Pastors may post articles about the recent events surrounding Ravi Zacharias with genuine grief and add commentary on why abuse should be condemned. They may even reference it in their sermons and talk about how God hates any type of abuse.
But on many occasions, the pastors will forget to address the victims and survivors in their own congregation who may be triggered and re-traumatized by such news. I have sat through countless sermons and read countless online posts by pastors to know that every single time this happens and they are ignored, as a survivor of sexual abuse myself, I am left feeling slightly conflicted. Why?
I am glad pastors are willing to speak out against these crimes instead of choosing to stay silent. But I’m also a little empty inside. I have a million thoughts and emotions racing in my head, and my body has a visceral reaction to this news. As much as I appreciate the pastors’ sense of justice, I can’t help feeling I need something else. I need care. I need pastors who will care for me as a sheep that is confused, angry, and brought back to her own abuse through this news.
Dear Pastors,
I humbly write this letter asking you to consider a different and underserved area of ministry that is needed in times like this. Although I recognize that every victim’s experience is different, and I speak largely for myself and other survivors I have personally heard from, I still want to write this on behalf of the many victims that sit under your teaching and in your care.
Sexual assault is a traumatic experience, which means the body and mind will react to its memory differently than non-traumatic experiences. Psychologists say that these memories can activate a “fight-or-flight response,” resulting in increased heart rate, headache, nausea, difficulty focusing, etc.
There is already enough news of sexual assault in the world to keep a survivor feeling like he/she has to constantly navigate a minefield of triggers. Add to this the harrowing news of a Christian leader’s abuse, and it can all become too much to handle. Not only is the body and mind reacting at that point, but it is also the heart, which enters its own sort of “fight-or-flight” mode that leaves the survivor utterly confused.
In his or her most vulnerable moments, the heart can tempt the survivor to choose “flight”: abandon the Church that fails to protect and the God that fails to be good. This is why I, and so many others in the Church, need pastors who will choose to recognize, listen to, and care for us in these moments. We may not have been directly impacted by the abuser, but the incompatibility of his prominence as a Christian leader and the pure evil of his abuse can indirectly lead us to emotionally and spiritually dark places.
Pastor, at this point I want to say — please don’t be naive in thinking that there aren’t people like me in your congregation. Please don’t stop reading because you think this doesn’t apply to your ministry.
While all pastors know that sexual assault is a terrible crime, many pastors don’t realize that sexual assault is a terrible crime that many of their own congregants have been, and are currently, victims of. You may not personally know of many in your church, but I would bet that there are probably many survivors you don’t realize are survivors.
The CDC reports that more than a third of women experience unwanted sexual contact and about 1 in 5 women experience attempted or completed rape in their lifetime. Almost one-fifth of men report unwanted sexual contact and almost three million men in the country have experienced attempted or completed rape. So if you have a congregation of 100 adult members (50 men and 50 women), you may have 17 women and 10 men who have experienced unwanted sexual contact. I plead with you, please care for the victims in your congregation as they try to process and even wrestle with their own faith in times such as this.
I want to offer two suggestions for how you can care for victims and survivors in your congregation at this time:
1. Make spaces for safe conversation
On a number of occasions, I have had the chance to share the story of my own abuse and healing with groups of college students. Every single time, I left an open invitation for any other survivors and victims in the room to share with me. And every single time, I had a handful of students share with me about their own experience of abuse and/or assault.
I have realized from my own experiences as a survivor and my time doing ministry that victims deeply desire safe spaces to share and process their experiences. These students that came to me all displayed some sense of relief at the fact that they were offered a space to talk explicitly about their experiences.
It can be extremely lonely to try to comb through the mess of thoughts and emotions on your own. Sexual assault is also so complicated because there’s often a component of shame and guilt mixed into the bag of emotions.
