The CBE Scroll

Comment by leigh

October 15, 2009 @ 5:15 am

Dr. Kroeger, this is beautiful. I had not before seen this part of scripture in this way, yet the application makes sense. Thank you.

Comment by John Umland

October 15, 2009 @ 7:53 am

Excellent advice and wise counsel. Thank you.
God is good
jpu

Comment by Lin

October 15, 2009 @ 2:06 pm

I am becoming alarmed at what I believe is malpractice by pastors with this sort of advice. I am hearing it from too many sources not to be alarmed that it is more pervasive than we might think.

What about children witnessing this sort of thing?

Comment by Liz

October 15, 2009 @ 5:56 pm

For anyone who is interested in understanding the verses in Ephesians 5 re wives’ submission, there is an excellent article on the CBE website (cbeinternational.org)
Just click on the weekly “Arise” column.

Comment by jlp

October 15, 2009 @ 6:18 pm

This woman may end up being murdered because of the advice of her Christian friend and the pastors she has seen.

How many Christian women have died this way?

Comment by jlp

October 15, 2009 @ 6:19 pm

Between sobs she explained that every three weeks or so her abusive husband strangles her into unconsciousness.

This is attempted murder.

Comment by Jewel

October 16, 2009 @ 9:24 am

Excellent advice except for one thing…Statistics show that separation is a very dangerous time for abused women. Abused wives should be counseled to file for divorce, not merely separate from their abusers. If God works a miracle in both their hearts such that the man is truly changed AND the woman actually feels like sleeping with a man who repeatedly tried to kill her…. they can always remarry.

Comment by Francine

October 16, 2009 @ 10:04 am

what a great post. What caught my eye was about the abuser is the one that breaks to convenant. How many pastors will tell the wife to be more submissive but will not tell the husband that it is he that has sinned and broken the covenant between he and his wife by not loving her as Christ loves the church and that the husband also needs to honor, respect and submit to the wife. The tempting God part is also important. How many times do pastors tell the wife to tempt God by going back into an abusive situation?
The wife will ask God to protect her and cause her husband to see what he was doing was wrong. God often expects us to get out of harm’s way.

Comment by Sonnet

October 16, 2009 @ 3:09 pm

The message definitely needs to get out to more pastors and Christian counselors that joint couples counseling is not appropriate! I’ve read that many times the abusive husband puts on a great performance for the counselor, acting very remorseful and concerned about his wife, and then on the way home will do things like yanking her repeatedly by the hair or slamming her head into the dashboard. If during their counseling session the wife shares about how she has been abused, the husband will later blame her for making him look bad.

Comment by molly

October 18, 2009 @ 10:12 am

Hey, we’ve been talking about this very thing in various comments boxes at my blog. It’s so difficult for people to understand that abuse is a rendering of the covenant. In the conservative church, we are so trained to think of adultery and desertion as the only “acceptable” reasons to divorce, but the fact is, abuse *is* a form of desertion. When you try to systematically destroy the person you covenanted yourself to love and honor, it rips the covenant to shreds, one little act of abuse at a time.

Abused women are usually so *internally* beat down, though, by the time they realize that they are being abused, that just telling them to separate or to divorce will rarely be helpful. Friends and family must be willing to be in it for the long haul…it may take her some time before she fully comprehends. I know that it took me years. I look back now and I can’t believe it took so long…but when you are in the situation, and your mind is filled with what the abuser says you are…it is so hard to see anything clearly at all.

Keep on encouraging her to go get individual counseling (preferably with someone trained in spousal abuse dynamics). Get “Why Does He Do That,” by Lundy Bancroft, for yourself, to better understand what is going on, and for her, if she’s the reading type. It explains how the mind of an abuser works (which explains why all the normal things that help a troubled marriage DON’T work when it’s an abusive one). Keep on encouraging her and telling her that she is worth something, but don’t push her into doing what you want, now. He does that all the time. It will take patience and fortitude, but just being there for her will mean so much to her, when she finally starts coming around….because if her community is primarily made up of those who don’t think that divorce/separation is okay in abusive situations, she’s going to need strong friends when the time comes.

