It’s been over a year since I talked here with Barnabas International’s Josh Beck about member care and cross-cultural workers. At the time, he mentioned “emotional and spiritual abuse” as a “pressure point” that Barnabas was beginning to look at and said he’d know more on the topic in six months.
While it took me longer than I’d planned on, I recently reached out to him again to follow up. (How time flies!) Josh said that Barnabas staff had come across abuse situations when providing member care, so they first decided to look at themselves to make sure they weren’t fostering any systems that could lead to abuse in their own organization.
This evaluation took the form of a spiritual-abuse audit, led by Silas West, an adult TCK and former cross-cultural worker in Nepal and member-care professional, who now works as a licensed mental-health counselor in the US. Josh suggested I contact Silas, and Silas kindly agreed to add his voice to our discussion. Following is our conversation, which took place over email.
Thanks, Silas, for talking with me about such an important topic. First off, what do you see as the characteristics of spiritual abuse, and how have you seen it take place in the world of cross-cultural work?
Thanks for asking this question and for making this issue known in a broader way. So specifically, you asked about the characteristics of spiritual abuse. The first characteristic is that spiritual abuse often occurs as a misuse of power. An individual or group with greater power causes harm (intentionally or unintentionally) to someone with less power. For abuse to be spiritual abuse, there must be a religious, sacred, or spiritual (faith-based) context.
This does not mean it has to only be within a church. It can take place in para-church organizations or faith-based organizations. It occurs in marriages or parenting where faith, Scripture, or fear of God is used to coerce or manipulate, and it can happen in a mentoring or discipleship setting or in a small group . . . anywhere where the sacred or faith is the context of the abuse.
It can be committed by an individual or by a group or system. It is not always committed by a leader. A pastor, leader, director, elder, or missionary team leader may be abusive. But so can a member of a congregation or team. If that member can wield the opinion of the group, even if that member is technically an equal in power sharing, practically, they hold power over the one being abused because they control the opinion or perspective of the group over the victim. Power is not just in the rank or role held. It can be real or perceived.
Spiritual abuse utilizes various methods to control, coerce, manipulate, or otherwise influence. Scripture is often used to persuade someone toward an outcome that the abuser wants. Theological teaching, fear of the eternal, or position in the group (like how the group may reject them if they disclose wrongdoing) are also used.
And one of the key characteristics of spiritual abuse is that it is not always intentional. In fact, I would say in the majority of abuse situations I work with, it happens unintentionally. But this is why it is often missed. Because those committing the abuse are usually in positions of authority or greater power, they get to dictate the narrative of what happened, which is filtered through the lens of their intentions.
What is essential to truly understand if abuse is occurring or not is the impact, not the intention. This means centering the victim when deciding when abuse has occurred. Whether it was intended or not, victims experience holistic spiritual, emotional, and psychological harm.
Spiritual abuse may include manipulation, exploitation, enforced accountability, censorship in decision making, requirements for secrecy and silence, pressure to conform, shaming, misuse of Scripture or the pulpit or leadership roles to control behavior, condemning language, requiring obedience, suggesting the abuser has a divine position, isolation from others, and more.
The second part of your question asked how I have seen this take place in cross-cultural work. I have a number of stories I could share and probably will over the course of this interview. But in general, I often see organizations fail their cross-cultural workers by protecting team, regional, or area leaders who have had abuse allegations leveled against them over believing and protecting the ones experiencing the abuse.
The abuse is often minimized or reframed as a misunderstanding. Victims are often told that they need to be forgiving and focus on unity. Sometimes there is silence—Maybe if we don’t respond this will die down. Frequently, victims are blamed for what happened and are censored. They are removed from their positions and cut off from support or help. What I frequently see is a concerted effort to silence the problem in order to get on to business as usual—but the problem that is getting silenced is the victim, not the abuser or the abusive culture.
I’m sure many will recognize what you’ve described but will be reluctant to label it as “abuse,” as that’s such a loaded word. (And that’s where some of the silencing can come in.) What should people do to make sure abusive behavior is seen for what is is—by the victim, by the perpetrator, and by others, such as those in member care—so that it will be appropriately addressed?
Honestly there is not much that can be done to make perpetrators and those who protect systems that cause abuse accept what is being done as abusive. If they are willing to acknowledge it, good on them, but they are in the minority.
