Sumber-sumber

Trauma-Informed Evangelism (2023) – Charles Kiser (Churches of Christ), Elaine A. Heath

(Wesleyan)1
Potential interlocutors
 Trauma
o Spirit and Trauma (2010) - Shelly Rambo
o Tragedies and Christian Congregation (2019) – ed. Southgate et al
o Dawn of Sunday: The Trinity and Trauma-Safe Churches (2022) –
Cockayne et al
o Bearing the Unbearable (2015) – Deborah van Deusen Hussinger
o When the Roll is Called (2017) – Hoffman  A history how the “true” gospel
of evangelicalism came to be
 Religious Trauma
o The Trauma of Doctrine (2021) – Paul C. Maxwell
o Bully Pulpits (2022) – Michael J. Kruger
o You Are Your Own: A Reckoning with the Religious Trauma of Evangelical
Christianity (2019) – Jamie Lee Finch (pp. 59-82); she is a sex witch
o Diane Langberg, Redeeming Power: Understanding Authority and Abuse
in the Church (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2020)  ch. 9 “Power Abused in the
Church”
o What Jesus Intended (2023) – Todd D. Hunter
o After Doubt: How to Question your Faith without Losing It (2021) – A. J.
Swoboda
 Theodicy
o Everything Happens for a Reason (2018) – Kate Bowler
 Dogmatics
o Christian Dogmatics (2017) - Cornelis van der Kooi
o Good Tools Are Half the Job (2021) - Cornelis van der Kooi, Margriet van der
Kooi
 Spiritual care
o The Practice of Pastoral Care (2015) - Carrie Doehring
1
Charles Kiser and Elaine A. Heath, Trauma-Informed Evangelism: Cultivating Communities of Wounded
Healers, Perlego (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2023).

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Introduction
 The good ol’ evangelical way of evangelism  A cold-turkey sales call disguised as a
survey  Response met: seen as judgmental and rejection
 The purpose of the book: to evangelise those who carry spiritual abuse and trauma
 The spiritually abused
o Religious “nones” or #exvangelicals
o Those who have been hurt by the gospel or at least by a distorted gospel
o May actually be receptive to the (true) gospel, but unreceptive to us  we
represent the source of their trauma
 Approach:
o As pastors, evangelists, theologians, but not therapists  to offer alternative
orthodox theological and social imagination about the gospel and the practice
of evangelism, which challenges popular imagination that often funds the
enactment of spiritual abuse and trauma
o As survivors of spiritual abuse and trauma ourselves
 Charles  his father was disowned by his father because of differences
in secondary matters of faith, threatened with hell
 Audience
o The primary audience is church leaders  to help them see the pain of our
neighbors, to think theologically about spiritual abuse and trauma, and to
embody the gospel to your neighbors with spiritual trauma
o The secondary audience is survivors of spiritual abuse and trauma  to help
see our own experiences more clearly, to give us fresh ways of seein God in
light of our spiritual traum
 A work of contextual theology of David Fitch, adapted from Schreiter’s framework in
Constructing Local Theologies
o Opening culture
o Opening theological tradition
o Opening dialogue between culture and theological tradition(s)
o Opening the future through contextual theology and practice
 Outline
o Part 1: Opening culture through ethnographic interview

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 o Part 2: Opening relevant theological traditions
o Part 3: Evangelism in light of the culture and the theology
 The contents through the lens of imagination
o Trauma fragments and disorders the imagination of those who carry it,
rendering them unable to imagine a life of hope and health beyond their
current experience.
o Part 1 expounds the disordered imagination
o Part 2 expounds the healing theological imagination
o Part 3 translates the healthy imagination into embodied imagination, i.e. the
postures and practices of trauma-informed evangelism
 A larger vision: the forefront of a new reformation  the emergence of a generous,
hospitable, equitable form of Christianity that heals the wounds of the world

Ch. 1 The Pain of Our Neighbors

 A study of ethnography on a local board game community
o “What if anything do you find transcendent about your experience in this
group?”
o Purpose of the study: To heal and to prevent
o A “grounded theory”
 Common Themes of Spiritual Harm
o Terminating relationship
 Forced out of relationship, ostracized, shunned for various reasons
 “Leaving the church meant automatic separation. Shunning isn’t a
word we used but it’s what we did to anyone that left the church.”
 Separation due to “worship wars”
o Mistreating those at the margins (against women and LGBTQ+)
o Exploiting pastoral authority
 The pastor is God’s representative  Such theological imagination
imbues the pastor with a striking amount of power—if he is identified
with God, he can’t be questioned when he commands and controls,
thus making space for him to abuse his power.
 Pastors who don’t need accountability

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  Monopoly on the truth  authoritarian, narcissistic, don’t listen to
anybody
o Witnessing harm
o Differentiating experiences: Why do some stay with religion and others leave?
 Depends on their ability to differentiate between God and church, and
between healthy and unhealthy religious expressions
o God and church
 The experience of trauma raises questions of theodicy (the problem of
suffering and the existence of God)
o Healthy and unhealthy churches
 A distinction between the pastor’s actions and the larger institutions of
the church and school
 The exposure to different church experiences  it doesn’t necessarily
have to look like this; I have seen pastors that aren’t like him (se the
positivity in religion)
 “If the Holy Spirit is sanctifying people, why are they so screwed up?”
 Your Neighbor Next Door
o The study was done in a small group, but there are significant number of
people who have painful experiences of spiritual abuse and trauma

Ch. 2 Understanding Spiritual Abuse and Trauma

 Joshua Ryan Butler’s “Four Causes of Deconstruction”
o “church hurt”, poor teaching, the desire to sin, “street cred”
o Not a good framing, because it invites backlash
 Including the desire to sin and “street cred” obscures real hurt and
invites this motivation to be projected onto those who are really hurt
 Poor teaching is obscure  toxic theology is not just poor, but abusive
 “church hurt” softens and minimizes the reality of the trauma
o The need for better language, better concepts, and better understanding of the
experiences and pain of our neighbors
 Three conceptual frameworks that connect to the experiences of spiritual abuse and
trauma: clinical trauma, moral injury, and spiritual abuse. The first two center on the

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 bodily experience. These concepts illuminate the complexity of one’s experience of
abuse and trauma. Therefore, healing is not a simple thing.
 Trauma
o τραῦμα: “wound”, “damage”
o Modern understanding of trauma
 Late 19th cent. by Jean-Martin Charcot, Pierre Janet, Sigmund Freud
 The root hysteria: the trauma of childhood sexual abuse
 British “shell shock”
 Abram Kardiner “The Traumatic Neuroses of War”
 Bessel van der Kolk, a leading Psychiatrist and expert in trauma
studies”
 First trauma diagnosis DSM of 1980: PTSD of Vietnam War veterans,
four categories of symptoms:
 Re-experiencing symptoms
 Avoidance symptoms
 Arousal and reactivity symptoms
 Cognition and mood symptoms
 PTSD diagnosis expansion to include survivors of childhood physical
and sexual abuse, domestic abuse, rape, accidents, natural disasters,
and other serious events
 Judith Herman’s “complex trauma”, impacts include: self-hate, self-
blame, trust issues, losing system of meaning
 Collective trauma: historical trauma, intergenerational trauma,
institutionalized trauma
 “vicarious traumatization” and “secondary traumatic stress”
o Dimensions of trauma
 Van der Kolk’s “The Body Keeps the Score”: Not just an event in the
past, but also the imprint it left on mind, brain, and body 
emphasizes neurobiological and physiological dimensions
 Gabor Maté highlights the relational dimension  a loss of trust, the
shattering of relationship, and the sense of powerlessness, feeling
utterly alone and abandoned
 Neurobiological impact of trauma

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  Amygdala  “brain’s smoke detector” (van der Kolk)
 Traumatization: Amygdala is overwhelmed in response to a
traumatic event and become stuck on high alert  in a
perpetual state of “fight”, “flight”, or “freeze”
 The imprint of trauma extends from the brain to the body
through the nervous system
 Implications
o CBT or talk therapy are not adequate, yoga or
therapeutic massage are also needed
o Three-pronged approach:
 “top down”  connecting, talking, and
understanding what happened
 “tools” to shut down inappropriate alarm
systems
 “bottom up”  allow the body to have
experiences that contradict the helplessness,
rage, and collapse
o Most people recover naturally from those reactions
 People with PTSD, only 7-8% of population
 Factors that increase the chance of developing PTSD are not
controllable
 The prevalence of trauma has produced a movement of “trauma-
informed care” in the medical community
o Spiritual Trauma (Marlene Winell)
 Her book, “Leaving the Fold” (1993)
 Her organization, “Journey Free”
 Diagnosis: Religious Trauma Syndrome (RTS), see
https://www.journeyfree.org/rts
 Religious trauma or spiritual trauma
 Definition: the trauma individuals receive through
relationships, groups, or institutions in the context of religion
and spirituality

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  Spiritual trauma is also embodied trauma. The word “spiritual”
refers to its origin in a spiritual context and is motivated by
spiritual rationale  A trauma is spiritual because of its
spiritual original and motivation
 The trauma occurs within religion and upon leaving religion
 Five sources of trauma within religion
 Cultivation of fear, e.g. the doctrine of eternal damnation
 Understanding the self as bad, e.g. original sin
 The cycle of abuse (“I’m never good enough”)
 Untrustworthiness of personal feelings and the corresponding
trustworthiness of external authority figures like Scripture and
church leaders
 Abuses of power, e.g. patriarchy authoritarianism, and sexual
repression
 Trauma occurs upon leaving religion
 Loss of social support
 Loss of systems of meaning: it signifies the death of one’s
previous life and the end of reality as it was understood (“the
loss of the assumptive world”)
 Trauma of betrayal: disblief, minimizing, devaluing their
experiences
 Not included in the DSM-5
o Spiritual Trauma in Context
 Connections between the descriptions of trauma and RTS and the
experience of board-gaming friends and Storyline members
 Physical and bodily manifestations of their response to the trauma
 insomnia, nausea, depression
 “triggered by the worship songs”
 Trust issues: difficulty trusting people or authorities
 Devastation to systems of meaning, i.e. the loss of faith (actually not
specific to religious trauma)
 “Shunning narratives”  a primary source of trauma
 Life like a Jenga tower that crumbled and had to be rebuilt

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  Secondary traumatization reflects one’s capacity for compassion and
empathy
 Inability to differentiate God and religion, healthy and unhealthy
churches may be linked to the breakdown in the brain
 Important distinction: Whether or not they experienced trauma
symptoms, many of them nonetheless experienced spiritual abuse.
 Moral injury
o Robert Lifton’s “Home from the War” (1973)
o Jonathan Shay (1990s): Traumatic suffering as “injury” rather than “disorder”,
symptoms
 A betrayal of “what’s right”, either by a person in legitimate authority,
or by oneself, in a high stakes situation
 Two related but distinct sense of the concept that stem from “moral
agency”: the one responsible for the transgression (the soldier or a
leader in authority over the soldier)
 Shay’s emphasis on the leader
o Brett Litz (2009): frame the concept of moral injury with emphasis on the
individual’s participation in the transgression: “perpetrating, failing to prevent,
bearing witness to, learning about acts that transgress deeply held moral
beliefs and expectations.” A moral transgression with lasting impact:
emotional, psychological, social, behavioral, spiritual. “The dissonance
between experience and moral beliefs leads to particular moral emotions,
particularly guilt and shame, and can lead to persistent self-ascriptions of
unforgiveability that can then drive the reexperiencing, numbing/avoidance,
and hyperarousability symptoms characteristic of PTSD.”
o Warren Kinghorn: the limitations of these models: the lack of ethical dan
moral frameworks that would illuminate the nature of suffering and the goal of
human flourishing; too individualistic, obscure the communal and social
context of morality and suffering
o Jennings and Hanegan
o Moral Injury in Context
 A useful lens: helps to illuminate the extent to which their consciences
and moral values were damaged in their experience of religious trauma

