Another reader response
I applaud your beginning
to explore the issue of spiritual abuse; which in my observation is one cause
of church leaving within NZ.
When I was studying for a
secular counselling degree in 1999, three other Christians and I did our
research paper on ‘spiritual abuse'. We put one ad in Challenge Weekly, this
resulted in a research team member being interviewed for 10 minutes by Radio
Rhema. As a result we received phone calls, from Kaitaia to Invercargill,
literally, from people .
We chose eight people to interview,
from mainline protestant denominations, to illustrate that spiritual abuse was
not just happening in any one branch or stream of Christianity within NZ. We discovered,
for instance, that some of the interviewees were suffering from, and continued
to suffer from up to 10 years later, symptoms similar to those listed for post-trauma
stress syndrome. Characteristics of clinical depression and generalised anxiety
were described by the interviewees. 50% of those interviewed had been involved
in middle management of churches.
As part of out literature review,
for our research, we read every Christian book available in NZ on the subject
at the time, but found nothing referring to NZ, or any other research in NZ
even to acknowledge spiritual abuse existed in the NZ church scene. However,
results showed that there was no difference in the characteristics of abuse in
NZ to that described in the literature reviewed from the
I continue to encounter pastors and
Christian leaders, who are ignorant of, resistant to, or in denial about,
spiritual abuse, especially in NZ, despite people coming for counsel from their
churches.                                            Â
John R Munro