How Can Churches Protect the Vulnerable? A Conversation with Theresa Sidebotham

The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need Thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian podcast. I'm Dr. James Spencer. Through calm, thoughtful, theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now, on to today's episode of Thinking Christian. Hey, everyone. Welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I am joined today by someone I just met recently at the National Religious Broadcasters Conference, Teresa Sidebotham. And she is an attorney with Teleos Law. And we were just discussing some of her interesting work with churches and nonprofit organizations at a lunch we both attended and decided to have her on the show to talk about those things. So, Teresa, thanks for being on the show. Thanks for taking the time and just kind of interested if you would introduce yourself a little bit to folks. Tell a little bit about what you do in general, and then we'll kind of dive into specifics as we go. Yeah, it's great to be here. Teleos Law as a law firm works a lot with ministries and with businesses too, often with faith-based business owners. And, you know, the words from Scripture, meaning whole or complete or mature. And we really try to bring redemptive solutions, help ministries and businesses have a great workplace culture, take care of problems. In the case of ministries, we do a ton of child safeguarding work, you know, either preventing or responding to issues, a lot of stuff around sexual harassment. You know, the problems with people, you could say that's a lot of what we do. Well, I think it's interesting, you know, because a lot of times I think when people think about hiring an attorney, they think, oh my gosh, I've gotten in trouble. I need to hire an attorney. Or I'd like to get someone else in trouble and I'd like to hire an attorney. But some of your preventative work where you're coming in and you're actually helping churches form and shape policy, I think that's where I'd like to start our focus, at least for the conversation initially. So can you talk through, you know, what sort of churches and ministries really come to you? What's the impetus for them to say, wow, we really need some help with this? Well, unfortunately, the vast majority of people who come to us for help are actually in trouble. So we do a lot of ministry-related investigations, you know, allegations of everything from spiritual abuse to child abuse. You know, you name it. It's actually better, much better if ministries can get things squared away on the front end to make, it doesn't reduce the chances of things happening to zero, but it makes it less likely. And it also means that when things do happen, you're more likely to have a good response. So sometimes we'll help organizations work through policies, you know, maybe a child safeguarding policy, for example. But another thing that we really have a vision for, our Teleos Teaches affiliate provides subscription-based online training for ministries, you know, child safeguarding training, HR training, sexual harassment, racial reconciliation. But we take everything not just from a legal perspective, but more importantly, from a scriptural perspective. You know, how is God calling us to live with each other within the organizational structure? And so that type of training, we hope, will really help to create the healthy culture and avoid many problems. And so if we're a church or a ministry, right, without, let's say, any HR policies or with really lean HR policies, maybe, or we're a church or ministry or, you know, don't have any safeguards around the youth and children's ministry, but we know we probably should, those are proactive things that churches and ministries could really come to and get from you all. You'd work through them with that. Is there like, I'm completely ignorant of this arena. So are there like boilerplate things that you give people or do you really go in and kind of work with a church and a ministry to understand what their process is and kind of help them craft policies that would be more tailored to them? Yeah, so because ministries vary so much in size and scope and mission, we do some tailoring, but let me point you to a couple of great resources, you know, just to get started. So for all child safeguarding, Evangelical Council for Abuse Prevention, ECAP, that's at ECAP.net. They've got a ton of free resources, and they actually have part of our child safeguarding training, creating the capable guardian. You can see on that for free. So that's a great place to start. An insurance company like Brotherhood Mutual has a lot of free resources on their website. I think they do have some free template policies there. If you read the articles and resources we have for free at, you know, Teleos Law, Teleos Teaches, that can give you a lot of guidance. We don't have the actual policies, but we have a lot of, you know, thoughts and guidance. A great place to start would be to get a Teleos Teaches subscription, go through the trainings, get an idea of what you need to do, and then start to put policies together and then work with us or another attorney to tailor them to exactly what you need. So, you know, a little bit of a game plan there. Yeah, yeah. Well, we'll have all those links listed in the show notes, folks, so you don't need to rewind to write all those down or anything like that. I'll make sure I put them all in the listing for the show. But this is really important. I mean, I think that's what sort of strikes me about the whole thing. I remember working as an academic dean, and one of the things that our children's ministry program director did was she actually worked with churches to try to help put together things for children events. And even when we would have stuff that would involve youth, anybody over the under the age of 18, she was one of those real big advocates for, look, we have to have a strong policy around this. We have to have strong safeguards around