Photo by Rebecca Hull
What happens when a church protects its reputation instead of protecting victims? The answer has devastating consequences for survivors, congregations, and the witness of the gospel.
Recently, many people have watched Netflix's documentary The Death of a Pastor's Wife, which chronicles allegations of abuse, coercive control, infidelity, and spiritual manipulation surrounding South Carolina pastor JP Miller and the tragic death of his former wife, Mica Miller.
While the details of Mica's story are heartbreaking, they are not unique. Across the United States, countless victims of intimate partner violence struggle to find safety, support, and justice. What makes stories like Mica's especially troubling is not only the abuse itself, but the number of individuals and institutions that fail to intervene when warning signs become obvious.
For many survivors, the deepest wounds are not inflicted solely by an abusive partner. They are compounded when family members, church leaders, friends, or communities choose silence over accountability.
Mica's story forces us to ask an uncomfortable question:
What should faith communities do when abuse exists in their midst?
The growing number of documentaries exposing abuse within Christian communities has opened the door to important conversations about sin, power, and accountability. Series and podcasts such as Shiny Happy People, The Secrets of Hillsong, The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, The Way Down: God, Greed, and the Cult of Gwen Shamblin, The Death of a Pastor's Wife, and many others have brought hidden stories into the light.
These accounts also help explain why many people are leaving organized religion. The problem is not faith itself. Rather, it is how people sometimes misuse faith, authority, and religious institutions to control others. While some suggest Christianity or organized religion causes abuse, the reality is far more complex.
First, abuse is fundamentally about using power to control others. Intimate partner violence occurs when one person controls their spouse or partner in the relationship.
Individuals who abuse their intimate partners seek to dominate, intimidate, and control them, whether they are people of faith or not. Women are most often the targets, though men can be victims as well. Abusers use a variety of tools to maintain control, including intimidation, manipulation, isolation, finances, threats, children, and, at times, religion itself. Faith may become one of many mechanisms of control, but the heart of abuse is the desire to dominate another person.
Second, abusers often extend their abusive behavior beyond the relationship itself.
Abusive individuals frequently attempt to influence friends, family members, church leaders, medical providers, law enforcement, and anyone else who has access to their victim's life. Whether it involves violating protection orders, interfering with healthcare, manipulating children, or recruiting others to harass and pressure victims, the goal remains the same: maintaining control.
Third, our justice system often struggles to support victims effectively.
In addition to serving as a minister working with intimate partner violence, I serve as an expert witness in domestic and sexual violence cases. Victims are often expected to wait months, and sometimes years, for justice. Cases are delayed. Proceedings become emotionally exhausting. Many victims spend enormous amounts of time, energy, and resources pursuing accountability, only to feel disappointed by the outcome.
Unfortunately, this is the world many victims navigate every day.
Abuse is not confined to faith communities. It exists in every profession, social class, culture, and community.
However, faith communities are uniquely positioned to offer something our world desperately needs: Shalom.
Shalom is the Hebrew concept of peace, safety, wholeness, healing, equity, and well-being. If Shalom is absent in our communities, congregations should be among the first to help restore it. Congregations and spiritual communities should be places where victims find support, justice, healing, and safety.
Yet in my work as a minister, college instructor, and abuse advocate, I have seen too many faith communities add to the burdens survivors already carry. Rather than becoming places of refuge and accountability, some congregations protect abusers, silence victims, and prioritize institutional reputation over people's well-being.
Sometimes leaders themselves engage in abusive behavior. Other times they unknowingly become tools through which offenders continue exercising power and control. When faith communities protect offenders instead of defending the vulnerable, they lose sight of the mission God has entrusted to them.
Yet despite these challenges, my colleagues and I continue to believe that faith communities have an essential role to play in promoting justice and healing.
So what can faith leaders do?
Grace Goes to the Humiliated First
In The Death of a Pastor's Wife, one minister suggested that “we have to give the offenders grace." While this sentiment may sound compassionate, Scripture consistently directs our attention first to those who have been harmed.
"God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humiliated" (Proverbs 3:34; James 4:6; 1 Peter 5:5).
While many Bible versions use "humble" as a common translation, the biblical language (both Greek and Hebrew words) describes people who have been brought low through suffering, oppression, poverty, affliction, or mistreatment. “Humiliated” or “oppressed” is a more accurate translation of the word. Throughout Scripture, God's concern is consistently directed toward those who are vulnerable and dependent on others to provide resources and support.
This does not mean offenders are beyond redemption. They can experience grace through repentance, accountability, and making amends. But God's people are repeatedly instructed to prioritize those who are wounded and oppressed.
Victims need validation, support, protection, peace, and safety. Those gifts are themselves expressions of grace.
We Must Hold Offenders Accountable
God's opposition to the proud requires more than a simple apology.
True repentance involves acknowledging harm, changing behavior, and seeking to make things right. Jesus taught that reconciliation matters so deeply that offenders should leave their gift at the altar and first seek restoration with those they have harmed (Matthew 5:23-24).
Accountability is not the enemy of grace. Accountability and repentance (making amends to those we have hurt) are often the pathway through which grace produces transformation.
Faith communities can walk alongside offenders while still requiring honesty, responsibility, behavioral change, and appropriate consequences.
Victim Safety Must Be the Priority
Showing grace and mercy to those who are afflicted, abused, and oppressed reflects the heart of God.
Likewise, siding with abusive and controlling individuals places us at odds with God's concern for the vulnerable. Survivors need to know that God sees their suffering, cares about their safety, and desires their healing. Offenders need to understand that God stands with the oppressed.
Rather than pressuring victims to reconcile or return to dangerous situations, faith leaders should work to promote safety, protection, recovery, and emotional healing.
Bringing It Into the Light
The stories told in documentaries such as The Death of a Pastor's Wife are heartbreaking, but they should also cause us to examine our own congregations and communities.
Abuse thrives in secrecy.
It flourishes when reputation is valued more than righteousness and when institutions are protected at the expense of people.
Throughout Scripture, God reveals a consistent concern for those who are vulnerable, oppressed, afflicted, and humiliated. The God of Scripture repeatedly stands with widows, orphans, foreigners, the poor, and all who are mistreated while calling all of us to do the same.
When churches respond to abuse by questioning victims, protecting leaders, minimizing harm, or pressuring survivors to return to dangerous situations, they place themselves in opposition to the very heart of God.
Conversely, when congregations provide safety, support, accountability, and healing, they become visible expressions of God's kingdom in a broken world.
Jesus taught that reconciliation requires repentance and that worship cannot be separated from how we treat others. James and Peter remind us that grace is extended to those who have been humbled and afflicted. The prophets repeatedly condemned those who used power to exploit others while claiming to honor God.
The biblical witness is clear:
The people of God are called to protect the vulnerable, confront injustice, and hold wrongdoers accountable.
For too long, some faith communities have treated abuse like dirty laundry to be hidden away and ignored. Yet hidden laundry does not become clean. Healing begins when it is brought into the light.
Faith communities do not need to fear the truth.
The truth is where repentance begins.
The truth is where healing starts.
The truth is where justice becomes possible.
If the church is to be a place of Shalom; a place of safety, peace, wholeness, and restoration, then we must be willing to acknowledge our failures, listen to survivors, support those who are suffering, and confront those who cause harm.
It is time to take our dirty laundry to the laundromat.
Not to shame the Church, but to cleanse it.
Not to destroy faith, but to strengthen it.
Not to abandon God's people, but to help them become the community God always intended them to be.
Only then will our congregations become places where survivors find safety, offenders are called to genuine repentance, and the grace of God is experienced by those who need it most.