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 and spiritual abuse, adding an important layer of nuance given the
inherently moral/ethical environment of religious communities
 Failure of the leaders leads to moral conflict of the followers
 This devastation is twofold: first because it is a deep violation of moral
values, and second because the perpetrator of that violation is
simultaneously the institution (or a representative thereof) that shaped
those moral values in the first place.
 When the perpetrator is oneself: How one’s sense of moral superiority,
which one learned in one’s church culture, hurt one’s relationships
with friends: being judgmental and superior (“I’m failing them . . .”)
 Moral injury and spiritual trauma
 Moral injury is distinct from spiritual trauma in that it
highlights the impact upon one’s conscience and moral code,
and then the resulting guilt and shame when that code is
violated by someone in authority or by oneself while under
another’s authority.
 Moral injury is closely related to spiritual trauma in that both
manifest similar symptoms in the body, mind, and brain (“the
similar embodied imprint”)
 Spiritual trauma with the dimension of moral injury
 Spiritual abuse
o A concept in relation to the matrix of abuse language (child abuse, sexual
abuse, physical abuse, domestic abuse, verbal abuse, emotional abuse),
employed within psychological, medical, and criminal justice communities 
Abuse in these contexts refers to “interactions in which one person behaves in
a cruel, violent, demeaning, or invasive manner toward another person.”
o “Spiritual abuse”: First appeared in “The Subtle Power of Spiritual Abuse”
(1991) – Johnson and VanVonderen. In the contexts of cults, domestic
violence, and clergy sexual abuse.
o Comparatively little has been written

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o David Ward’s “Not all spiritual abuse is found in a cult.”
o Various definitions
 Johnson and VanVonderen: “the mistreatment of a person who is in
need of help, support, or greater spiritual empowerment, with the result
of weakening, undermining, or decreasing that person’s spiritual
empowerment”
 Wehr: “spiritual abuse is the misuse of power in a spiritual context”
 Oakley and Humphreys: “a form of psychological and emotional abuse
characterized by coercive and controlling behavior”
 Matthew and Snow: “any abuse or trauma done in the name of religion
or the deity associated with that religion”
 Diane Langberg, Redeeming Power: Understanding Authority and
Abuse in the Church (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2020), 127: “Spiritual
abuse involves using the sacred to harm or deceive the soul of
another.”
o Spiritual abuse does overlap with other abuses, but spiritual abuse is distinctly
at work when those other forms of abuse are ultimately motivated by religion
or God.
 Mark Stibbe: Without the spiritual dimension to his behavior, there
would have been no abuse at all. He would have never succeeded, over
time, in eliciting our cooperation.

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  Diane Langberg: When a spiritual leader abuses others, spiritual abuse
always occurs.
o Key features of spiritual abuse: coercive control, manipulation, pressure to
conform, heavy-handed accountability, gaslighting, silencing of dissenting
opinions, superiority and elitism, fear-based tactics, misuse of Scripture to
control, divine appointment of and divine representation by spiritual leaders,
threat of spiritual consequences for disobedience or nonconformity. (Oakley
and Humphreys)  some are features of other forms of abuse, but some are
unique
o Spiritual abuse occurs on a continuum of behavior and culture: Left (toxic
cultures in religious cults and high-control groups), middle (abusive practices
and unhealthy cultures), right (healthy practices and cultures)
o The relationship of (spiritual) abuse to (spiritual) trauma
 Trauma: a traumatic event that causes particular responses of
overwhelm in the body, mind, and brain (emphasis on victim)
 Abuse is harmful behavior that is enacted upon one person by another
(emphasis on perpetrator)
 Traumatization can be the effect of abuse
 Spiritual trauma and RTS are caused by spiritual abuse and abusive
cultures
 Spiritual trauma and RTS are distinct from spiritual abuse: they
represent chronic response in the body, brain, and mind of the
individual who was spiritually abused
 If trauma is the imprint of abuse on a person’s body, brain, and mind,
then spiritual trauma is the imprint of spiritual abuse on a person’s
body, brain, and mind
o Spiritual abuse in context
 Whenever they experienced any form of abuse in the name of religion
or God, they simultaneously experienced spiritual abuse.
 Dr. Kathryn Keller’s Spiritual Abuse Questionnaire; Two major factors
of spiritual abuse: power-based affective wounding, conditionality
(religious legalism)

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  Whe the victims of spiritual abuse disagree that they have experienced
spiritual abuse? Two reasons
 Many didn’t experience spiritual abuse through conditionality
(religious legalism)
 Many are abused by leaders and by toxic and marginalizing
narratives
 Various manifestations of spiritual abuse
 What about victims of secondary traumatization? Are they spiritually
abused? Yes
 Those who witness the spiritual abuse of those they love
spiritually abused themselves
 Religious leaders who help to steward and nurture such toxic
cultures are complicit in spiritual abuse and trauma, though
they may never have directly or interpersonally abused an
individual
 Agency and culpability for spiritual abuse become more
difficult to identify in such cases
 Considering the fruit
o Behaviors and cultures of spiritual abuse and trauma represent rotten fruit
hanging from the tree of Christian community that must be reckoned with
because it reflects real harm and damage in the lives of our neighbors.
o First, reckon with the diseased fruit sickening our neighbours
o Second, realize that this bad fruit lives in the bodies, minds, and brains of
those who have been abused and traumatized (their bodies “keep the score”)
o Third, look at the tree that bears this fruit and the soil in which it is nourished
 Hans’ summary: Spiritual abuse with the dimension of moral injury may cause
spiritual trauma
o Spiritual abuse  abuse done in the name of religion or God
o The dimension of moral injury  moral violation done by oneself or one’s
(religious) leader
o Spiritual trauma  bodily trauma of the abuse happening within the religion
and upon leaving the religion

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Ch. 3 Mediating Narratives of Supremacy
 The social construction of reality
o Frameworks from Mark Charles and Soong-Chan Rah’s Unsettling Truths
(2019)
o Cycles of externalization, institutionalization, internalization
o Identities and values coalesce to form a social imagination
 Social imagination:
 the sense of what is real and what is not
 it includes a memory of how the society got where it is,
 a sense of who it is, and
 hopes and projects for the future….
 [It] is the condition of possibility for the organization and
signification of bodies in a society.
 Social imagination helps to form and perpetuate social reality
 Social imagination shapes and is shaped by theological imagination
o Example: Medieval Europe’s Doctrine of Discovery
 Theological imagination (“an agent of God in the subjugation of black
people”; “slave trade as an act of worship”; “conquest for salvation” )
 social imagination  white supremacy  oppression of indigenous
and black bodies (institutionalization of conquest, slavery,
colonization, internalization by the conquered, enslaved, and colonized
people)
 Mediating narratives of supremacy
o Definition: the stories that make sense of the world and sustain imagination
o More powerful than systems and institutions  they can survive the collapse
of institutions and reappear in others
o E.g. white supremacy: slave trade  (abolition)  Jim Crow segregation laws
 (termination)  new Jim Crow
o Complicit theological imagination
o Some mediating narratives: white supremacy, male supremacy, pastoral
supremacy, heterosexual supremacy
o Supremacy narratives creates power differentials through which abuse is
possible

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o Possible for the narratives to intersect (“black Christian woman”)  amplifies
the impact of abuse and trauma
o Intersectionality: every layers of our identities are fused, e.g. raced gender,
gendered race, etc.
o Illustrations of male supremacy
 Gothard’s umbrella of protection
 God  Man  Woman  Children
 Violation of hierarchy brings judgment  fear of judgment and
punishment brings adherence
 Michelle’s church-planting experience: women denied involvement in
decision-making processes
 Externalized by the church-planting team  Institutionalized in
the new church and its structures  Interalized in the new
members who participated in the church
 Impacts on women: causes a sense of inferiority and a low
sense of self-worth, feeling of isolation, powerless, and
dissociated to protect herself from the harm of this narrative
 Promise Keepers
 Believes that men are to control the beliefs of their wife and
children
 Feels heavy-handed and dangerous
 Shift of social imagination
 Medieval: Virgins, widows, then wives
 Reformation: wives, widows, then virgins  Womanhood
redefined by marriage and motherhood and the “cult of
domesticity”; Reasons: women are more spiritually attuned to
their children’s needs and physically weaker than her husband
 Conservative of evangelical leaders: adopt the imagination of
the cult of domesticity, sanctify it, and claims it to be the gospel
truth supported by a plain reading of scripture
 Women should be subordinate to their husbands, the reasoning
goes, in the same way Jesus is subordinate to the Father.
o Illustrations of pastoral supremacy

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  Privilege of impunity: Pastor as the final authority of the lives of the
congregation  We don’t need to question the pastor. End of
discussion. No accountability. Expects obedience without question.
 Lack of accountability created the space for abuse
 Pastor as God’s representative  “The pastor says something, that
means that’s what God wants you to do.”; to obey one’s superior
without question
 Pastoral supremacy is the narrative that elevates one man (or a group
of men) over other men (and their families) and creates the power
differential through which spiritual abuse and trauma can occur. . . .
The pastor is never a sheep
 Clericalism fuels the culture that permits and covers up widespread
sexual abuse by members of the Catholic clergy
 Clericalism involves “trying to replace or silence or ignore or reduce
the people of God to small elites.”
o Illustrations of heterosexual supremacy
 The mediating narratives: The imagination that heterosexuality is
superior to homosexuality, and, in fact, the only legitimate and healthy
expression of sexuality according to their reading of the Bible
 Romans 1:26-27  “AIDS is not just God’s punishment for
homosexuals; it is God’s punishment for the society that tolerates
homosexuals.”
 “Gay people are an abomination”
 Rodgers’s mother said to her, “I just want God’s best for you, and I
know that homosexuality is not it,” expressing her belief in both the
supremacy of heterosexuality as “God’s best,” and the consequent
inferiority of homosexuality.
 Primordial Trauma
o What sustains these mediating narratives of supremacy? What makes them so
resilient and persistent?
o From the study of ideology:

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  Ideology is another way of describing the whole system of social
imagination, mediating narratives, and the social construction of reality
employed by Charles and Rah.
 Slavoj Žižek: “there is no ontological truth at the center of ideology,
but rather emptiness and antagonism” (the real is “us-vs-them”) 
Nihilistic, Hegelian
 An initial experience of trauma creates an antagonism that sustains the
social construction of reality and perpetuates further trauma 
“Mediating narratives of supremacy are so persistent, therefore,
because they are driven by unresolved trauma at their core.”
o E.g. The Puritans and Pilgrims suffered trauma from religious persecution
back in England  They fled to the new world and traumatize others  white
bodies oppressed other less powerful white bodies  A redirection white-on-
white trauma toward indigenous and Black bodies (“the Negro”)  The
concept of “race” was conjured to manage their fear and hatred of other white
people
o Compassion for the perpetrator of spiritual abuse and trauma, why? They are
victims too (still culpable!) and they themselves are in need of healing
 Christian supremacy
o Mediating narrative: Christians are better than the “heathens”
o Theological imagination: to be able to speak from a position of privilege,
chosen, and preferred by God, to know what’s best for the rest of the world
o Sustains the social imagination and practice of coercive and heavy-handed
evangelism
o As the church identifies itself with God, and with God’s mission to save the
broken world, it approaches the world from a posture of judgment and
condescension, creating a power differential and conditions in which spiritual
abuse can occur.

Ch. 4 Healing the Wounds of Christendom

 Brother Lawrence (1614-1691: experiencing trauma from the Thirty Years’ War,
shame from his own defects, failures, and general importance, and felt God was
unhappy with him; Until he realized God was not ashamed of him, but rather loved
him  he replaced self-loathing with gratitude for God’s love and presence

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  Otto Scharmer’s Theory U  The posture of presencing, a kenotic posture  enables
people to be present to the future
 The story of human and environmental trauma at Spring Forest
o The scene has witnessed bloodbaths, genocides, slave trade, and Jim Crow
o Crimes against people and other creatures perpetrated by people worshipping
the Death God, who said their God was Jesus
 Repentance required before speaking about trusting and following God revealed in
Jesus
o Phil. 2:5-11
o The track record for the church is riddled with forms of evangelism and
mission that are manipulative, coercive, exploitive, and violent
o “Every knee shall bow”  A theology of conversion by fear, shame,
humiliation, violence, and death  e.g. Forcing Native American children to
attend boarding schools in order to assimilate them to Christian culture and
religion
o The Sand Creek Massacre led by Col. John Chivington, an ordained Methodist
minister
o The Washitaw Massacre led by General George Custer
o Sand Creek  Child sexual abuse by clergy  Labeling people in the church
as “giving units”  A form of Christendom that is fundamentally predatory
o “The only way we will regain the moral authority and credibility to speak to
our neighbors about a God whose meaning is love is to repent of all religion
that is manipulative, exploitive, and violent.”
o “To rethink every institutional system that we have created in the church from
systems of ordination, to church planting, to theological education, because
they have evolved as interlocking systems that produce a spirit of predation in
the church.”

