Repentance and Healing: Addressing Abuse of Women in the Church

0:00 Hello everyone, this is Stephen Strang and welcome to the Strang Report. Today we're going to handle a very serious and very disturbing problem and that is abuse of women. It's all through the culture. In many, many ways we all know the term the Me Too movement, which is how corporate America and Hollywood has responded to this problem. But the sad thing is it is also in the church, even with several fairly well-known scandals that have happened recently.

0:41 And today my guest is Lee Grady, my longtime friend, the longtime editor of Charisma. For 11 years you've filled that role and even since you left in 2010 you have continued to work with us. So I'll say hello to you, Lee. Thank you for fitting this in. I wanted to do this podcast because it's very important and it's actually the cover story of the May issue of Charisma Magazine online. And it's powerful and of course that will come out in May. Some people will be watching this after it's out already. We're playing this of course in April. And my goal is to try to get out the message that is so powerful that we have to follow scripture. We have to, and really what we need to do, the church needs to repent of abusing women both in sexism and also sexual abuse of various kinds. So let me start by asking you this question. You approached us, you sent the article in, of course anybody who knows the journalism business knows that sometimes the editors will reach out to an author to write something. But in this case you had the idea to do it and you sent it to us. And of course we were very, very glad to put it in Charisma and even to do this podcast. But what motivated you to write this article? Well Steve, thanks for having me on.

2:14 It's good to see you and congratulations on moving to a new building and I look forward to joining you there sometime when I'm back in Orlando. As you know, when I worked with you at Charisma, I started dealing with this issue. I first wrote a book in the year 2000 called, called Ten Lies, The Church Tells Women, which part of that book dealt with the problem of abuse, not only domestic violence but sexual abuse. And then because that just continued to grow and I started traveling and ministering, I started a ministry that focuses on helping women overseas who are struggling with various forms of cultural abuse and oppression. But all the time that I've been involved in this, I have known that women in the church were struggling with this feeling, not only that they were vulnerable and that sometimes there was predatory behavior on the part of men in the church and sometimes leaders in the church. That was there and then there was also this feeling that sometimes it was covered up when it happened. So that can make a victim feel even more vulnerable when maybe she goes and tells somebody that she was abused and then it is overlooked

3:46 or excused or the woman is blamed herself for what the man did to her. So when we just lived through this most recent scandal involving International House of Prayer in Kansas City, and I know that the wounds are very fresh right now and people are still sorting through all of that, but it has raised so much concern among women today about whether or not they are safe in the church. And you know, this is not just a charismatic Pentecostal problem. We know that a few years ago it came up that there has been some systematic problems with sexual abuse in the Southern Madness Convention and it looked like there were times when leaders were covering that up.

4:40 And then of course this most recent experience with IHOP has just made it all come to a head again. And so I approached you guys to say, is it not time for us as a movement, the charismatic Pentecostal movement, and we don't speak for all Christians, but I think Charisma has a role to play in speaking out on these types of issues. I think it's time for leaders in the charismatic Pentecostal movement to make a declaration of repentance for the fact that we haven't addressed this, we haven't done enough to make women feel safe, and that we're going to approach this, you know, before God and say, Lord, forgive us, first of all, for allowing this, for not addressing it, and then make a statement of repentance. And my prayer is that more and more leaders across the, across our movement will express these words and really search their own hearts about how we have allowed this to happen and then make a public declaration about it. I think it's going to bring healing if we do that.

6:00 Well, I want to get to that declaration because there is one in the article that we'll talk about in just a minute, but you've mentioned several of the concerns. Of course, the Bible is a standard and has a very high standard. The apostle Paul dealt with these issues, particularly in the Corinthian church. Do you want to elaborate on that and maybe explain why you think there's, you know, the standard of the Bible that has missed so much and instead of dealing with them, often it's just covered up. So for example, when sexual abuse is found in the church, sometimes it's uncovered by a whistleblower or whatever, there's a emphasis to somehow hide it because it tarnishes the reputation of the person being accused or maybe the reputation of the ministry. Why do you talk to me about why that is and why you think it happens?

