This guide is for a congregation, or for one person inside it, who wants to answer a hard question honestly: what would it take for a survivor of sexual abuse to tell the truth here and be safe afterward? The answer it works toward is plain. A church becomes that kind of place when what happens after someone speaks is safer than staying silent. Rev. Dr. Neichelle Guidry, founder of She Preaches, a professional development organization for Black women in ministry, explains why that bar is so high. She says speaking out can feel more isolating than the original abuse, partly because others who were harmed, or who knew, said nothing. In her words, “their silence is their complicity, and it allows the violence to continue to happen.”
So the guide does not ask survivors to do anything. It asks the rest of the church to look at itself. You can work through it alone over a week or with a small group across two or three meetings. It moves through lament, one very hard story in Scripture, an honest look at your own habits, and a practice your church can carry out. If you are a survivor, you set the pace. You may skip any section, read a summary instead of a passage, or stop. No question here asks you to describe what happened to you, and no group should ever require it.
Start with what the silence has cost
Lisa Fields, host of the conversation this guide draws on, described a friend who had talked on the podcast about what an elder in his church did to him when he was 13. Listeners wrote in saying they could not believe it happened in a church. Her response was simple: “it does happen more frequently than we care to admit.” She also described a friend whose one-woman show about abuse, performed at a pastors and leaders conference, led pastors’ wives to tell her that their husbands beat them. Fields did not soften it. “I know it’s uncomfortable, but it’s real.”
Notice two things in those accounts. The survivors include a boy, not only women. And the first response many people gave was disbelief. Guidry assumes that any Sunday congregation includes women, men and children who have survived sexualized violence. If that is true of your church, then disbelief is not a neutral reaction. Survivors hear it, and they learn from it whether telling is worth the risk.
Before reading on, take one quiet observation. You do not need to share it. Think of the last time abuse came up in your church, in a sermon, a prayer request or a news story. What did the room do with it?
Lament before you plan
A church that wants to become a refuge usually reaches for a program first. Scripture often begins somewhere else. Read Psalm 10 slowly. It opens with a complaint, not a compliment: “Why standest thou afar off, O LORD? why hidest thou thyself in times of trouble?” (Psalm 10:1). The middle of the psalm describes a predator who lies in wait and catches the poor when no one is watching. The psalmist does not pretend this is fine, and he does not pretend God’s absence feels like presence.
Then the psalm turns, without explaining the suffering away. Psalm 10:14 says: “Thou hast seen it; for thou beholdest mischief and spite, to requite it with thy hand: the poor committeth himself unto thee; thou art the helper of the fatherless.” The comfort is not that the harm was small. It is that God saw it and will answer it. Lament is honest speech addressed to the One who sees.
If you are working alone, write a few lines of your own lament in the shape of this psalm: what you see, what you wish God would do, and whatever you can honestly say about who God is. If you are in a group, the leader can read Psalm 10 aloud and then allow a full minute of silence before anyone speaks. Silence here is not a failed discussion. It is part of the practice.
Question 1. Why might a survivor find it easier to trust a church that can pray a psalm like this one than a church that moves straight to encouragement?
Judges 19: the story that will not let you look away
A care word first. Judges 19 describes a gang rape and its aftermath. If reading it in full would harm you, read only the summary in the next paragraph, or skip to the following section. That is a wise choice, not a lesser one.
A Levite travels with his concubine. In the town of Gibeah, men surround the house where they are staying. To protect himself, the Levite puts her outside. She is abused all night and found at the door in the morning. He then cuts her body into twelve pieces and sends them through Israel to rally the tribes. Fields named the bitter irony: the Levite launches a campaign for justice over a crime he helped cause. Guidry answered with the question the story forces on every reader: “Did you not put her out on the doorstep to be raped?”
Look closely at one feature of the chapter. The woman never speaks. Her father speaks, her husband speaks, the old host speaks, the mob speaks. She does not. Guidry observes that “her life was not even in her own hands to begin with.” The book of Judges presents this as a portrait of a nation coming apart, not as a model. It describes the atrocity; it does not approve it. Guidry draws out what the dismemberment says about harm that is not physical. Harassment, biased treatment and patriarchy, she argues, take something from a woman. “It leaves women feeling dismembered.”
The chapter ends with the people who saw the body saying, “consider of it, take advice, and speak your minds” (Judges 19:30). The text calls for a response. Fields noted that passages like this are often avoided: “those are the passages that are skipped.” Guidry argues they belong in the pulpit, and she adds that this preaching “must be done with extreme care and with extreme responsibility.” Before care, she says, “you just have to have a little courage.”
Question 2. In Judges 19 everyone talks about the woman and no one listens to her. Where in your church’s life do people talk about survivors without anyone hearing from them, and what would it take to change that without pressuring anyone to speak?
