Breaking the silence
As more domestic violence survivors speak out,
the church must be ready to help them heal
By Eva Stimson
It has been nearly 20 years since Julie Owens’ husband threatened her with a carpet knife. But she describes this episode from a short-lived abusive marriage in chilling detail — as if it happened yesterday.
“He was threatening to hurt me if I yelled or screamed. He held me at knife point for hours.”
The couple’s baby son slept peacefully nearby. In another part of the house her parents were busy packing for an anniversary trip.
Owens says her husband, David, was upset because he had called home and the line was busy. He accused her of being unfaithful to him. He had been possessive and controlling since the early days of their marriage, but this was the closest he had come to harming her physically.
Finally David fell asleep and Owens hid the knife. The next morning he told her, “I should have killed you last night when I had the chance.”
The daughter of a Presbyterian minister, Owens says she “was educated, well-traveled. I didn’t fit the stereotype of someone who would be abused.” But church connections and social status could not protect her from a husband who was charming in public, but who struggled with inner demons precipitated by his own childhood abuse.
After the knife incident Owens filed for divorce, and her father forced David to move out. (The couple had been living with Owens’ parents while they tried to salvage their marriage.) Then one night Owens and her dad returned home to find David waiting for them in the dark, again with a knife. Summoned by neighbors, the police arrived to find Owens and her father bleeding from serious stab wounds. Fortunately, both recovered, and David went to jail.
Only then did members of First Presbyterian Church in Honolulu, Hawaii, learn about the nightmare shadowing the family of their pastor, Robert S. Owens. They were “devastated and shocked,” Julie Owens says.
Not in my church
In every town — and most likely every congregation — there are people affected by the scourge of domestic violence. A growing number of them are speaking out.
A quarter of all women in the United States will experience domestic violence in their lifetime, according to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence. But generally people today are better educated about abuse than the Owens family was 20 years ago.
Marie Fortune, whose Seattle-based FaithTrust Institute (formerly the Center for the Prevention of Sexual and Domestic Violence) has led the way in raising awareness of abuse issues, says she has seen progress over the past 30 years. “Domestic violence is no longer a completely hidden issue,” she says. “There’s been a significant increase in resources to address the problem.”
Yet more work is needed, particularly in the church. A January 2007 article in Sojourners quotes evangelical feminist scholar Catherine Clark Kroeger, a Presbyterian, who notes: “The rate of abuse in Christian homes is exactly the same as in the general population.”
Some churches, in fact, contribute to abuse by teaching that women should be subordinate to men. “Churches have been part of the problem,” Fortune says, “but have tremendous potential to be part of the solution ... by reaching people in terms of their values and beliefs.”
Unfortunately, say Presbyterians committed to advocacy on the issue, many pastors and church members still don’t want to talk about domestic violence.
“Typically, when you hold a training session, people won’t come,” says Bonnie Orth, pastor of Central Presbyterian Church in Mayfield, N.Y., and former co-moderator of the Presbyterians Against Domestic Violence Network (PADVN). “It’s not an issue people want to hear about. A lot of pastors will say ‘It’s not happening in my church.’”
Orth’s own experience suggests otherwise. She grew up in an abusive home and at age 12 made the mistake of confiding in her Presbyterian pastor. “He told me to go home and be a better girl, then called my father.”
This pastor’s response, she says, fueled her commitment to educating church leaders about domestic violence. “I decided to make sure no minister would do that again.”
One pastor's call to act
Orth’s childhood might have been different if Kevin Frederick had been her pastor. This associate pastor of Black Mountain (N.C.) Presbyterian Church has led his congregation in developing a policy on domestic violence, and has instituted rigorous training to equip church staff to assist abuse victims. All parents of children in the church’s preschool program receive educational resources on domestic violence. The church has given part of its Peacemaking Offering to a local shelter for battered women.
Last October, as part of Domestic Violence Awareness Month, Frederick led a community “service for wholeness.” Each worship bulletin contained a brochure outlining safety options for abuse victims, including telephone numbers to call for help.
Frederick, a current co-moderator of PADVN, says he sensed a call to become involved in domestic violence issues about the time his daughter was born in 1994. He was pastor of a church in Maryville, Tenn., at the time. “I was reading about all these cases in the newspaper. They were so disturbing to me.”
He prayed, asking God what he could do. Not long after that he found himself in a courtroom (to support a church member who had been arrested at a nuclear arms protest). A woman seated next to him spotted his clerical collar and whispered, “Will you pray with me?” Tearfully she explained that her husband was abusing her and putting their children at risk. He prayed with the woman, but never saw her again.
