September 25, 2020 Show with Jennifer Michelle Greenberg & Rev. Bill Shishko on “Help! There’s Domestic Abuse in My Church!”

Domestic Abuse, Church Failure, and the Need for Biblical Shepherding

Live from the historic parsonage of the 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

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Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth, who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Friday on this 25th day of September 2020.

Although I've had both of my guests today on before, one has been on many, many times, this is the first time they've ever been on together. My guests today are Jennifer Michelle Greenberg and Pastor Bill Shishko.

Jennifer Michelle Greenberg is a pianist, a vocalist, and songwriter who has received a wonderful commendation from Brian Ray, bassist and guitarist for Paul McCartney. She is a wife, mother, and half of a musical duo with her husband Jason, an advocate for victims of domestic violence and abuse, who has been commended by Tori Amos for her work benefiting these victims, and by President George W. Bush and Governor Sarah Palin for her charitable work for the military and veterans.

She is also the author of Not Forsaken, the story of life after abuse, how faith brought one woman from victim to survivor. It's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Jennifer Michelle Greenberg.

Thank you so much, Chris.

It's great to have you back. And also joining Jennifer is Pastor Bill Shishko, one of my dearest and oldest friends in the faith going back to the 1980s. He is pastor of the Haven, an Orthodox Presbyterian congregation currently meeting in Bohemia, Long Island, New York, in the facilities of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church of Bohemia.

He's also an advisory board member of the Bonson Project, and today both Pastor Bill and Jennifer are going to be discussing Help! There's Domestic Abuse in My Church. And it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio as well, Pastor Bill Shishko.

Hey, Chris, good to be with you again in comparison with Gene.

Well, that isn't true at all. In fact, as far as my circles of acquaintances and friendships globally, since I've been doing Christian radio so many years, you are one of those friends that I have that it seems at least 90 of the people that I come into contact with know who you are.

And they say very wonderful things about you, I might add.

They know who I am, but what do they say about me? My wife said to me once, Bill, Jesus said, woe to you when all men speak.

Well, I find that hard to believe. But today we are speaking of Help! There's Domestic Abuse in My Church. And Pastor Bill, if you could perhaps set the stage for what we're going to be discussing today.

Sure.

I pastored the Ork Ware on Long Island for 35 years. Toleration.

Praise God. Well, Jennifer, what would you like to say about your curriculum?

Yeah, well, the curriculum, it's a study. It's about the length of the book itself. And you can download it free through my website at jennifergreenberg .net. And basically what it does is it takes the reader, it's geared towards church leaders, Christian counselors, school admins.

And so it basically takes them through the book and helps them understand how to respond to reports of abuse, as well as how to understand the dynamic, the spiritual, emotional dynamics that are going on.

And hopefully help them see red flags, so they can identify abusive situations, respond to them effectively. And be able to intervene as a pastor, as a church leader, as a Christian counselor in that situation.

And tell them they're dealing with someone who is maybe a narcissist, or who is maybe a sociopath. And how do you distinguish between genuine repentance and someone who's just saying that they're sorry so they can keep doing what they're doing behind the scenes.

By the way, Jen, I don't want you to be overly alarmed, but you do sound a little muffled. Is there anything that you could change in the way that you're communicating with us? Oh, that's a hundred percent better.

Oh, good. Sorry about that.

Five hundred percent better.

Okay, good. Oh, no. Okay, so what I was saying was that the curriculum is geared towards church leaders, and it takes them through the book and helps them see red flags for abusive situations. For example, just different signs to look for in both children and adults.

I go through the seven stages of recovery, as I call them, which is similar, I guess, to the five stages of grief. But it just, it talks about how, you know, depending on how far in the past the abuse is, the different signs that you're going to see, the different kinds of confusion and theological challenges you're going to be dealing with with that person.

You know, it's like, why did God let this happen to me? And how do I know whether or not my abuser is truly repentant or if he's just lying to me again? And so going through all these issues and trying to equip pastors, church leaders, counselors, school teachers, and the like, to just better identify and understand and respond to these situations.

By the way, I want to let our listeners know that after this program is over, if you want to hear Jen's story, which she has chronicled in her book, Not Forsaken, you can go to ironsherpensirenradio .com and you can click on podcast past shows.

And if you type in the search engine Greenberg, that's spelt with a B-E-R-G at the end, you will see her, the audio link for her interview. And you could find out more about that. But just so our listeners know, your specific abuse that you were the, of which you were the victim, was parental abuse.

Specifically, your father had abused you sexually.

Correct. Yeah, there was domestic violence, as well as sexual abuse and psychological abuse. And then that abuse was furthered in the church when I tried to tell pastors what was going on.

