Open Letter: To My Dear Fellow Pastors, Missionaries, Educators

By Douglas Lay (March 3, 2022)

PART 1

I am ashamed of my professions.

As an ordained pastor of thirty-eight years, a fourteen-year former cross-cultural missionary, and a seventeen-year Bible college professor, I am ashamed to publicly identify as a Christian leader these days.

Several years ago, the leader of the largest Christian institution of 1.2 billion Catholics, Pope Francis, publicly admitted, from the holy Vatican city, to decades of unspeakable sexual abuse by the clergy and church institutional cover-ups by the clergy:

“Child sex abuse is a akin to human sacrifice and the ‘wrath of God’ should be visited upon the ‘ravenous wolves’ who commit it.”

During that same week, the leader of the largest Christian Protestant institution of 15 million Southern Baptists, Dr. J.D. Greear, echoed a similar sentiment of confession by the Pope, calling on all church leaders to repent of

“a culture that has made abuse, cover-ups and evading accountability far too easy,” and for thinking that clergy sexual abuse is “a Catholic problem” or a “corrupt Hollywood problem.”

Some in my professions—engaged in sexual abuse over multiple decades against countless innocent children and immersed in a premeditated cover-up of that abuse—have failed to follow the essential, foundational core truths of the gospel by the founder and author of our professions—Jesus Christ:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.” (Luke 4:18-19 ESV)

All sexual and physical abuse victims, particularly child victims, are members of this special and loved group by Jesus in need of His good news, liberty, and favor.

Yet, some in my professions, regardless of their theological, geographical, racial, and socio-economical positions, have brought hopelessness, captivity, darkness, oppression and rejection to the very defenseless sheep they were called to protect while disguised as wolves in shepherd’s clothing.

So what should we, Christian leaders, do?

1. IDENTIFY WITH VICTIMS:

We must acknowledge, identity, and empathize with the same experiences that sexual and physical abuse victims have in common with the spiritual, emotional and physical abuse victims of Jesus’ day.

Between Jesus’ baptism and triumphal entry, He encountered a diverse group of victims immersed in pain, fear, isolation, rejection, enslavement, and grief—similar experiences shared by sexual abuse victims.

Consider how sexual abuse victims may share the same

• spiritual oppression of the demon-possessed man in the synagogue; the

• social isolation of the man engulfed in leprosy outside the city; the

• total dependency of the paralytic dropped through the roof; the

• public embarrassment of the man with the disfigured hand in the synagogue; the

• overwhelming anxiety of the soldier over his servant’s near-death illness; the

• unexpected grief of the widow over her son’s death; the

• lonely enslavement of the demon-possessed man living in the cemetery; the

• humiliating shame of the woman with a chronic blood disorder; the

• excruciating grief of the father over his 12-year old daughter’s death; the

• overwhelming bondage of the demon-possessed young man; the

• emotional isolation of the man’s muteness caused by demonic-possession; the

• debilitating helplessness of the woman’s demonic-possession of eighteen years; the

• physical suffering of the man with dropsy; the

• religious rejection of the Samaritan with leprosy; and the

• blatant silencing of the blind beggar by the religious community. [1]

We need to, first and foremost, see the pain and despair of sexual abuse victims through the same eyes of compassion, empathy, and acceptance that Jesus saw in these loved and cherished victims.

We must never treat a sexual abuse victim as an inconvenience, as a statistic, as a problem, as a burden, or worse, as a lie.

2. MINISTER TO VICTIMS:

We need to be FOR victims, not just against abuse, by engaging in proactive and practical works of provision, restoration, and protection for these victims.

Do we need Jesus to remind us of “what good is it if someone says he has faith, but does not have works?” (James 2:14). Do we need to be reminded about what good is it to preach about the evils of abuse, to proclaim our hatred of the deception of predators, and to boast about of our policies and procedures to protect children, but to ignore victims when they come forward, or to place extraordinary burdens upon them, and not the predator, to prove their claims, or to silence the victims in order to protect our institutions' reputations?

Jesus didn’t engage in a dialogue about the crippling effects of paralysis—Jesus restored the man’s legs. Jesus didn’t discuss the stages of grief of losing a child—Jesus raised the widow’s son from the dead. Jesus didn’t share the statistics of the number of people possessed by demons—Jesus cast out the demons into a herd of pigs!

Jesus also met the immediate needs of these victims with actions of love, chosen specifically for them. Jesus addressed the beggar’s blindness, not a skin disease; Jesus healed the woman of a demon, not a withered hand; Jesus freed the woman of her chronic blood disorder, not the grief of a deceased child.

We must initiate practical ways to meet the needs of the victims “bleeding on the side of the road”—with the strategic policies and procedures of the Good Samaritan, not the fear, indifference, and silence of the Priest and the Levite.

(Part 2 Next Week)

Comments:

• For full disclosure, I was physically and sexually assaulted, at age 10, at the home of a neighbor--Bob Stroeber, and I was physically and sexually assaulted in the dorm of an Ozark Christian college student--Ed Reynolds.

• Today is the 7th anniversary of the first edition of Is It Enough? Sexual Abuse Within the Church: A Case Study at First Christian Church of Florissant.

[1] These 15 examples are a selection of people whom Jesus healed as recorded in the book of Luke.