You can bring the hurt of a protected leader to God in plain words, and you can do it without becoming what hurt you. Both depend on telling the truth. One truth is about what happened, and the laments of Scripture give you words for it. The other is about your own heart, which you cannot see alone. This guide takes them in that order, through a psalm, a prophet, a heart check and three things to try. It draws on a Jude 3 Project conversation in which Lisa Fields talks with Darryl Ford, a pastor and church planter in Atlanta, about the churches that protected his father.
Work through it alone with a notebook, or with a small group that has agreed to keep what is said in the room. Nothing here requires you to tell your story. Every prompt can be answered privately, answered later, or skipped.
One thing comes first. If a leader, a spouse or anyone else is harming you now, this guide is not your next step. Tell someone outside that person’s reach. If you are in danger, contact emergency services. The National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233. Seeking safety is not a failure of faith or disloyalty to your church.
The answers that made it worse
Ford’s mother suffered physical abuse at home. When she finally brought it to people at church, he says, she was told that her husband had the Holy Ghost and that the Spirit would deal with him. Ford also names a reply many churches give when someone says they were hurt: “if you understood the scriptures this way, you wouldn’t be hurt or you wouldn’t feel this way.”
Both answers sound spiritual. Both quietly relocate the problem. The leader’s conduct drops out of view, and the hurt person’s prayer life or understanding takes its place. Ford describes what that does over time: “Then you internalize and you start thinking, this has more to do with me.” He watched his mother carry that weight.
That is why lament comes before any heart check here, and why it comes without conditions. Ford, who stayed in the church and now pastors one, does not treat these stories as weak faith: “a lot of us have those kinds of stories, and they’re legitimate complaints and legitimate lament.”
For your notebook: Which answers like these have you heard? You do not need to write who said them. Write what each one asked you to believe about yourself.
A betrayal Scripture keeps
Psalm 55 is a lament, a prayer poem that complains to God about real harm. Its sharpest lines are not about an enemy. Read Psalm 55:12-14 slowly:
For it was not an enemy that reproached me; then I could have borne it: neither was it he that hated me that did magnify himself against me; then I would have hid myself from him: But it was thou, a man mine equal, my guide, and mine acquaintance. We took sweet counsel together, and walked unto the house of God in company.
The psalmist neither explains the pain away nor rushes to excuse the friend. He says it, and he says it to God. The psalm swings between complaint and trust and never ties the betrayal up. Near the end comes this line: “Cast thy burden upon the LORD, and he shall sustain thee: he shall never suffer the righteous to be moved” (Psalm 55:22). As poetry of trust, it confesses where the psalmist rests his weight. It is no promise that you will never feel shaken. He plainly was.
Ford knows this kind of speech. As a teenager he studied other religions because the faith he had seen looked cruel: “The God that I’m seeing is one that just keeps breaking hearts.” He went on to investigate historic Christianity and found what he calls inklings of hope. But he said the true thing first.
- Read the whole psalm aloud. Mark the lines of complaint one way and the lines of trust another. Which comes last?
- Count how often the psalmist speaks to God and how often he speaks about him.
- Find one line you could pray as your own today, and one you cannot pray yet.
What God says about shepherds who feed themselves
If you were told to let the Spirit handle a leader, it can feel as if God sides with the powerful. Ezekiel 34 says otherwise. It is a prophetic oracle against Israel’s rulers, whom the prophet calls shepherds: “Woe be to the shepherds of Israel that do feed themselves! should not the shepherds feed the flocks?” (Ezekiel 34:2). Then comes the charge: “The diseased have ye not strengthened, neither have ye healed that which was sick, neither have ye bound up that which was broken, neither have ye brought again that which was driven away, neither have ye sought that which was lost; but with force and with cruelty have ye ruled them” (Ezekiel 34:4).
Try this: Underline each thing verse 4 says the shepherds failed to do. Then read Ezekiel 34:10-16, where God says he is against those shepherds and will take his flock from their hands. Mark every task on your list that God now promises to do himself. What does that tell you about whose side he takes?
Read it first for what it meant. Ezekiel addressed Israel’s leaders, not a modern congregation. Carrying its principle to church leaders is an application, a reasonable one, since Scripture elsewhere speaks of pastors as shepherds of God’s flock. The principle is plain: God holds leaders responsible for how they use the people in their care, and his sympathy runs toward the driven off and the broken.
Is naming this dishonoring a leader?
Many people raised in church carry a real objection here. Scripture does tell believers to honor and follow their leaders (Hebrews 13:17). Isn’t speaking of a leader’s failure gossip, or a kind of rebellion?
The passages above answer it. In Ezekiel 34, God himself names the shepherds’ failures, in public, by the mouth of his prophet. Honor for an office never required silence about its abuse. Psalm 55 also shows the difference between lament and gossip. The psalmist names the betrayal fully, but he names it to God. Gossip spreads a wound for its own sake. Lament brings it to the One who judges, and telling a trusted person so that someone is protected is neither. The objection does carry one fair warning: grief can harden into contempt. That risk is real, and it is what the next section is for.