I must confess to you: I feel completely naked writing this letter. I don’t feel this because I’m sharing that I was once a victim of sexual abuse. I feel it because I’m sharing the confusion and chaos that goes on in my heart when I read about stories like Ravi Zacharias. I feel exposed because, more often than not, I weigh myself down with the assumption that people would think I was “crazy” or “overreacting” if they knew how affected I was by abuse that wasn’t committed on me but on other people. I feel shame for not being stronger and not being fully healed of something that happened so long ago.
I know that this is unbiblical and unnecessary shame. I know now from my years of listening to other survivors, receiving counseling myself, and pouring over Scripture, that I am not expected to heal at any particular pace and that I am no less of a Christian because I’m still wrestling with the effects of my abuse. But this is a hard truth to tangibly grasp when events like Ravi Zacharias trigger me so deeply.
Survivors need to know they are not alone. They need to hear that they’re not overreacting and that their pastors want to hear them out. They need to be invited into safe spaces where they could make the decision on their own to step in and share their stories and pains. It starts with you recognizing that there may be some in your congregation who are survivors themselves and need help processing what is happening. Then it could be as simple as this: Let them know you acknowledge their pain and leave an open invitation for them to receive care about this if they desire.
If and when they come to you, be empathetic. Ask the Holy Spirit to give you every ounce of his power needed so that you could display true, Christ-like, empathetic care for your hurting sheep. Listen more than you speak. Acknowledge that if you haven’t experienced sexual assault yourself, you can’t claim to understand what they’re dealing with, but that you want to better understand by listening well.
Ask questions to help them process. Don’t try to forego the process and rush to the conclusion by throwing Bible verses and Christian-isms at them in untimely ways. Part of making a safe space may require having qualified women be available for the shepherding. You yourself may not sit in the conversation but as the pastor, I firmly believe even making spaces for women is part of your care for the flock.
Don’t let the conversation end without recognizing the tremendous courage and vulnerability it took for the survivor to share with you. Thank them for the personal costs it took for this conversation to happen. Show appreciation for the level of trust they just demonstrated in you.
Lastly, don’t let the ball drop. Nothing hurts more than sharing the most vulnerable part of your life with someone, only to have them neglect the most crucial part of the conversation: What happens after you leave. As best as you can, keep the invitation for conversation open to them and if appropriate, recommend them to good counselors or mentors. You may not personally be in regular contact with this person afterward, but make sure that some part of the Church is!
2. Be an example of good male leadership
I first want to say that it is really important for us to recognize that sexual abuse doesn’t just happen to women. Male victims are even more shamed because of their gender and it is imperative that we are cautious with our narrative so we don’t add to the shame.
However, I do believe that the Ravi Zacharias case, along with similar cases of abuses with Christian leaders, is undeniably tied to the stronghold of male dominance in evangelicalism. I also believe it is a part of the conversation regarding male leadership in the Church and even complementarianism’s practical implications. So I want to focus this next suggestion on the male pastor-female congregant relationship.
In a previous letter I penned to complementarian pastors, I wrote that “It really is not a natural thing for some women to easily believe that men, even men in the church, want what is best for them.” As I explained in that letter, all you have to do is look at the news and the daily life of a woman to see why women struggle with this.
I can’t begin to explain how much this very struggle is intensified for women who have been sexually assaulted by men. The idea that men could overpower and take advantage of a woman isn’t just a possibility to us survivors; we have lived through the very experience of it. Every victim is different but it is not uncommon for your mind to build defense mechanisms by convincing yourself of lies that men cannot care for women or that all men cannot be trusted.
One of the hardest parts of my healing process was unraveling these very lies. It’s painful because you have to tell yourself to not be afraid of the very object of your fear. You have to wrestle with the ideas of sin, God’s designs for gender, and even God himself. It takes years to have normal relationships with male friends and learn to trust your pastors as your overseers.
I am so thankful that God has taken me through highs and lows to separate my sin from my pains and to have peace in a right view of men. But when I hear of people like Ravi Zacharias, the first place my heart goes is to question male headship. I know my head believes in what I read in scripture but in these moments, my heart cannot make sense of male headship. I question God: “Could you really be good and sovereign over this? How could we tell that to the victims?”
