IT BEGAN ON CHRISTMAS EVE, six months after I became the senior pastor at First United Methodist Church. I had been welcomed by most people in my California Central Valley town, even though I was the first woman preacher most of them had ever met.
I entered the sanctuary robed in black, with a colorful stole around my neck (the symbol of the towel Jesus lay over his shoulders when he washed his disciples’ feet). I felt confident, even on a night when many community members would be in church for the first time or had come for their once-a-year worship experience.
I lit a dozen candles on each of two standing candelabras, and red poinsettias glimmered all around me as we sang “Joy to the World.” I preached a sermon from the first chapter in John’s gospel that says light shines in the darkness and darkness has not overcome it. I served communion to parishioners, friends, and slightly eggnog-tipsy extended families. At midnight, we dimmed the lights and sang “Silent Night” by heart, with only the glow of hand-held candles filling the room. I blessed the congregation with raised hands, honored by the privilege in this call to the ministry I embodied, and walked to the entryway to greet everyone.
Most people came by and shook my hand but didn’t linger—they had gifts to open or chores to finish for the next day. At the end of the line came a smiling, grey-haired man who was the lay leader of the church. He was in his 70s, fair-skinned, and nearly six feet tall. He took my hand and kept it beyond my comfort level. Then, as I pulled away, he gripped tighter, cupped his other hand on the top of mine, leaned closer to me, and whispered, “You look beautiful in candlelight.”
The following Tuesday, after the secretary had gone home and I was leaving my office, he showed up in the hallway and said he wanted to talk with me “alone.” I felt what many women call “the creep factor,” so I kept walking toward my car to be in a more public area as he spoke about his loneliness and his unfulfilling marriage. I offered to meet with him in my office, during office hours (when my secretary would be on site), and to provide him with referrals to couples therapists in the area.
He was not deterred, and over the next few years his contacts with me progressed to phone calls begging me to come to his house while his wife was away (I didn’t go), and to offering me a $50,000 gift for a down payment on a house so I wouldn’t have to live in the parsonage. I was 35, married, and the mother of a young daughter. None of that mattered to him. He professed his love obsessively.
‘Don’t let it get to you’
My first conversation with a male colleague about my harassment didn’t go well. He minimized the man’s behaviors: “He’s just a jerk; don’t let it get to you.” He blamed me for being overly anxious. I called my supervising district superintendent in the church, who, having no understanding about the ways harassers use money to gain power, had lunch with my husband and me and said that we should take the money.
Luckily, I had others to consult. “What will he say you did for that money?” a female colleague asked. At last, someone understood. She also suggested that I get a therapist. It was now my job to deal with what was happening to me, as if it were my fault.
A few months later, I met with the man and his wife in my office to decline his offer of money, to describe his unwanted behavior, and to say that I wanted it to stop. It was humiliating for the man’s wife, and she was silent and red-faced throughout the conversation. He said very little, did not acknowledge any wrongdoing, and, since he was the most powerful lay leader in the church, left the office formulating an alternate plan. He began sowing seeds of doubt about my leadership, spreading rumors about my marriage, and making up stories describing my supposed ineptitude. He played the victim when I blocked his re-election to the honored lay leader position. My only option in the end was to ask the bishop to move me to another congregation. The man’s abuse was never revealed to the congregation or to the clergyman who came after me, and while I lost a job I had otherwise loved, the man who abused me was restored to leadership.
Telling my own story
When I began working as a clergy consultant and psychologist more than two decades later, I was ready to tackle the ignorance I’d personally encountered. I participated too long in my own silent shame, the shame heaped upon other clergywomen, and the many sexual secrets churches keep. Having grown up around a shame-based family secret—my gay father spent his life in the closet—I was used to carrying shame. While keeping harassment under the proverbial rug, people in congregations say irritatingly ignorant things about offenders in their midst, such as “She must have done something to egg him on” and “He does so much good; we can certainly overlook this.”
Ready to tell my own story and to expose sexual harassment and abuse in the church for what it is, I loaded up my briefcase with handouts and traveled to all but a few states in the U.S, leading workshops for clergy from multiple denominations. I have zeroed in on the problem of shame. To keep their institutions untarnished, all denominations have left victims carrying the shame that doesn’t belong to them. Disowned shame by perpetrators is projected onto those who report the abuse. Sexual shame in faith traditions also distorts and represses sexuality, leading to secret-keeping. I wrote my first book, Sexual Shame: An Urgent Call to Healing, to explore the theological roots of sexual shame and abuse in the Christian tradition.
Clergy at thousands of my workshops have taught me the complexity of this issue. How can we affirm both spirituality and sexuality instead of seeing them as arch-enemies? How do we teach clergy and laity to have healthy sexual lives and lead them out of shame?
Fear of harassment is a constant reality for women clergy, but empirical data on sexual harassment within the church is still limited. In a 2005 report on Canadian churches, Christopher Lind wrote, “Female pastors are concerned about protecting themselves from unwelcomed approaches. Male pastors are concerned about protecting themselves against unfair allegations.”