For instance, I used to work for a sending organization as the director of mental health and counseling in the member-care department. I was getting a significant number of cases of C-PTSD (Complex Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder), depression and anxiety, and other mental-health illnesses from within two specific overseas teams. As I dug deeper, I discovered that their leaders, who were very well loved by the main leadership as charismatic and able to recruit well and tell a good story on stage, were bullies, would overstep boundaries, were very controlling, maintained a culture of secrecy on their field sites, and outed people who sought help from outside the team. . . . The list of their poor treatment of people goes on.
I tried to work with these two leaders directly with the help and partnership of the regional leadership, who supported my efforts (they actually asked for it), but we got nowhere. So the regional director asked me to present a report to organizational leadership that outlined our findings, our efforts to intervene, and our recommendations that these leaders be removed for a minimum of a year and sent to very carefully chosen places that could help them address their issues.
Instead, leadership rewrote the narrative saying that these field leaders were victims of a smear campaign against them, that they were now traumatized because they were being accused of mistreating people they loved, and that calling out leadership that was anointed by God was a sin. To add insult to injury, the organization then paid thousands of dollars to send them to a lengthy upscale retreat designed to help burnt-out and tired pastors and missionaries get some soul and physical care.
Meanwhile their victims were silenced, pleas for financial assistance for their counseling were ignored, and a new policy was put in place that disallowed the use of the words abuse and narcissism and banned the reading/recommending of books like When Narcissism Comes to Church, Redeeming Power, or A Church Called TOV. On top of that, I was given a week to pack up my office.
For victims, it is also complex. Many of them are caught up in systems that have manipulated them for years to believe only the best of their leaders, to believe that it might break a “covenant” with their teams if they speak out or ask for help, or to believe that they are being less spiritual and lacking faith if they can’t “tough it out for the kingdom.” I often find people very resistant to accept they are being abused for some of these reasons.
It is not my job to convince anyone of anything, though. Often I just ask the question, “Is it possible that you are experiencing an abusive environment?” and then let them ask questions like, “What would abuse look like?” I can define spiritual and emotional abuse for them and let them decide.
Organizations like Barnabas International are doing a really good job of educating member-care practitioners on how to identify spiritual abuse and what to do when they encounter it. I have spoken at several of the last Barnabas conferences about the topic and received good responses from MC professionals. They are also spearheading awareness campaigns for missionaries. And I’ve presented to a group of field workers about what spiritual abuse is and how to get help if it is happening to them.
More needs to be written to grow awareness. Often what helps is just finding ways to put a name to the array of symptoms victims are experiencing. Their growing lack of interest in things that they used to love, decreased motivation for ministry, panic attacks, depression or anxiety, reduced trust in others, etc., are not sin, failure, or an absence of God’s blessing—they are actually their nervous systems’ natural (God-designed) reaction to prolonged mistreatment.
Care has to be given to victims to prepare them for the possible reaction of their organizations if they speak out. Many have lost their standing within their orgs for calling out abuse and have had to serve under a banner of stigma or, what usually happens, get pushed out of the organization.
Thanks for advocating for your coworkers, and I’m sorry that you lost your job because of it. Spiritual abuse certainly has many and far-reaching consequences. I’d like to drill deeper into one of those consequences you listed: victims’ “reduced trust in others.”
Church and mission structures are often set up with defined lines of authority and communication. When abuse is introduced into those structures, how can that affect a victim’s trust, not only in those in leadership, but also in the institution of the Church itself and, ultimately, in God?
Craig, this is one of the truly tragic consequences of spiritual abuse. As you said, church and mission structures are set up with defined lines of authority and communication. In fact, their functional success depends on those structures working smoothly. Trust is the only way those structures can operate in a way where everyone gets what they need to do their jobs and to thrive.
Research psychologist Timothy Levine asked the questions why and how humans are prone to being deceived and, therefore, subjected to abusive systems and people. He discovered what he called the “Truth-Default Theory” (“Truth-Default Theory and the Psychology of Lying and Deception Detection,” Current Opinion in Psychology, vol. 47, October 2022, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2022.101380). Basically, he discovered that we are predisposed to believe in the honesty of others unless our skepticism is triggered by enough evidence to the contrary.
What typically happens in a church or missional context is that people have given their trust to leadership—often in a significant way—sometimes with loaded language, such as “covenantal” or “joining family.” So people who are seeking belonging, wanting to be part of something bigger than themselves, or desiring to make an impact for good on the world, they enter into a system that promises to give them a place to belong, promises to give them purpose, promises to be trustworthy. Often those joining are young and haven’t experienced much of the world, and their “trust-meters” are strong.
