Relationship restoration can take place when you’re ready.

 

The first thing needing said is that you must take care not to fall into the error of using this condition to avoid the journey of healing in the Lord from your wounds, and that you don’t use it as an excuse to live in unforgiveness towards your former spiritually and emotionally abusive leader. Unforgiveness will tear your heart and mind apart, not theirs. It may take some time to come to that place, but forgiving that leader is the first and most important step to spiritual and emotional healing. Unfortunately, spiritual abuse has consequences, and one of those consequences is that the relationship with the spiritually abusive leader may never be restored. However, once you’ve gotten past the healing and forgiveness stage, and who you are as a child of God is fortified again, and you are at the stage where you are ready to see a relationship restored with a former spiritually abusive senior church leader, then you can begin the restoration process. There is a caution in this however. If you are not ready to begin reconciling to that former leader then by doing so you will prematurely re-ignite the wounding, pain and resentment and be reinjured again. When wounding happens a second time, the open wounds go deeper because the first one never got the chance to heal. So, make sure you are ready to begin the reconciliation process.

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Relationship restoration is possible when the leader takes responsibility for their abuse.

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“If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him. If he sins against you seven times in a day, and seven times comes back to you and says, ‘I repent,’ forgive him.” (Luke 17:3-4). There are no scriptural limitations on repentance, forgiveness and the restoration of relationships, only that repentance and forgiveness be present for a relationship restoration to take hold long term. Before there can be a restoration with a former spiritually and emotionally abusive senior church leader there must be responsibility and repentance taken on behalf of the leader. So, what does that look like?

 

The first thing is that the leader takes full and complete responsibility for the words and actions towards you for the pain and wounding they caused you through their abuse of you. Now, let’s be clear, forgiveness is not simply saying “I am sorry you are offended.” That’s not taking responsibility for what they said and did, that’s political placation of the matter. They need to actually own up to the abusive behavior. The second is that the former spiritual and emotionally abusive senior church leader must take responsibility for the fact that their actions and words caused the deep pain and wounding that you experienced. Making statements of general failings they they exhibit towards everyone is not the same as taking responsibility for the pain they caused you. The last thing that the leader needs to do, is to show some kind of tangible change in their words, actions and leadership that shows that the same wounding and abuse won’t happen again. Now, this is does not mean that the leader has to conduct some kind of penance towards you, that is just an excuse for retribution on your part. However, there does need to be some kind of fruit of their repentance (Matthew 3:8) or else there is a very good chance that they will wound you, or others, again in the future. When there is responsibility and repentance from the senior leader who wounded you, then relationship restoration is possible.

 

What does relationship restoration look like?

 

What a restored relationship with a former spiritually abusive senior leader looks like depends on many factors. How long did you serve under them? What kind of relationship did you have with them in the first place? Were you a staff pastor on a staff of twenty, who had a grand total of a dozen short conversations with that leader? Or where you in a co-laboring relationship with a senior leader for years and what they did to you was a much larger betrayal? Are you still ministering in the same church or community? Are you still in the same region in the same network or denomination? Is the restoration conversation going to be informal over a coffee? Or a formal setting where everything is being recorded? All these are factors that will determine what a restored relationship will look like. But know this, your relationship will be different with them. Trust is like a bank account, when it’s all spent and wiped out, you have to start saving it up again, and the numbers are going to be different, and the goals you were saving up for will have changed. So too will the restored relationship.

 

Relationship restoration with a former spiritually abusive church leader is possible when these two main conditions are met. When that happens you have the opportunity to take back what the enemy stole from you and that former leader. 

 

This blog is based on the Broken Rising Podcast Episode 107, so if you want to take a deeper dive into when and how a relationship with a former abusive senior church leader can be restored, check that episode out.