In 2018, I received a Lilly Endowment-funded research grant through the Louisville Institute’s Pastoral Study Project. I analyzed data on the “uncomfortable silences” that remain in my United Methodist denomination about sexual harassment and abuse and what is needed to directly challenge, prevent, and respond to these incidents. The levels of harassment toward women in power in congregations is remarkably similar to data reported in other workplaces that indicates that in the U.S. more than two-thirds of working women have experienced at least one type of violence against them. Research conducted for the United Methodist Church more than a decade ago showed that United Methodist clergywomen reported as high as 75 percent victimization by harassment from laity or colleagues. A 2017 study in the UMC indicates that this rate has dropped to 58 percent for female clergy (as if this figure should give us hope!). The United Methodist General Commission on the Status and Role of Women notes, “it also appears that men are experiencing less sexual misconduct, and women are experiencing more. That, or as we may be seeing in the popular media, women are more likely to recognize and/or report it as such.”
Symptoms that can last decades
Sexual harassment is demeaning and is far more about power than about lust. Repeated comments, texts, phone calls, demands for personal favors or attention, and even stalking occur. These acts of violence against women in leadership are evident among female candidates for public office, but also in congregations that women serve. Harassment and abuse are, sadly, effective ways that people resist women’s leadership.
We can and should recognize sexual harassment as trauma-inducing, especially when multiple incidents over many years threaten a person’s psychological health. Clinician, researcher, and pioneer in the field of traumatic stress Bessel A. van der Kolk offers a working definition of trauma. In an interview with Psychotherapy Networker, he described trauma as “an event that overwhelms the central nervous system.” Repeated stressors exhaust normal coping strategies, and depression and fatigue are often the result. When accompanied by denial and minimization, physical symptoms can worsen.
Looking back, I can see that the harassment I experienced led to multiple physical symptoms. Many victims experience headaches, muscle and joint pain, high blood pressure, and other illnesses. Nannina Angioni, an attorney who has worked on hundreds of sexual harassment cases, says, “Employees talk of having a pit in their stomach commuting to work, having anxiety, panic attacks, inexplicable fits of crying, and physical manifestations of stress: hair falling out, hives, weight gain or loss, sleeplessness, and lethargy.”
Symptoms can last decades. When clergywomen are harassed early in their careers, their confidence plummets and they doubt their abilities. This lack of confidence can lead them to either drop out of ministry or say “yes” to positions with less pay and advancement.
When victims blame themselves (participating in dominant cultural myths about women and sexual abuse), they have increased shame, low self-esteem, and feelings of worthlessness. They fear job loss and loss of respect, or face blame if they report their experiences. Even clergywomen who confront their harassers, as I did, can end up losing their viability in the community or their effectiveness in ministry.
Listen and act
Is the church listening to sexual abuse victims? In the 2017 study by the United Methodist commission on women, 52 percent of female victims who reported sexual misconduct against them said they were listened to, but nearly 40 percent said their experience was minimized or dismissed.
My 2018 research in a United Methodist Church national survey of district superintendents (supervising clergy) at the highest levels in the church power hierarchy found that 37 percent of 85 responders said they had been victims of molestation or abuse. Fifteen percent of male responders and 68 percent of female responders indicated that they were victims of sexual harassment in ministry. Sixty-one percent of all female responders and 6 percent of male responders said that they were victims of harassment in another setting.
Having personal experience with harassment may not incline these leaders to act. Eighty-four percent of those surveyed had never used the polity within the church to remove a lay person due to sexual harassment. And only 20 percent of overall responding participants said that they provide laity with harassment policies for their congregations or clergy.
Most denominations are too frightened to excommunicate laity when they perpetrate abuse. Many denominations now require clergy to take sexual ethics training at least every four years, but they have not sufficiently trained their laity. Most congregations lack even basic policies that address laity harassment. When lay persons are confronted, hostility can divide congregations into factions for decades to come. If asked to leave, offending laity can and do mount smear campaigns that undermine the viability of clergy and congregations in their communities. United Methodist polity includes a rarely used procedure for filing charges against a parishioner and taking away their membership. When it has been used, offenders have fought back with countersuits for defamation and slander.
On Mavis Staples’ powerful 2017 release “No Time for Crying,” she belts out the chorus: “We’ve got no time for crying. We’ve got work to do.” I’ve shed plenty of tears, but our work is far from done. Clergywomen across denominations are being harassed and abused. Because a victim may not be psychologically ready or able to speak out, we can speak out for them. Ask them their #MeToo and #ChurchToo stories. Stand in solidarity with them and listen carefully to their experience.
With national public attention turned toward abuse by clergy, we have overlooked the reality that lay members offend as well. It’s up to each of us to be sure that our sanctuaries are truly safe sanctuaries.
Karen A. McClintock, author of When Trauma Wounds: Pathways to Healing and Hope and four other books, is a clergy consultant and psychologist specializing in shame recovery. She lives in Ashland, Ore.
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