Following up on my last post outlining core principles of trauma-informed practice, I wanted to share some more practical ideas for what it might look like to embody these principles Christian contexts. I should acknowledge that my own lived experiences of religious trauma relate to two specific subcultures—Independent Fundamentalist Baptist and White Evangelicalism—so my suggestions will naturally be disproportionately shaped by those experiences. No doubt there will be key insights I’ve missed that would speak more effectively to other experiences of religious trauma, and I don’t claim to speak representatively about all of those equally. As always, I welcome further suggestions in the comments, and I’ll try to update this list over time with new insights that flow out of ongoing conversations.
1. Think about space
Physical space has a huge impact on how safe an environment feels to trauma survivors. Make sure seating is available near an exit or out of the way for people whose bodies will feel safer in those spaces. Offer reserved seating for mask-wearers or people who will socially distance. Ensure people have agency in choosing where to sit rather than being ushered into a designated seat.
Consider markers of safety in the physical space—are there elements in the space that trigger unnecessary associations with harmful experiences (e.g. an Australian flag displayed without the Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander flag present)? Does the layout of the space serve the particular demographic you’re trying to connect with (e.g. does the traditional White church layout of pews in rows prohibit indigenous Australians from feeling comfortable in that space?)?
Have an accessible bathroom and a unisex bathroom and make sure this information is accessible on the church website or similar (see point 5 below).
2. Teach body awareness
This is common practice in primary schools now, but Christians who believe the theological importance of humanity being created as physically embodied creatures need to up our game too! One evangelical church I know of that’s leading Australia in being a trauma-safe space routinely makes an announcement along these lines:
“We want this to be a safe space for everyone, so if you notice yourself feeling unsafe please feel free to step out of the space and get a cup of tea, talk to someone, or go for a walk—whatever you need to do to engage safety. But since many of us have felt unsafe at church for so long, we don’t always recognise when we’re feeling unsafe… so we want to encourage you to keep checking in with your body and listening for bodily signals that you may feel unsafe: if you notice your heart’s racing or your face feels hot, your hands or arms are trembling, you’re holding your breath or breathing irregularly, you’re crossing your arms tightly across your tummy, you’re clenching your jaw, or you notice your eyes darting around constantly scanning the environment… these might be signs that your body feels unsafe. We encourage you to listen well to the communication system God has written into your body and to do what you need to engage safety.”
You may have read that longish announcement and thought ‘that’s nice, but it’s a bit intense, and I don’t think it’d fit the vibe of my church service.’ That may be true, and making changes like this is always a bit awkward, but I’d draw your attention back to this long list of people who find the gospel inaccessible when Christian spaces are non-trauma-informed and ask whether keeping the comfortable status quo is a higher priority in your church culture or making gospel teaching accessible to vulnerable people. Some of these changes will be an uncomfortable culture shift—and that’s the Christlike cost of leaving the 99 sheep uncomfortably standing out in the open field while we focus our efforts on restoring that one lost sheep to safety.
3. Utilise sensory devices
Provide access to sensory devices, fidgets, soft toys, cushions etc. that can help us regulate and ground our bodies during a service. I’ve just started compiling a Sensory Box for my church for people to borrow what they need as they walk in the door. (Side note: this would also be a game-changer in making the gospel accessible not just to trauma survivors but also any neurodivergent [autistic, ADHD, bipolar, etc.] people!) I’ve noticed when I bring a fidget to church to keep my hands busy while I listen, I retain at least 50% more of the teaching. Most of the queer people in my church have normalised bringing knitting/crochet projects to church and find that doing repetitive movements with their hands while listening allows a much deeper engagement.
I’ve also learned that clutching a cushion or soft toy across my tummy any time I’m feeling heightened is unbelievably effective at helping me feel safe again; it lowers my heart rate to a normal level again and resets my breathing so I can move through my fight-or-flight response and get my pre-frontal cortex (the rational part of the brain) back online again. It’s profound how much a simple embodied act can affect cognitive functioning (and by extension, one’s capacity to engage in corporate worship).
4. Be aware of power dynamics
As I mentioned in the last post, an experience of being disempowered is core to trauma, and restoring a sense of empowerment is essential to post-traumatic growth. Church leaders can support this by a) becoming self-aware of the power differentials in their relationships, and b) taking steps to mitigate the impacts of that power imbalance.