Chapter 5: Jesus, the Trauma Survivor

 (Introduction)
o The most devastating result of trauma: the loss of the capacity to imagine,
inability to integrate the overwhelming experience of the past, inability to

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 imagine a better future, to experience hope, joy, or delight (Bessel van der
Kolk)
o “Recovering the capacity to imagine is critical for healing and flourishing.
Survivors of spiritual abuse and trauma need “healing imagination” to see a
future with themselves, God, and the church in ways that are more life-giving
than what they have experienced in the past.”
o Not only survivors, but also the whole church  to dramatically rethink who
God is, that he loves us and wants to heal us
o Replacing diseased theological, social imagination with alternative, healthy
theological imagination that contributes to human flourishing
o Focus on the story of Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection as the location of
theological reflection and alternative theological imagination, for at least four
reasons:
 The crucifixion and resurrection narrative to be the center of the
Christian story and the gospel itself
 Christianity is founded upon trauma and grace—crucifixion and
resurrection  Crucifixion is a traumatic event  Jesus as sinless and
as victim  take seriously the impact of trauma and the path of
resiliency
 The story of crucifixion and resurrection have been interpreted with the
same diseased theological imagination that fuels mediating narratives
of supremacy  The best place to subvert such malformed
imagination
 The story of the cross and tomb is a story  such narrative forms are
needed to generate theological imagination
o Engage the work of theologians at the margins of white, heterosexual,
cisgender, male power structures: womanist, feminist, queer, liberation
theologies  because they speak out of the experiences of those often on the
bottom side of the power differential and thus most vulnerable to abuse and
trauma
o The idea: “if you center the most marginalized person and make life better for
them, then everyone else’s life will get better”  by centering the voices both
of survivors of spiritual abuse and trauma and theologians at the margins,

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 particularly in our consideration of the crucifixion and resurrection story, it
will fund healthier theological and social imagination for the practice of
evangelism
o Telling the story in three ways
 Highlight the historical dynamics to create both context and tension for
the theological reflection to follow
 Offering a selective and composite narrative from the four gospels
 Highlighting elements of the story that connect to themes of spiritual
abuse and trauma
 Consider the problems raised by theologians at the margins with
interpretations of Jesus’s suffering on the cross and their imagination
about the redemptive possibilities of suffering
 The Gospel of Trauma and Grace
o Jesus demonstrated the arrival of this kingdom with spectacular acts of
compassion and love
o The suffering Messiah
o Disciples’ quarrel about power  The power dynamics of God’s kingdom
were different than Rome’s
o Judas’ betrayal  the betrayal trauma of the worst kind
o Jesus’ trial
 False witnesses to make Jesus say something that could be ussed
against him
 Physical abuse
 Verbal abuse
 Peter’s betrayal
o Jesus before Pilate
 The religious elite asked Pilate to have Jesus killed
 Summon a crowd to pressure Pilate
 Pilate had Jesus flogged
 Pilate sent to Jesus to the cross
o Crucifixion

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  The most shameful, degrading, horrific death possible in the Roman
world  communicated that Rome was in charge and that the one on
the cross was not
 The culmination of a larger “rite of infamy”
 “You want to be high and lifted up? We’ll lift you up high, alright,”
sneered Rome through crucifixion.
 The soldiers paid homage to Jesus while beating him and spitting on
him
 Golgotha  An act of shunning and ostracization (social abuse)
 Jesus was so weak by that point that the soldiers forced another man to
carry it for him.
 Hung on the cross completely naked  sexual abuse
 Hung out in the open for maximum public humiliation
 Religious elite hurling insults  emotional and psychological abuse
 The women suffered vicarious trauma
 Crucifixion was designed to cause a slow, painful death by making
breathing very difficult
 Represents the powerlessness and immobilization in the face of
annihiliation that creates the conditions for traumatization and
ultimately death
 Ultimately all the abuses have spiritual abuse as center, fueled by the
diseased theological imagination of the religious leaders
 Jesus was framed and crucified in part out of a mediating narrative of
priestly supremacy, wherein the ruling religious elite sensed a threat to
their power and took Jesus out to preserve it.
 Godforsakenness: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
 The women stayed near Jesus in his crucifixion and went to his tomb
 high risk activities, considering Jesus was an enemy of the state
o Burial and death
 And when Saturday came, Jesus’s closest followers huddled together
in a locked room in shock, grief, tears, and trauma because of what had
happened to Jesus the previous day.

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  They were also very afraid: would the Jewish leaders or the Roman
authorities come looking for them because of their association with
Jesus (Mark 15:42–47; Luke 23:50–56; John 20:19)?
o Resurrection
 The women had the courage to anoint Jesus’ body
 They found the tomb empty and ran back to tell the other disciples.
But, the testimony of women was illegitimate
 Mary saw Jesus and spoke with him  Jesus had chosen his female
disciples, those at the margins of power and yet who demonstrated the
most courage and faithfulness, to tell the male disciples he had risen.
 The disciples were traumatized and locked in the eternal present  it’s
difficult form the to perceive what was happening
 Jesus showed his crucifixion wounds to his disciples  Jesus was a
survivor, a word which literally means “one who lives on,” even amid
the “ongoingness” of his wounds.
o Post-resurrection
 What did all this mean?
 Jesus was the Messiah who had to undergo suffering and
vindicated by God through his resurrection
 Israel’s new exodus from the bondage of Satan
 Israel’s sins of idolatry had been forgiven
 Jesus’s leading them out of their longtime exile
 The 40 days
 Jesus taught the disciples to prepare them to share the good
news with Israel and the rest of the world
 Jesus promised his presence with them through God’s Spirit
 Jesus’ ascension
 Valorization of Suffering, Sacrifice, and Trauma
o Stanley Grenz’s Theology for the Community of God  One significance of
Jesus’s death: an example for believers
o TaM (Theologians at the Margins): Jesus-as-example is problematic for those
in oppressive or traumatic environments because they have often been used to

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 spiritually, physically, and emotionally abuse people in lower positions of
power
o Delores Williams (Womanist): Jesus’s substituionary role is akin to surrogacy
 The backdrop of “surrogacy”: black women’s historical experience as
surrogates for the transgression of others (MCT 2nd ed., p. 464)
 Jesus as the ultimate surrogacy figure: he stands in the place of
someone else: sinful humankind  gives an aura of the sacred
 Does this have salvific power for black women or does this reinforce
exploitation that has accompanied surrogacy?
 (To reclaim the earthly life, work, and ministry of Jesus, MCT 2 nd ed.,
p. 464)
o James Cone (Black liberation)
 Suffering should not be made a good in itself because of the way the
valorization of suffering was used as a means of quieting any
opposition to enslavement and lynching of Black slaves in the
American South
 “Be patient, they were told, and your suffering will be rewarded, for it
is the source of your spiritual redemption.”
o Dorothee Soelle (German liberation): valorization of suffering as “Christian
masochism”
 Christian masochism: Suffering is always one of three things:
 test that we are required to pass
 punishment for sins, or
 refining for the sake of sanctification
 a Christian masochist’s attitude toward suffering is one of full embrace
and even pleasure  “Submission as a source of pleasure”
 The Christianity of the plantation: “In its teaching, theologizing,
preaching, and practice, this Christianity sought to bind the slaves to
their condition by inculcating caricatures of the cardinal virtues of
patience, long-suffering, forbearance, love, faith, and hope.”
 Womanist theology  Reevaluate those virtues in light of Black
women’s experiences
o Wendy Farlet: “The cross is very ugly but it is a door to Christ”

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  “We do not have to walk through that door because God wants us to
suffer in imitation of Christ. We are standing in that door every day.”
o N. T. Wright: ““suffering is good for you, therefore you need to put up with
the conditions we are laying upon you” is at best callous and patronizing . . .
the message about necessary suffering has often been preached by men to
women”
o Any faithful theological reflection about the significance of the crucifixion and
resurrection must reckon with this problem of the valorization of suffering,
sacrifice, and trauma.
 Redemptive Possibilities in Jesus’ Suffering, Sacrifice, and Trauma
o How can we understand Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection in a way that does
not unnecessarily valorize and sacralize abuse and trauma, particularly for
those who are oppressed and harmed against their will?
o Rather than shifting emphasis to the life and resurrection of Jesus, as Williams
does, Baldwin follows the imagination of process theology
o Williams is correct: Jesus’s life and resurrection are significant parts of God’s
redemptive work. And Baldwin is correct: the crucifixion certainly seems to
bring a new experience into the divine community.  Is there anything more
to say about the significance of suffering and Jesus’s suffering in particular?
o Cone’s proposal:
 God “snatches victory out of defeat,” (Christus victor)
 MLK’s sacrifice  suffering for the cause of others
o Shelly Rambo’s Resurrecting Wounds
 Williams and some feminist/womanist theologians  “Resurrection
without a wound”
 Is there a way to work through wounds without reinscribing them as
negative marks of identity and without perpetuating the toxic logic of
redemptive suffering?
 Rambo: “if feminist theology flees from wounds, refusing to attribute
significance to them, then it cedes this space to the endless repetition
of the patrilineal wounding narrative.”
 To see the wounds in the risen Christ  as a symbol of survival and a
symbol of the definitional work facing the new community

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 o Copeland also maintains a theology of suffering in womanist perspective
 “the One who died for all and redeemed it from Christianity’s vulgar
misuse”
 Suffering is tragic and not sacred. Also, suffering can be endured as a
means toward transformative ends.
 One only endures suffering if it’s somehow deemed as the way toward
a boundary-breaking transformation and liberation that will ultimately
destory both it and the circumstances that impose it
 Blount’s reflections: Black women under chattel slavery endured
suffering with a purpose, as a way toward boundary-breaking
transformation and liberation—“for the sake of the lives and freedom
of their children.” In this way their suffering was redemptive, because
it was the suffering and persistence of love.
 “Suffering endured for the sake of healing and liberation”
 Looming questions
o Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection story poses as many questions as answers
o Jesus is a trauma survivor: suffered spiritual abuse but ultimately survives 
wounds and traumatic death do not have the last word, but are rather eclipsed
by life and healing
o However, where is God in this narrative? What is God’s relationship to the
abuse and trauma Jesus suffered in his crucifixion?

Ch. 6 Finding God in the Trauma

 Introduction
o “If God is omnipotent, if God knows everything, if we’re all God’s children,
why would God let this happen? He didn’t look out for me.”
o Theological imagination of the abused as a spectrum: less favorable to more
favorable
 God does not exist – God is absent and negligent – God is an abuser –
A distant God (deism) – “noncontrolling” God, but inscrutable and
distant –
 This spectrum of theological imagination raises the classic question of
theodicy: where is God in the midst of suffering, evil, and death? 

