I could write a book about boundaries. Oh wait! Someone already did. I read the book years ago, desperate for help.

In a nutshell, Boundaries, by Henry Cloud and John Townsend, teaches that people have boundaries, just as surely as property does.¹ Property boundaries mark where one parcel ends and another begins. Personal boundaries mark where one person ends and another begins.

People dispute property boundaries all the time. People challenge personal boundaries too. Often, personal boundary violations involve:

• people who run roughshod over the boundaries of others, and
• people who tend to surrender their boundaries without protest.

Case of the battered boundaries

When I read Boundaries, I finished the book still perplexed. According to everything Cloud and Townsend described, I should have been in a good place, boundary-wise. It was my heart’s desire and my practice to honor other people’s boundaries. I also sought to establish healthy limits and was not easily guilted or coerced to let others mow them down.

Yet something alarming had begun to happen. I would set a healthy boundary. I would identify it clearly and with kindness: “This is what I can do, and will do gladly. This, in good conscience, I cannot.” When tested, I maintained the boundary consistently.

But suddenly, people in my church culture were not honoring my boundaries.

In every case, the boundary in question involved a major issue, and a spiritual one. The line drawn marked a place I could not go beyond and still remain true to myself and obedient to God. Yet the very people I thought would affirm my choice to follow God never stopped pushing against it.

I faced instant and unrelenting pressure to recant – not just to move my boundary an inch or two, but to renounce it entirely. To stand where God had told me to stand, I had to exert an enormous amount of effort for a very long time.

According to the Boundaries book, that should not have happened. People tend to honor the boundaries of those who maintain them consistently. The boundaries may be tested immediately. But when they hold firm, the testers typically move on to people whose boundaries they can shift at will.

“Why is this happening?” I asked the Lord. At last, I began to see:

The refusal to honor my boundaries hinged on the view of adulthood, in general, and womanhood, in particular, in the church culture in which I lived.

Adulthood described

In his book, Changes That Heal, Henry Cloud describes adulthood as a place of freedom, authority and “eye-to-eye equality” with other adults.

Freedom, authority, equality, responsibility

Adults have freedom:

• to make their own decisions without permission from others;
• to evaluate and judge their own performance;
• to choose their own values and opinions;
• to disagree with others freely;
• to enjoy sexual relations with an equal spouse.²

Adults also have freedom to give up rights and serve others in submission. Cloud wrote:

When we submit in love, we are displaying our freedom; if we submit in compliance, it is not true submission. It’s slavery.

Does that statement grab you like it did me? Reread it. Let it sink in.

Having substantial freedoms gives adults great authority. With freedom and authority comes a weighty responsibility. As adults, we’re accountable to God for every choice we make.

The passage into full adulthood

Certainly, we’re not to live as islands. We’re to give and receive wise counsel, to exhort and confront one another in love. But “adults don’t need ‘permission’ from some other person to think, feel, or act.” Rather, adults answer directly to God.

Children, by contrast, relate to adults in a one-down/one-up relationship. Children need permission to make important decisions. If a child makes a choice the parents think unwise, they have the authority to intervene. In fact, if they see their child doing something harmful and don’t take action, they’re accountable. If they say “no,” but the child persists, the parents have a responsibility to correct in love.

“Becoming an adult is the process of moving out of ‘one-up/one-down’ relationship and into a peer relationship to other adults.”

Remaining one-down in relationships means “looking up to other adults for parental functions,” such as thinking for us, telling us how to live and what to believe. Remaining one-down means always being the one to submit to the other.³

We miss the important passage into full adulthood if we grow up physically, yet remain “one-down” in key relationships.

Adulthood denied

Every time people have battered my personal boundaries, they denied my adulthood. Every time, other adults in the church have decided to cast themselves in a parental, one-up role in my life. So you know, those adults include women.

If they had counted me an adult, they would not have tried to impose their will onto my choices. They might have spoken up to give their perspective, but then would have left the matter between God and me.

Instead, they determined, “We will continue to try to make you comply. We will continue to punish you for resisting. We will not stop.” In their minds, they are ones to whom I must listen and from whom I must get permission – and I’m nothing more than a rebellious child.

Every time people have battered my boundaries, they counted themselves one-up to me spiritually. But more, they believed that “spiritual maturity” gives them the right and the duty to control others’ personal choices.

And mine is not an isolated case. Church cultures built on hierarchy and celebrity cast people in static, one-up, one-down roles. It’s rare there to be able to relate adult-to-adult.