And when you say it was, the abuse was furthered, you mean the mental and emotional abuse because of the fact that the churches were not really doing anything to adequately respond to your suffering?

Correct. There was that, but also one pastor in particular, when I went to try to tell him what was going on with my dad, he actually propositioned me.

Wow.

Yes, yeah. So it was very disturbing and confusing. And that, because that happened, it was very difficult for me to try to report again. Because I was thinking, well, are all men like this? Is this like, how do I know who to trust?

And so that also is a big thing that I deal with in my book. How do we help victims and survivors learn how to trust again? How do we avoid triggering them? How do we avoid treating them in such a way that maybe seems okay to us, but might actually exacerbate their situation or make them nervous?

And so, yeah. So I go through all this different stuff and I'm really excited about it. It's a free download through my website, jennifergreenberg .net. And I've already heard wonderful feedback about it.

One of the pastors who downloaded it recently told me that he's been dealing with a situation in his church where the wife was dealing with psychological abuse. And he didn't know how to respond to this because he'd never heard about it before.

You know, it's like he's always heard about physical violence or sexual abuse. And so this idea of psychological abuse was completely foreign to him. And he said that reading the curriculum had helped him understand what was actually going on and help him understand the dynamics of the situation so that he could pastor to both of those individuals better.

And I want to repeat your website, even though we plan on doing that throughout the program, jennifergreenberg .net. And remember, Greenberg is spelt with an E-R-G at the end, jennifergreenberg .net.

And can you give us a basic outline of exactly how churches and others, individuals, counseling ministries, what have you, how they actually make use of this curriculum?

Absolutely. Well, it's, you know, I tried to design it in a way that was very flexible. So you can read through it as if it's a book, just in your individual time, but it also would work in a class setting.

So you can, you know, say you're a pastor and you want your session or your group of church leaders, elders to go through this curriculum. You can do it in a class format or if you're a seminary professor, you know, it would work in that format as well.

So I try to make it as versatile as possible and just kind of give, you know, church leaders a baseline and the information that they need. And the other thing you can use it as is almost kind of like an encyclopedia.

So say you don't have time to sit down and read 135 pages about preventing and handling abuse. Well, you can also just have this, you know, on your computer or your smartphone or whatever, your Kindle, you can have it there.

And then say you went into someone who, you know, they have abuse in their past and their abuser keeps saying that they're sorry, but then they keep abusing and they keep saying sorry and then doing, you know, being abusive again.

And so how do you respond to that? Well, you can just open up Not Forsaken, a shepherd's guide, and you can scroll down to chapter 12, the truth about repentance, and you can run through the various signs of repentance, you know, what to look for, red flags, that maybe an abuser is not as repentant as they claim to be.

And so you can kind of use it in that way as well. It's kind of a reference material.

I remember in both my interview, previous interview with you and Pastor Bill, that fake repentance is a very, very common, in fact, it's almost guaranteed when an abuser gets caught. Is that correct?

Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And a lot of times they'll say things, you know, like, I'm sorry, you know, I'm sorry that you feel this way. I'm sorry that you're, you know, I'm sorry that you're upset.

But a lot of times, you know, some of the red flags you can look for is, are they demanding forgiveness of you? Like, do they expect you to just up and trust them because they said, sorry, because a genuinely repentant person will understand the gravity of what they've done.

They'll understand that they've lost your trust, that they've done something that has proven them to be untrustworthy. And so they're not going to try to pressure you into trusting them again, pressure you into forgiving them immediately, pressure you into letting them around the moment, you know, whatever.

They're going to understand that you need time to heal. They're going to understand that you have reason not to trust them, and they're going to be respectful of that. That's one of the number one red flags that I've seen is abusers demanding forgiveness.

And it's just not something that we see backed up by scripture at all.

Yeah. The one thing that makes my skin crawl in any circumstances where the guilty party involved in some kind of a sin who has harmed someone either physically, spiritually, mentally, or emotionally is when they say, I'm sorry you were hurt by this, or I'm sorry you feel that way.

Because basically what that means is I pity you because you're so weak and sensitive. That's really what that means.

Right. Exactly. Exactly. They're not apologizing for what they did. They're not repenting of what they did. They're saying they're sorry that you feel a certain way. And that's not the same as repentance.

Now, do you agree with Pastor Bill's comment before? He, I think, was just saying this by his gut feeling, but he was saying that spousal abuse or domestic abuse and violence are on the rise from previous years and generations.

Do you agree with that? Do you have any knowledge whether that is a statistical fact? In the church, that is. I'm talking about in the church.

Right. I would imagine so. I mean, just the, I feel like the climate in the church has, you know, especially in the evangelical church, unfortunately, has become more worldly. And as we lose our biblical definitions of things like repentance and forgiveness and we forget the rich biblical theology that teaches us how to deal with sin and how to respond to sin or just sin in general.