this. And I always just really appreciated her wisdom around those ideas. But I know that not every academic dean or ministry has somebody in there, you know, in-house who's really knowledgeable about these issues. And so just appreciate the ministry you're providing for folks because it is a pretty, a spectacularly large problem if you have it. And maybe that's where we can kind of pivot to now. You know, you work with churches who have issues that like, there's been problems that arise. And so why don't we just start with the children issue and then maybe we can pivot into some of the spiritual abuse issues that you deal with and those kinds of things. But talk about, you know, obviously safeguards are an issue, but what sort of issues do you run into in children's ministries with churches that you think churches really or ministries should be aware of? Yeah, so, you know, tons of churches and ministries are getting this right now and they've got, you know, policies in place. They're careful how they check kids in and out. They screen people, they train people. They don't let anyone near the kids who hasn't been properly background checked and trained. So that's all great. It's surprising though, how many still don't have that in place. And I think there's maybe a couple of reasons for it. One is churches, you know, sometimes pastors think, well, you know, we're about evangelism and the gospel, and they don't like the administrative side or what they think of as the administrative side. But, you know, what I like to say to that is, you know, everyone's concerned about whether millennials and Gen Z are even going to church. If you want to write a love letter to young parents, making sure you have the absolute best protection and safety for their young children is the way to go. I think churches also sometimes have the feeling, you know, we're doing God's work. These are good people. It's not going to happen here. That's sort of a partly true, if you were going to do a Snopes evaluation. So it is actually true that there's less abuse in a ministry context than there is in some other contexts, like, take public school, for instance. But it's not zero. I read, I was doing some research yesterday and I read a study. They estimate, this is going to shock you, I think. They estimate that 5% of the adult males in the United States are pedophiles. That's a massive number. Yeah. That's a massive number. And whether that exact percentage is true or not, you know, I didn't do the research study. If there's that many would-be sex offenders out there, there's going to be a few of them in the church. And they're going to try to get into the church because you've got a great, you know, it's like a candy shop with children's ministry. Right. And then the second piece is what we're seeing a huge amount of that people are still very naive about is child on child stuff. I mean, I've seen children in missionary families doing incestual type of things. We've seen, I mean, we just see a lot of it now because families are so broken. The society is so broken. Kids, you know, they might get abused. They might get exposed to porn and then they're acting out on other children. And so, you know, then you've got a double victim scenario where you've got two children.

need to be taken care of. And actually, we wrote a white paper on that, which is also posted on that ecap.net website that gives some really good suggestions on how to respond if anybody faces that situation. But churches, pastors, leaders, they've got to be realistic. This is the world we're living in. Yeah. Do you see, you know, so, I mean, every church I've gone to, or I think almost every church I've gone to has that sort of check-in system for the children's ministry. And I know they do background checks and all that kind of good stuff. Do you see churches that sort of lean too heavily on those things? Like, in other words, I know they're necessary, and I understand why they're necessary, but I would also think that they could lull you into a false sense of security. And so beyond those things, are there aspects of this that you would recommend for churches that maybe go beyond that, like I said, that check-in system, the background checks, the maybe two workers to a classroom, or whatever else they're doing? Like, obviously, there's no way for us to eliminate this completely, but are there other things that you would suggest that churches and ministries look at? Yeah, the rules and the programs and processes are absolutely necessary, and they actually do reduce abuse significantly. I mean, the Catholic Church has been doing this type of thing since 2002, and their abuse rates went way, way down to just a tiny, tiny amount now. So we know it works. My ministry organization clients are reporting the same thing. So I absolutely want to encourage people. It's not wasted effort. It does work. I think where the growth edge is that ministries don't always realize the place where they can stop stuff is the red flags and the boundary violations. You know, so sometimes they'll be reported something that's not exactly abuse, and people, you know, they don't want to take action on it because we know this is a good guy. So let me give you a couple of examples of the type of thing I'm talking about. Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed? With inflation, market volatility, and ongoing global uncertainty, more families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up, and many are finding that adding a layer of protection makes a lot of sense. Sanctuary Metals is a Christian-owned company that helps families strengthen their retirement savings with physical gold and silver through a gold IRA. During uncertain times, many people look to precious metals as a way to add stability when other assets may be under pressure. If you'd like to explore whether a gold IRA is a good fit for your situation, Sanctuary Metals makes it easy to get started. Text GUIDE to 94878 to receive your free retirement defense guide or call 888-958-6579 to speak with one of their knowledgeable team members. Again, text GUIDE to 94878 or call 888-958-6579. Just like you have a middle-aged man who's having little girls age 8, 9, and 10 come and sit on his lap, and they're not his own granddaughters or daughters. So people see that and they think, ah, that's a little bit inappropriate. And if your child protection policy is written right, that should be in violation of the policy. But the guy's an elder. He's a big donor. That isn't technically abuse. It's sort of right out where everybody can see him. And people are like, well, you know, that's just Harry. You know, he's just affectionate. He just likes kids. That's a red flag. It's a boundary violation and it's not appropriate. And so calling people on it. Another example, I had a friend call not too long ago. The friend's son was involved in a youth ministry, and a volunteer with a male, middle-aged male volunteer with a youth ministry was kind of trying to wangle it so he would take boys out, onesies, twosies, to a football game or to other events, maybe to dinner. And the dad shut that down pretty hard. And then next thing, the boy's friend said, yeah, this guy is sending me TikTok messages at 2 a.m., which is a little weird. So it hadn't quite got to sexualized material, but those are both red flags. They're boundary violations. It shouldn't, so it should be a violation of the child protection policy for the adult volunteer to go anywhere with kids alone. It should be, especially one-on-one alone. It's also a violation or should be a violation for an adult to have private digital communication with a minor. And by, you know, that would be Facebook. That would be text. That would be TikTok. That would be email. So parents should be copied. It should be a group. So these on the edge. And the response on that, honestly, from that church was, well, we don't think so because, you know, he used the same name, Harry, and Harry's a great guy. And, you know, he's got daughters and he's part of our church, and we don't think. It doesn't matter what you think about Harry. That's a red flag. And it's possible that Harry in both these instances is perfectly innocent and just a little bit stupid, right? Right. But if you stop it at the boundary violations, the people who actually are grooming kids, you can stop that from happening. And think how much better you would feel then five years down the road when one of our Harrys has been molesting, you know, dozens of kids. Right. Well, and you can even think of it, you know, because, I mean, you can see the, I can hear the arguments now, right? You know, with the first Harry, it's like, well, he's not doing anything bad. This is not something we're going to call him on. This is getting too legalistic. This is, you know, you can just hear those arguments sort of flow out, but the reality is that even if it's not these Harrys who are going to do something bad, you know, maybe Barry, you know, the next guy, when you've normalized the behavior for these kids and they think it's okay now, you're blurring lines for them because they're not distinguishing between Harry and Barry. They're just looking at it and going, well, nobody thought this was bad, so why should this be bad? Yeah. And so there has to be that thought process of not even safeguarding the children in a particular instance, but helping them understand overall what is or what is not a boundary-crossing behavior in their own minds. I would think that's a big part of this. Well, it's huge. And to that point, can I say to all the parents and grandparents and relatives out there, don't make your three- or four-year-old kiss you or hug you or kiss, you know, kiss Aunt Thelma or whatever because that takes away agency over their own body. You know, so with my grandchildren, I ask their permission or I say, would you like to give Omi a hug or kiss? And sometimes they wouldn't. Sometimes they wouldn't. But if they wouldn't, I respect that because I want them, either with a Harry or a Barry someday, or even, you know, as girls when they grow up with a teenage boy someday, I want them to be able to say, no, hugging and kissing is not happening. Yeah. Yeah. It's something we've, and now we came about this in a really weird way, and so, but we had our dog in dog training, and our dog trainer said the exact same thing about the dogs, like that the dogs should almost invite you to touch them. Now, I thought that was super strange and I'm like, I don't even understand this. But when you put it in the context of kids and that is sort of one of the things we've, so I have four kids now. We have three daughters of 15, 15, and three, and then we have an 18-year-old son. And across the whole time, it's like, yeah, we don't, we're not making them do these things. Like if they don't want to give you a hug, they're not going to give you a hug, so don't be weird about it. Right. And, but that's all we really framed it as, like, don't be weird. But I think in this context, it, it sort of makes more sense why you'd do it, right? You're giving them the agency as you're, you're saying just to say, no, that's not something I want to do. It's not something I need to do, and so I'm not going to do it. But then I think also your right setting in their minds, this idea that there are boundaries that shouldn't be crossed. And that when people cross those boundaries, the adults around them need to be saying, yeah, that's a boundary that shouldn't be crossed, even if it's not pernicious. Like even if it's not bad, it's just strange to get, like, I would never send my daughter's friends a TikTok. That's weird. Like, I'm not going to do that. Like, I don't even communicate with my kids like that. Yeah. It's just strange. And so I think we have to be careful what we normalize for kids. Very interesting. Well, I read a really interesting book once, and I sadly can't remember the name, but it argued that kids who have lots of interaction with adults, with strangers, lots of social interactions, develop a better sense of what's weird and what's not. So the children who are really more likely to be victimized are the very shy, introverted, otherwise vulnerable. You know, not all kids are really susceptible to being abused, but, you know, one of the three factors that can lead to abuse is a vulnerable child. So to the extent you can help

