Speaker: Kristin Thomas Sancken

Text: Acts 2:42-47; Psalm 23; John 10:1-10

Good morning. I’m Kristin Thomas Sancken, the new Coordinator for Church Safety at Central District Conference. I learned of this role from my sister‑in‑law, Joni Sancken, a CDC‑credentialed seminary professor who grew up at First Mennonite (Champaign‑Urbana). My background is in social work and nonprofit work on child‑abuse prevention and treatment, and I completed a Doctorate of Ministry in 2024 studying the faith journeys of women who survived sexual abuse. This role at CDC fits my training and calling—what Frederick Buechner called the place “where our deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.” I’m committed to helping the church be a true sanctuary for vulnerable people.

Mennonite Church USA created my position after adopting the “Prevention and Accountability” resource last summer. The nearly 90‑page document has two halves; the first focuses on prevention. My role is to help congregations build practical preventative policies—Safe Church rules, clear job descriptions, transparent finances, press and social‑media guidelines—that imagine how the church will respond when crisis comes. Crises are unavoidable, so written policies give concrete steps to follow when emotions run high and help pastors, boards, and congregants share expectations and prevent larger harm.

The second half of the resource covers accountability. It created a Church Safety Liaison system: each of MC USA’s 15 conferences hired a Liaison, of which I am one. When a misconduct claim arises the Director of Church Vitality convenes four Liaisons from different conferences to investigate under MC USA policy. This cross‑conference approach reduces conflicts of interest that occurred when cases were handled inside a single, often small, conference. Since early 2026, five cases have been processed under this system.

Now is when you may be thinking, “Thanks for the document summary, but how does this apply to us at Columbus Mennonite?” When it comes to “Prevention and Accountability,” Columbus Mennonite has solid preventative policies and none of your pastors have had misconduct claims against them. There is a third pillar we must build on these foundations of prevention and accountability, and that is sanctuary. Sanctuary is not only preventing harm or adjudicating wrongdoing; it is creating a place of healing where people who have already been harmed can grieve, be seen, and be accompanied before anyone tries to explain why the pain happened.

I am so impressed that Columbus Mennonite has a “Keeping Safe” Sunday. I have never been to a church that recognizes the importance of discussing how to prevent abuse during a Sunday service. Openly discussing abuse and its prevention is essential to creating true sanctuaries.  The British Reverend G. Campbell Morgan said, “Sanctuary means having no complicity with anything that makes sanctuary a necessity.”  When we come together as a church, we must not be complicit with the things that make the world around us unsafe. For many children, they are most unsafe in their homes.  The prevalence of child maltreatment in the United States is staggering. At least 1 in 7 children has experienced abuse or neglect in the last year, according to the U.S. Centers For Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), though the CDC cautions that abuse and neglect are often underreported.

When we look at these statistics, it tells us something about children – one in seven children are experiencing abuse – but it also tells us something about today’s adults, because children are not static beings.  They grow into adults. Studies indicate that the percentage of today’s adults who experienced child abuse could range anywhere from 6% to 50%.  It’s a hard number to pin down. If we stick with the 1 in 7 statistic from the CDC, which is about 14%, that’s a conservative estimate between 6% and 50%, then, statistically, based on Columbus Mennonite’s average Sunday attendance of about 175, that means about 25 people in this room carry a story of abuse or neglect from childhood.  The question for Columbus Mennonite today, is “What is the faithful response to people who enter our sanctuary having already experienced harm?”  Another way to say this is, “how does a church help someone overcome adversity?”  How do we acknowledge the realities of abuse – full of honest grief and lament – while still offering the hope of the Gospel that is the job of a church?