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 Jesus’ “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mat. 27:46,
Mark 15:34; cf. The Death of the Messiah, v. 2, p. 1046ff.)
o What imagination about God and the world is compelling and life-giving
enough to supplant images of God as an absentee and apathetic father, God as
abuser, or even more favorable yet still distant images of the watchmaker God
and non-controlling God? Is there theological imagination that envisions a
more hopeful future?
 Glorification of God as Traumatizer
o The changing cultural plausibility: from honor to wrath
 Anselm’s satisfaction theory: offering to God the honor God is due
 Protestant reformation: suffering the wrath of God due to sin on the
cross
o Critique
 From feminist and womanist:
 “patrilineal configuration of salvation”
 “divine child abuse”
 “Christian sadism”  worshipping the executioner
 Serene Jones: reject the interpretations of the cross which make God
the Father as an intentional agent of traumatic violence
 A connection between theological imagination which envisions God as
a violent and traumatizing agent and the church’s sanction and
perpetration of violence against others
 N. T. Wright


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  How does one perceive and articulate the theological significance of
the crucifixion and resurrection in a way that doesn’t cast God as
Abuser-in-Chief?
 The Father in Jesus’s Crucifixion and Resurrection Story
o What was God doing if he did not unleash his wrath on Jesus?
o Moltmann
 The doctrine of Trinity is rooted in the cross, i.e. how God is
understood in the light of Jesus’ crucifixion
 Proposal: a reformulation of the doctrine of the Trinity and the
deconstruction of the doctrine of impassibility  God experiences
suffering and death in the crucifixion because Jesus is part of the
trinitarian community with the Father and the Spirit
 God takes suffering and death up into Godself on the cross and it
causes a “deep division” in God, between Father and Son, which Jesus
experiences when he cries out in forsakenness upon the cross.
 Jesus suffers in torture and godforsakenness, and “the Father who
abandons him and delivers him up suffers the death of the Son in the
infinite grief of love.
 Serene Jones  the image of a woman’s experience of stillbirth—who
“has death inside her and yet does not die”
 The motivation that leads God to experience crucifixion is love (Jn.
3:16)
 The Holocaust is in God  God takes all humanity’s suffering and
death into Himself  God’s solidarity with all sufferers and to
anticipate transformation into new life
o Dorothee Soelle: Moltmann perpetuates the patrilineal logic of suffering
 One Person is suffers and the Other Person is the cause of it
o Gregory Boyd (against Soelle): No, God is not an abuser
 Freedom of the three Persons
 All share in the same suffering in different but equal ways
 God did not cause the violence, humans did  God withdrew his
protective hand from his Son
 The Spirit in Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection story

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 o Augustine:
 The Spirit as the bond of love between the Father and the Son
 The Spirit of the relationship between Father and Son
 The Spirit of the love between the Father and the Son
o Shelly Rambo
 Built on Adrienne von Speyr and Hans Urs von Balthasar, interacted
with Augustine
 Balthasar was present with von Speyr during her Holy Saturday visions
 How the Spirit both embodies and witnesses to the love that persists
between Father and Son and between death and life: a trickling drop
and a fragile thread
 The notion of “the middle Spirit”, the love that survives and remains
not in victory but in weariness
 The Spirit also experiences the abuse and trauma of the cross in his
own way
 God, the Trauma Survivor
o God in the crucifixion takes up spiritual abuse and trauma into Godself and
suffers with those who suffer
o In the crucifixion, God is not the abuse but rather the one who suffers abuse.
God’s experience of crucifixion and resurrection brings God into solidarity
with all those who have suffered the pain of spiritual abuse and trauma: God is
betrayed with us; God is shunned with us; God is physically, emotionally, and
sexually abused; God even experiences feeling forsaken by God with us.
o God is not an absentee father
o God is not a distant watchmaker or a noncontrolling but disconnected entity.
o God is intimately present with us in suffering and grief, and feels the pain of
abuse and trauma with us in love—just as God did within Godself in the
crucifixion and resurrection. This God does not respond to the powers of evil
with the same violent, coercive logic of retaliation but rather absorbs their
abuse and trauma and transforms it from within.
o God does not sanction, cause, or valorize abuse or trauma in God’s name, and
stands opposed to religious communities that do

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 o This theological imagination helps us to differentiate both between toxic and
healthy visions of God and between God and unhealthy expressions of religion
 The Gifts of the Cross and Resurrection
o God shares in the suffering of crucifixion  What does this mean for
survivors?

Ch. 7 Restorative Images of God

 Introduction: Hannah’s theological imagination
o God as the wrathful and judging God who causes her much shame and guilt to
well up within her.
o How difficult it is to supplant shame-inducing images of God!
o She points to the possibility for alternative imagination for God
o Long is the road to healing and healthy imagination
 Misapplication of Forgiveness
o Dominance of the penal substitution theory  Christians can only forgiveness
of sins as the only meaning of the crucifixion and resurrection
o The language of forgiveness is like a square peg in a round hole  How is
forgiveness a good news for those who experienced spiritual abuse? To
insinuate survivors are in fact culpable for their experience of abuse is to
perpetrate further spiritual violence against them.
o The theological language of redemption for trauma survivors conflates parts
that hold guild from commissions of sin and those that hold shame from
experiencing the wounding of sin (Jennifer Baldwin)  This conflation gives
rise to a common tendency in survivors to accept responsibility unnecessarily
as a way of coping with overwhelming feelings that are associated with
traumatization.
o Survivors in “trauma-formed traditions” “lack the theological grammar to
speak about salvation as more than forgiveness”  Not to say they don’t have
sin. They do require redemption, but the language of redemption is not
appropriate for the experiences of trauma. The language of redemption is for
the perpetrators of abuse and trauma.  Perpetrator-victim distinction
o There are more appropriate entry points for survivors of spiritual abuse and
trauma

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  N.T. Wright: exodus (as victims) + exile (as perpetrators) = new
exodus  “The original Exodus had nothing to do with the
forgiveness of sins; the slavery in Egypt was never seen as a result of
Israel’s sins. The Babylonian exile, however, was seen in exactly that
way. Thus two themes combined into a new, complex reality. The
‘new Exodus,’ freeing Israel from foreign oppression, would also be
the ‘forgiveness of sins,’ the real return from exile.”
 Andrew Sung Park
 “Christian doctrines of sin and salvation often miss the
relational consequence of sin.”
 The concept of “han” (the wounded heart of God)
 Exodus does not mean the survivors are without sins, but forgiveness
comes only after deliverance, otherwise survivors might think
“survivors” deserve it, compounding the sense of guilt and shame
 Two images of God relevant to the context of spiritual abuse and trauma: witness and
healer
o While acknowledging the possibility of different points of resonance with the
cross and resurrection
o Assumes unity of the cross and resurrection narrative
o God as Witness (leans to the crucifixion aspect)
 The solidarity of Jesus with the plight of the oppressed and
downtrodden
 James Cone
 “The gospel is a story about God’s presence in Jesus’ solidarity
with the oppressed, which led to his death on a cross.”
 The presence of God in crucifixion and among those lynched in
American history
 Robert Goss (Queering Christ): Jesus’ solidarity with the outsider 
Jesus is queer
 Serene Jones: When survivors encounter the crucifixion of Jesus, they
see their own experiences mirrored back to them.
 JoAnne Marie Terrell: “Somehow I knew I was loved”
 John 15:13, 13:1

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 “The suffering itself is not the source of our redemption; the
persistence of love in the midst of suffering is that redemptive source.”
(Serene Jones)
 God’s loving solidarity in Christ is rooted quite objectively in the
incarnation of God in Christ witnessed in the gospels.
 Trend in Western theology, separation between the life of Jesus and the
cross of Christ  incarnation is usually placed in Christology, and
atonement in soteriology (cf. Kooi, ch. 11)
 The first meaning of the cross before all others is the presence of God
upon the cross
 The glorification of Jesus and the glorification of God at Jesus’
death (John 12:23)
 The crucifixion and resurrection is the supreme revelation of
Immanuel, God with us.
 Judith Herman: the importance of a witness in the process of healing
 The victim needs a safe space, the victim needs a witness who
is a trustworthy presence, and both need to tell a new, different
story together
 Gabor Maté: “trauma is not what happens to us, but what we
hold inside in the absence of an empathetic witness.”
 Healing, then, is facilitated by a compassionate presence, “an
empathetic witness who helps to prevent trauma by embodying
kindness and acceptance.”
o God, through the cross of Christ, is an empathetic
witness to the suffering and trauma of the oppressed. 
Michael Welker (What Happens in Holy Communion,
pp. 107-8), spiritual-communal practice meaningful for
the traumatized
o As survivors see themselves and their experiences in the
cross of Christ, they see Christ seeing them. They are
seen by Jesus.  The story of Hagar, El-Roi

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 o In [Jesus’] compassionate presence he witnesses them
and receives their story just as they have witnessed him
and receive his story.
o God as Healer (leans to the resurrection aspect)
 Requires the broader context in the world of scripture
 For the African slaves in the American South: The cross was treasured
because it enthroned the One who went all the way with them and for
them.
 The cross as the triumph over evil that was embodied by the
principalities and powers of death  Jesus’ resurrection meant that
Jesus is Lord and thus that the lords and masters of the white world
were illegitimate (Christus Victor model)
 Christus Victor
 The cross as Jesus’ grand exorcism of Satan prefigured by the
exorcisms in the gospel stories
 The manner of victory is unlike the violent manner of Jesus’
crucifixion: God is nonviolent, self-giving, self-suffering
 “Divine Aikido”  self-destruct (Gregory Boyd)
 Assumptions: The cosmic conflict and victory
 Jesus’ healing ministry as spiritual warfare
 In the ancient world: “salvation” close to physical and relational
healing  Luke, Gregory of Nyssa, Kärkkäinen
 Gregory of Nyssa  healing and salvation extended both to oppressed
and oppressor, to abused and abuser  how else will the power of evil
be broken if traumatizers are not themselves transformed?
 Is. 53:5  “By his wounds”  LXX, not τραῦμα, but μωλωψ (also
NA28 1 Pet. 2:24)
 Within the broader context of Christ’s victory over the powers of evil,
this story also means the defeat of mediating narratives of supremacy,
themselves powers and principalities, that perpetuate spiritual abuse
and trauma. God not only seeks to liberate individuals from the effects
of abuse and trauma in their bodies; God also seeks to liberate
individuals from the systems and circumstances that create the

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 conditions for abuse and trauma in the first place.  Gal. 4:8-11, 5:1;
Col. 2:15, Eph. 6:12
 Hope from Wounds
o Images of healing and liberation can be too optimistic
 One can still be caught in trauma until the end of their lives
 Can communicate “get over it” when they cannot
o Side note: In recent trauma literature: not just “survival and aftermath”, but
also “resilience” and “post-traumatic growth” as expressions of “life and
healing”
o Jesus’ post-resurrection wounds
 Hanegan’s three observations
 Jesus is identifiable by his memory and his wounds
 The wounds lost their malformative capacity
 Jesus is no longer susceptible to the impingements of the
Powers of Sin and Death
 Invite faith and hope: seek healing and liberation in the present and
anticipate completed healing and liberation in the future

Ch. 8 Educating Trauma-Informed Leaders

 Introduction
o What is it about theological education that produces leaders and congregations
who are the opposite of kenotic (self-giving), who inflict so much violence
upon the world?
o Why isn’t theological education producing more trauma-informed leaders who
are Christ’s vessels of healing for the wounds of the world?
o Two thousand years of perpetuating violence and making theological excuses
for violence  Theology empowered some Christians to harm others “in the
name of Jesus”
o Seeking kenotic, courageous, spiritually grounded, healing leaders for a
missional church
 Missional Ecclesiology and Trauma
o Missional ministry must be trauma-informed
o Missio Dei  Luke 4:16-22

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  Jesus as the exact image of the unseen God (Col. 1:15)
 Jesus’ work to make all things new (Rev. 21:5)
 See the way Jesus lives in the gospels (Luke 8:43-48, 19:1-10, John
21:15-19)
o Practices
 A stance of missio Dei: contemplative awareness (prayer and
discernment)
 Without contemplative awareness  drift away from the actual gospel,
activism at the expense of contemplation, marginalization of mission,
power differential between haves and have-nots are kept, perpetuates a
harmful ecclesiology of empire
 Rowan Williams: Not the church of God has a mission, but the God of
mission has a church
 Truly missional congregations practice spiritual disciplines
individually and communally and attend to their own healing
journeys so that they have the ability to hear and respond to what the
missional God through the Holy Spirit is saying to the church.
 Time-tested practices of discernment (e.g. Prayer of examen, lectio
divina, cultural exegesis)  receive love, courage, vision, compassion,
capacity from God
 To be well-informed about trauma, its effects, and its healing, also
spiritual abuse, how to prevent it, and how to foster healing
 There is no substitute for a habituated life of trauma-informed prayer
and discernment in order for Christians to be able to live into the way
of Jesus.
 Living, working, and worshiping in a healing, contemplative stance
exposes and undermines the consumerism and hyper-individualism of
postmodern American church culture.
 “Learning to see as the mystics see,” to quote a recent title from
Richard Rohr, guides us toward unflinching, honest reflection about
our religious systems and institutions.