The third component is failure to be a capable guardian. So that's why our training is called Creating the Capable Guardian, because we want everybody in the ministry to become that capable guardian. Okay. So would you say a lot, you know, I've done a fair amount of reading and research on sort of this idea of coddling our kids, you know, like trying this whole idea of trying to keep them so safe that they're never in any sort of danger whatsoever. Would you say that that's any sort of a contributing factor here? Like they don't build the resiliency or the experience to be helped to navigate what is or is not an appropriate experience for them. They're always just sort of cloistered. Is that, you know, in that initial, you know, they're shy. Does that feed into that aspect of what you're talking about or not? It possibly could. You know, some kids just by either their temperament or, you know, they might even have disabilities that make it hard for them to understand. I think a family where you talk about things openly and practice things openly, you know, that, that is giving the kids some ideas. Of course, even physically, you know, our 18-month-old grandson fell down. It was half a flight of carpeted stairs the other day and wasn't super happy about it. And my husband commented, well, now he knows about stairs. Right. Now with weird adults, I think where we want to be with that is processing through what's comfortable, what's not, what's weird, what's not, which is why we don't want to cross their boundaries by pushing them into close physical space when they feel like it's weird. You know, even if it's just, well, you know, Uncle Harry has a beard and I don't like the way it tickles. You know, fine. They don't like the way it tickles, you know. Right. Yeah. Really good. Well, I know you don't work exclusively with kid stuff in churches and ministries. And so I kind of wanted to pivot to what we talked about at the lunch there at NRB a little bit, but this spiritual abuse side. And so I think the question I have as we kind of transition here is, one, do you see a correlation between churches that have trouble with protecting their children and churches that have sort of this spiritual abuse dynamic? Are they connected issues? You know, is there a tight correlation there or is it more just coincidental? You know, I think it would probably take a research study, which is beyond me, to give a definitive answer. But it does make sense that an organization that's really working on healthy culture would hopefully be working on it across the board. And we know there's child abuse in ministries. We actually know there's quite a bit of sexual harassment in ministries. Christianity Today did a study or they did a research study on that. And it's about one in six people reported that they had been sexually harassed within a church or ministry context. Spiritual abuse is one of the forms of abuse of power, as is sexual harassment, and, of course, as is child abuse. So, intuitively, it makes sense to me that an environment where there wasn't a good understanding about healthy use of power might be a breeding ground for all kinds of abuse. That there's almost going to be some manifestation of this, whether it's in children or sexual harassment or what have you. That kind of idea. Right. Talk a little bit about what you would count as spiritual abuse. I mean, maybe people don't even understand what that term exactly is. So it's related to an inappropriate use of power, but how do you usually deal with it from your vantage point? Yeah, and before I comment on spiritual abuse, just one more point to the abuse in general. I was talking to one professional who made this argument. He said, one of the things he likes to do in screening for child abuse is screening for narcissistic tendencies. And his reasoning goes like this. People who are narcissists abuse other people in various ways. If you screen them out, you will screen out all the ways that they might have abused people, including child abuse. It's an interesting theory. I'm not saying it's for sure true. I'm not saying that I really mind the idea of screening out the narcissists either. Exactly right. It could be a value in and of itself. But turning to spiritual abuse, so a couple of ways to look at it. It is a type of abuse of power. And honestly, sometimes you're looking at a situation going, well, I definitely think there's abuse of power, and I'm not sure if it's spiritual abuse or not. It's a subset of emotional abuse. One definition is a person is using what's sacred, including God's word, to control, misuse, deceive, or damage a person created in his image. And that could be done by parents. It could be done by pastors. Honestly, it can also be done towards pastors. Sometimes pastors get spiritually abused by their congregation. Typically, though, a spiritual abuse is done by someone in a position of spiritual authority. We'll usually say it needs to be systematic. So, you know, just somebody throwing a Bible verse off the cuff or, you know, being a little authoritative in one situation or getting, you know, it's like as a parent, you get mad at your kids. That doesn't make you into an emotionally abusive parent. If day after day you demean them and harass them and scold them, that might. And similarly with a pastor or spiritual leader, it's this pattern of abuse. Some of the characteristics we see, it might be, and let's call it a leader because it's usually a leader, failing to take accountability for their own actions, censoring any nonconforming ideas or discussions. And then it's not just that you quote scripture, it's that you're using it to manipulate people