Exploited in the church, but Leah no more
“I’m Leah!” I cried. I had given myself to a church culture that had used me and used me, while profoundly rejecting my personhood, my adulthood, my worth, me.
“I’m Leah!” I cried. I had given myself to a church culture that had used me and used me, while profoundly rejecting my personhood, my adulthood, my worth, me.
At a crucial moment in my life, Henry Blackaby and Caleb of old encouraged me: Regardless which way anyone else is rowing, you be filled with following God.
"A woman with the gift of prophecy has to be very careful," the preacher said. "What she hears from God, she is not to speak but to take to her prayer closet.”
We expect to see illusionists in magic shows, entertaining us. We don’t expect to find illusionists in our everyday lives, betraying us. Yet anywhere it pays for abuse to hide behind an abuse-free image, abusers and abusive systems can hide in plain sight.
If you have been betrayed by a spouse: The God who sees you has been there. And as Malachi 2 tells us: The Lord hates treachery. The Lord defends the betrayed.
“She cannot say that!” the woman yelled. Half a world from my home, she forbade me to invite the churched to repent. Then, we watched the Lord break through.
It’s so enticing, and so much a part of the US evangelical church culture. Yet the lure of celebrity can deceive us into agreeing with much that is not God.
“Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak.” The meaning of that quote from 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 is obvious, right? God silences women, and the inspired apostle Paul affirmed it. Or maybe, just maybe: The Lord and Paul both snort at the idea – and we have not known it.
The greetings in Paul’s New Testament letters – the ones translators have altered and we often bypass – affirm women, as well as men, who minister as true servant leaders.
Here’s something I did not know for a long time, because I was afraid to look: In letter after letter, the man with the reputation for putting women down, instead treats women as fully human, fully adult – and welcome into the fullness of the redemption that is ours in Jesus Christ.
Maybe the church has become bewildering to you. Leaders you trusted and people you respected are acting in ways that do not reflect who Jesus is, nor what they profess to believe. They have turned on anyone among them who appears to threaten the status quo. What is going on?
Any number of motives can prompt leaders in our church systems to create an illusion that refuge for the abused exists, where it does not. “They say, ‘All is well, all is well,’ when it is not.” So how can we know?