Turn the examination toward the room
This part is self-examination, and it is meant for the people with the most power in the room. When God questions Adam after the fall, Adam’s answer goes sideways: “And the man said, The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat” (Genesis 3:12). Guidry connects that reflex to two habits she sees in church culture. One excuses a man as if he did not know what he was doing. The other blames the woman for what was done to her. Between them, she says, is a gap “where there’s just not responsibility on the part of men for their actions.” Her remedy is to fill that gap with “exercises and constructs of accountability.”
Guidry is not describing a few unusual congregations. She says of the wider culture’s tolerance of violence against women, “There is not a church that I have come into contact with” that has escaped it. That is her testimony from wide experience, not a survey. A congregation can test it honestly against its own jokes, dress codes, sermon illustrations and the way women’s accounts are received.
The hardest test comes when the person accused is admired. Fields named why churches resist: people watch a leader feed families and change lives and cannot hold that next to private violence. Her conclusion is that public good “doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be held accountable for the violence that they do privately to people.” The failures of leaders are real and grievous, and they are not the failure of Christ. A church can hold a pastor accountable without fearing that the gospel falls with him.
Question 3. If someone in your church accused a beloved leader, what would most people’s first instinct be: protect the leader, protect the church’s name, or listen to the person who spoke? What in your church’s habits trains that instinct?
Question 4. Where does your church currently ask men to answer for how they treat women, and where does it quietly ask women to manage men’s behavior instead?
Seen before fixed
One of the women Guidry mentions in this conversation is Hagar, used and then driven out by the household she served. In the wilderness she does something remarkable. She names God. Genesis 16:13 records that “she called the name of the LORD that spake unto her, Thou God seest me.” The first thing Hagar learns about God in her distress is not a solution. It is that she has been seen.
Guidry insists that preaching on abuse must still carry good news, and she defines it carefully: “the good news has got to always be that this was not God’s idea.” She goes on to say that people may have discarded a survivor or refused to listen, “but God is here and God is listening and God is available.” And she adds that “God still has use and need for your voice and your life and your ministry in the kingdom of God.”
Notice what that good news does not do. It does not promise that the pain will lift on a schedule. It does not tell a survivor to forgive quickly or reconcile with the person who hurt her. It restores her place: seen by God, wanted by God, still called. A church that believes this will not treat a survivor as a problem to be solved or a story to be used.
Question 5. Which part of Guidry’s good news does your church say most easily, and which part does it most often leave out?
A practice: walk the path a disclosure would take
This practice is for a pastor, staff team, elder board or any group with responsibility. It uses no one’s story. It traces what your church would actually do.
- Write down, as specifically as you can, who a person would most likely tell first in your church. Then ask what that person has been trained to say and do.
- Find out your legal reporting duties, especially where a child may be involved, before you ever need them. Decide who in your church makes a report and how quickly. The church supports authorities; it does not replace them or investigate on its own.
- Name at least one trained counselor or local advocacy service you would refer someone to. Seeking therapy is not a failure of faith, and caring for a survivor includes clinical care your church cannot provide.
- Look at your preaching. Guidry’s counsel is concrete: pray first, assume survivors are present because “triggering is real,” say plainly at the start when a sermon will address abuse, and arrange prayer, care and counseling afterward. She explains why: “you don’t want to rip off a bandaid or scratch off a scab and then send bleeding people out into the world.”
- Decide what public support would look like. Guidry urges churches “to stand with her publicly” and to tell her plainly, “let her know like, you’re not fighting this by yourself, and anything that I can do to support you is what I’m willing to do.”
Wherever your list goes blank, you have found the place a survivor would fall through. That blank is your next step.
If you are not in leadership, there is a smaller version. For one week, notice how your church talks about women and about abuse. Write down one moment you would once have let pass. Then decide what you would say if a friend told you something was done to them: probably something short, believing and unhurried, followed by asking what they need.
Question 6. After walking the path, what is the one change that would make telling the truth in your church less costly, and who has the authority to make it?
For whoever is leading the group
Assume survivors are present, whether or not you know who they are. Tell the group at the start that anyone can pass on any question and that personal stories are not part of this study. If someone does share, thank them, do not press for detail, and do not turn their account into a lesson for the group. Speak with them privately afterward. Keep the conversation on the church’s habits, not on any individual case in your congregation. If an abuse concern comes to light, your role is to listen, help them be safe, and connect them to trained help and, where required, to authorities.
If this is your story
You do not have to tell anyone here. If you are being harmed at home, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is available at 1-800-799-7233. If you are in immediate danger, contact local emergency services. A trained counselor and a trusted person outside the situation are faithful places to start. Nothing in this guide asks you to reconcile with someone who hurt you or to keep quiet to protect a ministry.
The question to carry out of this study belongs to everyone else. If a survivor in your church were weighing tonight whether to speak, what has your church shown her so far about what happens next?