A mystery to solve

I had learned much. Yet a mystery still remained:

I had been immersed in that kind of church culture from birth. So why, in midlife, did I suddenly find my boundaries battered and my adulthood denied?

Conned by people I trusted

I pondered and prayed over that question for a long time. Finally, I realized the answer lay in facing what I had not seen in me.

Though I could not easily be coerced, I could be conned. Especially, I could be conned by people I trusted, in a system I believed to reflect God’s will and ways.

Skewed teachings about women had misled me – teachings presented as Biblical, and even Gospel.

Such teachings were pervasive in my church culture. They fooled me into thinking I was being counted an adult, when the opposite was true. They affirmed me as “mature” each time I agreed to being treated as a perennial child.

Self-absorbed people had disarmed and used me – people who presented as godly Christians.

They could ingratiate themselves to me, completely fool me as to their character and motives, and routinely breach my boundaries without my ever knowing it.

The seeds of all that misplaced trust were planted in me in childhood, by key people I should have been able to trust. Long after I grew up, I remained blinded to the many ways I was manipulated, exploited, deceived.

Coerced when conning failed

But then a day came when those who had used me to get what they wanted began wanting me to do what I knew opposed God’s will. When I politely declined to go along, the pressuring started.

The more I chose integrity over compliance, the angrier they became. The more they punished me, the more bewildered I grew.

And then I realized: They did not see me and were not treating me as an adult.

And later I saw: They never had. All those years when I had thought I was maintaining healthy boundaries, I was doing what I had been trained to do – responding to other adults as if I were a parent-pleasing child.

The “shift” happened when they could no longer control me by finessing me, and set out to control by force.

A new quest begun

But God.

The Lord Jesus is my help, my strength, my deliverer. He has never failed me nor forsaken me. In the midst of my bewilderment, he kept pouring out to me his superabundant grace.

The more the mystery unraveled, the more clearly I saw:

→ I did not have to agree to battered boundaries, or shattered or breached ones.

And even when I had no clue what that meant, how it was possible, how it might look, I heard the Lord say:

I will lead the blind by ways they have not known,
along unfamiliar paths I will guide them;
I will turn the darkness into light before them
and make the rough places smooth.
These are the things I will do;
I will not forsake them. (Isa. 42:16)

Today, I bear witness: He has done it. He continues to lead me. And as I choose to take each next step with him, “The Lord will accomplish what concerns me” (Ps. 138:8 NAS).

Who knew battered boundaries in the church would set me on a new quest, by God’s grace, for his glory?

To embrace the womanhood
and the adulthood
that are his design.
And, ever more clearly, to see.

---

Previously titled, “Case of the Battered Boundaries,” this post is adapted from What About Women? A Spirit-to-spirit Exposé, © 2013, 2021. The original post was published Dec. 3, 2014, and updated in 2021. In 2026, the issue of battered boundaries in the church still hasn’t gone away. If anything, it’s intensified. So I’ve refreshed, retitled and reposted.

Also referenced: Boundaries, by Henry Cloud and John Townsend (Zondervan, © 1992, 2017).

Image by RitaE from Pixabay

What about women – and adulthood?

• Adulthood and the church that rejects it
• Women, false responsibility and the church
• Whatever happened to loving one another?
  
  
• Bucking the system: Shunning, submission, Jesus
• Killing with (fake) kindness – a lie that binds
• This “good Christian girl” is a woman now

Other related posts

• Recognizing the world in church clothing
• Masters of misdirection and mesmerizing fog
• Illusionists! The abusers we have not seen
• Sabotage, coerce, shame: Bullying in the church
  
  
• Church leaders bullying people, rejecting God
• Blinded no more! I choose light
• Counting the cost, going with God

Footnotes

1. Henry Cloud has taught important truths about boundaries and adulthood. Lately, he has also taught about spiritual abuse. Yet Henry Cloud maintains convoluted and lucrative relationships with abusive celebrity pastors. In telling my story, I’ve credited people whose words have helped me see something important in a new light. That does not mean I agree with, or endorse, everything they have done and taught. See my post, “The people I quote.” ↩︎
2. Henry Cloud, Changes That Heal (Zondervan, 1990, 1992) Mobipocket Edition March 2009. All quotations under the heading, “Adulthood described,” are from this source. ↩︎
3. The New Testament urges us instead to learn to “submit to one another” (Eph. 5:21). See the post, Whatever happened to loving one another? ↩︎