“I’m a survivor of domestic and family violence and I have not necessarily been safe to say that publicly because part of the perpetration has happened within church or people who are leaders of churches or religious spaces or Bible college spaces: it is hard,” said Safina Stewart a proud Wuthathi and Mabuiag Island Woman told “Faith Hope and Love,” a conference calling for “Churches together creating a future free from violence.”
Stewart, the Relationships and Storytelling Coordinator for Common Grace, a Christian network opposing injustice, was speaking at the conference jointly organised with the Anglican Church’s Families and Culture Commission. Capturing the spirit of the Conference, Stewart added, “I feel like I’ve grown up and come back to myself, praise the Lord and now I get to have the very privileged position of spurring people on so that my story can never be repeated again.”
She forthrightly linked colonisation and domestic and family abuse. “I’m going to bring up invasion, perpetration, invasion. Who knows, maybe it’s the same, but when my country was without consent exploited, when the skin of the body of my home without consent was exploited, then are we not talking about a similar story?”
“But our bodies were the first ones to be minced. And because the machines being built that way, we continue to be minced. Min, min, min, min, min, minced everywhere, blood everywhere, deaths everywhere. I’ve had family murdered on the street. I’ve had family caged under houses. I’ve had children attacked on the street, and I have my own story. This work is so important. This work is wonderful and good and I mean when I say my hope is in our God, because in my story everything got shattered and I only give my praise and my honour and my thanks to my God for coordinating my rescue because no one could have figured it out as quick and as fast and as thorough and intricately as the great creator, knew all the bits and pieces that needed to be dealt with, knew the time, knew the people, knew the connections that were needed.”
Another victim/survivor’s story was shared, with permission at the end of a talk by clinical psychologist Leisha Aitken.
“In November, 2023, I attended a very special church event that changed my life during the 16 days of activism against gender-based violence. I’m 57 years of age, a survivor of domestic abuse. My lived experience was like living in a vault where you could not breathe and had no voice, and at times, you just share a little vulnerability to others that crossed your path. But quite often, while they were compassionate, they were afraid and unsure of what to do with his knowledge. So I just kept quiet.
“Then she says, I sat in Paul’s cathedral with the wound raw, but thankfully this had already been thought of so sensitively by the organisers.
There were prayers for healing and a place to pour my tears into the jars that God has for me.
“One he carries close to his heart and, once [it is] full, gently replaces those tears with feathers that cover each of us. Under these wings, I found refuge and shame was finally stripped away. New growth through hope arose, and there was no more shame.
“I walked away knowing I’m so loved by God and him, his beloved and precious daughter, he had knitted together by his hand a dedicated group of agents. …
“My prayer is I wish more churches were brave enough to tackle this hidden issue. So God’s healing can be gifted to survivors and perpetrators alike, creating a safe place for God to exchange beauty for ashes.
“Thank you Anglican Church. She says, for helping change my life, I can breathe and I found my voice.”
Aitken spoke of how hope informs her work, how theology and psychology inform each other in her work, the subject of her PhD.
“I said at the beginning that in the West, our whole view of hope is deeply Christian. What happened when I started reading Plato, Aristotle, and the classical world as I realised that they did not like hope? They did not want hope. In fact, they actively argued against having hope, which really surprised me. I just had assumed that every human would want hope and that’s not the case. And I want to just quickly run through why that is. So, for a start, the Greco-Roman view of time is cyclical. They have a strong sense of fate and determinism. So, in their worldview, in a couple of hundred years after the universe has burnt up and started again, we will be sitting in this room, and you’ll be listening to me again. It goes round and round and round.
“Whereas the Christian view of time is linear. There is a beginning and it unfolds and unfolds in what we call the matrix of maybe in psychology. And most people in the West also have a sense of an ending and a good ending. In my research I asked people, what do you put your trust in for the future of humanity? And they could say anything, science, AI, evolution, the younger generation, politics, anything. Those who said they put their trust in God actually had very high levels of hope. Those who put their trust in science, AI evolution didn’t have high levels of hope.”
Aitken’s talk featured several quotes from Jurgen Moltmann, a theologian who famously wrote on hope. “The ultimate reason for our hope is not to be found at all in what we want to wish for and wait for. The ultimate reason is we are wanted, and wished for, and waited for. Does anything await us at all, or are we alone? Whenever we face our hope on trust in the divine mystery, we feel deep down in our hearts there is someone who is waiting for you, who is hoping for you, who believes in you. We awaited for as the prodigal son in the parable is waited for by his father. We are accepted and received as a mother, takes her children into her arms and comforts them.”
A strong challenge to those who use the Bible to assert male privilege came from Associate Professor Robyn Whitaker, who teaches New Testament at Pilgrim Theological College. She pointed to a need to amplify the stories of women in the Bible, often downplayed by our traditions. Whitaker asked the conference gers to examine the text of the story of David and Bathsheba, observing who has agency. (Spoiler Alert: exclusively David.)
“You know the story, and ultimately, the text is very, very clear at the end of chapter 11 going into chapter 12 that the thing that David has done displeased the Lord,” Whitaker said. “And then through the prophets we get this question, ‘Why have you despised the word of the Lord to do what is evil in his sight?’ This is evil in the eyes of God. And I think naming it as such is one way we can stand in solidarity with victim/survivors and name that abuse is evil even when done by sometimes our church heroes or our Christian heroes. So that’s one example of using the Bible to name abuse and thinking of the Bible as a text that captures the fullness of human experience and can in that sense be almost a bit of a mirror to our own cultural issues and complexities.”
The “Ten Commitments” from the Anglican Church’s Families and Culture Commission provided a platform for the conference. Here is The Other Cheek’s story about them.