September 1999

Dear Friends,

Gunfire rips a hot wound into the silence of the night. Our neighborhood. 3:30 a.m. Eleven rounds of semi-automatic fire.

It happens every few weeks. Some say army brats; Daddy buys them guns. Some say a leader from the church around the corner; he gets his kicks by terrorizing his wife in the dead of night.

Sleep is gone. I put on a pot of coffee and remember:

• A little girl we know shares with us a story of abuse. Her stepfather is a cop. Finally, they take her to the police hospital. She is told there is no conclusive evidence. She is told she watches too much TV. Finally, her Mom throws him out. Who can help thisgirl sort out her memories, her sense of self?
  
• As we enter the dining room, we can smell the fear. He is an elder in the local church, a professional. Articulate. Well-read. He has taken us as friends. His wife and daughters will not meet his gaze. Violence permeates the room. We have no idea how to name what we feel. We are guests. Taboos reign. We try to make eye contact with the wife, the daughters. The conversation is pleasant. We want to offer shelter, to tell them they have the right to say “No!”

I work at CEDEPCA, the Centro Evangélico de Estudios Pastorales en América Central (the Evangelical Center for Pastoral Studies in Central America). For the last fifteen years we have designed and implemented flexible training programs to respond to the needs of church leaders, women and men, who are actually “in the trenches” doing pastoral work, but who have little access to continued theological, pastoral, and technical training.

One of our programs is called Women’s Pastoral Ministry. In the last couple of years this program has worked to reduce violence against women in Central America. We have sponsored seminars and brought in experts to discuss the problem. Stories are shared. Strategies. A counseling service has begun and a shelter for battered women is on the drawing boards.

Around us, violence against women seeps from the very pores of society: the media, the schools, politics, the justice system. Who can deny its existence? But in the churches, denial is the order of the day. To name the existence of violence against women in churches is one of the last great taboos:

• She is a therapist, the daughter of a pastor. Her father abused her for years. CEDEPCA has invited her to tell her story to churches in Central America. She speaks. She breaks the taboo. It takes people’s breath away.

A woman approaches her after the seminar.

The therapist looks into her eyes: “It happened to you, too, didn’t it?”

“Yes,” she replies.

They embrace. They weep. They talk. Most of it she had already worked through, said the woman. But she had never understood the bit about being betrayed by her own body. She had never understood how part of her could have felt desire. “Thank you,” she said. “Finally, I am free. I no longer feel dirty inside. Now I can begin to understand.”

• She is a pastor. CEDEPCA sent her to teach a course about women and ministry at a local Bible Institute.

It was a rough crowd. Both men and women challenged her directly: “The Bible says you have no authority to teach men.” The men walked out and took their women with them.

CEDEPCA tries again. This time we send a man. He takes his Bible. Passage by passage, stereotype by stereotype, the group begins to work things through.

In such circumstances, you take what you can get.

I won’t do the statistics bit here. Sometimes statistics just make you numb.

It’s enough to say that violence against women is everyplace, all the time.

It’s enough to ask what names and faces all this brings to your mind.

Two final questions come to mind:

• What is being done to reduce violence against women where you live?
• Will you help us reduce violence against women where we live?

Under the Mercy,

Dennis A. Smith