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  The other quality that characterizes the great Christian mystics that we
need, as we have seen, is kenosis, the self-emptying that is inherent to
love.
o Challenges to the Missio Dei in Theological Education
 Curricula, academic culture, ordination systems, and appointment
processes
 Riddled with block against identifying, welcoming, preparing and
deploying missional leaders
 Obstacles: interlocking ecclesial/educational systems infested
with racism, misogyny, classism, and queer phobia
 The current system was designed to weed out leaders how
participate in the missio Dei
 University-based school of theology  emphasizes
intellectuals, research and writing
 Free-standing seminaries  emphasizes practicioners
 Elite schools  deprioritize course in ministry practice
 E.g. MDiv students could gradutate without a course in pastoral
care, lay leadership development, conflict resolution, church
planting, congregational renewal, prayer, community
organizing, missional theology and praxis, how to nurture
community in general, pastoral care for victims of domestic
violence or sexual abuse  These are peripheral to serious
scholarship
 Ministerial studies are “soft”, whereas historical and biblical
studies are “hard”
 Pastors: “Seminary was useless in preparing me for dealing
with this.” By “this” they meant the messiness of broken lives,
toxic churches, and a world that no longer respects or trusts
Christian leaders because of all the violence.
 Absent of spiritual formation  The guidance of students’
lives of prayer and discernment is absent or minimal
 Students graduate without skills or knowledge as to how to pay
attention to what the Spirit is saying to the church or have the

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 spiritual discipline and grounding to recognize the difference
between God’s leading and the clamor of ego in pious disguise
 Spiritual information includes attenting to one’s healing
journey in order to become wounded healers instead of
wounded wounders
o Toward Missional Leaders for a Kenotic Church
 Schleiermacher’s influence
 fourfold seminary structure:
o “hard”: biblical, historical, systematic
o “soft”: practical
 privileges white, patriarchal, Eurocentric theology at the
expense of the theological voices and wisdom from women and
the global church  western theology as “theology” and
everything else as “contextual theology”, whereas all theology
is contextual
 Proposals
 Own up to the fact that all theology is contextual, consistently
centering women’s, nonwhite, and global theological voices,
and moving practical theology into the core curriculum
 The purpose of theological education is to prepare Christian
leaders whose profession is to guide the church in fulfilling its
purpose.
 Faculty in theology schools must be committed to the real
missio Dei
 Curricula absolutely must be created to serve the mission of the
church, not the other way around.
o Constituencies
 the “why” of an organization should always lead the “what” and the
“how.”
 As John Wesley, founder of Methodism, vigorously argued about
biblical studies and every other theological discipline, religious
scholarship that is undertaken without the explicit purpose of helping

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 people enter into the healing, kenotic way of Jesus, is worse than
ineffective. It is a travesty.
 God forbid that schools of theology should mirror the violence of
surrounding culture as we engage the hard work that St. Anselm
described as faith seeking understanding.
 Christian schools of theology must wrestle through the deeper claims
of the gospel that critique even our cherished democratic value of
freedom of speech.
 “The church is the church only when it exists for others.” (Bonhoeffer)
 Nurture leaders who lead the church to be the church for others, the
trauma-informed church that repents from its history of violence, that
turns and goes in a new, life-affirming, healing direction

Ch. 9 Co-Witnesses with Christ

 Introduction
o How can we evangelise those with trauma?
 First, acknowledge the trauma and create the conditions and
environment through which it can be healed. Why? Trauma lives in the
body and brain  high alert  fight, flight, freeze responses make
interactions about faith difficult if not sometimes impossible
 Second, we need new imagination for evangelism that isn’t in itself
harmful and coercive.
 The evangelism as we know it is associated with superiority,
coercion, imperialism, domination, exploitation, and
colonization  “an abusive power play toward outsiders”
 We need to imagine evangelism that brings healing, that’s
actually good news to the church’s neighbors  deconstruct
and reform the old way
 A new evangelism  love our neighbors better
o Ch. 9-11
 responses to the context of spiritual abuse and trauma in part 1 (ch. 1-
4) and translate the alternative theological imagination of part 2 (ch.5-
8) into the social imagination and practices of evangelism that

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 might be a blessing and a gift to our neighbors instead of a wound and
a curse
 To explore healthier, trauma-informed practices of evangelism is
simply to consider how the church engages in relationships with
neighbors who have been harmed by the church in healthy and healing
ways—to love its neighbors well.
 In other words, by tending to the soil of theological imagination, and
the tree of social imagination, namely evangelism, we hope to see, by
God’s grace, healthy fruit of love, joy, and peace born in the lives of
our neighbors.
 Aim: to put forth a set of postures for evangelism that will open
space for healing the spiritual trauma that stands between our
neighbors and the church, and sometimes between our neighbors and
God  the embodiment of the gospel and the inbreaking of the
kingdom of God, as well as the possibility of further reconnection to
God and Christian community
o Ch. 9  to reform imagination about evangelism through the image of witness
(its embodiment and empathy)
 Embodied Witness
o Church’s imagination of evangelism has been hijacked by the capitalistic logic
of competition, exchange, and production  scam-vangelism (Bryan Stone)
 an ethic of conquering, defending, securing, and grasping, all out of an
attempt to “secure space in the world for the good news.”  More describe
the religious and political elite who sought to remove Jesus because he was a
threat to their space in the market (cf. Jn. 11:48)  But, Jesus doesn’t attempt
to compete in that space, but rather willingly undergoes suffering, allowing
himself to be conquered
o “Real evangelism is never coercive, violent, or exploitive. Real evangelism is
not colonialism, nationalism, or imperialism. Evangelism rightly understood is
the holistic initiation of people into the reign of God as revealed in Jesus
Christ.”
o Witness-oriented rather than results-oriented. Evangelism is measured in terms
of bearing witness through the church (an embodied witness to the gospel) 

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 “The proper context for evangelism is authentic Christian community, where
the expression of loving community is the greatest apologetic for the gospel.”
o When conversion is the highest goal of evangelism, rather than faithful
embodiment of the gospel, the church is tempted to objectify and dehumanize
its neighbors in pursuit of its evangelistic goal, which creates the conditions
for spiritual abuse and trauma.  Diane Langberg, p. 180
o Michael Gorman: “the church is the living exegesis of the gospel of God”
o Paul’s notion of ecclesial mission has three dimensions: being, doing, and
telling (the gospel). Being & doing  telling (different sequence from the
traditional approaches to evangelism)  Evangelism by fascination rather
than by force
o As the church becomes the gospel, the church has opportunities to speak the
gospel.
 Empathetic Witness
o Introduction
 Not only bear witness to the gospel, but also to the pain of its
neighbors with empathy and compassion
 What is empathy and compassion?
 Empathy is the ability to feel what someone else feels and to
see the world through others’ pain.
 Compassion flows out of empathy—as we see the world
through the pain of our neighbors, compassion is the desire that
emerges to alleviate their suffering.
 Embodied and emphatic aspecs of witness are overlapping
 The church joins Jesus as a co-witness—the one who suffered abuse
and trauma in solidarity with those who are abused and traumatized—
when it holds space for the pain and trauma of its neighbors
 Recovery from trauma, which creates a sense of relational
disconnection and disempowerment, is only restored through
relationships with those who serve as witnesses to the survivor’s
trauma, helping the survivor to articulate their story of trauma.
Articulation is difficult because physiologically trauma inhibits
memory, language, and imagination.

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  An empathetic witness is to walk with a survivor through three
stages of recovery:
 (1) establishing safety
 (2) telling the story of the trauma, and
 (3) reconnecting with life
o Stage One: Establishing Safety
 The first stage in trauma recovery is to establish the survivor’s safety,
which creates the context in which the trauma can be witnessed.
 Trust and safety are built as we enter relationships as a nonjudgmental,
compassionate presence, and without a conversionist agenda, but to
love our neighbors well
 Expect transference (and countertransference) in the relationship: the
survivors may project their distrust or disdain onto the witness as if he
were the perpetrator (and vice versa)  Cannot be rushed or short-
circuited and is part of the process of establishing trust and safety on
the path to healing
 Indicators of transference: Their body stiffens. They become more
serious or sullen. They quickly change the subject or even end the
conversation. They take it personally, get defensive and edgy.
 But transference is not personal, it’s rooted in harmful experiences in
their past
 It is our neighbors who determine if we are safe enough to entrust their
stories  We have no control. Our say means nothing, but our
embodiment of safety does
 Conversionist-oriented evangelism cannot sustain such patient
relationship building because its desired outcomes are so uncertain.
Neighbors with spiritual trauma might be imagined to be “bad soil,”
not capable of responding positively to the gospel, thus justifying
moving on to other relationships.
 Building good friendships with our neighbors is actually itself
evangelizing or gospeling
o Stage Two: Witnessing the Story
 The survivor tells the story of their trauma:

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  The very act of reconstructing the story, which is often bound
up in wordlessness and fragmentation, is healing because it
enables the survivor to displace the traumatic memory from the
eternal present of traumatization and integrate it as an
experience of the past.
 In this act of storytelling, the trauma invites the survivor “to
become a theologian, a philosopher, and a jurist. The survivor
is called upon to articulate the values and beliefs that were once
held and that the trauma destroyed.”
 As the story emerges, survivors are confronted with grief at the
loss they have experienced and are invited to mourn it as part of
their healing.
 Being witness to the retelling of their story
 To bear witness: to be an ally, to enter into moral solidarity
with the survivor against the abuse and trauma they have
experienced
 This witness makes space to hold the grief and pain with the
survivor as she mourns. The witness’s role is not to provide
ready-made answers, as if any existed.
 The compassionate presence of the witness with the survivor as
she tells her story helps her to begin rebuilding relational
connection and trust with others.
 No giving of theological answers and opinions
 They must first tell their story, make meaning of it, and grapple
with the devastation they have experienced while the Christian
witness inquires, draws out the story, and witnesses it as it is
told.
 My only aim was to listen and explore the story they had to tell
 This posture of listening is required before the witness shares
her own perspective  the church joins God as witness
 Defensiveness, the common response to stories of abuse and trauma
 Why so? We want to tell them, not all Christians are abusive.
We ourselves are not abusive!

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  Such defensiveness, however, is not safe or healing to our
neighbors who carry spiritual abuse and trauma.
o Our defensiveness minimizes the pain our neighbors
have experienced.
o Our neighbors do not need us to convince them that not
all churches or Christians are toxic.
o The trauma that lives in their bodies and brains will
subvert our attempts to persuade them
 What we should say
 “I’m so sorry that happened to you.”
 “That is a terrible thing and it makes me sad to hear it.”
 “That kind of thing should never happen in the church.”
 Help them to grieve and mourn  Help them to see it’s
injustice that they experienced in their past, not the reality of
God and religion  Help them to differentiate between
harmful from healthy religious expressions (priestly role)
o Stage Three: Reconnecting with Life
 A survivor “must find anew a sustaining faith” through an active
exercise of imagination
 Participation in some kind of community group, where survivors
experience a sense of belonging and affirmation that was previously
absent because of their trauma
 Such conversations about God and the gospel do not have to be limited
to Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection story, or specifically to
understandings of atonement that imagine God as a witness and healer
(though we hope that theological imagination is helpful)  They need
to find their place in a bigger gospel, the restoration of all things and
the reconciliation of all things to God  Mosaic approach to
evangelism (Seth Bouchelle)  Our neighbors will determine the
facets upon which conversations focus, based on their interests and
desires
 Forgiveness

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  It can be good news to survivors  When the traumatized
becomes the traumatizer
 Extending forgiveness to the abuser
o It can be a source of healing
o Be aware of misuse of forgiveness  A tool of
manipulation to restore the status quo  the “White
Christ” urged Black slaves to “turn the other cheek” and
endure their abuse while paitently waiting for their
heavenly reward: forgive your oppresor so he can go on
oppressing you
o Assumes: the survivor has exited the abusive
environment
o In healing forgiveness, the survivor releases the sins of
one’s abuser to God  an ongoing process of release
 Sharing the gospel, not to persuade or convince, but to pose an
invitation to participate in the way of Jesus
 Regardless of the commitments one has made or will make—we
release those outcomes to God and to them
 A Taste of God
o “And you heard my broken heart”
o “And now I think I can believe that God too is listening and hears my pain and
will be my sanctuary because I have gotten a taste of him through you.”
o Embodied-witness evangelism occurs anytime the church’s neighbors receive
a taste of God through the church’s compassion and empathy.