You know, there's so many churches that, you know, these days that preach about grace and the love of God, but they don't want to preach about sin. And that's a huge problem. And I think that it has, it has enabled abuse and it's resulting in just sort of a failure to confront abuse when it's seen because nobody wants to deal with the yucky, dark, dirty secret that's happening behind closed doors.

Why Churches Fail to Protect Abuse Victims

Now, Pastor Bill, as a pastor and your experience in all kinds of boards and leadership positions that extend even beyond your local congregations where you have pastored, why is it that conservative, doctrinally and theologically biblical churches that are otherwise sound and in many ways sound and reflective of the way Christ's church ought to be other than this area, why on earth do you believe these churches and these church leaders are not responding like biblical shepherds to the victims of abuse the way that they ought to be?

You know, and here's where I'm probably going to get myself in trouble with some people, but being a Christian, as long as I have been a Christian, having been saved in the 1980s, I have met, especially since I've been involved in the media for most of that time, I have met so many different people from so many different churches.

And one thing that I keep hearing about over and over again is almost the exact opposite of what you are both discussing today. I am hearing from men who are dismayed, who are discouraged, who are spiritually and mentally and emotionally crushed, because, and I'm talking about a lot of men over the years, who have said to me that there are churches who have been involved in counseling during their marital problems, have gone so overboard to try to dispel the notion of feminists and egalitarians that the church is abusively patriarchal, that it's misogynist, that it's chauvinistic, that they tend to go overboard in siding with the woman in any dispute.

And I keep hearing about this over and over and over again. And I was wondering how, especially Jen would respond to that, because obviously, just because one thing may be a reality, doesn't negate what you are saying either.

I mean, it could be cowardice, it could be cowardice all around on the part of church leaders. And it also, I'm not saying that these men that I hear from are in some cases, and of course, I would never say all, or even most, but in some of the cases, they may be delusional and it might be pride that is bringing them to that conclusion.

But if you could comment on what I said.

Yeah, I mean, I think that in a lot of cases, you know, there's a tendency, you know, I think too in courts, when you read about child custody, you hear about it a lot of times will be given to the woman.

And I'm not talking necessarily about abuse cases, just generally speaking, that the courts, our culture tends to lean that way. One thing I think that, one misconception I think that we really need to break through and that I tried to do in my curriculum in particular is realize that not all abusers are male.

There are a lot of female abusers. I mean, we're all human. We all have sins. And so you're going to meet women who are narcissists and women who are sociopaths and women who abuse children. And actually, if you look at studies, if you look at statistics from the Department of Health, you'll see that over 50 of child abusers are female.

And so, you know,.

Really, I'm shocked by that, actually.

Yes. Yeah. Well, I mean, we all have sin, you know, you've got, you've got a woman and maybe she's got a temper or, you know, what have you. And she's stuck at home with the kids all day and she's just, she's abusive.

Now, would that be more in the realm when it comes to the woman being the guilty party of abuse, especially of children? Would that be more in the realm of physical violence as opposed to sexual abuse?

I think generally speaking, it's usually more violent or just verbal, you know, just being really cruel verbally. But again, these are not hard and fast rules. So, you know, and for that matter, you know, you look on the news, you look at these school teachers who are having affairs with their students, you know, little boys who are 11, 12, 13 years old.

That's a sexual predator. That's a female sexual predator. So, we've got to get rid of this idea in our head that all abusers are, you know, drunk man in wife beater shirt. Just, it's not realistic.

Listening to Survivors and Recognizing Female Abusers

In fact, we're going to pick up, we're going to pick up right where you left off, Jen, because we have to go to our, we have to go to our first break right now. If anybody would like to join us on the air with a question for Jennifer Greenberg and Pastor Bill Shishko.

Our email address is ChrisArnzen at gmail .com. C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com. Please, if you're just asking a general question when it comes to ecclesiology and how church leaders are to respond to the tragedy of domestic violence in their own congregations, if you're asking a general question about that, please give us at least your first name, your city and state, and country of residence.

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So feel free to remain anonymous. This is one of those programs where there's a possibility that most of our emails will be anonymous. I don't know that for a fact, but feel free to write in anonymously if it's about a personal and private matter.

Again, it's chrisarnson at gmail .com. Chrisarnson at gmail .com. Don't go away. We'll be right back with Jennifer Michelle Greenberg and Pastor Bill Shishko on our theme, Help, There's Domestic Abuse in My Church.

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Welcome back. This is Chris Arnzen. If you just tuned us in, our guests today are Jennifer Michelle Greenberg, author of Not Forsaken and also Pastor Bill Shishko of the Haven and Orthodox Presbyterian Church.