Taking all of this into consideration, it often takes a great deal of mistreatment, of deception, of hurt before someone lets go of what Diane Langberg calls “a deep need to feel safe, to believe that evil could not possibly exist in the circles I inhabit.” So because it takes such an incredible amount of abuse to overcome these factors (loaded language, promises of purpose, sacredness of the spaces, the psychological effects of our truth-default bias, and our deep need to believe that we are safe), enough to trigger skepticism in them, once it does happen, trust is not just damaged or tarnished, it is shattered.
Some people are able to focus the broken trust onto the organization or onto specific leaders who harmed them. But many were initially introduced to the faith through the charisma of the same leaders or organizations who harmed them and have a much more difficult time separating the specific individual or institution from the church in general, faith, or even God. This results in a situation where their broken trust extends to their faith or belief in God or at least that God is somehow good.
I also want to revisit the truth-default theory again. Because our default is naturally to trust others, there is something that psychologically happens to someone when that internal mechanism gets broken. It triggers something in the parasympathetic nervous system of a person where the self-protection part of our brains takes over, and even if we wanted to, we can no longer trust until that internal switch gets turned off.
This is why one of the common effects/symptoms of C-PTSD is “difficulty trusting others.” This isn’t just something someone chooses for themselves. It happens outside of their ability to control. And it is not limited to situations or relationships similar to the one that harmed them. It often affects a person’s global ability to trust others or to get close to/attach to people or groups until that parasympathetic response gets resolved.
For many victims it is not simply, “I don’t trust my church (or mission agency) anymore.” It becomes something far more devastating: “I no longer know how to trust anyone or know how to feel safe belonging to anything again.” To me, this highlights how insidious and evil spiritual abuse can be. It debases the very psychological systems God created in us to connect, to build community, to unify together around common goals, to relate, to experience intimacy. Sometimes the damage is irreparable and people never recover their innate, childlike ability to believe that they will not be harmed again. Often recovery is slow and gradual and comes with great pain.
And every time a victim’s abuse gets denied— “You are just exaggerating what I said,” “You are making it sound worse than I meant it,” “No one meant to hurt you,” “That wasn’t abuse, it was accountability,” “Abuse is such a strong word,” “You are letting culture define abuse instead of the Bible,” “Everyone gets hurt in a church sometimes,” “You are confusing abuse with disappointment,” “It’s not trauma, it’s conflict,” “You are just oversensitive,” “You took it the wrong way,” “You are too easily offended,” “You are just projecting your own issues onto me”—the trust-trauma goes deeper.
A person not feeling heard or believed by the person or system they once put so much trust and belief in just adds to the deepening psychological effect of damaging their innate trust-default bias and makes their ability to trust anything again that much more difficult.
I didn’t even mention the effect that broken trust has on the functioning of systems that depend on trust to work. But people expressing their difficulty trusting after being harmed are often penalized for their expression of concern, doubt, or critical thinking. They are called troublemakers, people bent on disunity, people being influenced by culture instead of God’s word, unforgiving, etc. All of this just adds to the problem instead of making it better.
As you allude to, there’s been quite a bit of helpful literature written lately concerning abuse, narcissism, bullying, and the like in the modern church. While it all applies to Christians in general, what are some aspects of the missional world in particular that deserve more attention, characteristics that create environments that might be susceptible to spiritual abuse?
I think there are a number of unique aspects to missional life that create environments that are more susceptible to abuse. One is the isolation factor. A classic characteristic of narcissistic abusers is to isolate their victims (usually a domestic spouse) from outside support—think parents, friends, etc. The missional setting automatically does this.
Add to it teaching that a particular leader might promote like “We cannot trust therapy because it is humanistic” or “We honor one another by dealing with our issues in-house and not exposing one another to outside scrutiny” or even “We cannot talk about anything that happens here in our community because of the risk of exposure and deportation—anything shared outside could jeopardize our being able to be here.” (All of these and many more are things I have come across in my work.) So if you take teaching or community norms like this and add them to an already isolated context, so much abuse can take place without anyone knowing anything about it.
In his book, When Narcissism Comes to Church, Chuck DeGroat writes something to the effect that ministry draws people with some degree of narcissism. Who else but those with some level of narcissistic confidence can stand before a congregation week in and week out and speak on behalf of God?
In my own experience as an MK in Africa and then as a career missionary in South Asia, I can attest to the fact that many who are “called” to missions are actually people looking for a platform, and mission work provides a contact to be adored by supporting churches back home and practically worshiped by local people. Throw in team members who have been raised with Christian teachings about submission and the need to honor “authorities appointed by God,” and you have a recipe for abuse.