Ch. 10 Flipped Hospitality

 Introduction
o Becoming a guest is a vulnerable experience
 Accustomed to Hosting
o Introduction
 The church as vulnerable guests
 Against the dominant narrative: the church as host
 Vestiges of Christendom

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  Hosts outreach events, worship services geared for outsiders, or
workshops that seek to meet the perceived needs of its
community
 Even when the church ventures out into the community, beyond
the confines of its facilities, its default setting is still to be the
host, to be in charge.
 But . . . the waning influence of Christendom, the church’s crisis of
credibility  The church’s neighbors are increasingly not interested to
be the church’s guests
 Becoming a guest requires vulnerability and the acceptance of a
power differential which puts a guest in the hands of the host, and
many of our neighbors who carry spiritual trauma simply do not feel
safe becoming a guest of the church.
 Much of the spiritual abuse and trauma literature produced by church
leaders, however, assumes the role of host for the church. It focuses
on building healthier cultures within the church that resist abuses of
power and instead foster healing and growth.
 All of this is good and necessary for the well-being of those who are
part of churches now or who will be in the future, but it fails to address
one critical piece of information: neighbors with spiritual trauma often
have no plans to return to church, no matter how healthy its culture
becomes. They aren’t coming back, and it might even be harmful to try
to convince them to return.
o Becoming Guests
 “Flipped clasroom”
 Listen the lectures at home and come to class to process and
integrate the information through discussion and group
exercises
 Teacher as sage-on-the-stage to guide-on-the-side
 Discoveries of neuroscience in human learning: individuals
learn best through experience, discussion, and hands-on
interaction with material rather than by absorbing the
dispensation of information

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 “Flipped hospitality”
 The church as guest
o Instead of expecting its neighbors with spiritual trauma
to become vulnerable, the church must become
vulnerable.
o Go to them, not come to us
 Being a guest in someone’s home
o Lack of control, vulnerable, dependence
o Asking questions, ready to learn
o Two-way gift: “A guest is always a blessing, for a guest
brings new ways of seeing and understanding the world.
But guests, in turn, have to always be aware of the
graciousness of their hosts.” (Bevans and Schroeder)
o The guest is at the mercy of the host
 Becoming a guest is difficult
o We must lay down our need to be useful or helpful to
others, but first enter into the sphere of our neighbors
and be open to receive a blessing of hospitality from
them
o The discomfort of being served without being able to
repay it
o Struggle simply to be with the hosts without having
something to do
o “To accept a service without repaying it means giving
up on the illusion of leverage.”
 Guests do bring something to the table: themselves, their
presence, their stories  The concept of Zulu’s ubuntu
o This gift of presence is illuminated by the African Zulu
concept of ubuntu—which means “I am because you
are”—that expresses the way our individual existence is
always bound up in the existence of the other.
o The church has something to share—the good news of
the kingdom of God in Jesus—but only as the church

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 first becomes the vulnerable guest of its neighbors by
surrendering the usual power position of host.
o Jesus Flipped Tables . . . and Hospitality
 Flipped hospitality is more consistent with the way of Jesus
 Jesus sends the disciples in vulnerability (Luke 10:3), no provisions,
relu on “people of peace”, then preach the gospel
 Jesus consistently welcomed “the other,” crossing the boundaries of
“us” and “them” in order to embrace those who were vulnerable and
marginalized. Jesus was not only a gracious host; he was also a humble
guest, frequently relying on others to welcome him and provide for his
needs.
 Jesus receives hospitality from others by becoming a guest
 Jesus came to his own home and received no welcome (Jn. 1:11)
 Jesus invites Levi into relationship with him and then accepts Levi’s
invitation to a dinner party at his house, with many of his “sinner”
friends.
 God in Jesus assumes the bottom side of the power differential,
emptying himself of his privilege and power, taking the posture of a
servant and guest (Phil. 2:5–11).
o Celtic Flipped Hospitality: St. Patrick and his missionary band to the Ireland
o Church as Ethnographer
 Learning is a central aspect of guesthood. Guests learn the culture and
customs of their hosts in order to be respectful guests. Moreover, the
church as guest learns the culture and customs of its hosts/neighbors in
order to discern how the good news of Jesus relates to them, just as
Patrick and his team sought to understand the stories, symbols, and
customs of their Irish hosts.
 The church becomes an ethnographer of its neighborhood and
networks of relationships
 Three practices
 Participant observation
 Field notes
 Interview

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  Writing a report (when feasible)
 Ethnographies help to shatter stereotypes and understand and humanize
“the other.”
 Temptations to avoid
 Objectifying our neighbors (we seek to be in control)
 Reflexivity  be aware of our biases and the power dynamics
 Radical Inclusion
o Introduction
 First accept invitations to parties instead of throwing parties  Learn
what it means for them to practice hospitality and host people
 Becoming guests among our neighbors does not erase the opportunity
to host and extend hospitality ourselves; it simply reorders—or flips—
it.
 Becoming hosts to our neighbors who carry spiritual trauma: radical
embrace, acceptance, and inclusion
 Radical inclusivity  against narratives of supremacy: “the other” at
the margins of power is cast as inferior, while those at the center view
themselves as superior
o Host Par Excellence
 Jesus experienced rejection and inhospitable posture
 From the cross, he embodied an alternative posture of hospitality,
asking God to forgive those who were abusing him and welcoming the
man crucified next to him who had previously hurled insults upon him.
 “The practice of Christian hospitality,” notes Pohl, “is always located
within the larger picture of Jesus’ sacrificial welcome to all who come
to him.”
 Luke 14
 Hospitality towards those at the margins  God’s universal
welcome is displayed. No one would be excluded except those
who rejected the host’s invitation
 Those with spiritual trauma may never decide to give their
allegiance to Jesus as a result of our hospitality, but Jesus says
host them anyway. Accept them anyway. Include them anyway.

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 Trust that God sees and honors such hospitality, regardless
of the outcomes.
 Matthew 25
 The most important passage for the entire tradition of Christian
hospitality
 Especially, verse 35, “I was a stranger and you welcomed me.”
 First, those who showed hospitality to those in need are those to
whom God shows hospitality in God’s kingdom.
 Second, and most striking, those who show hospitality to those
at the margins are in fact extending it to God
 God’s solidarity with those in need of welcome and care
 Jesus’s theological imagination about hospitality inherently subverts
narratives of supremacy because the presence of God resides within
those at the margins of power, those who are identified as “the
other.”
 Theology of creation: neighbors at our margins bear the image of God
just as followers of Jesus do  when we welcome LGBTQ neighbors,
women, those wrongly ostracized and shunned in the name of religion,
we host God
o Inclusive Boundaries in early church
 Minimal boundaries  Gal. 3:28
 Human rights, recognition, equality from the historic Christian practice
of hospitality
 Boundaries are important for Christian (community), an element of
healthy communities
 A boundary is a recognized demarcation between insiders and
outsiders
 More about making the inside space safe for insiders than about
keeping outsiders out
 Beware of tendency to “keep outsiders out”
 The ability to exclude someone from community is the top side
of the power differential that creates the conditions for
spiritual abuse and trauma: “While it is essential for Christians

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 to be able to maintain a distinct identity and practice within our
churches, it is also important to recognize how much power is
condensed in the authority to exclude persons on the basis of
their deviation from belief or practice. Such power involves the
capacity to define a community and the capacity to affect
negatively the well-being of persons who threaten that
definition.” (Pohl, Making Room)
 A commitment to radically inclusive hospitality requires the
church to examine its boundaries, to reassess and reform those
that may be harmful, and to seek to create large community
boundaries as minimal as faithfully possible for the sake of
welcoming and holding difference in the community.
 Further, radical inclusion invites the church not only to
consider its boundaries—an expression of social imagination
—but also the theological imagination that informs them,
identifying and dismantling mediating narratives of supremacy
and replacing them with mediating narratives of equity,
inclusion, and love.
 Radical inclusion also requires the church to honor those who
may never share the same beliefs or practices and to refuse to
coerce them into belief or to ostracize them if they do not. In
other words, a posture of radical inclusion makes space for
anyone to belong, for as long as and to whatever degree they
would like, without being pressured to behave or believe in
certain ways. Radical inclusion honors a person’s agency to opt
in or out of hospitality and community depending on her
interest or desire, trusting the Spirit’s work within her.
 Having inclusive boundaries means that people like Marvin [a Jewish]
can belong in Christian community—they can experience the care and
support of such community—without being coerced into conformity in
behavior or belief. Those outcomes are entrusted to the Spirit and each
person.

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  Such radical inclusion does not prevent the church from being a
particularly Christian community in its music, prayers, participation in
Eucharist, and study of Scripture. The only difference is that a
radically inclusive, particularly Christian community does not exclude
or marginalize others who want to participate on the basis of how they
act or what they believe.
 The boundaries of hospitable community
 Social imagination for the coexistence of identity-defining
boundaries in the context of a larger community that has
minimal boundaries for participation
 The three circles
o Close circle: Jesus’ presence and hospitality extends to
the church through the eucharistic table
o Dotted circle: The church as host in the neighborhood
offering hospitality to its neighbors
o Half circle: The church as guest in its neighborhood and
receives hospitality from others in humility
 In the close and dotted circles have the power to define
community and sets the parameters for how the “close”
community interacts with cultural and religious difference
 Trauma-informed evangelism: move in reverse from half to dotted to
close
 Mutuality in Hospitality
o Jesus had first become their guest, but then became their eucharistic host at the
table.
o As we sit around the table of hospitality, whether we arrived as guest or host,
the power differences fade and we are simultaneously all guests and all hosts
of each other. We share the stories of our lives in mutuality. We sense the
reality of ubuntu, that our lives are bound up in each others’.

Ch. 11 Contemplative Evangelists

 Introduction
o “Charles, you need to find your own personal well-being apart from the well-
being of Storyline—your well-being as a child of God. If you don’t, as long as

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 Storyline is doing well, you’ll be doing well. But when Storyline isn’t doing
well, then you won’t be doing well either.”
o Charles had made Storyline the center of his identity and sense of worth 
Poor differentiation of self (family system theorists)  The importance of
interior work in evangelism and mission and in ministry and life in general 
stuck in reactivity and defensiveness when transference happens and struggle
to become a guest because it requires vulnerability and the capacity to define
onself apart from one’s contributions
o If we are unaware of internal drives to succeed, to please others, to
belong, or to be in control that live just below the level of our
consciousness, they may lead us to objectify our neighbors in service to
those drives. At worst, we may even perpetuate our neighbors’ experience
of spiritual abuse and trauma.
 Differentiation of Self
o Conceptualised by Murray Bowen, the founder of family systems theory
o A person’s capacity to “define his or her own life’s goals and values apart
from the pressures of those around them.”
o Inspired by cell differentiation in the field of biology
o Self-differentiation does not mean creating protective emotional distance from
other people. Rather, it describes the way one remains connected in
relationships with others without losing one’s sense of self.
o Differentiation is the center of attachment-autonomy spectrum
o Able to regulate their own inner anxieties in relationships and stay grounded
even when there is anxiety and chaos within people around them
o No one does this perfectly; everyone functions and moves along a continuum
of well differentiated to poorly differentiated.
o When overwhelmed with anxieties, we resort to anxious tactics to cope
 Reactivity: responding with the same level of anxiety they receive
from others in the system
 Overfunctioning: taking too much responsibility, doing too much
 Underfunctioning: refusing to take responsibility, doing too little

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  Forming triangles: No one does this perfectly; everyone functions and
moves along a continuum of well differentiated to poorly
differentiated.
o Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix (Edwin Friedman)
 The essence of leadership is the presence of a well-differentiated leader
within an organization
 Well-differentiated leaders are able to lean in and endure the resistance
and sabotage enacted by others in their organization as a response to
risk and change.
 Poorly differentiated leaders wither at the prospect of criticism,
resistance, and conflict because they are enmeshed within the anxieties
of their relational system and unable to self-regulate.
o Trauma-informed evangelism necessitates evangelists who are well-
differentiated, those who are able to regulate their own anxieties in the face of
transference, countertransference, and projection in their relationships with
neighbors who have spiritual trauma.
o Well-differentiated evangelists
 To be nondefensive, unoffendable because they’re able to differentiate
their true self from those toxic expressions of religion and from the
need to meet their neighbor’s approval
 To be able to hold the pain of their neighbors with empathy and
compassion
 To be humble and vulnerable when they make mistakes in
relationships
 To release the outcomes of evangelism
 To stay connected to their nonreligious neighbors even when they have
differences of opinions and even if they never decide to give their
allegiance to Jesus

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 

o Poorly differentiated evangelists

 Terrified by the prospect of rejection from their neighbors and yearn
for their approval
 They may be hesitant to take risks in relationships when the time is
right.
 They may be slow to be their true, Jesus-following self, out of fear of
hurting their relationships with neighbors.
 They may become defensive and offended more easily by transference
or hearing stories of spiritual trauma, reciprocating the reactivity they
experience in their neighbors.
 As a result, they struggle to become vulnerable and to show empathy
and compassion toward their neighbors.
 Poorly differentiated evangelists will also either
 overfunction (come on strong, take a lot of responsibility for
the outcomes, take charge and be very directive) or
 underfunction (disengage when it gets difficult, leave the
relationship in the name of “shaking the dust off” one’s feet) in
their relationships with neighbors.