7:01 Well, you mentioned the word standard. I mean, I think we all know that these days, in the body of Christ at large, I mean, biblical standards are being thrown around and removed and it's pretty much a free-for-all in some churches as far as where we stand on sexual issues. But in our movement, in the Charismatic Pentecostal Movement, we still believe that marriage is sacred. We still believe that marriage is between one man and one woman. We still believe in sexual purity and we still believe in the standards that are outlined in the letters of the Apostle Paul. You know, I did a study on his letters and there's only one letter of the Apostle Paul that does not address the issues of sexual immorality and holding leaders accountable for that. And that's the little tiny letter of Philemon. Every other letter of the Apostle Paul, he gets very, very clear. He makes it plain that immorality, fornication, adultery, homosexuality, go down the line, all those things are out of bounds in the church and that we are called to sexual purity and that requires, especially it requires leaders to be faithful in their marriages, to be faithful in their marriages, to be faithful in their marriages, to be faithful in their leaders, to be faithful in their marriages, and to be one man, one woman, pure, and to also call

8:35 the people in the church to sexual purity. And that would mean that sexual harassment, you know, luring women into some kind of relationship by a married man or a single man, all those things are out of bounds and that women should be treated with respect. Paul even told Timothy, treat younger women as your sister and treat older women as your mother. So there's that whole aspect of respect that obviously those kinds of rules are thrown out when a leader or any man in the church views a woman, objectifies a woman, treats her like an object and tries to lure her into a sexual relationship. You know, Steve, when I first came to work for you in 1992, we're going way way back, one of the first news stories that I had to jump in and deal with over a long period of time was the scandal at the Cathedral of the Holy Spirit in Atlanta, Bishop Earl Paul. You remember that that story dominated the headlines for a couple of years because we learned that there was sexual abuse going on in that church from the very top that the pastor of the church as well as

10:07 other staff members, male staff members, were praying on P-R-E-Y, praying on women in that church. And of course, they ended up coming forward. They had to go to the news media to talk about it. And it was a horrible scandal which ended up shutting down that church because it had become such a nest of immorality. I remember that more than 30 years ago, but we're still similar. And I remember that story, of course, very well. And we're not here to talk about that particular story. And of course, Earl Paul is now long dead, but it's just sad when that happens.

10:56 And your article actually names some names. We're not here to do that today. We're to talk about the bigger issues. And one of the things that I talk about on my podcast is the whole thing about spiritual warfare. What we see in the culture is not warring against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers. I'm talking about all the anti-Semitism and the sexual immorality, problems way beyond what you and I are talking about today. But in terms of attacking leaders, and I even want to make this personal, to ask you what you do to put guardrails around your life.

11:38 Because when we talk about Christian leaders, a lot of times when it comes out, there really weren't guardrails. And I guess they must have thought they'd get away with it. The enemy would love to take me down. He'd love to take you down. He'd love to take down anybody who's holding up a standard because of the hypocrisy and the way that it calls disrepute to the body of Christ. And one thing that I've prayed, and I can't even remember ever saying this publicly, but I've prayed for years that the Lord would help me finish strong and never bring disrepute to the body of Christ. Because some of these scandals do that. It causes people to turn away. Early in my career, I attended a church where the pastor had to step down due to immorality. And one of my close friends' wife was involved. And so I sort of knew it up close and personal in a way that most people wouldn't.

12:41 And there are still people that are not serving Christ because of the fallout of that scandal. The same thing happened with my mentor, Jamie Buckingham. And we're not here to go into all those kinds of things, but there's a fallout that happened. So let me ask you what it is that you do to put in guardrails and maybe expand it as suggestions for what others can do to follow your lead. Because I know that you do have guardrails in your life as I do. Yeah, and this is very timely, Steve, because my wife and I will be celebrating our 40th anniversary this coming Sunday. Well, happy anniversary.

13:24 Thank you. And I have been teaching, particularly young men, because I do a lot of mentoring of young leaders now, teaching young men how to stay pure, whether they're single or married, and how to put those guardrails around their life. And for me, the number one way that that is, of course, let me step back and say, I think the absolute number one way that you stay pure sexually is to stay on fire for God. I mean, it's, it's, there's a lot of things that we can do practically. But I think keeping the fire of the Holy Spirit burning in our lives is the number one way that you're going to stay pure. Because when you're on fire for God, you're not thinking about anything else as far as sinful things. But for me, I surround myself with strong friends who know that they have access to my life and they can ask me anything. I have a lot of close friends who I call them Barnabas in my life. They are, they are not necessarily mentors. They are just close friends. I do have mentors as well. And I have always lived, tried to live my life as an open book. So I make a habit of going and talking to my friends about anything that I'm struggling with and being open about my weaknesses. That has been my practice since I was a young man. And when