This is not just theoretical. The U.S. church has often failed to accompany people in suffering. Barna’s 2023 State of the Church found 42% of American adults have deconstructed their childhood faith; many cite leaving or drifting from church not from loss of belief but from how congregations handled suffering. As Dr. Hilary McBride argues in Holy Hurt, churches that offer simplistic answers or fail to sit with people through hard losses—disability, death, abuse—leave them feeling alone, and many choose to leave rather than remain where they feel abandoned. My friend Robyn’s story illustrates this well. A few weeks after the birth of her son Logan, he developed a virus that caused brain swelling and lifelong cerebral palsy. As Robyn and her husband reeled, they kept asking their church to sit with them in their grief; but instead, they were met with, “God is good all the time.” Their pain was dismissed, and they left the congregation feeling abandoned rather than accompanied.

Looking at the Bible, I see a people who understood suffering.  Somehow the American church has, in our wealth and abundance, forgotten the language of grief.  But, the writers of the Bible were intimately acquainted with suffering.  They didn’t shy away from it.  The book of Job comes to mind.  Heck, there’s an entire book called Lamentations.  The same is true when I look at today’s lectionary texts.

You likely recognized Psalm 23. It is most often read at funerals.  It’s the words we offer to those who are grieving – God is with you.  God walks beside you and leads you to green pastures, even when you face suffering and hardship.  I’ll tell you when these verses remind me of.  In one of my interviews with a sexual abuse survivor for my dissertation, I asked her why she returned to Christianity.  She had a horrific story of abuse, mostly at the hands of her father who was also a pastor.  In her twenties, she walked away from her childhood Christian faith because she equated it with her abuser.  She tried Buddhism, Hinduism, New Age Spirituality, and even dabbled in Baha’i. But one night, with traumatic memories of her abuse flooding her brain into a drowning worthlessness, she had a vision of Christ dying on the cross.  The next words that came into her gasping consciousness surprised her, “This is a God who knows your suffering, because this is a God who has suffered.”  Those words changed her mind on Christianity.  She no longer saw Jesus aligned with her oppressor or abuser but instead aligned with her in her suffering.  These lines from Psalm 23, “Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no evil; for you are with me; your rod and your staff — they comfort me,” they teach us that even in our suffering, God is with us. 

Which brings us back to this question I hope Columbus Mennonite is ready to discuss. What is the faithful response to those who enter our sanctuary having already experienced harm? It relates to one of the primary questions of my dissertation: why can two women experience sexual abuse, but it causes one to walk away from a Christian faith, and the other to cling to it more tightly?  What I found in my research was that there was one reliable intervention that helped Christian women process sexual abuse and hold still onto a Christian faith.  This intervention was allowing grief and lament to fully process before attempting meaning making.  And what I mean by meaning making is the active process of interpreting the reason why an experience happened.

I want to clarify here that I am going to mention women a lot as the recipients of abuse, but that’s only because that’s what my doctoral research focused on.  Men also suffer from abuse, both in childhood and in domestic partnerships. Some statistics show as high as 1 in 6.  But for the purposes of this sermon, and being true to my dissertation research, I’ll be using the word women. 

In my dissertation research, I found that the women who walked away from Christianity had religious authority figures who pushed a hurried or rushed attempt at meaning making of their abuse while they were still in an unsafe situation, or when they were still reeling from the grief and pain of the abuse.  The two most common forms of a rushed meaning making are spiritual bypassing and victim blaming.  For spiritual bypassing, these women heard things like, “Everything happens for a reason” or “I’ll pray for you” or “Time heals all.” It’s not that these phrases are untrue, it’s that they are clichés we say to avoid dealing with difficult emotions.  Chaplain JS Park, author of As Long As You Need, said, “We want to offer something into the silence between the ‘before’ version of the person you knew and the hurt ‘after’ version of who they are.  But, none of us know what to say, which is why these platitudes exist.” In our haste to help someone feel better, we may make them feel more alone and misunderstood.

Victim blaming was another form of meaning making that caused women to leave the church.  This looks like questions from pastors or trusted friends like, “What was your part in it?” or “I’m sure it’s a misunderstanding between you two, can I help mediate a conversation?” or the classic, “What were you wearing?” Victim blaming does not recognize the imbalance of power that always exists in abuse.  It turns the narrative around and implies that the victim should have done something to stop the abuse, rather than the perpetrator simply not abusing.  It points to the shame that should be felt for wrongdoing toward someone who did nothing. Women who felt blamed for what happened to them no longer felt like the church was a safe place to tell the truth.

