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'An intimate and important memoir of deconstructing and reconstructing faith after abuse... a spiritual memoir that does not shy away from abuse, queerness, or the multifaceted character of God.'—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)A courageous, vulnerable, and spellbinding memoir that explores with visceral impact what happens when harm starts at home—and is exalted as God's will For readers of Unfollow and Jesus Land: Jamie Marich explores spiritual abuse, intergenerational trauma, and weaponized faithAt nine years old, Jamie Marich asked God to end it all.Doing it herself would be an irrevocable sin: an affront to the church and her father's God. She prayed instead for the rapture, an accident, a passive death—anything to stop the turmoil of feeling wrong: wrong in her body; wrong in her desires; wrong in her faith in a merciful God that could love her wholly as she was.You Lied to Me About God explores the schisms that erupt when faith is weaponized, when abuse collides with the push-and-pull of a mixed religious upbringing tyhat tells you: no matter which path you choose—no matter what you know in your heart to be true—you're probably damned.With resilience, strength, and gut-punching clarity, Marich takes readers through a tumultuous coming-of-age marked by addiction, escapism, spiritual manipulation, misogyny, and abuse. She shares with unflinching detail the complicity of her mother's silence and the lengths her father went to assert dominance and control over her body, her desires, her identity—and even her eternal soul—”for her own good” and with a side of televangelistic hellfire.Hitting a breaking point, Marich embarks on pilgrimage: from shrines in Croatia to ashrams in Florida, she reckons with what it means to come home to a faith that heals and accepts her wholly as she is: in her queerness, in her body, and in her deep relationship to an expansive and loving God.

Most of my childhood was spent in transition...Anh Lin knows something about displacement and belonging. When she was four, her family left their home in Vietnam and migrated to the United States where Anh experienced difficult, transient living situations, the inherited traumas of her parents, and—the summer before she entered eight grade—the loss of her father to stomach cancer.From the creator of The Abundant Life Devotional Journal and the renovation and design YouTube channel'Girl and The Word', Forever Home is a moving perspective on belonging, reckoning with the past, and living abundantly.We all long for lasting peace and stability. We long for beauty. Whether we're healing from traumatic experiences, grieving a loss, or simply trying to find a quiet path in a chaotic world. Tender and insightful, Anh Lin will help you work through your pain by drawing on her personal experiences, psychological studies, biblical truth, and her talent for making beautiful spaces.As Anh vulnerably shares how she rebuilt her own'safe house'after the trauma of her early life, you will discover the five powerful steps to rebuilding your own forever home:How to remove the unsafe patterns of your past.How to renew the foundation of your life.How to rebuild the framework of your resilience.How to reinforce the integrity of your boundaries.How to restore the beauty that God promised you. It's time to uproot the pain from your past and build the life you've always dreamed of.

The COVID-19 era will be remembered not only for the tragic global public health crisis, but also for the continued police violence against persons of color, the courageous activism that continues to rise up to confront racialized violence in all its forms, and the perpetuation of white nationalist rhetoric from the highest government elected offices. Everywhere we look, we find trauma and pain, and we find resilience and resolve. This volume, featuring leading theological scholars and religious leaders, is rich in analysis of the plagues we are facing and equally rich in the resources, practices, and inspirations that will carry our efforts to build a more just world.

This is a book about God and gods, Spirit and spirits, prayer and sacraments, ghosts and resurrection, Jesus and the church. It grows out of immersion in Catholic and Anglican traditions and acute awareness of abuses in their name. It is an honest and personal exploration of what still holds up and what has had to be discarded.

How long will you limp through life before deciding it's worth the discomfort and outright pain to heal the way Jesus intended you to heal?After a childhood marked by abuse and dysfunction, Penny Maxwell knows how challenging the journey to healing can be. Healing hurts, and Maxwell knows how enticing it is to walk with wounds and dysfunction rather than endure the pain it takes to truly be free. In Setting Broken Bones, Maxwell shares hard truths she learned through her own healing journey and challenges readers to trust God with their hurts. Using the analogy of a person walking around with broken physical bones that never healed properly, Maxwell confronts readers with the truth: we can either walk around in pain with bones that were never healed or experience temporary pain to have them set properly so healing can occur. Sharing from her personal story, Maxwell provides: Powerful teachings from God's WordPractical ways to walk free from a painful past no matter what your personal struggles have beenGuidance to face the pain you've been hiding to experience healing and freedom Sometimes Christians wrap bandages around their pain with more church, more good works, more Bible reading plans, and other seemingly spiritual activities to distract themselves from the pain. This book will help you face the pain you have been hiding from so it can be healed once and for all. Whether you have come from a painful past yourself, have a loved one who is still trapped in that pain, or desire to minister to people who are on the path to healing from pain, this book will reveal God's heart toward that pain, and show you how He will heal it when you surrender it to Him.This book will help you find healing from past pain rather than focusing on blame, becoming bitter, and asking why. You will lean into God to gather strength and healing so that you can minister freedom to others who have faced pain themselves.