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 

 Self-Differentiation and Kenosis

o What about Jesus’ command of denying self?
o Jesus was well-differentiated
 He resists the expectations of others
 His sense of self and vocation (Luke 2:41-52): stays at the temple,
worrying his parents
 He moves on to preach the kingdom of God elsewhere even when there
are many around him who still need healing and help (Mark 1:38)
 He honors his personal boundaries through regular rhythms for retreat
and prayer (Luke 5:16)
 Jesus remains in constant conflict with the religious establishment
because he is a threat to their authority and power, yet he is undeterred
by their anxiety or the threat of harm (John 5:18).
 Many of Jesus’s closest disciples assume that he will be a militant,
conquering messiah, and he challenges and subverts those assumptions
(Matt. 16:21–23).
o Jesus disappoints many, but does not become reactive
 But even though they misunderstood him, Jesus never held it against
them.

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  Jesus listened without reacting.
 He communicated without antagonizing.
 Yet he deeply disappointed the crowds….
 Somehow Christ was able to serve and love them, again, without
holding it against them.
o Kenosis and differentiation in tension
 Kenosis, cruciformity, denying self do not seem to value individuality,
making them susceptible to the trappings of enmeshment that emerge
from an unbalanced focus on others. Differentiation seems to reserve
for itself a degree of self-focus that seems inappropriate.
 John 13:3-5  Jesus’ self-knowledge was the basis for his decision to
serve, to “empty himself”
 Differentiation the foundation of kenosis  Without a healthy
understanding of self, one is unable to “empty oneself of self.”
 Differentiation is the embodiment of kenosis (Kiser)
 Differentiation of self for the sake of boundary-breaking
liberation and healing is inherently kenotic
 trauma-informed evangelists who seek to become well
differentiated for the sake of their neighbors with spiritual
trauma follow in the kenotic, self-giving love of Jesus
 Self-Differentiation and Empathy
o Friedman: Self-differentiation is at odds with empathy  Kiser: No
 Friedman’s argument
 Leaders who seeks consensus to be poorly differentiated,
dependent on the opinions of others, and captive to the “fallacy
of empathy.” Empathy, with its focus on the experience of the
other, reflects an imbalance weighted toward herding and
togetherness to the neglect of individual autonomy
 Leaders facing the unmotivated and no amount of empathy will
change them: Friedman’s fundamental concern is that poorly
differentiated individuals within a relational system, who are
unmotivated to change and unable to regulate their own
anxiety, will not respond cooperatively to a leader’s empathy

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 and thus will thwart the forward movement and growth of the
organization. They will not grow in self-awareness. They will
not take responsibility for themselves. They cannot learn from
their experience. And no amount of empathy will change that.
 Poorly differentiated individuals will lead to overfunctioning or
underfunctioning  In either case, the evangelist’s posture is less
about feeling and experiencing (and witnessing) with another and more
about the self’s needs projected onto and enmeshed with the other.
 The ability to see where I end and another begins—the essence of
differentiation—is at the same time inherently an expression of
empathy.
 Without empathy, such imagination for differentiated leadership is
susceptible to the same kind of abuse of power that characterizes
church leaders who operate out of a mediating narrative of pastoral
supremacy. If empathy is not part of what it means to be well-
differentiated, then leaders, under the guise of differentiation (wrongly
understood) may steamroll those they lead, indifferent to any harm it
may cause their followers, for the sake of achieving particular
organizational outcomes.
 Differentiation absent of empathy in evangelism may lead evangelists
to “truth bomb” their neighbors with the gospel in hopes of bringing
them to Christ with no regard for the way such an approach might
activate spiritual trauma from past experiences, rendering the
encounter ineffective at best and spiritually abusive at worst.
 Limitation of family systems theory  perpetuates domestic violence
by making the trauma victims responsible
 Feminist critiques
 No direct line of causation in a relational system, but that every
member of the system is responsible and contributes to the state
of that system  Reasoning from individuals
 Empathy and differentiation as complementary and necessary
functions
 Self-differentiation is the foundation of genuine empathy

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  Well-differentiated evangelists empty themselves to make space for the
pain of their neighbors. They are able to create an environment of
safety, which requires them to self-regulate their anxiety and to have a
nondefensive and nonjudgmental posture.
 The Source of Self-Differentation
o Henri Nouwen’s Life of the Beloved
 You are the Beloved  Jesus’ baptism
 God’s words to Jesus are the same as God’s words to every human
being, that all are loved by God, and upon all God’s favor rests. All are
beloved daughters and sons of God.
o Nouwen’s sermon “Being the Beloved”
 The humanity’s central existential question is about identity: “Who am
I?”
 Three common answers: I am what I do, I am what others say about
me, I am what I have  Poor differentiation of self  The self is
enmeshed and absorbed
 Nouwen’s answer of “Who am I?” Beloved child of God
o Our identity as beloved children of God is the source of our self-
differentiation just as it was for Jesus.
 Just as God told Jesus he was beloved before he ever performed a
miracle, went to the cross, or was raised from the dead, so also God
tells us, before we ever accomplish anything—“You are my beloved.”
 Jesus’s sense of his own belovedness grounded him when he received
either praise or criticism, so also it grounds us in our relationships and
in how we process others’ perceptions of us
 God loves us as much now as God will ever love us. God will not love
us more if we do better. God will not love us less if we do worse. God
loves us fully and completely, with a perfect love, right now. Whatever
happens to us, we are the beloved of God. That is who we are. That is
our identity. That is our true self.
 Self-Differentiation and Hospitality
o Self-differentiation through one’s belovedness ironically does not ultimately
serve the self. It serves the belovedness of others. (1 John 4:11)

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o Nouwen’s “second love”
 Our belovedness leads us to see others as beloved, too, to honor them
as such, and even to help them understand and experience their own
belovedness.
 In The Wounded Healer, described in terms of hospitality
 Includes two concepts: concentration and community
 Concentration (“autonomy” of self-differentiation)
o We feel at home in our own houe, our own self
o We are able to make space for another because we have
first made space for own self there, with all its anxieties,
wounds, and loneliness—otherwise the concerns of the
self might distract us from being able to pay attention to
our guest.
o Allows us to become vulnerable guests and to pay
attention to those who host us
o The deepest realization of concentration, of being at
home with our self, is not the recognition that we are
broken but that we are loved—that we are beloved
children of God.
 Concentration enables community (“attachment” of self-
differentiation)
o We give our guests “a friendly space, where they may
feel free to come and go, to be close and distant, to rest
and to play, to talk and to be silent … the paradox is
that hospitality asks for the creation of an empty space
where the guest can find his own soul.”
o Hospitality brings healing
 Not because the host becomes the source of
wholeness for the guest
 But because it creates space for the wounds and
pain of the guest to be recognized and shared in
solidarity

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  And also because it becomes space for God to
bear witness to their pain and bring healing
 Wounded Healers
o It is at the center of our soul, where we discover our belovedness, that we are
being comforted in our own pain and healed of our own traumas by the love of
God. It is there that we see God as an empathetic and compassionate witness
to our own pain. It is there that we see God as our own liberator and healer.
o Trauma-informed evangelists must be contemplatives, we must be mystics
 We must be mystics, to the extent that “a mystic is a person whose
identity is deeply rooted in God’s first love [i.e., one’s belovedness].”
 As people who have discovered a spring of water in the middle of the
desert
 Not just for ourselves, but to share with our neighbours
 To be contemplative is to be a person of contemplative prayer, i.e. the
“listening to God” and “being with God” kind of prayer.
 Solitude (being along) and silence (being quiet)
 Solitude and silence create the space for us to pay attention—as
uncomfortable and restless as it is—both to our false self and
our true self.
 In silence and solitude we become aware of our loneliness, own
woundedness, our anxieties, and our desires for belonging,
control, security, and success.
 In silence and solitude we surrender these to God and root
ourselves instead in our belovedness as God’s children.
 Interviews of church planters  “The Crucible”: their spiritual growth
was often catalyzed by the heat of difficulties, failures, and
uncertainties in evangelism and church planting. The growth was
characterized by three interior effects: leads to trust God, to ground
their spiritual identity in God, and to release the outcomes of their
ministry to God
 Janet Hagberg and Robert Guelich’s the Wall
 The beginning of the fourth stage in “six stages of faith
development”

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  The Wall represents the experience of being brought to one’s
limits
 There is only going through the Wall, being stuck at the Wall,
or regressing from the Wall.
 How to go through the Wall?
o Accept God’s unconditional love and acceptance for
oneself  discovering one’s belovedness
o Surrender  Release and detach from identities to
ground one’s identity more fully in God
 Evangelism is embodied witness  contemplative life in community
 Inner-outer layer
 Healthy communities nurture contemplative practice in their
rule of life, their liturgies, and in times of retreat.
 The Contemplative Stance
o Not only in our prayer closet, we need to bring this contemplative stance into
all our relationships and engagement in the mission of God

o
o In trauma-informed evangelism, we show up to God and ourselves in silence
and solitude to pay attention both to our belovedness and to our brokenness.
We show up and pay attention to our neighbors and world both as humble
guests and as radically inclusive hosts. We join God as empathetic and
compassionate witnesses to the pain of our neighbors. And we release the
outcomes to God, realizing that the goal of our participation in evangelism is
not conversion but faithful embodiment of the gospel in our shared life as a

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 church with our neighbors. We release the outcomes because we are not
defined by the outcomes but rather by our belovedness.

Epilogue
 Problem: Theology that portrays God as narcissistic and bloodthirsty, supports
genocides in the name of mission and envagelism, perpetuates violence, abuse,
racism, shaming, and exclusion of our neighbours.  This is opposed to the God we
see revealed in Jesus Christ (image of the invisible God, Col. 1:15)  Jesus as the
hermeneutical key: we must view God in the Bible from the lens of Jesus
 The story of Jesus sending the disciples to the Samaritans who then reject them
o And the disciples want to call down fire from heaven to burn them alive
o Jesus rebukes them, Luke 9:55-56
o This is the exact situation where people reject Jesus and, according to our
theology, they are to be burned in hell for rejecting Jesus
 We become like the god we follow: If our God is the God of love, we will become
loving people
o See Good Goats: Healing Our Image of God
 James Burtchaell: “Jesus' mission is not to represent our interests
before the Father, but to disclose his relentless love to us. Mediation is
downwards.It is we, not God, who are hard to reach.” (58)
o If God is love for us, then we will also love
o A deep, vulnerable, committed relationship with God is only possible as we
come to experience God’s nonviolent love toward us.
o As we gradually awaken to the truth of our belonging and belovedness to God,
which is a central fruit of a contemplative practice, we can heal from spiritual
trauma inflicted by violent Christians and perpetuated by violent theology.
o Love and trust grow primarily from lived experience, not from intellectual
assent to a set of abstract principles.
 The cultivation of belonging
o Exclusion brings trauma, deep, internalized, toxic shame, and fear
o An education that perpetuates exclusion produces leaders who perpetuate
traum through exclusion and toxic shame in home, church, and society

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 o People cannot show up to do creative work, or take risks, or learn when they
are filled with trauma, which is what exclusion creates.
o Toxic shame, more than any other consequence of trauma, is the biggest
obstacle to traumatized persons’ participating in community and to fostering
community.
 Problematic theological education
o Prioritize abstract, theoretical work and marginalize the study and mentoring
necessary to foster Christian leaders who love well, who know how to nurture
communities of belonging
o This lack of belonging, and the trauma-producing structural systems that
exclude the majority of the human race from belonging as themselves in
religious organizations, produces deep, internalized, toxic shame that is very
difficult for excluded individuals and communities to overcome. I’ll say more
about shame in a moment. For now, suffice to say such an education also
produces leaders who perpetuate trauma through exclusion and toxic shame in
home, church, and society.
o Parker Palmer’s work as an educational philosopher is to help teachers foster a
climate of belonging so that everyone can show up as themselves, and do their
best, most creative work
o Trauma inhibits creative work, risk taking and learning
 Trauma activates amygdala (lizard brain)
o When trauma is triggered, the brain moves to fight, flight, or freeze, because
survival is at stake
o The lizard brain—the bodily instinct to survive—jumps into the driver’s seat
and guns the engine with adrenaline.
o A culture of bullying to have their way  leaders with lizard brains  people
are not safe, they can’t breathe  A climate of fearful secrecy in which people
are just trying to avoid being the next target  A cultural that fragments into
factions like neighborhood gangs run by bullies
 People work hard from love in that they will never from fear
 Toxic shame, more than any other consequence of trauma, is the biggest obstacle to
traumatized persons’ participating in community and to fostering community.
 Exclusion is the opposite of a Christlike posture toward our neighbors and missio Dei

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 o Jesus describes hell in this statement as a sort of gated community, with the
church actively breaking down the gates of hell, in order to liberate and heal
the captives
o The mission of the church is to go to hell (in line with Rev. 21:5)
 If we’re in Christ, our lives are centered around going to hell with Christ to set the
captives free
 To heal those wounds, we must repent of our participation in creating the hells in the
first place. To repent means to turn around and go in a new, God-given direction. That
new direction is trauma-informed evangelism that creates communities of belonging
where all of us get to show up as ourselves, and together, participate in God’s work of
making all things new.