This troubling encounter spurred Frederick to talk to other ministers in the community about the problem of domestic violence. They developed a “support in the court” program, making sure a minister was present in the courtroom and equipped to respond to the needs of abuse victims.
Crisis in Detroit
A call for help from Detroit Mayor Kwame M. Kilpatrick got Diane Smalley, pastor of Gratiot Avenue Presbyterian Church, involved in domestic violence issues. He enlisted the city’s clergywomen to help, calling domestic violence one of Detroit’s severest problems. The women organized the Council of Clergywomen of Metropolitan Detroit. They have invited pastors, police, judges and staff from hospitals and trauma centers to participate in roundtables to determine the extent of the crisis.
“It is a lot worse than we ever knew,” Smalley says. Detroit’s police department was responding to some 26,000 abuse cases per year, but there were only 116 beds in shelters for victims.
A pair of domestic violence–related murders in Detroit churches has left the community reeling. Last summer a man looking for his wife burst into a Baptist sanctuary and fatally shot his mother-in-law during worship. Another church endured a similar incident in January.
The clergywomen’s council is trying to involve more churches in seeking solutions. “We need more safe houses [for victims] and cooling off spaces for men,” Smalley says. “Churches need to preach about it.”
One goal is for five congregations each to buy a house to shelter victims of domestic violence. The Presbytery of Detroit’s social justice committee has asked Smalley to help organize a presbytery-wide response.
Smalley’s work is among a largely African-American population, but she is quick to insist that domestic violence “is not an African-American problem.” It’s a problem in all cultures, say members of PADVN, who have begun taking some of their training sessions outside the United States.
‘Turning women away’
At the invitation of the Evangelical Center for Pastoral Studies in Central America (CEDEPCA), Frederick has led workshops on domestic violence for pastors in Guatemala, where he says “there is only one [battered women’s] shelter for the whole nation.” He bases his workshops on the Bible, a source of authority the pastors respect. As a result of the sessions, many of these men have asked him for resources on parenting and marriage.
Sandi Thompson-Royer of Spokane, Wash., who helped organize PADVN in 2001, has taken teams of women from the United States to lead workshops for women in Guatemala, Costa Rica and Nicaragua. “We’re teaching basic advocacy skills to keep women safe,” she says. CEDEPCA gathers a maximum of 30–40 participants for each workshop, she adds, and “they’re turning women away.”
Presbyterian minister Ann Rhee Menzie, co-moderator with Frederick of PADVN, is discovering a similar eagerness among non-English-speaking immigrants living in Oakland, Calif. She is program director of a domestic violence and sexual assault program specifically designed to meet the needs of Korean American women.
“We are bombarded with calls every day,” she says. Some come from women in other states, drawn by the program’s website and seeking someone to talk with in their own language.
The language barrier keeps Korean immigrants from seeking refuge in mainstream domestic violence shelters, Menzie says. Women who don’t speak English also have difficulty communicating with the police. They don’t understand “restraining order” and other legal terms.
Menzie would like to see more lawyers volunteering their services. A dozen Korean churches support her program financially, but she wants more of the 300-plus Korean congregations in the San Francisco Bay area to get involved.
Signs of progress
Menzie and others praise the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) for playing a leadership role on domestic violence. “The PCUSA has done a tremendous job of engaging the issue,” Fortune says, noting that the denomination sent 100 leaders to training sessions conducted by the FaithTrust Institute in 1998.
“Presbyterians should be proud that we have one of the most comprehensive policy statements on domestic violence,” says Sara Lisherness, director of the PCUSA’s Peace and Justice program area. Turn Mourning into Dancing: A Policy Statement on Healing Domestic Violence, was approved by the 2001 General Assembly. Church sessions, presbyteries and synods have used this statement for study and as the basis for writing their own policies.
In April 2006 Clifton Kirkpatrick, stated clerk of the General Assembly, joined more than 40 U.S. religious leaders in declaring violence against women intolerable and pledging to work together to eradicate domestic violence.
Fortune hopes the day will come when “domestic violence will be a rare and unusual event.” She is encouraged that in battles against other social ills, such as smoking and drunk driving, “we’ve seen significant change in one generation.”
In the meantime, the survival of many people caught in abusive situations “has everything to do with the response of the faith community,” Julie Owens says. “When domestic violence happens, it will change your relationship with God. I have friends who have left the church because they feel abandoned by God, because the church sided with their abuser. But when people wrap their arms around you, say it’s not your fault, don’t condemn you and take your safety issues seriously, your relationship with God can become richer.”
When violence destroyed her own marriage, Owens recalls, the church helped her heal. “My church rallied behind me. My church was my salvation.”
Eva Stimson is editor of Presbyterians Today. |
