We Were the Least of These
Discovering how the Bible can speak freedom to survivors of sexual abuse by Elaine A. Heath
It
was the middle of summer, and I was preaching through a series titled “Men, Women, and God.” While the congregation was accepting of me as their pastor, they still tended to have patriarchal views about gender. Our church was in the Ohio River Valley, a region with unusually high rates of sexual abuse and domestic violence.1 My goal in the sermon series was to introduce the congregation to deeper levels of the healing and liberating power of the gospel. As part of the larger goal, I wanted them to experience a reading of several biblical texts that could help to prevent and heal the sexual abuse and domestic violence in our city. On this Sunday, several weeks into the series and after I had established a biblical foundation for gender equality, I preached
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about the sin of child sexual abuse. I talked about its presence even among Christians, its relationship to patriarchy, and how the church could help to prevent and heal this form of violence. My biblical text was the story of the woman at the well in John 4. The congregation was unusually quiet, listening intently as I preached about the woman’s worth in God’s eyes and how her series of rejections as an adult could very well have been the outcome of the wounds of sexual abuse. There were aspects of her adult life, I said, that are sometimes found in survivors of child sexual abuse. Instead of looking at her story as just one more example of an immoral woman, what if we thought about the kind of childhood experiences that can move a person toward this