Stormy Interruptions to Our Wholeness in Christ

Living Life in the "After-the-Storm" is Hell

Previously I wrote a post about our wholeness in Christ by talking about my favorite phrase, “Our Ultimate Creative Passion in Christ.” And I have written another post about spiritual abuse, as though we are caught in a giant spider’s web, with seemingly no way out. When we’ve been spiritually abused in our faith community, we have been stung by the spider – the leader who abused his authority to treat church members in undignified and shameful ways.

Being “stung,” can knock any one of us off our path,

making us feel isolated, shamed, coerced.

It is beyond difficult to find our way back.

In this post, I want to use another metaphor: a devastating storm. There are many kinds of storms that wreak havoc on life and property. Tornadoes, Hurricanes, Tsunamis, Storms at sea, Rivers Flooding their banks with raging water. When we’ve been spiritually abused, it feels like a storm has hit that has erased everything that we knew previously. We’ve lost our anchor. Our life’s rudder.

Ronald Enroth, in his book Churches That Abuse,* identifies five categories of spiritual abuse. The list reads as matters of fact, while not listing the terrible emotional and stressful trauma from the viewpoint of the recipient who is being abused.