Educating pastors: A volunteer who will distribute Jeff Crippen’s Open Letter to Pastors

UPDATE (written by Barb Roberts, 26 Nov 2018).
The volunteer who was sending out this letter to pastors is no longer able to do so. She has asked me to remove her email address from this post. Many thanks to her for the work she did on this project.

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One of our readers has offered to be a distributor of Jeff Crippen’s open letter to pastors to educate them about domestic abuse.

The letter is available in two formats

• An Open Letter from a Pastor to Pastors — blog post
• Ps Crippen Open Letter from a Pastor to Pastors

Would you like to get this letter into the hands of a pastor, but do not wish to be identified as the sender? If so, this volunteer is offering to be a hub point for distribution of the letter. In this role she is using the name A Friend in Christ; she uses a different screen name when she comments on the blog as a survivor. The volunteer has been a long-term reader and commenter on our blog and we trust her. If you contact her she will keep your email address confidential. You do not have to tell her your real name or your screen name if you do not wish to do so.

The volunteer has created an email address specifically for this work.

If you want to take part in this lobbying effort, here is what to do:

1. Email A Friend in Christ: [email address removed, see Update at the top of this post]
2. Give her the name and contact details of the pastor. Please respect the pastor’s privacy; if he has a church email address, use that in preference to his home address.
3. Advise her whether to send it by email or by snail mail. If she needs funds for postage, we can reimburse her through the money we raise from Amazon Affiliate links.
4. If you wish her to send the letter to a church elder, counselor, seminary professor or some other kind of leader, please make that clear, so that she can rephrase her covering letter accordingly.

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If you ask her to send it by email, here is the text of the email she will send:

Dear Pastor,
I wanted to share this letter with you from a fellow pastor whose writings I have been reading online at a site aimed mostly at churched women who are or have been in destructive marriages. The letter addresses abuse and I will pray that you take the time to read what Pastor Crippen has to say.
Thank you,

A Friend in Christ

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To the Glory of the Lord Jesus Christ,
Pastor Jeff Crippen,
Tillamook, Oregon

Letter to Fellow Pastors

Dear Pastor:

The evil of domestic and sexual abuse is in our midst. By “our,” I mean our conservative, Bible-believing churches. Churches just like the one I have pastored for nearly 20 years now. We are not doing well in confronting the perpetrators nor in effecting justice and kindness for their victims.

None of us learned about this evil in seminary. As a result, we are largely blind to it. Lest you think that you surely would see it if it were in your church, and that for the most part your church is free of it, let me assure you that those very thoughts reveal our blindness. The evil of domestic and sexual abuse either was – is – or is going to be in your church. And even more frightening is the confirmed fact that when it comes to your congregation, you (like me in the past) will not deal with it rightly, if you even see it at all. None of us would like to think that we would ever be an ally of evil against an oppressed victim. Yet this is what will indeed happen in your church and ministry unless you prepare yourself.

Permit me, if you will, to share my story with you in the hope that you can learn from it, and that we might all then bring the glory to Christ which we desire to.

First, let me share with you some of the lessons the Lord has had to teach me over the years, and which I am still learning. It took some really hard “knocks” from Him to get my attention. . . . I won’t give the details, but a terrible incident of sexual abuse of a child occurred among us. At the same time we found ourselves being recruited by an abusive man as allies against his wife. These are the things that divide churches!

These events propelled me into the study of abuse, domestic and sexual, in an effort to better understand how these things had crept up on us and what we needed to repent of. I wanted to know if there were signs we could look for that would help us detect abusers and their victims much earlier. And so I began to read.  click here to read the full letter

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And if you ask her to send a printed version of the entire open letter by snail mail, she will include this covering letter:

Dear Pastor,

I wanted to share this letter with you from a fellow pastor whose writings I have been reading online at a site aimed mostly at churched women who are or have been in destructive marriages. The letter addresses abuse and I will pray that you take the time to read what Pastor Crippen has to say.

Thank you,

A Friend in Christ

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UPDATE Sept 2021: I have come to believe that Jeff Crippen does not practise what he preaches. He vilely persecuted an abuse victim and spiritually abused many other people in the Tillamook congregation. Go here to read the evidence. Jeff has not gone to the people that he spiritually and emotionally abused. He has not apologised to them, let alone asked for their forgiveness.