Trauma as Barrier—and Springboard—to Scripture Engagement: Unleashing the Power of God’s Word to Heal
Scripture Engagement
American Bible Society views engagement with the Bible in terms of our mission statement, which is “Making the Bible available to every person in a language and format each can understand and afford, so all people may experience its life-changing message.” Bible engagement is the experience of the Bible’s message, and this implies a meaningful and life-changing encounter with its central figure, Jesus of Nazareth, the Word made flesh.
In recent years the Bible Society has identified four types of barriers to Scripture engagement: the places God’s Word is needed MOST. This acronym stands for Meaning, Outreach, Supply, and Translation, and it is actually in reverse logical order. Before you can encounter Christ in the Bible, you need (1) to have the Bible translated into a language you understand (preferably your “heart” language); (2) to have a copy available; (3) to overcome critical personal barriers like incarceration, impoverishment, illiteracy, or catastrophe; and (4) to recognize that the Bible applies to you and your circumstances—that it makes sense of life.
Given the work in recent decades in translation and distribution, we can say that in countries like the United States, the primary barriers to be overcome are in the areas of Meaning and Outreach. In this article, we want to focus primarily on the crisis points that require outreach and particularly the barrier of pain that severe trauma constructs between us and an encounter with God’s Word. As we will see, responding to trauma also requires addressing the barrier of Meaning, and so effective trauma care becomes an opportunity for demonstrating the power of the Gospel to a disinterested or disaffected culture.
As a case study, we introduce our recent initiative in this area. “She’s My Sister” provides Scripture-based programs of healing and restoration for traumatized people. We have started in one of the world’s most desperate areas, the region of Great Lakes Africa—including the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Rwanda, Burundi, South Sudan, Uganda, Kenya, and Tanzania; these countries have had literally millions of soldiers and civilian casualties in the past decades.
Consider a recent report from Ubutu Assuni, a Congolese pastor participating in a “She’s My Sister” program for refugee populations without a written language. He has helped translate 11 Bible stories—the first Scripture ever—into the Nyanga language as part of his training to be a trauma healing story-teller. The DRC has been called “the rape capital of the world,” and Walikale, a largely inaccessible region in western North Kivu province, is a hotspot of sexual violence and mass rape. Pastor Assuni told us a story from his work there this summer:
We met a woman called Fatima who had been raped in her field by foreign soldiers. Fatima’s problem was that she couldn’t understand how God let her be raped when she hadn’t sinned against him. She had stopped going to church and had also left the church choir because of her shame. We told her the story of Creation and the Fall, to show that suffering, sin, and pain came when Adam and Eve disobeyed God and ate the forbidden fruit. I visited Fatima with one of the pastors of her church, and he continued to meet with her. After a week, on the next Sunday, she came to church again. Soon after that she went back to singing in the choir. Her shame had disappeared. I visited her recently, and she testified that she feels good now. She is spending time with her friends to learn the songs they had studied in her absence. Finally, she understood that being raped was not a punishment from God. I praise God for this good method to help de-traumatize people who are in difficulty.
Defining Trauma: Beyond Mere Suffering
Before going further, it may help to clarify our terms, as “trauma” is in wide but vague use today. We rely on the work of the co-chairs of the advisory council for our She’s My Sister initiative, both of whom are psychologists who work with trauma survivors. Dr. Diane Langberg (who also chairs the executive committee of the American Association of Christian Counselors) makes the helpful distinction that not all horrific events are traumatic. Clinical trauma is a matter not of the event, but of the victim’s response. Some very bad events are better classified as “ordinary” suffering if the victims are able to cope—if they can put it in context of the story of their faith or worldview. Only if the event overwhelms normal coping strategies and causes people to question or abandon their overarching story do we enter the realm of trauma.
Dr. Phil Monroe, a professor at Biblical Seminary near Philadelphia, says that a trauma definition needs two elements: an overwhelming event and a pattern of responses. The overwhelming event involves actual or threatened death, serious injury, or threat to person (e.g. actual or threatened assault, rape, or other destructive behavior) that we experience or witness. The enduring, and sometimes enlarging, pattern of responses will include intense fear, horror, helplessness, shame, self-disgust, and confusion, resulting in fear of the past, the future and the present.
