Faith, and spiritual abuse

I am a church minister, I am part of the union for faithworkers and a rep, I have raised the issue of problems with the system to deal with discipline and complaints within the UK Methodist Church.  I have been part of a multifaith conference discussing spiritual abuse, where religious beliefs are a cover for un loving and even abusive attitudes.

Why? Because I have personal experience of bullying within my faith community, because I have known others to also suffer, because the systems to report this fall way, way too far short of facing up to those who bully in the name of faith.

I am a church minister, I have mental health struggles. I want to lobby for proper understanding of such issues. I have encountered those who gave me permission and acknowledged that mental heath wasn’t a failure. The student from another church in the circuit when I was at uni who spoke about being a Christian and depressed was the first step in that, and I cannot recall her name but spoke to me before I would ever have admitted to my own issues.

I have encountered a big barn church near here that sells a booklet written by its retired minister that says depression is self pity and that Christians should look to Jesus and reject psychology and psychiatry as of the devil (since Jung and Freud were not Christian).  Sorry but psychiatric care and medication are what enable my stability, and would they ever dare to say the same for physical conditions like cancer, even if those who discovered medications are not Christian? (And by the way psychology has developed way beyond Yung and Freudian ideas anyway).

Then I hear that decades ago, when alone in a distant place, someone close to me who was experiencing wobbles in their faith journey, and went to the person who was there to support and help was told that if don’t feel that fit the Christian mould then going to hell. Knowing that this person came home suicidal, that surviving attempts on their life they then lived decades feeling unworthy of God’s love….     All my understanding of spiritual abuse is clearly there; all the failures to understand not just mental health but the normal ebbs and flows, stresses and strains of life, all the failures I have experienced in the church, and through others’ journeys, are encapsulated in that one dismissal of a hurting person.   I wonder if that person who listened and replied in such a way went home feeling that they had testified to God’s Word and therefore had had a good day at work? Yet they left someone feeling that they could not be good enough for God and suicidal.

Matthew 18 v 6-7

⁶ “If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea. ⁷ Woe to the world because of the things that cause people to stumble! Such things must come, but woe to the person through whom they come!

 Sadly such millstone bearers are all too common in our churches and in our structures. And our structures are too scared to call people out – keeping the peace being held as more valuable than calling out injustice, bullying, causing others to stumble, and even to the point of collapse.

When we sit in our church buildings and wonder where the people are we need to ask ‘what sort of God have we revealed to them?’, ‘how have they been hurt by the church, by Christians?’ and ‘what in our life as church is strong enough for them to dare to trust us?’

I believe in God who has been part of my journey, through physical and mental health iussues. I give thanks for those who were there to say that I was not alone and without trying to fix me. I could not always sense God with me, but I was not judged in that uncertainty, others held me in their faith when I could not trust in my own faith, because I could not process my own chaos.   

Yet so many are not held as they are, but told they need to show their faith in a certain way. As with the person I referred to, this can leave wounds open for years, people spiritually abused by those that should be there to support them.  Sadly it is more common than we like to admit.