14:58 I went into ministry, or when I got ordained in the year 2000, 24 years ago, I went to one of my close friends and I just said, I want to tell you everything about my life, about my history, about my past. And I just want you to know all of my chunks so that you can ask me those hard questions. And I think that that is just so basic for any leader. But I find today that many, many Christian leaders don't, number one, they don't have relationships like that. And number two, many times they have never really opened up about their own issues to anybody. And that is a very dangerous place to be because the Bible says, James 5, 16 says, confess your sins to one another and you will be healed. So living in transparency, living in a vulnerable life is the secret to staying pure and staying on that straight path. So that has been a practice for me and that's what I teach others. Well, you know, we're just having a conversation in your comments, bring back so many memories and I want my viewers to hear what you have to say rather than me. But for me, for many years, Jamie Buckingham was that person in my life. And Jamie had his own shortcomings, but he rebounded from them and was always godly when I knew him. But when he died in 1992, the first thing that went

16:28 through my mind was I'm going to have to be open with someone else, which I have been. The Lord has put other people in my life as well. And I think this is very important because sin hides in the darkness and there's something about the light. And that is important. And I hope that even this podcast will encourage some people who may be struggling or tempted to or people that are going to sign this declaration that we're going to talk about in just a minute. That it'll help be a turning point because that's really the goal. And I'll also mention Jack Hayford, who also played a mental role in my life for many, many years. And he told the story, I'm sure that you can find it on his website because so many of his teachings are there. When he was in his mid 30s, he had a tempting situation that he did not succumb to, but he tells in a very wise pastoral kind of way how the Lord really used that as a wake up call to cause him to go in the right direction. And let's hope and pray that this podcast today and the article in Charisma and your ongoing ministry. So there's two things I want to cover in the short time we have left. Number one, you have taught this message. Your article goes into how you've taught it in places like El Salvador, in the Congo, in different places. And you have had men come forward and repent of even a type of sexism that we don't see

18:03 here. Like for example, in Uganda, where they had a chant that my cow is more valuable than my wife. And they didn't even see how wrong that was. Tell us about that and then how that's motivated you to do the similar thing here in the United States and with this declaration that you've written. Sure. Well, as you know, I started out when my ministry began way back in the days when I was at Charisma. I was going to different countries and I was trying to empower women to be in the ministry to discover their spiritual gifts, etc. And then I realized how oppressive it was for them to be in these third world situations where women were viewed as objects or they were viewed as animals. I mean, they were just put down so far. And the physical abuse in marriages was horrific.

19:02 It was very eye-opening and now it's become common for me to go to these cultures and see this. And so I did begin to teach a lot of men, I would teach men's conferences and try to get them to understand through scripture to have a God's view of women. And that of course requires repentance because if you grow up in a culture where your father beat your mother and maybe your father had 12 wives and women were just down here in another category, that requires the Holy Spirit to change your mind and it requires repentance. And so countless times I have seen men come to the altar, fall on their faces and ask God to forgive them for mistreating their wives, for mistreating single women, for viewing women as objects, for hitting their wives, so many different things like that. But then when this whole thing came up recently at International House of Prayer and there was this heavy feeling of women are feeling vulnerable, they're feeling prayed upon, when a leader, you find out that a leader was mistreating women and then hiding it, it makes women feel unsafe. And so I feel like what we need to do is a similar thing that we would do in Congo or in

20:40 El Salvador and that is let's publicly repent for this attitude because sexism can lead to spiritual, I mean to sexual abuse. It's, you know, when you view a woman as an object, you think she's down here somehow, you think that you have a right to mistreat her sexually, that's really at the root of this. And so we need to repent of it. And we also need to repent of covering it up. And then say, make a declaration, we're going to do our best to make church a safe place for women. That's what I think we need to do. Well, this declaration that is in the May issue of Charisma Magazine online is very, very strong. And we're going to make this available where people can actually sign it online. And I want to encourage my viewers to share this podcast and help us get this word out. We want other ministries to also pick up the mantle and share this. This needs to be a movement, not just, this is not just a podcast. This is a podcast about a movement that I really believe that you're starting Lee. And this is very important to the body of Christ, is very important to the lives of people that are involved in this thing. So this Declaration of Independence is a sincere apology to our sisters in Christ. And it begins this way, we repent on behalf of all abusers and we ask forgiveness for our sisters. And then it goes on, we repent for