Now meeting, at least temporarily, in Bohemia, Long Island, New York, we are discussing the theme Help! There is Domestic Abuse in my church. If you have any questions, our email address is chrisarnzen at gmail .com.

Chrisarnzen at gmail .com. I do want to go to at least one or two of our listener questions before we continue with the discussion. Let's see here. We have Mary in Cork, Ireland, and Mary says, Ecclesiastes 3 verse 7 says, There is a time to keep silence and a time to speak.

I have kept silent because it is not a nice topic and it is even worse when you are the actual victim in an abuse relationship and an abusive church. I write this as a survivor. I write this for the sake of just one woman who feels alone and in a hopeless situation, who is not listened to and is not heard.

God hears you. God hears your cries. He will rescue you. He cares deeply for you and loves you. I was married for about nine years and suffered mental, emotional, and physical abuse from my husband on a constant basis, even to the point of ribs being broken and not having food for myself or my baby.

I was always covered up, keeping my bruises not seen. I went to church and held my guitar as a protection so that no one would know that I was being abused and seemed quite normal, but behind it, I was in agony.

I reported the abuse to the elders and they took me away from my friends and put another supposedly older woman over me. They blamed me as an unsubmissive wife. When my baby was about one years old, my sister took me in for a few weeks only to be told that I was the older brother full of pride and my husband was the prodigal son and I was to go home.

I went back to more abuse. God led me out of that group eventually and I went to another church where I was told to turn the other cheek and keep singing just like Paul and Silas in jail. It dawned on me one day that Paul and Silas weren't beating each other up but were being persecuted for Christ.

The leader told me to keep taking it and wait for the angels. Imagine, these leaders were twisting scriptures to keep me in this relationship. I received counsel from a Christian counselor who helped me and told me I needed to mind my son.

This was my priority, so I began to move forward toward legal separation and this was desperately opposed by the church. I was told if I got a divorce I would not be allowed in the church, so I was terrified and another pastor said to go for an annulment.

After some time, we got to state annulment declaring we were never married. This broke my heart and even more because now it is said that my little boy's parents were never married. I am in tears writing this.

This is all in the past and although my marriage is annulled and I am on my own for the past 29 years, I am still considered married by my family and if I date a man I am called an adulteress. I am in a wonderful Baptist church now and am loved and cared for.

I raised my son to love the Lord and he is a minister of the gospel and a pastor of a church. God has used our pain for our good and his glory. I pray that God will use my testimony to help women. He is my strength and my song and I have forgiven all of these leaders and my ex-husband.

Okay, that was not a question obviously, but just a very sacrificial on her part to bear open her soul and pour out such a moving email and if you could both comment on it.

Absolutely, just the depth of the spiritual abuse. Not only did she suffer through abuse from her husband, but that's ecclesiastical abuse, that's spiritual abuse from her church leaders. That's the kind of response that you'd expect from a cult or a group that actually wanted to enable abuse and too often I see that kind of response from just very ignorant people in mainline denominations.

It's extremely disturbing and I just think that hearing Mary's story, it just struck me how much God has honored her for what she went through and for what she survived and for protecting her child and he's a pastor now and he's able to help people in a biblical and Christ-like way as opposed to the way her previous pastors and church leaders dealt with her in an abusive way.

It's just absolutely devastating though.

Pastor Bill?

Another pastor sent me to bring these things to the light so that justice can be done so the innocent can be protected. The church, so often I hear church leaders, they seem to have this instinctive or they think that, oh, if we expose that abuse happened in our congregation or this church leader was abusive or this guy over here was abusive, if we expose these things, it's going to embarrass Jesus and it's going to be a smear on the name of Christ but you know what a smear on the name of Christ is?

Is when you don't expose evil, when you sweep sin under the rug, that is a flight to Christ and so Jesus wants us to protect the sheep and nurture the sheep, not just pretend like the sheep are okay when we know that they're not.

By the way, Mary, I'm going to break a rule that we have here at Iron Sherpa and Zion Radio. We have a rule that only residents of the United States receive free books when we are giving them away during an interview with the author but in your case, I'm going to personally ship out your copy of Not Forsaken by Jennifer Greenberg.

So if you could email me your full mailing address in Cork, Ireland so I can ship that out to you and we're going to go to our midway break right now. This is the longer than normal break. I ask of your patience because Grace Life Radio, 90 .1 FM in Lake City, Florida requires of us a longer break in the middle of the show so that they can air their own public service announcements localizing Iron Sherpa and Zion Radio to Lake City, Florida in order to keep in obedience to FCC regulations and while they do that, we air our globally heard commercials.