When a survivor of sexual abuse tells someone at church, the first response matters more than any program the church will ever build. Believe the person. Do not rank or shrink what happened. Know where your training ends and have trained help ready before anyone needs it. When a child is involved, act to protect. Dr. Sarita Lyons, who holds a PhD in clinical and forensic psychology, counsels clients in private practice in Philadelphia, and leads women’s ministry at Epiphany Fellowship Church, puts belief first for a reason. The moment of disclosure is where a church becomes a refuge or becomes a second wound.
That is a heavy claim to place on one conversation. It is also the honest one. A person who discloses abuse has usually rehearsed it for a long time. They have weighed who might be safe and decided to risk it. Whatever comes back to them in the next few minutes teaches them whether God’s people can be trusted with the truth.
Why does the first response carry so much weight?
Abuse is a violation of trust, and disclosure is an act of trust offered to someone new. If that second trust is met with doubt, discomfort or a quick change of subject, the survivor does not hear a neutral reaction. They hear a repeat of the first lesson: telling the truth about this costs you.
Lyons describes the cost plainly. Speaking about how churches should respond to rape and sexual trauma, she says the church can “harm more people by questioning their experience or making them feel as if it wasn’t that bad.” Notice what she places on the list of harms. Questioning the account is one. The other is subtler and more common: the gentle minimizing that tries to comfort by shrinking the event. A leader who says it could have been worse may intend kindness. To the survivor, it sounds like a ruling on whether their pain counts.
Lyons also warns against a church that panics. She says churches need “to not be running around like a chicken with our head cut off when someone comes to our doors.” Her alternative is preparation. She pictures something like an emergency response system inside the congregation, with known steps and known people, so the first conversation is steady. Panic and silence fail the survivor in the same way, because both turn the moment toward the church’s discomfort and away from the person who just spoke.
What does “believe them” actually ask of a church?
The most serious objection deserves a direct answer. What about false accusations? If leaders believe every account, will innocent people be harmed?
Lyons does not address false accusations in her remarks, and an honest article should not pretend she does. What she addresses is the posture of the first response. Believing someone at disclosure is a stance of care toward the person in front of you. A congregation is not a court, and questions of guilt and legal consequence belong to processes and authorities equipped to investigate. A pastor who listens with belief has convicted no one. A pastor who listens with suspicion has already decided something: that the survivor’s word is the thing under examination.
The fear of being wrong also tends to run in one direction. Leaders often worry about wrongly believing a survivor and rarely worry about wrongly doubting one. The second error has its own victims, and they are usually sitting in the same pews, watching how the last disclosure was handled.
Why does ranking the abuse add to the damage?
One of Lyons’s most specific warnings is easy to miss. She cautions against responding “as if there is a different weight between someone who was sexually molested versus someone who’s raped.” That kind of comparison, she says, further creates shame.
Churches rank harms without meaning to. Someone hears an account and quietly sorts it: at least it was only touching, at least it was a long time ago, at least it was not a stranger. Lyons names incest as part of what many survivors carry, which is exactly where this sorting does the most damage, because the abuser may still sit at family gatherings or attend the same church. A survivor who senses their experience being graded learns to keep the rest of the story to themselves. The person who discloses needs someone to receive the wound. Nobody needs to measure it.
Should the pastor be the one to counsel a survivor?
Many pastors love their people and want to carry every burden personally. Lyons honors the desire and still draws a boundary:
not everyone should be touching this issue of sexual trauma with people in the church. Everyone is not equipped or able to effectively walk with someone through some of these painful experiences. And so we just wanna be very wise about who we assign and task to do that sacred work.
She calls it sacred work, and the phrase cuts both ways. Because the work is sacred, it should not be handed to whoever happens to be available. Lyons applies this to men and women alike. Being a woman does not qualify someone automatically, and being a pastor does not either.
Her own practice shows what wise referral looks like. She says, “I get the majority of the referrals for even my practice through the church.” She reads this as growth, since pastors “are acknowledging the fact that there is a limit with how far they can do some of the work.” The limit she describes is one of training, and it applies even to work a pastor would call biblical. So she urges churches to build relationships with “godly clinicians, even outside of the walls of our church,” and to train the lay people and leaders who will be the first to hear a disclosure. A pastor who refers a survivor keeps praying, visiting and shepherding. What the pastor gives up is the role of therapist, which was never his to fill.
Lyons adds a note about who walks alongside a woman inside the church. “I wouldn’t say that men cannot minister to women around issues of sex and sexuality and rape, however, I just think that it’s better when you have a woman that does it, or if a male is supported in doing it.” She cites a figure of one in six women being sexually assaulted, and she says it “really is important to have people who kind of can walk in your shoes, who may have experienced similar things that you’ve experienced.” The practical result: a church with no trained women ready to sit with a survivor has a gap where much of the need is, and a man doing this work alone, without support, has a different gap.
