When the Church Is Not Safe, and God Still Is

When the Church Is Not Safe, and God Still Is

🚨⚠️ This post discusses sexual assault, spiritual abuse, and institutional betrayal. If these topics are tender or activating for you, please take care of yourself as you read. You are free to pause, step away, or choose another space on this site. You matter.

When the Church Is Not Safe, and God Still Is

There are some stories we do not tell because we are in hiding. Others, because we are surviving. For a long time, mine lived in the second category.

Many of you have asked why I moved churches after fourteen years. Why my voice changed. Why my ministry direction shifted. I have often answered vaguely, not because the truth is unimportant, but because there is a cost to telling it.

This was not one wound. For nearly three years, I have been walking through cancer, surgeries, and treatment while also carrying the weight of a deep violation, the silence that followed, and the consequences that came with telling the truth. My body was fighting to survive. My heart was trying to make sense of betrayal. My spirit was learning how to endure more than I thought possible.

Here is what I can say now, carefully and honestly.

I was sexually assaulted in a church setting. Before that, the same church pressured me into silence so the congregation would not “panic” at the awareness that registered sex offenders were roaming the halls. I was treated as a “conflict” to be managed instead of a person to be protected.

A couple of weeks after my double mastectomy and lymph node dissection, with surgical drains still in place, the church arranged transportation so I could keep my promise to the incarcerated women at CCWF. I had told them the ministry event would happen no matter what.

I was not told that the man assigned to transport me and my Bibles was a registered sex offender. I was given only his name and told he was a respected Bible teacher.

After a thirteen-hour day and a terrifying five-hour drive home, I asked for a chaplain-to-chaplain debriefing. I was made to wait thirty days, all while undergoing dose-dense chemotherapy. Instead of concern or compassion, I was treated like the villain, not the victim.

Exposure is the secondary infection; while chemotherapy was meant to kill the cancer in my body, the church’s negligence introduced a toxicity to my soul that no medicine can treat.

What I endured on that drive was psychological trauma that will never leave me. The lack of transparency, the lack of care, and the lack of protection turned an already devastating season into layered trauma.

One year later, while I was still in cancer treatment and still serving my church, the unconscionable happened. I was sexually assaulted by a weekly‑attending member, right outside the prayer room.

This was not one bad decision or one painful moment. It was compounded trauma. Spiritual. Emotional. Physical. It affected my health, my work, and my trust in spaces that once felt like home.

I am not sharing this to attack a church or to name names. This is bigger than one congregation or one leadership team. This is about spiritual abuse and institutional failure, and the real damage they inflict on real people.

It is one thing to be hurt by the world. It is another to be hurt in the house of God. And it is something else entirely to be told that speaking the truth will cost you everything.

In my case, it did. It cost me credentials. It cost me an organization I had built. It cost me relationships. And for a long time, it nearly cost me my voice.

Scripture tells us in 2 Corinthians 1:3–4 that God comforts us in our troubles so we can comfort others with the comfort we have received from Him. It also tells us that when one member of the body suffers, the whole body suffers.

Sometimes, instead of bearing one another’s burdens, systems protect themselves. Sometimes, instead of binding wounds, institutions manage risk. Sometimes, instead of walking with the violated, people choose silence because it feels safer.

That does not mean God failed. It means people did. And God is not confused about the difference.

For a long time, I carried this quietly. Part of that was fear. Part of it was exhaustion. Part of it was knowing that survivors are often treated as liabilities instead of image‑bearers who have been harmed.

If you have walked this road, you know how lonely it can be. You start to question your own memory, your own instincts, your own worth.

But silence has a cost too. It teaches your nervous system that you are not safe. It teaches your heart that your pain is inconvenient. And it slowly shrinks your world.

I am writing this because God does not heal what we are forced to keep hidden. And because there are women and survivors sitting in churches right now wondering if God sees what is happening to them.

He does.

I am also writing this because my story did not end in loss. What was meant to silence me became the ground where God reshaped my calling. What was meant to break me became the place where He deepened my compassion. What was meant for harm has been woven into work that now serves law enforcement families, foster children, and people who live with trauma every day.

This is also why I wrote my book, Boots of Resurrection, now with Moody Publishers. It was not born out of theory. It was born out of survival, faith, and the long, slow work of God meeting me in places I would never have chosen but could not avoid.

That does not make what happened okay. It means God is faithful in the middle of what is not.

If you are a survivor of sexual assault, spiritual abuse, or institutional betrayal, please hear this:

You are not weak because it hurt.

You are not faithless because it changed you.

You are not dangerous because you tell the truth.

And you do not owe your silence to any system that failed to protect you.

There is a difference between protecting the Church and protecting an image. Christ asked us to love people.

I am still walking this road. But I am no longer willing to pretend this part of my story does not exist.

Not for shock. Not for drama. But for truth. And for the women and children and families who deserve better than silence.

If you are carrying something similar, you are not alone.

He walks with the violated.

He stays with the wounded.

And He is not afraid of the truth.

Until next time…

Keep being Amazing You!

Hallelujah!!!