Becoming aware of power doesn’t necessarily mean eradicating all power imbalances, which is rarely realistic. Attempts to do this often overlook the reality of ‘soft power’ and end up resembling something like the power equivalent of a ‘colour-blind’ or ‘gender-blind’ approach where claiming that there’s no meaningful difference in people’s experiences actually makes it harder to speak openly about power dynamics and their impacts. Instead of pretending they don’t hold power, healthy leaders should strive to be self-aware of their own relationship with power and consciously steward that power responsibly.
For example, when doing a pastoral catchup, be aware of the power imbalance in your favour and recognise that the person may not feel total freedom to speak their mind to someone who holds power over them (this is true of ‘soft power’ too, like where a pastor’s wife has no formal authority but still holds a lot of influence and proximity to ‘hard power’).
Do as much as you can to restore power and choice back to the other person: ask them where they would like to meet (and consider a neutral space like a café/park rather than a church office if that would be helpful), let them choose the timeline, ask them what they would like to get out of the conversation, or if you have an agenda yourself, make sure to communicate this transparently to them ahead of time.
In cases of conflict (either between a leader and a layperson or between a senior pastor and another employee), it’s essential for conflict resolution to consider the power imbalance and give the less empowered person additional opportunities to safely express how they feel without risk of ramifications from the leader.
Even if the leader feels that power is irrelevant from his perspective ‘because we’re all just siblings in Christ,’ trauma survivors have a heightened sensitivity to power that we literally feel in our bodies, and it’s irresponsible to ignore that especially when our employment or place in our community is in the hands of the person holding power over us.
Instead, invite an external professional mediation service (without links to your denomination/faith tradition—so not just a Christian counsellor from a sister church) and vet them by asking how they intend to navigate the power imbalance between the two conflicting parties. Make sure that both parties feel equally comfortable with this arrangement, and remember if the other person doesn’t have the freedom to realistically say ‘no’ without guilt, it’s not a truly consensual ‘yes.’
5. Make information accessible
Information is empowering and gives people agency to choose how they engage.
Many people won’t even get to the point of walking in the doors of your church without first accessing information about what to expect. Putting some of this information on a church website shows transparency and gives people agency in preparing the accommodations they might need to brave that experience.
For example, you could list a step-by-step description of what someone might experience in a church service, including the unstructured social bits before and after the formal service. This helps people with social anxiety and trauma backgrounds know what to expect, and also communicates that this is a community that not only recognises that those people exist but also thoughtfully accommodates their specific accessibility needs.
Include details like child-friendly facilities available and bathroom location and accessibility. Many disabled and trans people won’t even get to the point of visiting a church in the first place without some kind of assurance that there are bathrooms they will be welcome and able to use, so having access to this information ahead of time is essential.
Offer public transparency about things like the church’s theological position on same-gender marriage or women’s ordination, and offer clear, unequivocal answers when asked. If your church is non-affirming [of same-gender marriage], give people the dignity of being up-front about that, and if they email you ahead of time to ask, don’t equivocate with a ‘let’s talk about this over coffee.’
Ideally, a diversity and inclusion statement on the church website (thoughtfully crafted in collaboration with relevant people!) could do a lot of heavy lifting for making your community accessible.
6. Offer content warnings
Before speaking on a topic/passage that may cause distress or trigger trauma responses, offer content warnings ahead of time to signpost that this will be happening and acknowledge the complex emotional experience it may entail. This applies not just to the obvious topics (speaking about sexuality, suicide, abuse, sexual assault, etc.) but also to things that may be associated with harmful experiences (like preaching on passages like Romans 1 or Eph 5 which have been weaponised against queer people and women so many times that it’s hard to shake that association now, or when passages use imagery like slavery [Rom 5] that some people can—and should!—find confronting). If you’re a church leader, you have a responsibility to get to know your people and learn where these traumatic associations may occur—that’s part of building trust and speaking from mutual trust rather than power.
Make sure to not only give the information of a content warning but offer choices to the listener of whether or not they engage this topic. For example, when preaching about sensitive topics in the past, my pastor has flagged a content warning about what we’ll be covering by giving a content warning early in the service before a short break (when kids normally go out to Sunday school) and explicitly invited people to step out of the space during this break or at any other point in the service if that’s what they wanted. It’s not enough to simply acknowledge the sensitivity of a given topic once you’re already talking about it and it’s too late to exercise choice.