Comment by molly

October 18, 2009 @ 10:14 am

PS.
Oh my, I forgot to add how much I enjoyed this article and the unique perspective it offered. Wonderful words!

Comment by Kate Johnson

October 20, 2009 @ 7:01 am

Great article. I thought I was the only one whose husband would smother her with a pillow until I started counseling others and found that it happens to others as well. And I remember experiencing the same treatment when going to my pastor. We tried the couples counseling, which made it worse. Now I know better and counsel others to seek separate counseling.

I just read yesterday where one woman had gone to her pastor for help and he told her to stay and get on her knees by her bed when her husband was alseep and pray that God would touch him. He told her that when her husband found out she was praying for him, he might get mad. But she needed to stay and pray and trust God. She came in with two black eyes, badly beaten, and told her pastor, I hope you are satisfied. He said yes, he was very happy (that’s right, happy) because her husband walked into church and came forward at the altar call… now, do you think if she left the same result may have happened and she would not have been beaten black and blue??? And do you think he truly made an altar call or did it for show?

I had one client whose pastor told her that if her husband killed her she should consider it joy because that was God’s will for her life…. God’s will? Pa-lease! If that were so God would not have told David to flee Saul, or Rahab to lie to hide the spies. No, God’s will is not that His children should be beaten, whether emotionally or physically. His will is that there would be peace and protection in the home.

Comment by Francine

October 23, 2009 @ 8:23 am

Although all kinds of abuse is wrong, one type of abuse that is seldom reported and dealt with is emotional abuse. I realize that it is not as life threating as physical abuse, but it can be damaging to the soul and spirit of the wife or hushand. My ex-husband was a very controlling person. He felt it was his church giving right to control every aspect of my life. He did it by telling me I was fat, ugly and stupid, until I actually believed that without him I was a nothing. I couldn’t report this type of abuse because at the time it was happening I didn’t realize that it was abuse. Plus, there are not physical signs only emotional scars. It took me years to get over the emotional trauma, but I went through a divorce to do it. I then later met and married a man who loved me so much he would tell me I was just the right size, very pretty and smart enough to do what ever I was called to do. But it took him years of telling me this to get me to believe him. I’m “lucky” some women never get this kind of help.
How do you help these ladies?

Comment by molly

October 23, 2009 @ 12:29 pm

My situation did not involve physical abuse either…which is what made me think it wasn’t abuse…

…Yet the things done to me, almost all of them in God’s name (thanks to complementarian/patriarchal theology that put him in the position of my prophet, priest and king), were abuse, plain and simple.

Comment by Trevor

October 23, 2009 @ 9:18 pm

One of the saddest things, to my mind, that we encounter in respect to this topic concerns women who leave an emotionally abusive marriage situation only to find, in later years, that their children side with the abusive husband.

Most often a woman leaves when the children are younger because she senses that living with constant abuse is detrimental to the children’s own well being and relational development. During the separation the children, at the direction of the courts, continue to visit the father, by staying over weekends or alternating week about. Unless the woman has become incredibly embittered by the experience she will usually work hard at not speaking negatively about the children’s father around them. So in time the children forget the issues.

Add to this mix that the father, who saw no good thing in his spouse during the marriage, continues to berate and malign her in his access times with the children. If he is the religious type he lays on the children all the biblical reasons why he sees that it was wrong for their mother to leave him. As the children develop their own spiritual values they may well be attracted to the simplistic, legalistic outlook of their father, especially if they attend and are influenced by the hierarchical teaching of his church.

Meanwhile, with no hope of reconciliation in sight, the mother may find herself in a position where another man comes in to her life. Through much agonizing heart-searching and prayer she believes that God may be leading her into a new marriage relationship where mutuality and genuine caring for one another has an opportunity to grow. She is overwhelmed by God’s grace to her in her brokenness only to discover that the children, now teens or young adults, do not share her joy, and in fact become resentful and obstructive.