Hope Carpenter opens up about her personal struggles that nearly destroyed her family, her church, and her ministry, but then God did something miraculous—out of her brokenness, He made something beautiful.As co-pastor of one of the nation's largest megachurches, Hope Carpenter had perfected the roles of supportive wife, good mother, devoted worship leader, and dutiful homemaker. But inside, she was secretly ashamed, sad, and afraid. She didn't know who she was, and she didn't know how to ask for help without bringing down the whole façade. A series of bad choices led to multiple affairs; her husband kicked her out and announced from the pulpit of their church that their marriage was over. Hope was sure her life was done. But in her lowest moments, something beautiful happened. God met her there, and, with a lot of hard work, time, and mountains of therapy, she started to understand the pain that had caused her to act out. She and her family faced their brokenness together, and in powerful acts of forgiveness only God could have arranged, they all found real breakthrough and healing. Ron and Hope rebuilt their marriage and their family, and their ministry thrives today. In The Most Beautiful Disaster, Hope helps readers understand the lasting impact of childhood trauma and gives readers practical steps to uncovering the root of pain in their own lives. She shows how small decisions can lead to big changes, and helps readers find healing and wholeness in Scripture and prayer. Ultimately, readers will be led to hope, reconciliation, and true freedom.

Find freedom and healing from painful memories and relational struggles and learn how your past has uniquely prepared you to experience more joy. Tragedy and pain inevitably touch our lives in some way. We long to feel whole, but more often than not, the way we've learned to deal with our wounds pushes us away from the very restoration we need most. Renowned psychologist Dr. Dan Allender and counselor and teacher Cathy Loerzel present a life-changing process of true connection and healing with ourselves, God, and others. With a clear, biblically trustworthy method, Allender and Loerzel walk you through a journey of profound inner transformation--from the shame and hurt of old emotional wounds to true freedom and healing. Drawn from modern research and their pioneering work at The Allender Center, they will help you identify your core trauma in one of the three outcast archetypes--the widow, orphan, or stranger--and chart your path of growth into the God-given roles of priest, prophet, or leader. This book will help you learn: What to do about feeling out-of-place and directionlessHow your coping mechanisms create a false sense of healthHow to embrace your divine calling and find lasting reconciliationHow your heart wounds are your unique invitation to true strength and purpose.Your past pain does not dictate your life. Answer the call to healing and discover your life's beautiful story and a future of hope and freedom.

How do we practice hope after trauma? What shape does hope take after abuse? In grappling with these questions, Ashley E. Theuring implicates the entire church and advocates changing our theologies of hope and our understanding of resurrection. Reimagining the Empty Tomb narrative from the Gospel of Mark in light of the experiences of domestic violence survivors, Fragile Resurrection reveals the possibility for everyday practices and relationships to mediate hope and resurrection. Theuring constructs an embodied imaginative hope found in the wake of trauma, which can speak to our current context of trauma and uncertainty.

Das Modethema'Transgenerationale Weitergabe von Kriegstraumata'ist auch für die Praktische Theologie von erheblicher Bedeutung, wie die vorliegende Darstellung nachdrücklich herleitet. Dafür werden zuerst Sachverhalt und Forschungsstand zu dem Phänomen'Transgenerationale Weitergabe von Traumata'erarbeitet und Entstehung, Gründe und Folgen dargestellt. Um das Thema im protestantischen Zusammenhang angemessen zu verorten, wird die Rolle der evangelischen Kirche im Zweiten Weltkrieg zusammenfassend dargelegt und der Rückbezug zur Problemlage hergestellt. Anschließend werden der gesamte Zusammenhang aus praktisch-theologischer Sicht im Rahmen des heutigen kirchlichen Lebens betrachtet und Empfehlungen vorgestellt, wie sich ein konstruktiver Umgang mit den Einschränkungen durch die Problemlage gestalten kann.

The intention of Trauma Sensitive Theology is to help theologians, professors, clergy, spiritual care givers, and therapists speak well of God and faith without further wounding survivors of trauma. It explores the nature of traumatic exposure, response, processing, and recovery and its impact on constructive theology and pastoral leadership and care. Through the lenses of contemporary traumatology, somatics, and the Internal Family Systems model of psychotherapy, the text offers a framework for seeing trauma and its impact in the lives of individuals, communities, society, and within our own sacred texts. It argues that care of traumatic wounding must include all dimensions of the human person, including our spiritual practices, religious rituals and community participation, and theological thinking. As such, clergy and spiritual care professionals have an important role to play in the recovery of traumatic wounding and fostering of resiliency. This book explores how trauma-informed congregational leaders can facilitate resiliency and offers one way of thinking theologically in response to traumatizing abuses of relational power and our resources for restoration.

Forgiveness is a central tenet of the Christian faith and yet it is so difficult to embrace and put into practise. With sensitivity and grace, Dr Sue Atkinson explores what it means. The example of Christians forgiving others is often heralded as one of the great signs of Christian love and yet the call to forgive can have a darker side, particularly for victims of injustice and trauma as it can add to their despair and guilt if they do not'feel'love or the ability to forgive. Well-meaning Christians can make their situation worse with insensitivity and bluntness. In this timely and empathetic book, full of anecdote, story and illustration, Dr Sue Atkinson, tackles what the call to forgive really means. What do we really do when we forgive? Exploring Jesus teaching about forgiveness and justice, she explodes myths and outlines practical ways in which we can let go of resentments. Highly accessible and sensitive this important book will be a means of grace and comfort for those embracing the challenges of forgiveness.

This book examines how repertoires of speech and action that are often considered to be mutually exclusive--those of church and state--clash or unite during the postdisaster period as local communities and cities struggle to establish a stable collective identity. Based on an analysis of forty in-depth interviews with disaster-response participants and over 325 print-media sources, this study explores, first, the extent to which ministers and citizens challenge statist narratives in order to publicly relay theological views; second, the cultural processes by which local places are nationalized and theologized; and third, the ecclesiological convictions necessary to peaceably advance the work of Christ's body after disasters.