The doubts I thought I dealt with long ago when I processed my own pain trickle back into my head and I feel like a puzzle piece I worked so hard to fit into my understanding of God’s design goes missing once more.
I don’t know how else to say this: Survivors in your churches need you to be a godly man. We need you to be an example to us of good, godly, male leadership. We need you to show us that what God has designed is good and that the moral failings of men like Ravi Zacharias do not have to strip us of our trust in God’s design. When lies start creeping into our hearts as we read the news of fallen pastors and apologists, we need to be able to confidently say to ourselves: “No! This is not a reason to distrust God. My pastor is an example of why I can trust.”
You don’t have to be perfect. In fact, you cannot be perfect and you should acknowledge that! We need to see that male headship is not about giftedness or perfection, but calling, and that God calls the weak and empowers them with his grace. We need to see that very grace in action! We need to see that you may not have everything down yet, but that you’re trying. We need to know that you desire to genuinely care for the women in your flock by seeking to understand their unique experiences in your church and their spiritual needs, and by seeing them as your sheep, not your sheep’s wives or “the other.”
We need to know you are willing to be held accountable and display transparency. We need to see that you aren’t just crying out against abuse after it happens but you’re actively seeking to protect and prevent. We need to see that you are moving away from a “boys club” culture of ministry at our churches where women are constantly looking in from the invisible fences that keep them “outside.” We want to know that your relational capital with other men doesn’t get used as a weapon to give the benefit of doubt to each other while questioning the intentions of women.
We need to see you trying to practice the most robust form of complementarianism you can, with women at the leadership level that can truly complement you by offering perspective for your decisions. In this way, we need to see that it is possible for men to fulfill their God-given role to lead without dominating, controlling, isolating, or belittling women.
I know that being a godly leader may not be the first thought that comes to mind when considering how to care for sexual assault survivors. But trust me when I say that it will go an extremely long way to help survivors work through their own healing. Your day-to-day efforts to grow in this manner will not go unnoticed by the women, and the survivors, of your congregation.
So when situations like the Ravi Zacharias case happen (which unfortunately will continue to happen) the survivors in your care may fall into less confusion and frustration because of your example. They’ll also be much more likely to trust you enough to speak with you. My first suggestion of an open invitation to safe conversations won’t be very effective if the survivors in your congregation don’t trust that you are fundamentally different — that you are a leader who cares and protects.
It’s not just for the sake of gender roles that I am pleading with you to be a godly example. I have witnessed on numerous occasions how easy it is for hurt, disillusioned women to go from questioning God’s design to questioning his goodness then coming to conclusions that only leave them outside of the Church. Even outside of complementarian circles, I see women who still have the same struggles and questions as they see men failing women in the Church. This is not just a matter of guarding gender roles but fighting for the faith of countless women, particularly those who are victims of abuse, and helping God’s people see the beauty of his goodness even in this broken world.
Conclusion
Pastors, please see and care for the survivors in your congregations that are being deeply impacted by the recent events surrounding Ravi Zacharias. I will personally attest to the level of emotional, mental, and spiritual turmoil experienced while reading through the investigation report and other materials that showed the organization’s cover-up of abuse. Don’t leave the women (and men) in your churches to be in pain on their own. Be an example to them and invite them to safe conversations. Don’t just denounce Ravi Zacharias’ actions but also teach your church to grieve over the pains of his victims – your members who have experienced abuse need to know that their church is growing to care for all victims. May God use you to care for your sheep well and help many to find deep and lasting healing.
Resources for pastors wanting to better understand the effects of sexual assault, as well as how to provide gospel-informed care to survivors:
- Rachael Denhollander “The Lion & The Lamb – How the Gospel Informs Our Responses to Abuse”
- Dr. Justin Holcomb “Rid of My Disgrace: The Work of Christ and the Effects of Abuse”