Considered in this way, trauma becomes a double barrier to Scripture engagement because it affects people at two different levels. On the cognitive or intellectual level, trauma causes a loss of meaning and connection. Traumatized people experience severe dissonance that separates them from their culture, from prior systems of meaning, and from other people near them who have not been through their experience. The second barrier is at the level of the emotions. Trauma is a wound of the heart, a wound of the emotions. Referring back to the Bible Society categories, we could say that the emotional barrier is related to Outreach and the intellectual barrier to Meaning. Let’s begin with the intellectual barrier.
Intellectual Dissonance in Two Cultures
People—individuals and societies—need to make sense of their world, and a primary function of both religion and of culture is in providing a story that does so. When such a story seems to fall short of explaining a critical incident, we experience dissonance. We saw this overtly in Fatima’s story, as she questioned her prior understanding of God. Why should someone engage with the Bible if she does not believe God is good and powerful?
Many people in the U.S. and other Western countries have equally serious, if lower intensity, barriers to Scripture engagement. The widespread cultural perception that the Bible is an irrelevant and outdated rulebook leaves many people ignorant of its actual message. In a culture that is materialistic to the point of nihilism and denies the possibility of an overarching purpose for living, it is little wonder that depression and suicide rates are so significant.
We are created to live in culture like fish in water, so it is not surprising that even people raised in church are vulnerable when trauma and cultural stigma undermine the legitimacy of the Bible’s narrative. We all know Christians who feel unprepared to respond to cultural attacks or who have become reluctant to ask hard questions of their faith. But neither believers nor the wider culture are well served when Christian leaders, however unconsciously, accept culture’s criteria for what makes a legitimate belief and then respond defensively. The resulting mindset is the dark side of “family safe” church, radio, and entertainment products. It can result in a brittle and superficial practice rather than a robust confidence in the God who created, redeemed, and is restoring the universe.
Nothing in the DRC is “family safe.” Their churches cannot avoid hard questions like “Where was God when I was raped?” and “Why did God kill my parents?” These are perennial questions, and that they are often colored by misconceptions or misinformation does not make them any less serious. But they are questions with which the Church has wrestled since its founding, and for which we have equally serious biblical responses. No one is served by the pretense that they are not serious and not present in every congregation.
Heart Wounds
One of the things we have learned from our work in trauma care is that there is little point in trying to address hard questions at the level of intellectual dissonance until we have faced up to the second barrier that trauma presents. Trauma disrupts our emotions, and this both impedes our ability to think clearly and distorts our perception and interpretation of external data, making rational argument ineffective. Much of the diagnostic literature regarding trauma focuses on its effects at this level, with outcomes including disrupted sleep, health, relationships, and hope. If the symptoms of trauma continue for more than a month, they indicate post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Referring to PTSD calls to mind Western military personnel and civilian contractors who have come home traumatized from recent conflicts. The Bible Society’s Armed Services Ministry has worked with military chaplains to create a resource for use with veterans and service personnel. Our God Understands series includes Scripture portions that address the eight primary “spiritual injuries” the chaplains identified: anger, grief, doubt, guilt, fear of death, a sense that life is unfair, hopelessness, and meaninglessness.
Great Lakes Africa is a region with PTSD. The churches there have been discovering why a spiritual injury, a wound of the heart, becomes a barrier to Scripture. Just like a physical wound, if it is left untreated it will go septic. We are all too familiar with the ways people try to suppress their pain, or to numb it with work or drugs or pleasures. But coping mechanisms do not release the pain, and untreated spiritual pain will fester into numbness, bitterness, hardness, depression, and worse. This is not fertile ground in which to grow the seed of God’s Word, and it is understandable that the churches are asking for help in dealing with their traumatized people. They are learning to speak out clearly about the real pain of their parishioners and neighbors. They are also increasingly pointing out the Bible’s standards for justice and speaking out about systematic evils that cause trauma.
A Scriptural and Practical Response to Trauma
As Pastor Assuni did with Fatima, we help churches address both of these barriers to the Bible by using the Bible. Our trauma healing programs feature resources that trained local facilitators use to guide participants on a journey through Scripture. To address the cognitive barriers, we help establish, expand, or reorient their view of God and his love for them. To address the emotional barriers, we help traumatized people tell their stories to admit their pain.