22:14 viewing women as sexual objects and instead of valuing them for their character traits, personalities and intellects and spiritual gifts, we ask for forgiveness. And it goes on in a similar matter. It's over a page long. I don't want to read all of it. Why don't you just summarize what it is and why you wrote this and what you hope to accomplish with it? Sure. And Steve, you mentioned earlier the Me Too movement. And I wanted to make a comment about the fact that, you know, I know that in our secular culture right now, we look at what's going on and we also see a very radical form of feminism that's out there today that maybe many Christians are uncomfortable with. And I just want to say, I'm not talking about that. I'm not talking about, let's just jump on the secular feminist bandwagon. There is a godly biblical view that we should have of women that we find in Jesus Christ himself. When Jesus was on this earth, Jesus was respectful of women and he radically elevated women because in those days they were down at this bottom rung of society.

23:30 And you see all the women that Jesus ministered to, the bleeding woman, the crippled woman, Mary of Bethany who knelt at his feet, every woman that Jesus ministered to in the Gospels, Jesus was elevating them and showing a respect and an honor and a dignity, restoring something that the enemy took and also that men of that culture, they had that very degrading view of women. They viewed women as less than human and Jesus came to elevate that and to restore dignity. That's what we're talking about here and Jesus cares about women who have been abused and he wants them to know that that's not what defines them, their value is restored through Christ and that's why we want to make this statement. We're basically saying that we know that sin has damaged women and sin gets in the hearts of men and causes them to put women down, but because we are Christian men now, we are saying we understand that our sisters are valued and that they have equal value with men and that we're going to restore that and we're going to ask God to change us so that we don't have that negative view of them and that we will not only respect them,

25:00 but that we will protect them and that we would say we don't want abuse happening in the church anymore. We are tired of this and we want the church to be a safe place. That's so well said and I think it's so important and before we end, I want you to pray and I want to say again that people should share this in the process. If you don't subscribe to my podcast, please do so. Hit the little bell so you know when we're on live Tuesdays and Thursdays at 4 p.m. Eastern time and we want to get this word out and you can subscribe to Charisma Magazine online by going to My Charisma.com. It is the May issue. It isn't out yet, but it will be. You want to read this article. Lee goes into a lot of other things which he just referred to about respecting women as equals. Even men who are not abusers, who are not doing anything immoral, sexually often will put down a woman with a respected ministry by using a term like girl or something like that. The article touches on some of those kinds of things. We need to get rid of that too because that goes very deep into the culture and even into the Christian subculture. I'll give you the final word and then close in prayer and we'll end the podcast that way.

26:30 Yeah, let's just go ahead and pray right now. I want to just say that if anybody is listening to this podcast right now and you were abused, you might even be male, a guy, and maybe you were abused and it could have been in the church. We know that Jesus cares about that pain that you struggle with and we want to pray that God would heal that. Father, we thank you right now that even though our nation is struggling in so many ways spiritually right now, we are asking you to heal this problem in the church. We are asking you, Lord, to pour out your Holy Spirit in a fresh way on the body of Christ and we pray there would be an awakening. We pray, Lord, that men throughout this, our movement throughout the body of Christ in this nation, Lord, that we would turn away from any sinful attitude, any practice, any behavior, any addictions that men are involved in that have put women down, degraded them, harassed them, abused them. We pray that that would be broken and we pray that this behavior and also this cover-up would end and, Lord, we pray for every woman out there who has been abused, particularly by a man in the church or by a leader in the church or if the church turned away, turned a deaf ear to her concerns and covered it up or

28:08 ignored it. Father, we ask that you heal those women from that pain and that trauma and we pray, Lord, because we know Jesus that you came to heal the broken hearted and so we ask that the Holy Spirit would come and pour out this healing on those who have been victimized and we pray that this predatory behavior would end. We pray that there would be a godly attitude in the hearts of men in the church, that we would see our sisters as equals and that we would have a protective heart for them, that we would treat them as our sisters and our mothers with purity and that, Lord, that we would see a great restoration and a great healing take place across the body of Christ. We pray that in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. And so thank you, Lee, for being on my podcast today.

29:04 I believe this is very powerful. There's so much more that you go into in the article, which is the cover story of the May issue of Charisma Magazine online. People can find it after it comes out in May at MyCharisma.com. You can subscribe to get it in your inbox to get a copy of your very well written article and the declaration that we refer to that we're encouraging people to sign. Thank you for watching today. God bless you. Thanks, Lee.