What changes when the survivor is a child?
Lyons resists treating sexual abuse as an adult issue: “there are so many children who are victims of sexual abuse.” Her first answer is prevention. She commends churches that hold workshops teaching children the difference between safe and unsafe touch and that equip parents to respond.
Her second answer is more searching. Lyons observes that some parents respond to a child’s disclosure in harmful ways because they were abused themselves and never received help. For such a parent, she says, “to have a child share something like that with a parent can be very re-traumatizing for a parent,” and the parent’s distress then passes onto the child. Caring for children therefore includes caring for their parents’ unhealed wounds. A church that helps adult survivors heal is also preparing for the next disclosure, the one a child may someday bring home.
Lyons widens the definition of harm as well. She notes that “sexual abuse is even being shown pornography at a very early age,” and calls it “a trauma that the child has experienced that has lasting effects.” An uncle who hands a child explicit material, or an adult who lets a child watch it, has done something the church should name as abuse.
When a child may be in danger, the response cannot stay inside the pastor’s office. Protection comes before reputation, and in many places the law requires certain adults to report suspected child abuse to the authorities. Leaders should know what their local law requires before they ever need it.
What if the person who caused harm holds a position in the church?
Lyons makes this observation while discussing sexual sin in the church broadly, so applying it to abuse is an extension, though a short one. “We have a pattern of sexual inappropriateness and sin with the people who are the pastors and the leaders and the elders and the ministers or deacons.” She says there is often no biblical church discipline around it, and she names who pays: “Then the women are the ones often told to leave the church. The women are the ones that are made to seem like they are the problem.” Survivors notice that pattern. When the person who caused harm stands behind a pulpit, they know the church will be tempted to protect the leader’s position, and they count the cost of speaking accordingly.
Scripture records this failure without endorsing it. After Amnon rapes his half-sister Tamar, her brother Absalom tells her to keep quiet because Amnon is family. The narrative then states, “So Tamar remained desolate in her brother Absalom’s house” (2 Samuel 13:20). The next verse says King David was very angry, yet the text records no justice from him. Second Samuel is narrative, so it describes rather than commands. What it describes is a household that silenced a victim to manage a family problem, and it follows the consequences: a desolate woman and, later, more violence. It is the second wound, written down three thousand years ago.
Why should a church speak about this before anyone discloses?
Survivors are listening long before they speak, and they notice whether sexual harm is ever named in public or only whispered about. Lyons argues that sexuality, including sexual trauma, belongs in the preaching and teaching of the church and is not something that “should just be saved for like a small group.” Her reason is theological: “the church needs to know that this is an important issue to God. And if it’s an important issue to God, it’s an important issue to us.”
The reasoning runs in a particular direction. Lyons does not begin with what the congregation is comfortable hearing. She begins with what God cares about and lets that set the agenda. A church that never speaks about abuse from the front has made a statement anyway, and survivors hear it clearly.
What can the church honestly offer?
The church cannot promise a timeline for healing, and it should not try. Trauma does not resolve on schedule because a verse was read or a prayer was prayed. Scripture itself makes room for long sorrow. The psalms of lament let God’s people speak grief, anger and confusion directly to him without first tidying them.
What the church can offer is presence that tells the truth. “The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit” (Psalm 34:18). The psalm promises God’s nearness to the brokenhearted. It does not promise that the brokenness will quickly disappear. A congregation reflects that nearness in small, concrete ways, starting with the next person who works up the courage to say what happened. The first sentence they hear back will tell them what kind of church this is.
If you are a survivor and you are not safe right now, contact local emergency services. If someone in your home or relationship is hurting you, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is available at 1-800-799-7233. If you are having thoughts of ending your life, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline. Telling one trusted person or one trained counselor is a real and faithful step.
Quick answers
Where and how should the first conversation happen?
Somewhere private but not isolating, at the survivor’s pace. Let them say as much or as little as they choose. Thank them for telling you, and ask what they need now instead of pressing for details. Detailed questioning is work for trained counselors and investigators.
Can I promise to keep it confidential?
Be honest before you promise. If a child may be at risk, or the law in your area requires you to report, say so gently and explain what will happen next. A broken promise of secrecy can feel like a second betrayal.
Should the church bring the survivor and the accused together to talk it out?
No. Do not arrange a meeting, press for reconciliation, or confront the accused in a way that alerts them before the survivor is safe. Safety and proper investigation come first.
What should a church have in place before anyone discloses?
The names of trusted clinicians it can refer to, a small number of trained leaders and lay people who know the first steps, clarity on local reporting requirements, and teaching for children and parents about safe and unsafe touch.
