Catherine Clark Kroeger speaking on domestic abuse in 2010

We were recently given permission to upload a talk given by Catherine Clark Kroeger at the Bringing Hope Conference, UK, 2010, onto YouTube. The talk is about one hour in length and a summary of what Kroeger discusses is below. In addition to the link provided in this post, there is also a link in the Audio  & Video section of our Resources.  Cathy Kroeger passed away in 2011. We want to extend our thanks to Natalie Collins for making this available to us. Natalie organised the Bringing Hope conference.

Catherine Clark Kroeger was the founding president of CBE (Christians for Biblical Equality) and at the time of this talk was the President of PASCH (Peace and Safety in the Christian Home). In this talk she spoke about things she and colleagues had been doing for decades to get Christians to address domestic abuse, in the USA, Canada and Russia.

Cathy Kroeger passed away in 2011. Peace and Safety in the Christian Home (PASCH) no longer functions; it was unable to be continued after Kroeger’s death.

The talk covers:

Domestic abuse in the Bible: Ezekiel 34, Hagar, Judah and Tamar, Joseph and his brothers. David’s adultery and Nathan’s faithfulness.

The dichotomy in domestic abuse: many are in denial, some are trying to generate social change. In social change, the role of the prophet is unpopular.

Pastoral counselling for domestic abuse takes up more time than any other kind of pastoral counseling.

Pastors with the least training feel they can handle the problem by themselves. Pastors with more training in domestic abuse work in consort with secular agencies.

17:57 In the early 20th century evangelicals thought Prohibition would stop domestic abuse, but they found that curtailing liquor doesn’t reduce domestic abuse.

19:28 How CBE got active on domestic abuse, ran a conference on the topic, produced two books on the topic, then lost motivation. (She says CBE then got back on board but gives no details of what she means by that.) Transcript from this part of the video (emphasis mine):

As we started Christians for Biblical Equality, I remember a board meeting where Alvira Mickelsen said, “Well, from the mail I’m getting, people want equality in the church, but what they really want to do is to figure out what’s going on in the home.”

I said, “Let’s have a conference!”

“We wouldn’t dare; we’d get sued.”

Well after a few years, people decided that we really wouldn’t get sued if we put on a conference called Women Abuse and the Bible. Now, some people were very excited, and some people weren’t, but it was agreed that we would meet in Chicago. And since some of us weren’t sure that we knew all as much as we might know, or should know, about domestic abuse, we put out a call for papers. And we got an incredible response. We got responses from theologians, biblical scholars, counselors, psychologists, shelter workers, pastors, victims, even an abuser who wrote a prison epistle for it.

To accommodate the massive response, we divided the presentations into three groups that could meet concurrently. We had one group for biblical and theological concerns, one for counseling and pastoral care, and one for practical means of ministry. And so we had these concurrent sessions running for two days solid.
Subsequently we skimmed off the best of the papers and put them in a book called Women Abuse and the Bible. And some other people said, “But wait a minute we didn’t get published yet!” Because, while some were afraid to let people even know they had attended the conference, others wanted to get published on the subject.

21:19 So we persuaded Baker to do a second volume, Healing the Hurting. It stirred up a lot of controversy. And about that time Christians for Biblical Equality said “We’ve had about as much of this stuff as we can stand, it’s time to move on to something else.”

Conservative Christians didn’t want to touch the issue with a 10-foot pole. By the way, CBE is now back on board.

Liberals wanted to distance themselves from the Bible. We knew that we must find answers as we embrace the scriptures, and not as we discarded them. We bided our time and prayed.

21:56  Then a Zambian woman named Eva Sanderson stood before the General Assembly of the World Evangelical Fellowship and asked, “When is this assembly going to address the issue of violence against women? There are men right in this chamber who are abusing their wives.”

That woman got a standing ovation, and the women’s commission formed a task force on violence against women. The result was a declaration that was unanimously adopted at the next General Assembly four years later, along with the publication of our book No Place For Abuse.

Catherine Kroeger and Nancy Nason-Clark then set up the RAVE website (Religion and Violence E-learning), because pastors were saying they didn’t have time to read books or go to conferences.

PASCH was helping practitioners who worked for the DULUTH program to write a faith-based program for men who want to stop being abusive to their wives, called Changing Men Changing Lives.

Some professions have higher rates of abuse: military, police, doctors, lawyers, judges, clergy.

The attempted suicide rate in abused women is 35-40%.

Catherine says that responding well to domestic abuse demonstrates the love of Christ in every dimension of life. She also touches on practical ways to talk to and help victims of abuse: e.g. the use of ‘shoe cards’, toilet and washroom leaflets.

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Further reading

Does God Authorize Abuse? — A Thesis 96 post by Aaron Hann. From his post: There are many difficult and painful stories of sexual abuse in the Bible. One such story comes from Genesis 16 with Sarai and Abram’s exploitation of Hagar, their Egyptian servant. It is a story that deserves careful reading to guard us from dangerous conclusions.