This not only gives people information and agency, it also communicates a strong message that their body’s responses to these things are valid and normal. It prevents the experience of isolation and questioning one’s sanity for sitting through a service and thinking ‘Did he really just say that? Is no one else hearing this? Am I crazy for feeling this way?’
Similarly, content warnings serve everyone else by making them conscious of the fact that it’s not spiritually healthy to numb our moral intuition or disconnect from our bodies. We should learn from the sensitivities of people with more sensitive moral intuitions who rightly experience strong reactions to human suffering and injustice.
7. Foster mentoring relationships
This is a huge opportunity to foster collaboration and empowerment for trauma survivors. This quote from Dawn of Sunday: The Trinity and Trauma-Safe Churches says it best:
“Mentoring ministries can make our adoption come fully alive within us. One of the reasons why mentoring ministries are so powerful is that a message is clearly sent to those being mentored: they are worthy of focused attention and time together. Attentive listening and care by the mentor (and other mentorees if group mentoring is the model at work) is precious and embodied evidence that God cares for his children. In the best kinds of Christian mentoring, the mentor has a heightened sensitivity to the great spiritual blessings we have received, and helps other Christians understand these. In addition, and this is especially important for helping trauma survivors recover a sense of safety, the mentor can, in a number of ways, make it clear that God can heal our wounds, including the pain of abandonment and betrayal by those who have done horrific things to us instead of pursuing good things for us. The mentor can be a channel for God’s healing power: the ‘immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe’ (Eph 1:19). Above all, the most powerful form of mentoring schemes for trauma recovery are those which are led by the survivors themselves. No one is more qualified to mentor the traumatized than other seasoned survivors. The willingness to let trauma survivors mentor others sends a powerful message of empowerment that the church does not think they are broken, or mere projects to be fixed. Oftentimes, offering gifts to others from one’s own journey is a foundational step of healing for survivors because it exhilarates them with a renewed sense of the integrity of their own agency. The empowerment of mentoring others is the opposite of the powerlessness involved in surviving trauma, and this empowerment allows survivors to embrace the truths of the Father’s safe love for themselves.”
Joshua Cockayne, Preston Hill, and Scott Harrower, Dawn of Sunday: The Trinity and Trauma-Safe Churches, Chapter 4, E-book version.
8. Ask for consent
Asking for consent gives people choice and empowers their autonomy.
Always ask for someone’s consent before praying over them, laying hands on them, etc., and make sure that you ask the question in a way that makes opting out easy and acceptable so that they have real agency in their religious experiences (e.g. “Thank you for sharing all this. I’d love to keep you in my prayers. Would you like me to pray for you now? Or would you feel more comfortable if I prayed for you privately when I get home?”). A good follow-up question is, “Are there particular things you’d like me to pray, or perhaps things you don’t want me to say?”
At a conference recently I saw an attendee leave the room distraught and sobbing, and I introduced myself and asked if he’d like some company. After he poured out his heart to me, I asked him if he’d like me to pray for him, and asked if he’d be comfortable with my putting my hand on his shoulder while we prayed. This is standard practice for me, but the man (at least a decade older than me) broke down when I asked and told me, “No one’s ever asked for consent to pray for me before. Thank you for making this feel so safe.” My heart breaks that such a vulnerable and spiritual experience as prayer had been so disempowering for his entire lifetime when a simple question could have established safety for him.
9. Conference chaplains
Have several ‘conference chaplains’ available at any Christian camp/conference who people can debrief with about any difficult feelings that come up, including a safe space to share concerns about harmful things that have been said in that space. This not only creates safety and confidentiality for attendees, it also creates an invaluable anonymous feedback channel for the conference leaders.
These chaplains would need to be someone who isn’t a holder of power in that system (both hard power and soft power). David Pohlman writes, “Chaplains work at the invitation of an organisation, within that organisation, but without necessarily being a member of that organisation.”[1]
10. Empower people’s voices
One of the factors that most intensifies my experience of trauma in religious spaces is whether I feel like I am trapped being exposed to things as a passive receiver, or whether I have a voice and the opportunity to engage in attuned back-and-forth dialogue. If I were having a vulnerable conversation with a friend over coffee, they would [hopefully!] be attuning to my tone of voice, body language, and of course the actual words I speak, so that if the conversation becomes distressing or re-traumatising, the other person would intuitively pause to check in with me, maybe slowing down or clarifying something, or just offering some empathy (“I can see this is really raw for you.”)