Our basic curriculum, Healing the Wounds of Trauma, was first developed by four Africa-based Wycliffe staff workers. It provides basic mental health concepts in a biblical framework. Each of the 11 lessons begins with a composite real-life trauma story that helps people connect with its theme, and includes exercises to facilitate a participatory encounter with Scripture and the God it reveals. Five core lessons help people to ask their real questions about God, recognize what God says about himself and the world, express their pain honestly through lament, take their pain to the cross for healing, and eventually learn to forgive other people. Optional chapters address specific cases for traumatized children, raped women, HIV-AIDS, caring for the caregivers, and living in situations of ongoing conflict.
We have recently begun to expand the trauma healing program extensively in response to urgent requests from local churches and national Bible Societies in the Great Lakes Africa region. On the ground, we work with the national Bible Societies in each country that coordinate the program with local churches. We train master facilitators, who then train local facilitators to run the programs in each location, and we follow up with support, multiple levels of certification, and additional training that help multiply the program’s impact.
In Great Lakes Africa we also partner with multiple faith-based NGOs to provide an innovative holistic response, pairing traditional relief and development efforts with the missing component of spiritual support and trauma care. In one pilot program, we provide Scripture and trauma healing materials alongside a partnering foundation that provides regular food and medical supplies, all administered through local churches by the Bible Society of DRC, which also offers literacy training and HIV/AIDS education.
Healing heart wounds is most effective when done in the heart language, and the curriculum has already achieved a degree of robust success with translations into 150 languages. The Bible Society is now creating a formal support and distribution model to bring the materials to additional countries, including the U.S., and to ensure compliance with the highest professional standards. In addition to our “classic” trauma healing model, we also have a related curriculum for children aged 9-12 as well as the story-based oral model for people with no written language or no Scripture in their heart language.
A Long-term Opportunity
“She’s My Sister” programs have been on the ground formally for barely a year. To date we have been focusing on program design and training master facilitators. In the DRC, even the facilitators (local pastors and church leaders) are traumatized and need healing themselves. Initial results are promising with many reports of forgiveness and healing. Pastor Assuni’s group in North Kivu, using our story-based model, has participated in two training sessions, five months apart. Significantly, these Congolese facilitators have become highly motivated to share the materials widely. At the beginning of the first session, they reported that even though they read or heard the Bible more than five times a week, God still felt distant to many of them. In the five-month interval they traveled widely in extremely dangerous territory telling hundreds of Scripture stories. Nearly all of them experienced additional personal traumas like being arrested and witnessing atrocities and looting.
Yet after their second equipping session, they reported a closer relationship with God and better emotional health, despite the events of the intervening months.
Since its founding, the Church has been at the forefront of many movements—from hospitals, orphanages, and hospices to schools and universities to abolition and civil rights—as Christians followed the Lord’s call to care for those he loves. This is a history many Christians need to be reminded of. We at the Bible Society are now trying to respond to a call of God that points to a new opportunity for sacrificial ministry that may be as significant as any of these. It came through Dr. Langberg this spring. She told us that trauma is a leading—perhaps the number one—mission field in the world today. What is clear is that for all the barriers of pain and meaning that trauma poses to Scripture engagement, trauma is ultimately a prime opportunity for the Gospel.
Across the world, cultures—and sometimes churches—insist that hurting people hide their pain. People hear this message so strongly that they often cannot recognize their true pain. Yet they know their symptoms—couples not getting along, youth acting out, broken relationships—and are open to receiving help. As we are learning over and over in Africa, when the traumatized meet people willing to hear their stories and help them connect the dots—people who can name their pain, help them face it, and point them to the one who can carry it—they come to see how the Gospel truly is good news. They begin to find healing.
Jesus told his disciples that the gates of hell will not prevail against his church (Matt 16:18). Gates are barriers that keep armies out. The church is called to go in to places of despair and imprisonment and set captives free. The Bible Society is honored to be a part of God’s work in the DRC and other places of overt trauma where facilitated encounters with Scripture are bringing healing, restoration, and hope for the future.
Our experience supporting the church in Africa brings opportunities for the church in North America, as well. It shows a new face of Scripture engagement that reaches out and transforms horror into hope. It has the potential to refresh perceptions of Scripture among Christians and nonbelievers alike as his followers live out God’s concern for justice and wholeness. It can help the church demonstrate for our generation that God’s Word can stand up to our questions and will bring healing and restoration to people who have faced the worst humans can do to each other.
