Some of you love Jesus and cannot walk back through a church door. You have not turned from the Lord; you have turned from a room where you were hurt. I understand that, and so does my recent guest on the podcast, Shaneen Clarke.
Shaneen spent more than twenty years in a church in the UK before enduring what she now names plainly as spiritual abuse. In her words, it was mostly the misuse of authority, the kind that grows in a celebrity culture where everyone assumes the leader is right and everything he says must be from God. She knows the cost from the inside. She lost trust in leadership, wondered whether her marriage, her finances, her reputation, and her faith would survive, and reached the place where she wanted to give up. “I’ll still love God,” she remembers thinking, “but I don’t know if I could carry on in ministry.”
She did carry on. And her testimony now is that recovery is possible.
NAMING WHAT WE HAVE TOLERATED
There is a line Shaneen offered that I have not been able to set down: what we confront will die, and what we tolerate dominates. For too many years the church has tolerated toxic culture, and toleration is a kind of permission. We have watched a pattern repeat across the world, in Australia, in America, in Europe, in Asia; a moral failure surfaces, and behind it we discover a culture that was already unwell, leaders who knew something and said nothing, people who felt intimidated and stayed quiet. The failure was the symptom. The tolerated culture was the root.
Part of what has done such deep harm is the weaponizing of Scripture, bending the text to defend the leader or to pressure the wounded. Shaneen named the prosperity distortion especially, the give-and-you-will-be-blessed, withhold-and-you-will-be-cursed manipulation that has bruised so many. I know the genuine scriptural basis for generous giving; that is not what either of us is describing. We are describing the misuse of holy words to control God’s people.
This is why silence is not neutrality. When leadership avoids the truth to protect the institution or the reputation of a leader, it deepens the wound. Shaneen was direct: we minimize what victims have been told, we defend the wrong thing, and we withhold the whole truth. The healthier way is full disclosure, honestly facing what actually took place rather than rushing to defend a system.
THE HEALING IS REAL, AND IT IS PRACTICAL
If you are in the middle of this, Shaneen walked through the practical steps that carried her, and I want to hand them to you plainly.
Call it what it is. Acceptance comes first. Stop defending the abuse. Many of us feel guilty even using the words spiritual abuse, as though naming it were the sin. Naming it honestly is where healing begins.
Forgive. The big “F word” in the church, as she put it. Forgiveness is not a verdict that what happened was acceptable; it is the guarding of your own heart against bitterness, resentment, and the trap of a wound that never closes.
Regain trust. Trust is rebuilt through relationships, face to face, not only through a screen. When we are hurting we isolate, we hide, we carry shame that whispers we did something wrong. Reconnecting is hard precisely there, and it is exactly where the mending happens.
Step back and take counsel. Seek a trusted third party who can assess the situation from every angle. Shaneen did this; she went to two mature elders who took her cause to the leaders. The leaders refused to meet, and Matthew 18 was never honored, and her wound went deeper because a biblical principle was denied. Her counsel still stands: get wise, outside help.
See a therapist if you need one. There is good Christian therapy available, and there is nothing unspiritual about it. Churches, of all places, should be the ones encouraging it.
DON’T LET GO OF THE CHURCH
Here is the part I most want the wounded to hear, and it comes from someone who earned the right to say it. Don’t isolate yourself. Don’t let go of the church.
Shaneen reclaimed her faith and her healing by going back to community. Not the polished, trending, everything-looks-perfect environment she had known for years; she now belongs to a small local village Bible study, and she has found there the authenticity and the deeper, meaningful connection her soul actually needed. “We don’t find community,” she told me. “We build community.” She lost friends in the season of her hurt, people who judged her and fell away, and she grieved them; but others stood beside her, and those are the ones she chose to build with.
The Scripture we opened with was Hebrews 10:25, that we not neglect to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encourage one another, all the more as we see the Day drawing near. The Day is drawing near, and it is dark out there, and we were never meant to walk this road alone.
MEND BEFORE SEND
I shared with Shaneen something I teach here often. In Ephesians 4:12, the word for equipping carries the sense of mending or repairing. The fivefold ministry does not exist merely so you can identify your gift and your calling; it exists to make you whole, to form Christ in you until we come to the full stature of Christ. God wants to mend you before He sends you.
That is the reformation I believe we are living through. Not the destruction of the church, but its divine reconstruction; leaders being revived and made healthy, relationships being realigned, the authentic gospel being recovered after a decade of sugarcoating. A generation that will not settle for half-truths is asking, honestly, what is true, and where can we go if we cannot trust the church? The answer cannot be a better facade. It has to be a church with a pure heart and clean hands, a place where Jesus is truly honored as Lord and people are loved because they bear His image.
So if you have been hurt, hear this from someone who has been where you are and has come out the other side. It took her a while. It may take you a while. But healing is possible, community can be rebuilt, and the Father is near to the brokenhearted.
Be brave. Reconnect.
Shaneen Clarke has ministered for thirty years across Europe and beyond. You can connect with her at shaneenclarke.com. This post is drawn from our conversation on the podcast; a fuller follow-up on spiritual fathers and mothers is on the way.
