Church Hurt and Spiritual Abuse: A Faith-Affirming Response

After experiencing severe coercion in religious settings as a teen, I wrestled for years with the term spiritual abuse. Here is why a faith-affirming framework for church hurt matters.

Art by Sabrina Paredes

I write from lived experience, more than twenty years of working with youth in church settings, and ongoing learning about evidence-based safeguarding that names harm clearly without undermining faith.

I began researching the term spiritual abuse in 2018 after trying to understand my experiences with church hurt as a youth. What I found was both validating and unsettling. Much of what I encountered online described real problems, but it left me feeling worse rather than informed. Definitions varied. There was no shared language. Many descriptions felt reactive or aimed at blacklisting entire churches rather than nurturing healthy cultures. Everything still felt very “in process.”

Why Naming Church Hurt and Spiritual Abuse Without Abandoning Faith Matters

I could understand the charged emotions. Decades of trying to cope with my own made me empathetic. But by then, I needed something different. I needed more of the peace and clarity I'd felt from my Savior as He helped me understand the impact of my childhood experiences. I needed ministering.

Instead, much of what I encountered felt re-traumatizing. The conversation often seemed to be shaped by all-or-nothing thinking and offered only one conclusion: leave your toxic, high-demand church.

And there were other things that didn’t sit well with me.

First, the two faith communities most central to my life, one in my youth and one in adulthood, were places where I had experienced genuine goodness. They shaped my relationship with God in lasting ways, even though harm sometimes occurred within them.

Second, whenever I read about Jesus encountering imperfect or unhealthy behavior at church and or in faith-based relationships, there were no final judgements. He gave room for growth and change.

Thinking of how Jesus ate with “sinners,” I realized He didn’t see anyone as beyond hope. Those who doubted Him, denied Him, broke His laws, and slept while keeping watch were not labeled irredeemable. Instead, everyone kept their place at the table where He met them as they were. As He invited them to new ways of thinking and being, He even allowed for slow timelines.

So how could it be that the two faith communities where I had experienced both wounds and profound spiritual growth were simply relegated to a “bad list”?

I couldn’t shake the contradiction. The people and institutions I knew were genuinely trying, even though some within them misused agency (at times). There was no way these were completely beyond redemption.

Uncomfortable with the term spiritual abuse?

For those of us who are deeply religious, terms like spiritual abuse can create an almost impossible conflict. How can something good and sacred be paired with words as dark and painful as abuse? Because most behavior in faith communities is healthy, many have had only positive experiences with religion. While this is a good thing, it can also make it harder for those of us with painful experiences to be understood.

That said, we don’t have to look far for context. Struggles with coercion in faith-based relationships are not new. They are recorded throughout scripture.

Throughout His ministry, we see Jesus repeatedly challenge unhealthy tactics used to influence faith and belief. He ministered to those affected, the same way He ministered to me as a young teen. He didn't deny harm, but He also didn't reject faith.

Sometimes, beneath experiences of church hurt, is the impulse to label an entire faith community as “high demand.” But that can be too simplistic. It’s more accurate to recognize that church dynamics are interpersonal and layered. Individuals, families, or the culture of a local congregation may create pressure that does not originate in doctrine itself. I explore that distinction more fully in a separate post on high-demand faith culture versus Jesus’ easy yoke.

Because I've seen the term spiritual abuse used in ways that feel weaponized, I remain cautious about using it to describe my experiences. Still, naming it matters. When you don’t know what you’re suffering from, it becomes almost impossible to heal.

The discomfort surrounding this topic can make it hard to talk about. Shame may keep us from bringing our church hurt to God. After years of wrestling with all of that, I've learned something important:

Bringing spiritual wounds to Jesus Christ isn’t an “even this” situation, where Christ can even help us with this. It is especially this.

I’ve heard it said that He could have learned everything we would suffer by revelation, but He chose to learn by experience. Looking at His life, this rings true.

We see Him falsely accused, threatened, shamed, and subjected to attempts at coercion meant to force Him to deny who He was. When that didn’t work, those efforts escalated. We don’t often describe Christ’s suffering using the language of abuse (because His sacrifice was the will of His Father, and He willingly laid down His life) but that does not erase the reality that He experienced coercion, which is why He understands.

Jesus Christ is uniquely willing and able to minister to wounds that are spiritual. That includes wounds caused within families and faith communities that are often described as church hurt or spiritual abuse.

Finding language that holds both faith and truth

With that understanding, I continued searching for faith-affirming language that could name harm clearly without requiring me to abandon my faith.

That search eventually led me to the work of ThirtyOneEight (formerly CCPAS), a Christian nonprofit that has spent decades doing evidence-based safeguarding work across the UK.

What helped me most was their position paper on spiritual abuse. Like a light in the dark, it offered clarifications that reduced polarization and misuse of the term.

Wanting to know if there was truly room at this table for someone with both my past and my current faith, I enrolled in several of their training courses. The experience was consistent throughout: the information was clear and evidence-based, the resources inclusive and non-weaponized, and I walked away with the same clarity and peace I had felt from my Savior. I also felt better equipped to contribute to a healthy culture in my own faith community.

Insights from ThirtyOneEight’s Position Paper and Training on Spiritual Abuse

• The goal of helping faith communities.

