been much more than 10% I suspect.

These were not healthy things, any more than anything I experienced as an adult. There are many various ways that churches place unhealthy and unreasonable expectations on members.

You don’t have to look: Revisiting how we tell the Easter story

Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on April 17, 2015.

I have problems with Easter.

My church attendance has been irregular since I left fundamentalism, which I’ve been told is normal for people who have suffered spiritual abuse.

This year, I tried to go to church on Easter Sunday. I drove to the parking lot. Panic rose in my stomach until I thought I might vomit. I left for Starbucks.

This is the beginning of realizing that my spiritual life never has to be an obligation, nor should it. I don’t have to try to show Jesus I love him through ritual, because now I believe Jesus would want us to love others and even Him by our own choice.

I’ve had a love / hate relationship with Easter since I was a small child, because of the intense guilt I had about the story.

Since leaving fundamentalism, I’ve wrestled with doubts and whether or not I’ll feel home inside a church again.

Last year, Cynthia Jeub wrote a blog post about why Christians should stop wearing crosses, and she wrote this about me:

One of my friends was obsessed with revisiting the death of Jesus. She watched films and plays depicting his torture and death over and over, and I asked her why the resurrection got so little time in such plays. The resurrection was short and the crucifixion was long in every story. She admitted to the problem, but didn’t have a solution for it.

I thought the only way to honor Jesus for his sacrifice, to love him, was to be a witness to his suffering.

After moving out, I watched movies like the Passion of the Christ and the Stoning of Soraya M., because the torture of my fellow humans troubled me and I didn’t know how else to show that I cared but to watch.

That’s how I demonstrate that my love and compassion is real, right?

I made a new friend this last fall. She’s had her own church trauma–she was at New Life Church when Ted Haggard left in 2006 and during the shooting in 2007 and later another pastor who turned out to be a con man.

We were discussing violence in media and how we deal with it one day. She said that she looks away during the scourging and crucifixion scenes in movies and reenactments.

I had an epiphany. I’ve never been able to look away, to choose not to watch.

I remembered what a high school pen pal once told me: “I think there’s a reason we weren’t there when Jesus died.”

At the time, I vehemently disagreed with her, believing extreme forms of remembrance to be a religious duty, something any lover of Jesus would desire. I understood, even identified with the flagellants of the medieval period.

I was in the Thorn cast again like last year, but that was my only church-related Easter activity. I’d thought, It’s Lent season, do you want to watch the Passion? No, not really. It hurts too much. And maybe it should. After all, I can feel my emotions now.

So I rested over spring break, hung out with friends.

I stopped reopening my old scars.

On Good Friday, a fellow blogger in the Homeschoolers Anonymous community, posted on Facebook:

And my heart said, Amen.

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Sidenote: I did love one of John Pavlovitz’s posts during Lent season, Waiting for Easter: A Eulogy for Jesus.

What passes as Christianity here in America often bears no resemblance to the humble, gentle Nazarene rabbi…. When I look around at the faith so often proposing to be Christianity these days, that Jesus seems gone.

Jesus isn’t just dead, but he’s had his identity stolen posthumously, too…. So yes, for far too many of his people, this is a eulogy for Jesus within Christianity.

Yes, we grieve a religion that often seems dead, and yet still cling to the slimmest of hopes, that an Easter Sunday is still within reach.