When domestic violence is happening among its own members, a church should do four things: say the word abuse out loud, learn what abuse actually looks like, refuse to let Scripture be bent into a reason to stay in danger, and build working ties to trained help before anyone asks for it. Prayer belongs in that list. It cannot be the whole list. Morgan McCoy, who has spent years listening to women in churches after her performances, puts the limit plainly: “we have to do more than pray.”
Each of those moves answers a question a hurting person is already asking in silence. She is not asking the church for a program. She is trying to find out whether this room is safe enough to tell the truth in, and most of the answer reaches her before she says a word.
What she sees from the pew
McCoy tours a one-woman show called She’s Got Issues. One of its monologues follows a character the audience loves. She is funny and likable, and only gradually does the audience realize she is being abused and does not recognize it herself. McCoy chose that character on purpose, so people would see that the person being hurt is often someone they sit beside every week.
After the show, women write their burdens on cards, and McCoy and her team pray over those cards for a month. Then women come up to her and tell her about years of beatings, about being left for dead, about leaving a spouse who was a minister. What struck her was the isolation inside a crowd: “many of these women, they fellowship together. They go to church together, they worship together, but none of them knew that they were all going through the same thing until somebody said something after the show.”
These women were not missing from church. They were present, serving, singing, and silent. Their silence did not mean the church had no problem. It meant the church had not yet shown it could hear one. A survivor reads a congregation’s quiet as an answer to her question, and usually the answer she hears is no.
McCoy names why the quiet holds. Abuse carries its own shame: “a lot of times if you’re being abused, you think there’s something wrong with you, like you did something and there’s a shame, there’s an embarrassment that goes.” A person who already suspects she caused her own suffering is listening for any hint that the church agrees.
Will anyone here say the word?
From where she sits, a church that never mentions abuse looks like a church that would rather not know. McCoy is direct about what she has seen, especially, she says, in the Black church, where hard subjects often go unspoken. Her instruction is simple: “if it’s wrong, say it’s wrong. And then let’s figure out how we can move forward. But let’s not pretend like it doesn’t exist.”
She is not asking pastors to turn sermons into investigations. She is asking them to stop treating abuse as a private embarrassment that will vanish if no one names it. She calls domestic violence a war taking place in homes, and admits the subject is uncomfortable: “it’s not a popular topic, but I think it’s a necessary one.” The women who found her after the show are her evidence. They were in church, and no one had ever said the word in a way that made speaking possible.
Lisa Fields adds the fear that keeps many survivors quiet even when the topic is raised. People in churches often expect abusers to fit a certain mold, so a victim married to a respected man worries no one will believe her. Fields says plainly that people “could be used by God and be abusive.” A deacon’s reputation, a minister’s gifting, or an usher’s faithfulness tells you nothing about what happens behind his front door. A church that cannot hold that possibility will protect the wrong person.
Will they recognize what is happening to me?
A survivor may not have bruises to point to, and she may be wondering whether what she lives with even counts. McCoy hears a common defense from women, and her character repeats it on stage: he never broke any bones, I never had to go to the hospital. Every assault is abuse, she insists, and physical abuse is the kind that most often escalates into killing.
She describes other forms too. Sexual abuse can happen inside a marriage, even when the abuser claims marriage gives him the right to do what he wants: “any unwanted, unsafe or degrading sexual activity is sexual abuse.” Emotional abuse wears down a person’s worth and independence through yelling, name-calling, blaming, shaming, and cutting someone off from friends. Of those wounds she says, “they’re just as dangerous as physical abuse.” Financial abuse, which she first learned about from a counselor at one of her college events, means controlling the money, withholding necessities, demanding an accounting for every dollar, or restricting whether someone can work. McCoy notes that this is one reason many women stay. They cannot see how they would survive on their own.
This is why a church has to learn before it can help. McCoy warns that “if you’re not aware of what that abuse looks like, you might not know that you’re in it.” Someone who has lived with this for years can come to think it is normal. A church’s clear teaching may be the first outside voice to tell her, as McCoy does, “This is not what love looks like.”
The person in the pew may also be a man. McCoy mentions men who are abused, and Fields points out that women can be violent toward men through threats, throwing things, or destroying property. As Fields puts it, “love isn’t violent.” A church that imagines only one kind of victim will miss others sitting in the same rows.
Will they use the Bible against me?
This is where many survivors expect the church to fail them. McCoy has seen people “manipulate that scripture” about wives submitting so that a husband feels free to do whatever he wants. Her answer comes from the passage itself.
Ephesians 5:22 reads, “Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord.” Yet the verse just before it opens the whole section of household instructions with a command to every believer: “Submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God” (Ephesians 5:21). McCoy points to exactly that framing when she says that “the word clearly says you’re supposed to submit one to another.” Paul is not handing one person power over another. He is describing how believers who all live under Christ should relate within a household.