Overview of the book

Charles Kiser and Elaine Heath wrote Trauma-Informed Evangelism (2023) to help pastors to
be embodied witnesses of the gospel to victims of spiritual abuse and trauma while being
sensitive to their pain.2 The book is also written to help the victims to heal from their and
spiritual trauma.3 The higher goal of this book is to contribute to the larger vision of “a form
of Christianity that heals the wounds of the world,” as opposed to Christianity that
perpetuates sinful structures, exploitations, racism, etc.4

In order to achieve the goals, the book is divided into three parts: first, cases and concepts of
spiritual abuse and trauma. Second, trauma-enabling theologies and their remedies. Finally,
evangelism practices that bring healing.

Spiritual abuse and trauma

The discussion of the first part on spiritual trauma will be summarized with the following
four questions:

What are they?

Spiritual abuse is any forms of abuse, i.e. cruel, violent, and demeaning interactions towards
others, done in the name of God or motivated by religion. 5 Such abuse is spiritual because it
is commited in the context of spirituality and religion.
2
Kiser and Heath, chap. Introduction.
3
Kiser and Heath, chap. Introduction.
4
Kiser and Heath, chap. Introduction.
5
Kiser and Heath, chap. 2: "Spiritual Abuse".

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Spiritual trauma is embodied like other kinds of trauma. It leaves an imprint on our “mind,
brain, and body” and causes them to be in a perpetual state of fight, flight, or freeze. 6 The
trauma is spiritual because it is received in “the context and experience of religion” and
usually occurs “both within religion and upon leaving religion”.7

Spiritual abuse may cause spiritual trauma when the effect of the abuse is imprinted on one’s
body, brain, and mind.8

What are they like?

The book cites Oakley and Humphreys to describe examples of spiritual abuse, such as:
“coercive control, manipulation, pressure to conform, heavy-handed accountability,
gaslighting, silencing of dissenting opinions, superiority and elitism, fear-based tactics,
misuse of Scripture to control, divine appointment of and divine representation by spiritual
leaders, threat of spiritual consequences for disobedience or nonconformity.”9

A case of spiritual trauma looks like as follows: panic feeling upon entering a church
building, chronic pain and nausea upon knowing that one’s husband is terminated from
ministry position for being too “progressive”.10

How are they enabled?

Power differential enables the conditions for spiritual abuse and trauma. 11 It allows a posture
of judgment and condescension, removes accountability, permits heavy-handed treatments of
others, and minimizes repercussions of abuse perpetrated by those in power.

Power differential is made possible through narratives of supremacy sustained by theological

and social imagination. A narrative of supremacy tells how one or one’s group is more
superior than others. For example, the narrative of Christian supremacy tells how Christians
are in a privileged position in relations to God and others. Firstly, Christians are chosen and
preferred by God. They alone have relationships with God. Consequently, they only also
know what is best for the others.12 These narratives of supremacy are sustained by theological
imagination, i.e. theological justifications purported to be supported by Scripture. 13 Moreover,
this theological imagination shape and be shaped by social imagination, i.e. how a society
6
Kiser and Heath, chap. 2: "Trauma".
7
Kiser and Heath, chap. 2: "Spiritual Trauma".
8
Kiser and Heath, chap. 2: "Spiritual Abuse".
9
Kiser and Heath, chap. 2: "Spiritual Abuse".
10
Kiser and Heath, chap. 2: "Spiritual Trauma in Context".
11
Kiser and Heath, chap. 3: "Christian Supremacy".
12
Kiser and Heath, chap. 3: "Christian Supremacy".
13
Kiser and Heath, chap. 3: "Mediating Narratives of Supremacy".

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imagine their identities and values, through cycles of externalization, institutionalization, and
internalization. During externalization, individuals externalize their identity and values by
creating a social institution. In institutionalization phase, the institution embodies the
identities and values in its structures and systems. Next, internalization occurs when the
structures and systems of the institution form the identities and values of participants within. 14
The feedback loop continues to shape social and theological imagination and sustains the
narratives of supremacy. For example, the existing narrative of white supremacy has gone
through various institutions across centuries: from 15th c. European slave trade, to 17th c.
American Puritans, to 19th c. American KKK, and to 21st c. Trump administration15.

Multiple narratives of supremacy can accumulate to increase the power differentials. 16 For
example, in the US, Black Christian woman is in a lower position of power compared to
white Christian male. Therefore, the former faces a higher risk to be abused by white male
celebrity pastor than the latter.

How are they perpetuated?

Narratives of supremacy can survive the collapse of particular systems and institutions and
resurface in others. They are resilient and persistent because “they are driven by unresolved
trauma at their core” and trauma begets further trauma.17

In particular, church history has been laden with trauma-causing violence, exploitations,
manipulations, and coercions done in the name of God and missions. Therefore, “the only
way [the church] will regain the moral authority and credibility to speak to our neighbors
about a God whose meaning is love is to repent of all religion that is manipulative, exploitive,
and violent.”18

Repenting from trauma-enabling theological imagination on Jesus’ death and resurrection

Trauma results in “the loss of the capacity to imagine” 19 Trauma survivors need healing
imagination to be able to see hope for their future with God and others. The church also need
to repent from trauma-enabling narratives of supremacy sustained by diseased theological
and social imagination by supplanting them with healthy and renewed one.

14
Kiser and Heath, chap. 3: "The Social Construction of Reality".
15
Simon Clark, “How White Supremacy Returned to Mainstream Politics,” Center for American Progress
(blog), July 1, 2020, https://www.americanprogress.org/article/white-supremacy-returned-mainstream-politics/.
16
Kiser and Heath, Trauma-Informed Evangelism, chap. 3: "Mediating Narratives of Supremacy".
17
Kiser and Heath, chap. 3: "Primordial Trauma".
18
Kiser and Heath, chap. 4: "Repentance".
19
Kiser and Heath, chap. 5.

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The book intentionally engages with theologians at the margin of power, i.e. white,
heterosexual, cisgender male power structures for two reasons. For, their theologies come
from the experience of being in the position of disadvantage and vulnerable to abuse by the
powerful. To listen to them helps our search for a healthier imagination than the diseased one
perpetuated by those in power.20

One crucial resource for theological imagination of the church is the story of Jesus’
crucifixion and resurrection. The gospel story places Jesus as a victim of spiritual abuse and
makes his death a traumatic event. However, death has not the last word and the story ends
with a hopeful resurrection of Jesus.

For theologians at the margins, the mainstream theological constructions of the death of Jesus
glorifies suffering and trauma. For example, Stanley Grenz states that Jesus’ death can be
understood as an example of humility, patience, and sacrificial love for believers. 21 This
understanding enables abuse of those in lower positions of power in this way: as Jesus
faithfully endures suffering, so must you, even when you are abused. At best, this denies
suffering as tragedy. At worst, this glorifies suffering and permits abuse by those in power.
Moreover, theologians at the margins often take the Anselmian theory of penal substitution as
portraying God as a divine child abuser.22 Finally, the image of God as the Forgiver of Sins
does not square with the victims of trauma because it conflates the experience of abuse with
their own sins. As a result, they may accept the experienced abuse as their own fault.23

One of the important questions is, then, how can we reflect on Jesus’ crucifixion without
glorifying trauma? The book proposes that the triune God as the Trauma Survivor and
champions Christus Victor as an atonement theory as healthier theological imagination.
Furthermore, the images of God as a trustworthy Witness of their trauma and God as Healer
were proposed as images of God conducive for trauma healing.

20
Kiser and Heath, chap. 5.
21
Kiser and Heath, chap. 5: "Valorization of Suffering, Sacrifice, and Trauma".
22
Kiser and Heath, chap. 6: Glorification of God as Traumatizer.
23
Kiser and Heath, chap. 7.

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A Public Missiology (2020) – Gregg Okesson
 Theological approach from evangelical perspective, building on Newbigin’s
missiology
 Purposes
o To elaborate public missiology of the local congregation, in particular, to
elaborate Newbigin’s dictum: “The basic unit of [a] new society is the local
congregation,” and the church as the “hermeneutic of the gospel.”
o to cultivate back-and-forth movement between gathering and scattering to
effectively witness to the surrounding publics
o to nurture a thickness of identity within and for the publics of this world
o To describe also actual public witness in three actual case studies
 Thickness (complexity)
o The analogy of weaving  back-and forth movement of threads, i.e.
movements between the church and other public places displaying an ornate
crisscrossing fabric of lines extending from the congregation throughout the
city
o Metaphors
 Seashore  Waves moving back-and-forth creating a majestic beach
landscape
 Making of alloys  Liquid-solid, heating-cooling movements increase
cohesion of the metal particles
 Collaboration between interview participants that manages to build a
consensus
o Reasons: Thickness of Trinitarian identity and sociologically thick public
o Wesley’s “complicated wickedness” and “complication of goodness”
o Evangelical problem: oversimplication of a complex issue (or reality)
o What complexity? Complexity of movement
 Central thesis
o Congregations participate in different movements, lending them a witness
capable of interpenetrating the thickness of the public realm to witness to it
from within.

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 o “capable”  “In local congregations we find all the resources necessary for
public witness”; “thick public requires thick identity”
o Not advocating a particular model of public witness  every congregation is
situated in a unique context (or ecosystem)
o By talking about the local congregation as the agent of a new society, I am
referring to every person in the church, and especially the scattered church as a
collective witness of God’s reign within and for society.
 Structure of the book
o Theoretical framework for congregational witness (ch. 1-5)
 1: Western Christians struggle with complex social problems
 2: An introduction to the thickness of publics
 3: The complex story of God’s mission in the world
 4: What is public missiology?
 5: Public missiology within local congregations
o Empirical study (ch. 6-9)
 6: Theory of etnography for studying of congregations
 7: Case study of “thick doxology” in Kenya
 8: Case study of “thick place” in Montreal
 9: Case study of “thick identity” in Nashville
 Conclusion
o Name the public ideologies or social imaginaries in light of the gospel of Jesus
o Tell the story of the gospel again and again
o Use the new social order to show the world that there is another way of being
human
o To equip the people with the gospel of Christ that deals with the publics in
their context

Global Arts and Christian Witness (2019) – Roberta R. King

 Questions: How do music and the arts fit in with doing mission?
o How do global arts engage in Christian witness?
o What is the contribution of global arts to communicating Christ, making him
known, worshiping him authentically, and following him faithfully?
o What are the critical issues and hurdles that need to be overcome?

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 o What artistic practices engage people in their everyday lives to hear the good
news of Jesus Christ?

The Church and Its Vocation (2018) – Michael Goheen



Becoming a Missionary Church (2022) – Goheen, Sheridan



Ministering Cross-Culturally 3rd ed. (2016) – Lingenfelter, Meyers

 Evangelical framework of approaching different cultures

God at Work in the World (2022) – Lalsangkima Pachuau

 Systematic intersection of mission, theology, salvation, Christology, ecclesiology, and
global culture
 The need for a theological understanding of mission that grows of encounter with
people with narrow definitions of mission
 Mission is essential to theology, not additional
 Goal: to provide a theological lens for the church’s missionary calling / to locate their
theological foundation and identify dogmatic themes and thoughts in order to refine
missiological thinking
o Locating the foundation of mission in the economic Trinity revealed through
incarnation
o The goal and task of mission in God’s salvific work in the world
o God’s mission at the center of ecclesiology
o The relationship between the gospel and culture
o Rowan Williams’ 3 Cs of Theological methodology: celebratory,
communicative, critical

Apostolic Imagination (2022) – J. D. Payne

 Biblical approach from Baptist perspective
 Something’s not right with the Church missions today. This is an attempt to reimagine
the 1st century apostolic task of reaching the world with the gospel.

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