and to sort of twist the situation. And so sometimes when it gets wrongfully identified, it's when the pastor actually is teaching on the theology of that church. And the person doesn't happen to like it. Or the pastor's teaching on, you know, some of God's call to holiness and, you know, people might get offended by that. But pastor is using scripture position of authority to control and manipulate people, you know, then we might have spiritual abuse. So that's kind of a long answer, but I hope it was a little bit clarifying. No, it's really helpful. It takes me back sort of the Barmen Declaration that the confessing church did in Germany. They actually had, I think it was their fourth thesis. They talked about rejecting the false doctrine that the church would put a leader in place that would have more power really than they've been given. And so the general idea was that they didn't want a fuhrer within the church. They didn't want somebody whose authority was such that they were even beyond the word of God in some ways. And it sounds like that's sort of what this would take shape as, that even the word of God gets bent into the agenda of this person who has sufficient control of the church and sufficient position and authority to move other people around as he sees fit or she sees fit. Is that a fair sort of summary of it? Yeah, and that they're using power that way. And where it gets a little hard to delineate, you know, many really successful ministry leaders have charismatic personalities, really strong personalities. So you have to look at the interactions and say, okay, would a reasonable person find this manipulative or exploitive? Because sometimes the person on the other side also has some responsibility to say, you know, I really don't want to volunteer 15 hours a week. You know, that doesn't fit my schedule. I've got a husband and children. And we'll even find when we're, you know, investigating a situation that you have seven people who are feeling traumatized by the leader and three people are like, no, I never had any problem. I just said no when I didn't want to do it. So it's partly the, you know, the strength of the individual. And often it was fine. You know, the leader didn't push further. So was that actually abusive or coercive? You know, we'll look at, well, did you ever come back and talk to the person? Because it can be a little unfair to the leader, right? If, you know, they think they're just going along organizing life in their fairly high D kind of way. And, you know, nobody ever says, you hurt my feelings. That didn't work for me. So it's pretty nuanced. And honestly, with the investigations sometimes will land with, well, we're not actually finding abuse, but we do see a lot of growth potential for this leader, you know, to maybe get some coaching and be a little more sensitive. Or sometimes they really are just very abusive, manipulative, self-absorbed.

people and then at that point you hope the ministry would make some good decisions there. Yeah. Well, having been in leadership occasionally and sort of feel the complaints from people who I supervise, one of the things that I've, I think, learned over the years is that I actually appreciate it when people who I'm supervising let me feel the pain. And so in other words, you know, I have had this situation where somebody is working 50 hours a week, and, you know, ultimately coming to me when they're at their breaking point and saying, I've been working 50 hours a week for this long, and this is unbelievable, and you won't give me any help. And what, you know, and it's like, well, I didn't know you were working 50 hours a week. I don't, I don't watch you work 50 hours a week. So now that I know I can do something about it, but, you know, if you're not letting me feel that pain, if you're not saying we can't get this done because we don't have X, Y, or Z resource, I don't know about it. And so I think it's a really helpful process that you're outlining there just to say, you know, you almost give the leader, you know, you don't walk in and, you know, sort of presume guilt. It's just there's a whole slew of things that can go wrong here and a whole slew of ways that people can experience what goes wrong then it doesn't always have to be spiritual abuse. There really does need to be that patterning that you find and um and maybe even just, you know, the folks who don't say no, maybe the easiest way to curtail the spiritual abuse is just start saying no, right? I mean, it can be as simple as those kind of solutions. I would assume. Yeah, and a lot of it's in the response. So, you know, the response you've described as, wow, I didn't realize you're working so hard. Let's see what we can do to get help. We don't want you to work that hard. If your response had been, well, you know, Susie, the Bible tells us that we need to work heartily as unto the Lord and not men. And we really want to see Jesus come back. And if you're not willing to work for that, you know, I really question whether where your heart is with Jesus. That would be spiritual abuse. Yeah. Definitionally. That makes sense. It really does. Because I mean, I think I've worked with a number, so I consult with a lot of higher ed institutions. And one of the things you inevitably hear when you're working with them is that the mission is often used in this way. It's sort of used to cajole people into continuing. Whether, whether I and and it's usually phrased like this from the people who are experiencing it, but I don't always see it from the leadership. So, I mean, very similar to what you're describing. But the idea is that the mission is so sort of supposed to be so compelling that we give up other things in order to serve it. And so a lot of times what I encourage people, even just in the course of the consulting is, listen, you need to decide what you're willing to give to your organization and don't give more. It's just about setting a boundary really. And so you're hired on to work 38.75 hours a week or whatever it