Then the passage gives its longest instruction to husbands: “Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it” (Ephesians 5:25). The model is Christ giving himself up, not Christ taking control. McCoy draws the plain conclusion: “the husband should be willing to lay his life down for his wife, not beat his wife up.” Colossians 3:19 says it more briefly: “Husbands, love your wives, and be not bitter against them.”
Two statements follow, and they should stay distinct. The first is what the text says. Paul calls husbands to self-giving love defined by Christ’s sacrifice, and nothing in the passage permits a husband to harm, frighten, or control his wife. The second is application. A person in danger does not violate this passage by getting to safety. Christians hold different views about separation and divorce, and those questions deserve careful study of their own. But no faithful reading of Ephesians 5 asks a wife to accept violence as obedience. That reading turns a call to sacrificial love into a weapon against the person it was meant to protect.
If I speak, is there somewhere to go?
Sympathy alone tells a survivor the church cares. It does not tell her the church can help. McCoy’s advice for leaders starts with their own education: talk with local domestic violence prevention organizations, learn from counselors, and gather resources so that when a woman, a man, or a teenager comes forward, the church can point them in the right direction.
Her reason is about safety: “what you don’t wanna do is say something that will cause the person to put themselves in harm’s way.” A well-meaning pastor who calls the couple in together, or urges quick reconciliation, can raise the danger without knowing it. Trained advocates know how to assess risk and plan for safety. Most pastors do not, and that is no shame. The responsible step is knowing who does and having their names ready.
McCoy also recommends ministries for people who have been in abusive relationships, ideally including someone who has come out of one, because “people that have been abused have been isolated for so long, they don’t feel like they have a support system.” A church can offer back the community that abuse took away.
She suggests one more thing many churches would not consider: a ministry for people who are abusive or recovering from abusive patterns, including those who witnessed abuse in childhood and never learned to handle conflict. She speaks of retraining men in how they engage with women, grounded in the same Ephesians passage. This is the church taking responsibility for the men in its care instead of leaving the victim to absorb the cost. Any such effort has to stay fully separate from the victim’s care, with no joint sessions and no use of the program to regain access to her, and it should be led with trained professionals rather than improvised by volunteers. Fields adds that someone carrying unhealed violence will bring it into any relationship, which is why she urges people with those tendencies to let God heal them. That healing does not replace accountability or treatment. It is part of the work an abuser must actually do.
What if I am not ready to leave?
A survivor may fear that if she does not leave right away, the people who care about her will give up. McCoy admits her own first response to a friend was to tell her to get out. Her friend stopped talking to her for a while. McCoy came to understand why: people being abused are constantly controlled and told what to do, so one more voice giving orders feels like one more wall.
A counselor taught her another way: “instead of telling someone, ask them is something wrong, express your concern.” Listen to the answer. “And then you validate them as you listen and just offer your help.” She suggests questions that let a person reach her own conclusions: “Do you think this is a healthy relationship for you? Do you think this is God’s best for you? Do you feel safe?”
She also learned that “it takes oftentimes someone seven times before they leave, seven times of thinking about leaving before they actually leave in an abusive relationship.” An ultimatum might arrive at the fifth or sixth attempt, just when the person needs you once more. Staying in contact keeps open a door the abuser is working to close. When McCoy notices warning signs such as isolation, fear of a partner, or injuries that go unexplained, her counsel is to say something, keep praying, and stay.
Isn’t the church supposed to protect marriages?
This objection comes from people who take marriage seriously. Jude 3 Project affirms marriage as a covenant between one man and one woman, and a pastor may worry that naming abuse, or helping someone leave, undermines that covenant or unfairly damages a member’s reputation.
The concern is real, but it misidentifies the threat. Violence and control break the covenant, not the person who seeks safety from them. Ephesians 5 places its heaviest demand on the husband’s self-giving love, so a church that protects an abusive husband’s comfort at his wife’s expense is not defending the passage. It is reversing it. A church also does not have to rule on every detail to act responsibly. It has to take the person seriously enough to connect them with trained people who can assess the danger. That is how a church can be fair to the accused without leaving the person at risk unprotected.
There is also a limit to what a church can promise. McCoy speaks with real hope about God bringing healing and wholeness, and Christians are right to pray for it. But no verse guarantees that a particular relationship will be restored or that pain will end on a schedule. Scripture leaves room for lament, and a survivor should be allowed to grieve without being rushed toward a happy ending.
If you are the one who is afraid
McCoy ends her show with words for anyone living in fear at home: “you should not be afraid of the person that’s supposed to love you.” She continues: “you deserve to be loved, you deserve to be valued. You deserve to be respected and love should not hurt like that.”
Your safety comes first, before fixing the relationship and before anyone else’s opinion of you. Leaving danger is not a failure of faith. In the United States, the National Domestic Violence Hotline, which Lisa Fields shared at the end of this conversation, is available at 1-800-799-7233, and advocates there can help you think through your options and make a safety plan. If you are in immediate danger, call 911. If there is a pastor or trusted believer you know is safe, you do not have to carry this alone.