What Happens When the Church Hurts Its People

Diane Langberg has been a psychologist for more than 50 years, starting in the 1970s when there was no diagnostic category for post-traumatic stress disorder and there were very few Christian female psychologists. When women began coming to Langberg saying things like, “My father did weird things to me,” she had no idea what they meant. She went to a supervisor, who told her that women sometimes tell hysterical stories, and that giving them attention for it would only contribute to their pathology. 

But as the months went by, more and more women came to her with stories of sexual abuse — something Langberg’s Ph.D. program in psychology had never mentioned. Simultaneously, Langberg was working with Vietnam veterans who were returning home from war. 

“I recognized the similarities between the Vietnam vets and the women,” Langberg told me in an interview for Common Good. “They had similar problems and fears — similar pains. And they were my teachers.”

Langberg observed that Vietnam vets and sexual abuse victims were often dismissed by the church leaders they reached out to for help. Soldiers were criticized for complaining when they’d come home alive. Abuse victims were told they were making up stories or speaking against men of God. Both groups were experiencing a significant lack of care from the church. And, in the case of the abuse victims, the perpetrators had often been religious leaders. 

In a new book, When the Church Harms God’s People: Becoming Faith Communities That Resist Abuse, Pursue Truth, and Care for the Wounded, Langberg draws upon more than half a century of experience doing clinical work with trauma victims, educating caregivers, and training clergy.

“I love what I do,” she says. “I get to see things that are squashed and silenced and sometimes actually dead come to life. I get to watch God work in broken places. There’s much there to love, like the people and their courage. But it also still breaks my heart.”

Langberg spoke with me about the common themes in abusive systems, the urgent  need for many church leaders to reframe their metrics of success, and the centrality of the person of Jesus. 

Through the story of your father’s struggle with Parkinson’s, you write about how a physical body that does not follow its head is a sick body, and, so too it is with the body of Christ. What leads us away from following Jesus, the head of the body of Christ? 

Big numbers. Big fame. Money. All of those are seen as fruit of the Spirit —  as proof that God is here if we have those things, which, of course, is diametrically opposed to the Scriptures. If that’s proof that God is with us, then God was clearly not with Jesus.  

I got that metaphor watching my father try to stand up by himself when he didn’t know I was looking — it really has shaped my life. He was not only a colonel in the Air Force but a superb athlete. He had control of a six foot four-and-a-half inch body. And then he didn’t.

How do you see Christians — especially church leaders — being drawn toward self-deception rather than obedience to God?

It started in Eden. It’s always been there. We’re drawn to things we call ‘good’ that are not of God. That’s how we got in this mess in the first place, right?

So, the allure differs for people, but obviously there’s praise, fame, money, people following you, wanting to be next to you, wanting to be close to you because you’re so wonderful. They become your disciples rather than Christ’s. I think that’s part of what humans do in general and, unfortunately, the church has certainly caught that disease. 

What’s really sad is that so many of the sheep think they’re following God by following a person, and they don’t seem to really understand that you don’t need a person in order to follow God. There already was a person who followed God perfectly.

But to be with somebody famous or on the radio or in videos or whatever somehow elevates people for themselves, and they’re hungry for it. Hunger makes people vulnerable.

Many Common Good readers are pastors and ministry leaders. What do you hope this book will help such readers understand about the nature of systemic abuse within churches, denominations, and Christian organizations?

As long as somebody is blind to what’s going on, all they will do is defend. They will want to protect their system. It’s God’s after all, so how can you say something bad about what’s God’s? The leader, the so-called shepherd, is God’s person. So, we bow before them; we pretty much worship them. We follow them. 

So for the shepherd, if all of that is taken away, they feel like they have nothing. In some ways, it’s actually a gift, because it will make you hungry for Christ. But we have come to worship, lean on, long for, and protect things like fame and congregation size — things that have nothing to do with Jesus Christ. If he had insisted on those things, he would have been a failure. He looked like a failure. But was he not.

Along those lines, the “call to limitation” stands out as remarkably countercultural. Pastors are often told they should be doing more, growing their churches, going faster. What might it look like for a shepherd to embrace his or her limitations and, in doing so, bring help rather than harm to those in their care?

I seem to be coming back again and again to the person of Christ, which is indeed what I do. If pursuing fame, wealth, and whatever else proves God’s presence, then Jesus was an utter failure. Somehow we’ve been led to believe, and have chosen to believe, the idea that those things prove God’s presence, when what proves God’s presence is likeness to him. The things that we’re seeking are really very earthly things.

We’ve really twisted in our minds what the church is supposed to look like. It’s supposed to look like sheep who look like their shepherd.  You can have two people. You can have 2,000 people. It’s the same purpose.

If you’ve bought into the idea that fame, numbers, or money are the measures of church success, then it can feel like something is being taken away if that doesn’t work out. But it seems that, really, what’s being taken away is an obligation to something that harms the leader as much as it does anyone. 

Sometimes more, because you have to fully believe in what you’re doing. If you have 3,000 people in your church or 300 … the loss of those people to any level is placed at the pastor’s feet, and so pastors want to protect that. And pastors, who are sincere and want to do the right thing, they want to see the church grow. It’s not like it’s all bad pastors. It’s people in positions that do have power and wanting to succeed in that, which often alters the way we think. We slide over into those things being more important than love and obedience to Christ. 

What would you say to someone who says, “Well, I know we’re not supposed to be caught up in numbers, but don’t those numbers represent people coming to know Christ?”

The first thing I would say is, “then Jesus was a failure. He started out 12 and ended up with 11.” But he was not a failure. He said, “I always do what pleases the Father,” whether he was talking to 5,000 on a hill, or whether he was talking to three of the 11 that stayed with him. He said to his disciples, “Will you too walk away?” He’s asking us that same question today.

What else would you like to share?

The most important thing to me is the centrality of Jesus. Whether you’re a pastor or somebody who sits in the pews, whether you’re spouse or single, whether you have money or don’t — those things do not measure your likeness to Christ.  

I think we are hungry for likeness to Christ, but we have also lost our way. We believe that so many of these other things are proof that he is with us and we are with him. And then you have people in churches where they find out that the pastor that they loved and was not only having sex with women but with children, and that it went on for years. It’s going to hurt you to do something about it.

So we have come to measure ourselves, our spirituality, our likeness to him, and the fruit of our lives by the things that are hurting us. But it’s when we bear his fruit, his likeness, in private and in public that we bring joy to him. 

I live in Dallas, where a church of 200 is small to the point that people question if everything is okay over there. 

In which case, that’s what they would say to Jesus.

“You’re here to tell people about God and you only have 200 people following you?”  Well, he would say, “No, actually, I only have 11!” 

If I have 2,000 people in my church and you only have 200, that 2,000 feeds my ego. It’s proof that I’m doing a good job. And yet the person with 200, or even 20, may be someone who is faithful to God and carries his likeness wherever they go. But they’re treated like that doesn’t count. Then again, Jesus didn’t count either.

What do you think keeps some people coming back to church after they’ve been in a place where a pastor was abusive or a moral failure occurred? It seems to me we should be celebrating those people far more than we do.

Yes! It’s quite remarkable when people don’t let that totally define them in terms of their relationship to church. I think they’re looking for Jesus, who they didn’t find in the previous place. I think that’s probably what drives it, even if they wouldn’t know how to say that. They’re looking for him.

 

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. When the Church Harms God’s People is available from Brazos Press.