It is one of the roles of a good leader to protect those whom they lead. I served under a couple at one time who looked out for me by always questioning how much I was taking on. Their thoughts were that the work of ministry will always be there, but there is only so much of us to go around. We need to steward ourselves as a limited resource. It was helpful to be supported in saying no, having boundaries, etc.
So many of the abuse survivors I have the privilege of working with have vastly different experiences. Whether explicitly or implicitly, they are given the message that if they are being supported, they owe it to their supporters to serve with (code word) “diligence,” which actually means with no boundaries. Or they are given the message that the weight of people’s eternity rests on their shoulders so there is no space or time for recreation or leisure—only time for ministry.
As an MK who attended a boarding school specifically for global workers, I am very aware of the issues those schools have. There are some pretty horrific stories that have surfaced following investigations of abuse at these schools. Thankfully my experience was a good one. But what occurs over and over again in these settings is that abuse happens, people who could do something about it find out, and it gets covered up out of fear of the financial implications or of marring the reputation of the ministry or even God. So the abuse actually just keeps happening because abusive people discover that there are no consequential consequences.
Other types of abuse follow the same pattern: A team leader is found out to be abusive. Rather than removing them from leadership, which would draw questions and attention, it’s covered up, victims are discredited or silenced, and the status quo is maintained. This is not unique to missions, but it probably is more prevalent because of the lack of public scrutiny and the isolation from accountability. It’s easier to spin the narrative when you are thousands of miles away from anyone who can ask more critical questions.
So I would say the key factors I see are isolation from support; the teachings and spiritual formation people bring to the table about things like boundaries, expectations, leadership/authority, and autonomy; narcissistic leaders who are drawn to the kinds of platforms missional ministry provides; the need to protect the ministry; and the weight of the kind of work that global missions offers. These are all factors that uniquely contribute to spiritual abuse in missional settings.
This is quite a sobering topic. What encouragement would you have for current or former cross-cultural workers who are experiencing the effects of spiritual abuse? Can you share about some you know who have found their way to healing and regained trust?
My first response is that there is hope for sure. For some of our most painful wounds that we receive from spiritual spaces, we never had language to discuss them—before talking to someone (usually someone outside the situation who can help us see things objectively). The wounds lived in our bodies, and when they manifested, we thought they were a sign of weak faith or sin or maybe rebelliousness or selfishness. But in reality, it was because we felt our safety was being threatened.
Hope is in being able to begin naming our experience for what it is and not what we were told it is by those who benefited by controlling us. Doing so is not an attack on our faith or our spirituality (though it can feel like it at first); it is an act of clarity and care for ourselves for the ways we had to adapt in order to feel safe. It is truly an act of faith—faith that God may hope for something better for us than what we were told was “His best.”
Curiosity is a natural part of cognitive and emotional development. Many of us were taught that questioning is dangerous and a sign of rebellion. So our nervous systems adapted, teaching us to fear asking questions, thwarting our God-given means of development. We learned to distrust our minds in order to belong. We learned that our acceptance within our spiritual spaces shifts the moment we express disagreement, a current struggle, or a need.
So our nervous systems learned that anything that wasn’t black and white must be dangerous, that anything we had questions about was a threat. Our bodies adapted by hiding from ourselves what felt true about our experiences or about the doubts we had because being honest threatened connection and belonging.
Repeated warnings about God’s punishment and wrath from early developmental years activated our nervous system’s fear centers, and even though our minds adapted as we matured to understand a theology of God that integrated his mercy, grace, and forgiveness, our nervous systems—our physical bodies—keep reacting to old messages embodied in childhood. This created a split, where our minds believed one thing about who God is, but our nervous systems believed another. We needed the childhood messaging of God’s goodness and faithfulness, not the fear messaging about hell or damnation.
We learned that our pain was a faith issue, a failure on our part to manage ourselves correctly or to appropriate our faith adequately. Our bodies learned that suffering should be hidden, spiritualized, or pushed down. What we actually needed instead of the message to pray harder or seek Jesus more fervently was comfort and presence so that our nervous systems could receive co-regulation. Suffering didn’t need to mean we were lacking faith; it meant we were humans without enough support and compassionate resourcing.