Take this a step further…. the disenfranchised father can fill the children’s minds with his belief that it is wrong for a divorced woman to contemplate remarriage and in fact if she does she will be living in adultery. Granted the teen years, communication wise, can be difficult anyway, but, if the mother is the primary carer, and the children in their inexperience, are consumed by this notion, a huge, additional wedge is driven between them.

This may cause the woman to end the prospective relationship, no matter how promising it appeared to be, or how much in love she felt herself becoming, in favor of reaching out to the children and preserving their relationship. Or, she may push on with a second marriage in the hope that by God’s grace, in time, the children will understand. It seems to me that, in either of these possible scenarios, the original abuse of the estranged husband, who I might add, sundered the marriage, continues to hound the woman in this new form and is in fact very likely energized by the resentful expressions of the children.

Perhaps there are some women out there who can share their experiences of how they managed situations like I’ve outlined above where there are children involved. It could be that you are going through something like this right now, or, you are just coming through it all onto the other side.

Maybe, by God’s grace, this is well and truly behind you but there are some valuable life lessons that you’ve learned along the way that you would like to share on this forum.

Comment by Joan

November 8, 2009 @ 12:21 pm

My abuse story didn’t start until I was almost 40 years old, when I was getting married for the first time. I shared my desire to be a Godly wife and partner, after living independently all my adult life. My abuser used that as a tool to charge that any of my thoughts were atttempts to control him…The verbal abuse escalated so quickly, I felt I was in a boxing match, being hit so quickly I couldn’t even fall down. The day he grabbed my throat I knew I was in trouble. Within days, I heard an inner voice that said, “if you stay, you will kill him, and possibly yourself”. I got out. I was a lucky one. People often forget the potential retaliation of a victim who feels so hopeless.

Comment by Liz

November 8, 2009 @ 5:50 pm

Thanks for sharing your story Joan. It gives another perspective on how a situation of abuse can end up. It’s so good that you heeded that inner voice when you did.
Maybe someone else is reading this and will be helped to run from a similar situation.

Comment by Jennie Dugan

November 18, 2009 @ 5:35 am

My former mother-in-law (long time ago), who was also a Brethren minister, once told me that in her classes on counseling, they were taught that the first priority is to keep the family together. She told me about it as she was telling me about a man in the church who had sexually abused his daughter. It didn’t make sense then, and it doesn’t make sense now. Thank you for your article. Like some others, I especially like your comment that it’s the abuser that breaks the covenant.

Comment by TL

November 18, 2009 @ 11:39 am

“Excellent advice except for one thing…Statistics show that separation is a very dangerous time for abused women. “

Very true. A man who is violent physically has violent thinking also. When the victim he has so enjoyed abusing, slips out of his hands, this only serves to inspire more violence. Such a woman needs to remove herself and her children far from his physical presence. Even the act of divorcing will be an excuse for anger.

Comment by Noel Bullock

November 28, 2009 @ 8:02 pm

As a seminarian, I was frightened to hear of the poor counsel or ineffectiveness in couple’s counseling for abusive relationships. I noted carefully Molly’s recommendation of “Why Does He Do That?” (thank you). My suspicion is that this is clearly an area where pastoral staff need equipping. I know that the hospice foundation has material for clergy to assist others in the grieving process. Is there any place where a similar resource exists to equip pastors with respect to abusive relationships? Dr Kroeger, thank you for your post.

Comment by Trevor

November 29, 2009 @ 2:27 am

Noel, my wife and I were privileged to be able to attend the CBE Conference in St Louis, Missouri in July 2009 where Catherine had a stand representing the work of PASCH (Peace and Safety in the Christian Home). We brought home with us a couple of the organization’s newsletters and a book edited by Catherine Clark Kroeger, Nancy Nason-Clark and Barbara Fisher-Townsend titled, “Beyond Abuse in the Christian Home: Raising Voices for Change.” That book is a valuable resource for Pastors as would be the web links of the following organizations.
PASCH – http://www.peaceandsafety.com
The RAVE project – http://www.theraveproject.org
Something that may be of further help is the work of Ty Schroyer and Barb Jones-Schroyer of the Duluth Domestic Abuse Intervention Project who work with Christian perpetrators of abuse. http://www.theduluthmodel.org