God’s Plea to His Body:

When you sit with a griever, your work is to be with them where they are, not drag them out where you are more comfortable.

I know with certainty that there is hope for the darkest of stories because the Light of the World has come. His name is Jesus, and He brings life to dead places, forgives sins, and heals the broken and wounded.

It dishonors victims of abuse when we are silent about their experience or pretend it did not occur or was not important.

Using our position of authority to get our own way, serve our own ends, crush others, and silence and frighten them is an ungodly use of power.

When the church shows grace to an abuser in response to a few approved words and some tears, we have done added damage to the victim, risked the safety of others, and left the abuser with a disease that will rot their soul.

Many trauma survivors have lived in terrible isolation, thinking their secrets were too horrible to be told. To attend to the struggle of another by listening is to bestow honor on that person.

When we use God’s sacred Word in a way that harms another, commanding them to do wrong, manipulating them, deceiving them, or humiliating them, we have spiritually abused them.

A survivor who has never known safety or dignity talks with you—you treat them carefully, respectfully, kindly, and with gentleness. Have you changed them? No. But in that moment, in your Christlikeness, you have, by His Spirit, brought a small shaft of light into their darkness.

A truth-teller disturbs, alerts, awakens, and warns against indifference to injustice and complacency about the needs of human beings. To be silent about injustices in this world is to be a partner with those who carry out violence, evil, and corruption.

We damage the dignity of others when we refuse to wait for them—whether they need to tie their own shoes or they are struggling to find words for the indescribable. We bestow honor on another when we consider them worth waiting for.

Jesus calls us to be light in the darkness, exposing those things that are not like God no matter where we find them, even in those organizations we greatly love. We are called to sit apart when those who stand together are disobedient to Him.

The more we practice deceit, the more incapable we are of speaking or even recognizing truth. Deceit functions like a narcotic, and it is ingested in order to silence guilt or empathy for others so that a deadened soul can continue its destruction.

Never demean the occurrences of ordinary human life or see them as interferences in some “big work.” It is in just those ordinary places, far more than the public, lifted-up places, that the life of Christ is to be made manifest.

Clergy sexual abuse is not an affair; pedophilia is not about struggling with difficult circumstances; molesting adolescents is not about a struggling marriage. Such things must be called by their right names—the abuser needs to be held responsible for their abusive behavior.

This webinar was held last year by my colleague, Philip Monroe. It is now available to anyone who wants to know how to help their organization respond well to scandals. Preparation is everything!

No system that carries oppression, silencing, dehumanizing, violence, abuse, and corruption within is healthy. Tolerance of such things, out of fear, disbelief, or self-deception, will not protect the system from the disease that will kill it if left untreated.

It is never helpful to remind one grieving of what they have not lost or of the fact that it could have been worse. We do not grieve what we have but what we do not have. We compare our loss to the good we had, not to the bad that never happened. The empty space is that — empty.

When we turn from those who are vulnerable or who have been abused, in our midst or elsewhere, we have chosen to value something else more than love and obedience to our God.

“Grant that my part in this world’s life today might not be to obscure the splendor of Your presence but rather to make it more plainly visible in the eyes of men.”  ~John Baillie, A Diary of Private Prayer