is, right? So if you feel like 40 hours is appropriate, you know, it's technically about an hour 25 over your, you know, an hour 0.25 over your actual hired contract length. Great. Right, if you want to do 45 and you don't feel like that's out of bounds, okay. But if you start to hit 46 and you're like, whoa, this is too much, just don't do it. And so I think people need to, there's some of that that I think is more um there is that sort of negotiation that has to take place between the social pressure maybe to get the job done and get the job done well because it's an important job versus actually having somebody manipulate that. And so, really interesting stuff. I, yeah. So how do you, do you have resources for sort of like identifying, would you, do you have anything that would help people identify spiritual abuse? Like are there markers of this? Would you, you know, and to help people sort of evaluate whether or not it's happening or not? Yeah, well, definitely if you think of words like manipulation, coercion, control, especially if, you know, done with scripture in a religious way, that type of thing, often in an environment with a strong religious spirit will be that way. You know, you get people who are so busy racing around doing the work that they don't have time to stop and spend any time with Jesus himself. And actually, going like 180 to my employment law attorney hat, if you've got employees who are not exempt and they're working more than 40 hours a week, you'd better be paying them time and a half or you're going to be violating the law. You know, your pastors and some people like that are exempt. And so I guess you can legally work them to death, although I wouldn't recommend it. Probably not the best move, yeah. But just that, you know, there are people having space to grow and flourish. And then from the perspective of the person who wonders if it's happening to them, do I feel a lot of shame? Do I feel pressure? Do I feel controlled? Do I feel manipulated? Do I feel trapped? And then that might open a discussion of, okay, is it that somebody's being spiritually abusive to me? Do I maybe, I need to go to a counselor and work on healthier boundaries because of some of the messages out of my childhood. I mean, there can be a lot of solutions, but I think those feelings flag for us that there may be problems we haven't addressed yet. Well, I think one of the things you mentioned early on was a leader not being willing to take accountability for, you know, their actions. I can envision maybe that that takes on accountability looks very different depending on your denominational structure, like elder-led congregations, you know, all those kinds of different permutations of the way church government can be sort of organized. So is there some sort of fundamental sense in which they need to take responsibility and accountability versus being held responsible and accountable by a governing board of some sort? Well, it's both. So you would hope that leaders, you know, that they have boards to be accountable to, maybe they have a hierarchy to be accountable to. If people are in an independent church or ministry, and, you know, you could speak better to this with theological training, but they probably need a mechanism to have some kind of accountability partnership. So that to start with, but within ourselves, and we can, you know, if someone says, I didn't like the way you acted in this relationship, okay, we probably all feel a little bit defensive initially, but do we then say, well, you know, maybe there's something that I need to learn from this. Is there a growth point? Did I, you know, did I sin or maybe if I didn't sin, was I unwise? So as leaders, are we thinking through that? Are we honestly hearing it or are we saying, you know, you're just making excuses for the fact that you're lazy and screwed up and you just, you need to get back to it. Well, it's really, I would think it's getting more and more difficult. I mean, I would posit this. I don't know this, but I would think it's getting more and more difficult because you have all the conversation around microaggression. You have all the conversation about, you know, vulnerability and power dynamics that have really raised the, I don't know, awareness maybe of it. And then I also think that you have this sort of weird mechanism of the media and it's not that the media hasn't always been there, but I think that, you know, now you have sort of what I would call ambulance chasing bloggers who live off church scandal and they're not doing the nuanced work that you would do within a given congregation. They're not coming in as an unbiased voice, necessarily really trying to seek and understand what all the patterns are happening and what's going on. They're presenting usually one side of the case and sort of giving their point of view out. But once those messages are sent, it's very difficult to unsend them. I would say it's probably impossible to unsend them. And so is there a sense in which you see as you work with folks that maybe those who are being accused are more getting more defensive? They're getting more concerned about demonstrating their innocence. You know, like, has that dynamic changed over the last several years? Yeah, it's a tough space right now. The people who write about it, it's mixed. I mean, there are some who try very hard to do it in a balanced and nuanced way. And when I see in that work, I really appreciated it. There are some also that it's more victim advocacy and there is a valuable place for victim advocacy. There's a lot of abuse that needs to be uncovered and needs to come out. But I think where it can be a problem is if only one side of the story gets presented which is often true because it's hard for a ministry to present the other side without, you know, saying negative things about a person who may have been harmed or coming across as really defensive. And so are pastors and leaders worried about it? They are. And there, and there's been some studies recently.