On the other hand, the women who stayed Christians after sexual abuse, were women who had spiritual authority figures in their lives who were willing to sit with them in their pain, be present, listen, and allow them to grieve what happened to them and then, and only then, gave them agency to create their own meaning making about what happened to them or how it changed them.  There is Biblical precedent for this.  Sackcloth and ashes is the ancient Biblical tradition of wearing coarse, uncomfortable goat-hair fabric and covering oneself in ashes to outwardly signify deep mourning, intense grief, and humility.  It’s a physical expression of a broken heart, often used when facing devastating loss.  For example, Jacob tore his clothes and put on sackcloth when he believed his son Joseph was dead.  Mordecai wore sackcloth and ashes to express immense grief over the decree to destroy the Jews.  The expression of grief happened before anyone attempted to say, “But why did Joseph die?” or “Why did Haman write that edict to destroy the Jews?” And, we know from the stories themselves, that the meaning making after these moments of grief was unpredictable, as in there was literally no way for Jacob or Mordecai to predict the ending of their stories.  Joseph did not, in fact, die. He was taken to Egypt as a slave.  The Jews were not, in fact, murdered thanks to the bravery of Queen Ester.  This is why meaning making can’t be made right after a tragedy.  It may be a while before we know the end of the story.

Survivors who stay in the church after abuse are those who don our modern-day version of sackcloth and ashes. Those whose churches allowed them to face their suffering and not turn away from it, try to squash it, or ignore its existence.  The forms of meaning making these women took on their own agency after a fully felt grief, anger and sadness were creative – full of storytelling, reflection, art, self-expression, and social connection.  When the church allowed people who had experienced harm to feel all the negative emotions that come with abuse for as long as they needed to and assured them that God was with them in their suffering, then the survivors continued to turn toward the church to accompany them when they are ready for meaning making. They stayed because they were fully seen and known.

Which leads us to our Gospel for today, John 10.  “He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. When he has brought out all his own, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice.” Jesus fully sees us and knows us, and he’s asking us to see and know him too – so well that we would follow wherever his voice leads.  The verse at the end of John 10 tells us why, “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.”  Jesus didn’t come for us to suffer. Jesus didn’t come so that we would hear his voice and feel shame or regret or fear. When the little lambs hear their shepherd’s voice, they run to him because they know he is safe.  When we follow Jesus, when we really listen to his voice, when we allow Jesus to fully see and know us and allow his teachings to be the things that help us make meaning of our lives, then our life is abundant.  There is suffering, but through the accompaniment of a community of other sheep and a shepherd committed to knowing us, there is abundance.

So, back to this question I asked, what is the faithful response to people who enter our sanctuary having already experienced harm? It’s both simple, and complicated.  It’s to love them unconditionally, and to reassure them that even though you may not be walking in that dark valley with them – God is.  Unconditional love looks like letting survivors feel their grief, anger, sadness and pain, not making your love conditional to a good mood, or a presentable public face.  Unconditional love looks like giving survivors the agency to find their own meaning about what happened to them, not making your love conditional on listening to your good advice. Unconditional love looks like living your own life abundantly, guided by Jesus, so you have the emotional resources to show up and sit with someone else in their pain.  That is how Columbus Mennonite can create a true sanctuary for abuse survivors.

In our Sunday School hour, I’ll be discussing some other evidence-based ways churches can help abuse survivors be more resilient.  We’ll be looking at an influential 30-year-old study called Adverse Childhood Experiences and how these experiences affect brain development in children.  Then, we’ll talk about studies of Positive Childhood Experiences, and how these experiences can mitigate the long-term effects of childhood trauma. I hope you’ll stay for that conversation.  Let’s close with a prayer: God who walks with the brokenhearted, give us the strength to sit with one another’s pain, the wisdom to protect the vulnerable, and the courage to love without conditions. Amen