In contrast, the very medium of a 30-minute sermon monologue makes many trauma survivors feel like they are being treated more as machines downloading information rather than full people. When a religious leader heightens the power differential by talking at people for 30 minutes with no chance to respond, those people are denied the opportunity to have their own human responses in that moment, let alone have their responses attuned to by the leader. For trauma survivors who are already used to having their voices silenced and their agency denied, this power dynamic can easily make the sermon the least safe experience in their week. Being nourished by God’s word should not be this fraught!
It doesn’t need to be that way. As I mentioned in the post-script to my last post, Black and Latino church cultures normalise a much more responsive approach to church gatherings that gives congregants the chance to express their reactions and allows the leader to read the room and act responsively.
I’ve personally experienced team preaching with multiple voices teaching the Bible in conversation together goes a long way to managing this dynamic. Think less monologue and more panel discussion or interview-type approaches to teaching. I always love when the end of a sermon pivots towards interviewing someone from the congregation to think through application together. (For example, when I had to preach on Titus 2, rather than trying to explore an application on my own, I invited two women from the congregation to share their mentoring relationship of an older woman discipling a younger woman just like this chapter describes.) Discussion-based teaching is far more relational and therefore far more attuned to real-time human responses. It’s also a much more engaging form of pedagogy! It’s also a great way to hear from more diverse voices in the church and to learn from the insights of women who’d otherwise have limited teaching opportunity in complementarian churches.
Another option is breaking up the monologue with opportunities to reflect and/or discuss. I’ve seen churches in predominantly immigrant communities where the Bible teaching used an interactive model with people sitting around tables (with dinner!) alternating between a few minutes of a preacher teaching and then breaking out into table discussions as they studied the Bible passage together. They’d then go back and forth between monologue and discussion several times. It was a beautiful balance of giving people the space and voice to grapple with the teaching for themselves while also honouring a suitably qualified leader in an authoritative teaching role as they guided the interactive teaching experience. (And again, it’s just good pedagogy, with the added benefit of being accessible to people with limited English!)
Another possibility is inviting questions/responses from the congregation. I visited a great church this week that has a practice of holding question time after every sermon, and I know the people who attend this church find it makes the space feel much safer. Alternatively, my church has seasons of inviting question submissions, with our January ‘AMA (Ask Me Anything)’ series the past few years inviting questions from the congregation which are then discussed by a diverse panel.
11. Cultivate an ambiguity tolerance
This point deserves a blog post of its own (and it’ll get one, eventually), but in short, the opposite of spiritual gaslighting is acknowledging when things genuinely are ambiguous, and validating people’s perception of such.
When we take a black-and-white ‘the Bible is clear’ approach on everything (and not just the things the Bible is actually clear on!), we force people to doubt their own perception and make them feel like they’re a ‘bad Christian’ for not seeing the obvious that everyone else allegedly sees.
Instead, we could teach from the parts of the Bible that feature ambiguity (you know, the stuff we normally avoid like Genesis 6, Song of Songs, and Jude) and not airbrush over that ambiguity with socially-constructed clarity. We could model for people that it’s okay and even good to hold things in tension and sit with the ambiguity. Often ambiguity is a deliberate literary device in the Hebrew Bible, and sometimes our doctrinal orthodoxy requires an ambiguity tolerance to hold paradoxical truths in tension; you literally cannot accept the doctrine of the Trinity or the two natures of Christ without being able to tolerate ambiguity! By cultivating a higher ambiguity tolerance in our church cultures, we allow people to mature theologically as well as creating safety for people to explore their own thoughts and perceptions in community.
Leaders could foster a culture where people’s questioning (and dissent!) is encouraged as evidence of critical thinking and healthy differentiation. A pastor could develop this culture by modelling it herself in the way she expresses her own thoughts and feelings that deviate from the accepted status quo or the way she acknowledges different legitimate interpretations of a Bible passage even while she then humbly teaches her own interpretation. This would be a culture where questioning and even deconstruction is valued as evidence of deeper engagement.
[1] David Pohlman, Equip Issue 41, November 2022, emphasis added.
Singled Out 