We were taught not to trust our “Spidey-sense” when we were pretty sure something was wrong with phrases like The heart is deceiving you or You are under spiritual attack. Frequent gaslighting overrode our perception of threat or a boundary crossing. Our bodies learned that our instincts—God-given methods of detecting threats—threatened our belonging and connections to our communities, so we learned to silence our instincts, resulting in broken trust with our bodies long after we leave.
When we witnessed real abuse or unhealthy dynamics and spoke up about them, we were ignored or our concerns were explained away. So our nervous systems learned that naming pain or abuse risks being exiled. We learned to accept and tolerate greater levels of abuse or un-health even if it hurt us.
The hope is that once people can begin to name and recognize these experiences as maladaptations to our nervous systems, when fear or pressure or silence became normalized, we can see how these patterns made sense in their context, and we can seek out new experiences where safety and honesty exist. Our nervous systems are resilient and can learn new, healthy adaptations if we give them the chance to.
I was recently sitting in my church and one of the pastors stood up and acknowledged how he had said something disparaging about another denomination in an offhand way in his sermon the previous week. He said clearly what he did, how it didn’t reflect the character of God to disparage anyone or any group of people, even in jest, and that he wanted to repent publicly for what he had done. What he had said truly was not a big deal, but he was willing to humble himself even in the little things. It felt safe.
In that moment, I realized how so many times in different spiritual spaces I had sat through countless toxic statements, “othering” comments, etc. I realized that many times I had even brought attention to discriminating and disparaging statements made by leaders and pastors. But each time they were minimized, normalized, spiritualized, denied, or flat-out ignored. I began weeping in my seat at the felt safety my nervous system was experiencing at the simple yet profound apology from my pastor for making an off-hand remark about people from another denomination. It was a moment of hope and healing.
When our nervous systems experience something good, they respond, often with grief at all the bad they have experienced. But that is a sign that what has been normal no longer feels normal and we are adapting to healthier, godlier environments.
I also recently exchanged emails with a former client who had gone through a traumatic team situation. Her team leader had borderline personality disorder, which is marked by emotional instability, an insatiable need for approval, the need for others to walk on eggshells, etc. The explicit demands this leader made were impossible. But even more traumatizing were the implied demands made by her emotional instability. On top of it, she required the team, made up of four single women, to live together in the same apartment. So there was no emotional safety or space.
It took years for this client to feel she could name what had happened to her and begin to parse out the specifics of how she had been harmed. Her faith had been twisted by this leader to the point she believed saying anything honest about her experience was not only a betrayal of her leader, but of God himself, who had set her up as leader. This, along with her need to be loyal, made it feel unsafe for so long to name what had happened. But once she did, she began to look for new experiences that allowed her to begin feeling safe, to grieve her lack of safety, and to learn to trust herself again. It took time, but the fullness of life and the courage she lives in now is in stark contrast to her old missionary life.
I used to work in a large church system that celebrated the extreme. Missionaries who had extreme situations, people who did extreme street witnessing, people who went to extreme lengths to share the gospel, etc., were platformed and venerated. It created an atmosphere where people who were living normal lives felt like they weren’t doing enough for God. My wife and I left that environment after, as I mentioned before, I named some abuse taking place within some of the overseas church-planting teams and I was fired from my member-care position.
A couple of years after leaving, we visited a service to support a friend who was singing on the worship team. As soon as the sermon started, we both felt a level of tension and noticed growing anxiety in our bodies. The sermon would have felt normal to us before. But we had detoxified ourselves by attending a different, healthier church where amping people up to serve God in extreme ways was not the messaging: being salt and light, loving our neighbors, finding God in the quiet and normal walk of life was what we had come to accept as normal. So when our bodies encountered something different, something that felt like a boundary crossing, they reacted with anxiety and even panic. We both had to leave the auditorium.
I have spoken to a number of others who have had similar experiences of panic rise up in them when they returned to this church’s services after a lengthy time away. Even their own missionaries who return for a home assignment report feeling this way, like, “I don’t know what is happening, but I feel really anxious when J*&&% starts preaching.”
I see this as hope: hope that we can learn to discern what is healthy for us after getting out of what is not, hope that where abuse was normalized and we couldn’t see it as abusive becomes clear for what it is when we can name it and see it clearly, hope that our resilient nervous systems can relearn how to feel safe when given truly safe spaces to exist in, and hope that they can then tell us more accurately when we aren’t safe whenever we find ourselves in toxic settings that used to feel normal.
Thanks again, Silas—for bringing awareness to this issue, for giving wise counsel to those affected by it, and for offering hope.
[photo: “Broken Glass,” by Rene Mensen, used under a Creative Commons license]