I'm not sure where, maybe Christianity Today, the pastors are leaving the ministry in record numbers, and I think this sort of whole, I don't know, can we say a word like this on the show, but the damned if you do, damned if you don't dilemma that many of them find themselves in, even because even if they're good leaders, they're certainly not perfect leaders. I would say a common cultural sin right now is taking offense and holding offense. And let me just give you an example of, I'm a middle-aged woman, as anybody watching this can see. If I go through life watching for slurs against women or slurs against grandmothers or slurs against attorneys, and I'm like, everything you say, I'm kind of listening for it, taking it to bits. I'm going to be very unhappy because I'm either going to hear some or I'm going to hear some things that might be or that weren't, but I thought they were. And if I brood on it and take offense at it. So what I try to do instead is if I hear something, I try to let go of the fence, not hold it against the person, or I think it's, you know, I think it's worth it. I remember I said to one male attorney once, you know, I don't know if you realize it, but you're sitting there shouting at me and that is very disrespectful. And he was like, oh, oh, I'm sorry. No, I didn't. And, and, you know, it changed the whole tenor. And we had cordial conversations after that. So, you know, because he wasn't like deeply misogynistic or trying to put me down, he was being rude, but you know, we dealt with it. So, and you see this with, you know, and you talk to anybody who's, who's a minority or has a disability, the, the happy, healthy, well-adjusted people will tell you they have had to go through life consciously letting go of offenses because it's going to make them miserable if not everybody around them. Yeah. And I, yeah. And I in no way want to let anybody off the hook for dealing with abuse in the environment. No, no. And I, I don't hear you saying that. I mean, I think it's, I think it's just an appropriate approach. Like, you know, offenses are going to happen in our relationships. We're going to have those moments where it's, there's going to be a tough conversation or somebody's going to get their feelings hurt and you can either choose to dwell in it, you can choose to let it go, or you can choose to address it. And what I hear you saying is we're choosing to dwell in it way too often. And then once we dwell in that for so long, right, addressing it has to ramp itself up. Like the way we address it has to eventually, it has to be an explosion. It can't just be a, Hey, you know, you're yelling at me right now. Maybe if you could stop that, that'd be fantastic. And then it's diffused and it's done. And, and so I, I think there is this sort of gradual ramping up and I agree with you. I think there's, I teach a course for a, uh, right on mission. It's a non-collegiate training organization on profits and whistleblowers. And one of the things we discuss in there is not everyone who calls themselves a whistleblower is actually a whistleblower. Like there's a technical understanding of what a whistleblower is. It's not just somebody who has a complaint. A lot of us have complaints. We're not all whistleblowers. And just because we say we express our complaint does not make us a whistleblower, right? There's a more technical process that has to be worked through there because the, the offenses can actually be demonstrably shown to be much more, um, heavy or weighty, um, in a sense. And so I think there does need to be that, certainly there needs to be that sort of process to deal with abuse in the church, but I think we all need to take responsibility also to actually deal with our offenses either quickly or to set them aside completely and say, I don't think this one's worth my time. That's kind of what I hear you saying at least, that there are these tiers to it. And the, the response of the healthy leader, you know, the person who's not spiritually abusive is, is how do you respond? So, you know, I've occasionally, but I've, I've had a friend who's a, a minority say, wow, this thing that you said was offensive and it hurt me. And I mean, it's like, wow, I didn't, you know, I didn't mean to say something offensive or to hurt. And so I would stop and try to think about it and maybe, you know, help me understand why that hurt you. And then, you know, just own it. Say, I'm, I'm really sorry I hurt you. And, and maybe the thing I said was, you know, objectively not a wise thing to say. And maybe there was some misunderstanding, but, but to be humble enough to say, thank you for sharing. Please forgive me. You know, make sure I never say that again. Right, right. It's almost like we leaders need the orientation to care sufficiently about their people that even if they don't feel like they've done something wrong, they're recognizing that what they're doing isn't going to help the relationship. Right. And we do that in our marriages too, right? Yeah, yeah. You know, the, the little things that, you know, like for my husband, it actually matters how you put on the toilet paper roll. And so I go to great lengths and he's the most easygoing guy in the world and hardly anything matters to him, but that particular trivial thing matters to him. So you know what? In our house, they are hung the right way. Because I, you know, that's just showing care. Right. Yeah. Well, I can imagine, I can envision that you've had