Spotlight Articles from 2020

The first and most important thing you need to realize when someone discloses the experience of sexual abuse is that they are demonstrating an immense amount of courage.  Caring for Survivors  Maybe one of the least understood aspects of sexual abuse is the victim’s loss of voice. Abuse is usually followed by demands not to

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Clearly, abuse is not something new or modern. It has been one of the results of sin in our fallen world from the very beginning. Tim Lane and Paul Tripp write, “The Bible is not about an idyllic world full of noble people who always make the right choice. The Bible describes a world we

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I wish more than anything that this topic of caring well for friends and family who have experienced abuse wasn’t something that I could speak personally on. But yet here I am. I’m not coming to you as an expert on the topic of caring for survivors. I have no degree that gives me any

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Perhaps you can remember an occasion where something was said and you felt a shudder of shame. Such a moment happened for me a couple of years ago, when I had convened a group of conservative evangelical women leaders to talk about various issues affecting the church. The conversation turned to the awful revelations of

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Culturally, we have been conditioned to believe that the greatest threat to our children is the stranger. However, statistics do not support our fear of strangers when it comes to sexual abuse. We should be more concerned about the people we know. In order for a pedophile to successfully offend against a child, he or

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When we face a crisis, we both desperately want and are intensely skeptical toward hope. We want to know that things will eventually be better. But we inherently mistrust those who say, “Everything is going to be okay.” It feels like they’re minimizing the problem. We experience this with the coronavirus crisis, and we experience

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Southern Baptists gathered in Birmingham in 2019 and showed their continued commitment in exposing the evils of sexual abuse and fighting to make churches safe in several ways. One was by passing a resolution on the evils of sexual abuse. In that resolution, Southern Baptists asked for forgiveness “for failing to cultivate a culture of

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Parents and caregivers have the wonderful privilege to explain to their children that God made their bodies. Because private parts are private, there can be lots of questions, curiosity, or shame regarding them. For their protection, children need to know about private parts and understand that God made their body and made it special.  The

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