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.

Below the list are some ideas of what happens “after the storm,” to the ones being abused.

Here’s Enroth’s list of five categories of spiritual abuse:

1. Authority and power that have been usurped by the leader(s). There is no accountability. The right to question their decisions has been taken away from the members.

2. Manipulation and control by the leaders. Fear, guilt, or threats are used to produce obedience and conformity. The members have lost the capacity to make choices themselves.

3. Elitism and persecution. The leaders present their church as being unique and separate from and far better than other churches. This produces even less possibility for internal correction, reflection, or external criticism.

4. Life-style and experience. Churches with abusive leaders find themselves under the “law” of rigidity and conformity to ideals that are not Biblical. Or if the leaders claim the “rules” are Biblical, they have twisted Scripture

5. Dissent and discipline: Any kind of internal challenge to decisions made by the leaders is strongly suppressed. The members who tried to challenge the system are disciplined.

Being part of a church like that is like living in an unending storm. Part of the problem is that many times, the members are too shamed or frightened to leave that church. Some do manage to escape. I claim that for both the ones who stay and the ones who leave, they still have the damaged Self with them. Living with the aftermath, living with the “after the storm” can be horrific. Because the “after the storm” doesn’t go away without therapy of some kind. Sometimes not even then.

Shelly Rambo writes what it’s like to live with the “after the storm” in her book “Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining.” I will write more about that in a future post.