some really difficult conversations. I mean, how do you think about, you know, when you look out at churches and ministries, how do you keep a positive outlook on what's going on? Like, what do you, you know, in the midst of sort of evaluating all these different problems, I can envision that that would be difficult, just keeping that positive outlook on churches and ministries. So how are you, how do you guard yourself as you work in this area? Well, partly, I think in the West, we're going through a winnowing time where the the true followers of Jesus are sort of self-sorting away from, it's not popular to be a Christian anymore. And so, you know, we're getting to be in the situation of the remnant. So there's an awful lot of things and people with the label Christian where, you know, that, that might not actually be their top priority. You kind of have to allow for that. But I think God is trying always building the church and our calling as a law firm is primarily, primarily the angle of internal affairs in the church, the misconduct, the child safeguarding. And, you know, we do a little bit of the religious liberty stuff, but there's other groups like ADF that do, you know, they do that so well. There's probably a dozen of those wonderful nonprofits that do that. But we're focused on, you know, helping, helping the church follow God's calling to purify the bride. So yes, we're in dark spaces, but we think we're there because God is acting redemptively. And most of our clients, that's their heart. You know, they don't call us and pay for an expensive investigation because they want to ignore or cover up. It would be a lot cheaper to ignore it and cover it up without doing the investigation. So their attitude is generally, you know, come and find out the truth, tell us how we need to improve. And with prayer and by the grace of God, you know, we try to do that and I think often are able to do that. So it's the redemptive piece that gives us hope. And, you know, just like within our own characters, trying to constantly be obedient to the call of the Holy Spirit and having a repentant attitude. The church needs to have a repentant attitude too. And that's a great call for it to do that. Well, if we, as we kind of close up our time here, I guess my, my last question for you is what do you think, you know, given your experience and, and, you know, expertise in this area, what's the one thing that you would tell?

any church and ministry that they need to be looking for, either positively or negatively, in their leadership that is just so crucial to sort of keeping some of these more pernicious problems at bay. Wow, it's going to be hard to do just one, but the people who understand the pastoral heart also requires good structures because a lot of the protection and prevention is structural stuff. And then I think for any leader, you know, us included, a spirit of humility, you know, being willing to receive and learn and grow and, yeah. Yeah, I love the, I mean, I love both those. I think the structural comment is really crucial. As somebody who works with a lot of organizations, what you do tend to find is that structures can solve problems, but they can also create problems. And so really understanding well how to structure an organization, create communication within an organization, make sure that you're able to bridge the structural gaps, you know, within your organization is just kind of, I think, leadership 101 anymore. It's such a crucial aspect. And administrative gifts are one of the spiritual gifts, so that's important to remember. Yeah, yeah. Well, Teresa, this has been awesome. I'm going to post all the websites, so I'd encourage people to go and look at Telios Law. It's T-E-L-I-O-S law.com. And then they also have Telios Teaches, same, T-E-L-I-O-S teaches.com, where you could sign up. And it's mostly for organizations, right, to sign up for, you know, sort of the memberships and the classes and those kind of things. Am I correct about that? Right, yeah. And so I just encourage people to go and visit this. This is a really important issue. If your church doesn't have some of this stuff in place, I mean, as Teresa said, it really does reduce the incidence of abuse, particularly in the children's ministry. But I can't imagine it wouldn't be elsewhere. And just plugging into the Telios Law's expertise is, I can imagine, is going to be exponentially helpful for anybody who does it. And so, Teresa, just thanks for being here. Really appreciate your work. And I'm really happy we just happened to meet each other at NRB and have a nice conversation over lunch. So pleasure meeting you and appreciate you being on the podcast. You too. Thank you so much. All right, everybody, we'll catch you on the next episode of Thinking Christian. Take care. I just want to take a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to lifeaudio.com, you'll find dozens of other faith-centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more. What happens when a writer and former history teacher goes toe-to-toe with his best friend, a nationally touring stand-up comedian? Total carnage, that's what. Two men enter and two men leave because that's how it works. Actually, you get hilarious, real, and insightful conversations about life, history, culture, faith, and everything in between. Join me, comedian Johnny W., and my pal, author and speaker John Driver, for Talk About That at lifeaudio.com or wherever you get your podcasts.