  A faith-affirming approach to naming spiritual abuse isn’t about attacking religion, but about education and prevention. It’s about empowering faith communities from within and strengthening faith and nurturing healthy culture.

• A definition centered on patterns of behavior, not doctrine or belief.

  It is not spiritually abusive for faith communities to hold doctrines rooted in scripture. That freedom is essential. The issue is how beliefs are taught and whether agency, dignity, and respect are preserved.

• Unhealthy behavior doesn’t flow in only one direction.

  While many stories involve leaders harming those they lead, coercive behavior can occur within families, marriages, friendships, college roommates, missionary companionships, or church members.

• Church leaders can be on the receiving end.

  Leaders may experience manipulation, gossip, pressure, or control from individuals or groups within a congregation. Influence doesn’t only come from titles. It can come from money, legacy, social standing, or relational leverage.

• Power in faith communities is layered and complex.

  Authority and influence can come from many places, not just formal roles. Harmful behavior may occur when any form of power is used coercively within a religious context.

• It’s possible to experience good and harm in the same place.

  Many people, myself included, carry both faith-building experiences and painful wounds from the same community. Naming harm doesn’t require erasing what was meaningful.

• Spiritual abuse affects the heart and the soul.

  It includes emotional and psychological harm and uniquely impacts a person’s relationship with God, their sense of identity, and their ability to trust their own conscience.

• Intent matters, but so does impact.

  Much harm is unintentional, growing out of unmanaged emotions, misuse of faith and belief, or unhealthy culture. That said, harm is still harm.

• The word abuse is uncomfortable, but purposeful.

  Naming behavior is essential to acknowledging the seriousness of impact, need for care, and understanding that results in prevention.

Not everything is abuse.

Not all church hurt is spiritual abuse. Some experiences reflect unhelpful or unhealthy behavior. Spiritual abuse involves a repeated pattern of coercion and psychological harm that overrides a person’s agency in matters of faith.

It is also important to say clearly that research and safeguarding data indicate most behavior in faith communities is healthy. Spiritual abuse is not the norm. When it does occur, it reflects an ongoing, patterned misuse of religious language, authority, or relational leverage to coerce or control.

In safeguarding work, this has been described as a systematic pattern of coercive control within a religious context. In my own faith community’s youth protection training, coercion is similarly defined as compelling others through religious authority or language that implies spiritual obligation, intimidation, or threat rather than persuasion, long-suffering, gentleness, and love unfeigned.

In other words, not every uncomfortable or imperfect church experience rises to this level. But when psychological harm becomes ongoing and intertwined with faith, it deserves to be named.

For those who want a clearer framework for understanding the difference, I explore Professor Lisa Oakley’s A Spectrum of Behavior in a separate post.

A brief clarification about authority and agency

Throughout scripture, God has called prophets to speak on His behalf in various dispensations of time. Speaking from a place of divine or entrusted authority is not, in itself, coercion. Teaching, instructing, and guiding others, in religious leadership and within families, has always been part of God’s design.

The distinction lies not in whether authority is exercised, but in how it is used.

Healthy authority teaches truth with humility, extends loving invitations, then allows space for individuals to choose. Even when correction is needed, agency is preserved. Christ Himself modeled this pattern. He invited rather than pressured, taught rather than shamed, and gave those He taught room to ponder personal decision-making.

As one who has worked with teens at church for over twenty-five years, I'm required to complete abuse prevention training. Doing so, I've seen coercion defined in my faith community's youth protection training this way:

“Coercion can occur when a leader (or parent) compels a child using religious language or authority that implies a spiritual obligation or duty, permission, sanction, punishment, justification, intimidation, or threat. This is contrary to the Savior’s teaching that individuals should lead “only by persuasion, by long-suffering, by gentleness and meekness, and by love unfeigned.”

The issue, then, is not faith, belief, or divinely appointed roles. It is the misuse of authority within those roles.

A Faith-Affirming Response to Church Hurt: Closing Thoughts

My journey with the term spiritual abuse has taught me that language matters. But ministering matters more.

How we talk about spiritual wounds, how we listen, and whether we allow room for complexity all shape whether those who are hurting feel safe enough to stay or whether they quietly leave.

I’ve written more about how to respond wisely and compassionately when someone shares their church hurt.

This topic has a way of dividing Christians, which is why the apostle Paul’s counsel feels especially relevant:

“If there be therefore any consolation in Christ, if any comfort of love, if any fellowship of the Spirit… let nothing be done through strife or vainglory; but in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves. Look not every man on his own things, but every man also on the things of others.” (Philippians 2:1–4)

So when it’s difficult to understand another person’s experience, instead of rushing to defend what we love, we can slow down and “look also on the things of others.” We can sit with discomfort and find consolation in Christ together.

This is what a faith-affirming response to church hurt and spiritual abuse means to me. Rather than abandoning faith, we name harmful behavior and invite Jesus Christ into situations that would otherwise leave us in the dark. With His light, we move beyond describing problems to responding well. Sometimes that means letting petty behavior go. Other times it means peacefully standing up. Either way, we are no longer voiceless. We are empowered to act with God-given agency.

My hope is that conversations like these remain centered on Jesus Christ.

He's the One who understands.

The One we can trust.

He is the One who can help us minister with love.