Turning the light around, with care
This part is not about whether you caused what happened to you. It concerns what happens next, inside you.
Lisa Fields describes a man she once dated, a preacher whose father was known for mistreating women. He wept over what his father did. “And he was trying so much not to become like him, that he became him.” She explains the mechanism: “Because what hurt does it magnifies the other’s offense.” And the cost: “To the point where you start not paying attention to your own character and your own steps.”
Ford learned the same lesson the long way. For years he knew exactly who he refused to be: not that husband, not that father, not that kind of church. “I ended up having to learn that you can’t lead anything based on what you don’t want to be.” Anger felt like protection. He concluded it was not: “good, well-intended willpower and even indignance towards like painful wrongdoing that you’ve seen, that’ll never be enough to bring transformation for yourself.” What helped was people. “first of all, I was never meant to be a Christian isolated.”
His church defines humility as “the ability to say, I would never put that past me.” Heard carelessly, that sounds like the self-blame his mother was pressed into. Look at its direction, though. Self-blame points backward and hands you the guilt for another person’s sin. Ford’s sentence points forward, at harm you have not yet done, and its remedy is company. Paul gives a similar caution to people restoring someone caught in sin: “Brethren, if a man be overtaken in a fault, ye which are spiritual, restore such an one in the spirit of meekness; considering thyself, lest thou also be tempted” (Galatians 6:1). The warning lands on the restorer. Nowhere does it tell a victim to restore the one who harmed them.
Lisa Fields names one place the old pattern often resurfaces. Some people leave a critical church only to find that “your church has became social media where you could be critical.” Then they are “guilty of the same criticalness that damaged you.” Her test is a question to ask yourself: “how do you best receive information when you are wrong?”
The prayer for this examination is already written: “Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting” (Psalm 139:23-24). God does the searching. You are asking him to show what you cannot see, not digging until you find enough fault to deserve what happened.
Some of what surfaces may need more than a notebook. Ford asks, “if the fall has affected every part of our body, then why would we not believe that the fall has affected our mind?” God works through trained counselors, and seeing one is part of caring for the life he gave you.
Three scenes, three things to try
Each step grows out of a moment in Ford’s story. Spread them over several days. None needs to be shown to anyone.
- The church that said to let the Spirit handle it. Ford’s mother was given a prayer assignment instead of a hearing. Give yourself the hearing she lacked. Write a lament in the shape of Psalm 55: what happened, said plainly; what it did to how you see God; one line of trust you can honestly mean, even if it is only that you are still talking to him. If the third line will not come, leave it blank. A blank space in a lament is still a prayer.
- The preacher who became his father. A few days later, pray Psalm 139:23-24 slowly. Then answer Lisa Fields’s question about how you receive correction, and write one place where hurt has made you harsher or more certain of your own rightness than the facts support. If nothing comes, do not force it.
- The mentor’s advice. A mentor once told Ford, “you need to have people in your life with whom you can share things that could potentially get you fired.” Write the name of one person who could tell you a hard truth and whom you would actually hear. You need not tell them anything yet. If no name comes, a counselor or a wise friend outside the situation could become that person.
Doing this together
If you lead a group, agree before starting that what is said stays in the room, read the safety paragraph near the top aloud, and say that passing is a full answer. Never ask anyone to name a leader, and do not steer anyone toward forgiving, reconciling, staying or leaving; those choices belong to the person harmed. Keep the heart check from becoming a discussion of what a victim did wrong. If someone discloses ongoing abuse, stop and help them reach support outside any leader who might be involved. If anyone speaks of wanting to end their life, call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline with them, or contact emergency services if the danger is immediate. Afterward, check privately on anyone who went quiet.
- Read Psalm 55:12-14 together. What changes when the one who wounds is a companion in worship? Why might Scripture keep a prayer like this?
- Without naming anyone, think of the religious answers people give after harm. Where do they move the focus, and what would leaving it in the right place look like?
- Ezekiel 34 was first spoken to Israel’s rulers. What carries over to church leaders, and where would you be careful not to stretch it?
- Where is the line between lament, protecting someone, and gossip? Has a fear of dishonoring a leader ever kept you silent when you should have spoken?
- How would you tell whether Ford’s humility or the self-blame his mother was pressed into is at work in you?
- Ford says knowing what you do not want to be is not enough. In one relationship you have now, what would looking like Jesus mean?
No one in this conversation claims the wound simply closes. Ford calls his healing “an already not yet kind of principle,” and Lisa Fields says that when trauma is tied to God and childhood, “it is really a lifelong journey.” What changed for Ford was the question he began asking. He had always known what he was running from. The harder question was the one he says he had not yet faced: “what does it mean to actually want to look like Jesus?”