A Safe Place
An Interview with Pastor Floyd Yutzy: Part 2
This is the second part of an interview with Pastor Floyd Yutzy of Cornerstone Community Church in Kalona, Iowa. Find the first part here.
Abigail: In your pastoral role, how do you engage with the reality of abuse?
Floyd: In Light in the Darkness Trainings, we always end with a question-and-answer time and this question almost always comes up. My answer is always that it is less about program and more about culture. You do need policy in place, and we have some policies, but I know churches that have well-written policies to deal with abuse situations and are still doing a poor job of it. The statistic that I come back to over and over is from a study that the Christian Coalition Against Domestic Violence did. They said: “75% of women experiencing domestic abuse said that they would go to a church for help. Of those who did, only 4% say they would do it again.”
That means that 96% of women who have reached out to church leaders for help in an abuse situation are saying, "We would not do that again." That is an alarming statistic to me. So for us, it goes all the way from what is being said across the pulpit on a Sunday morning to how women's ministry is being conducted.
Every time that we've had a woman step forward in an abusive situation, she has reached out to somebody who's leading in the women's ministry. We try to be very careful in communicating that it is safe for somebody to step forward and to say, "I need to have a conversation about what's going on in my marriage." And for us, our experience has been that the women's ministry, if it's done well, is the best open door for that.
But I think almost every time that I start to address abuse across the pulpit, either a woman who is in an abusive situation or a man who is an abuser and feels like he just got outed will contact me.
My wife and I meet with women, and if we can, we try to have some ladies in our church who have also had some training meet with them. We're doing some of the same for men. One of the things I've learned from Chris Moles is that it's more effective to deal with an abuser in a group of men than it is one-on-one. The name of the game is getting them to take ownership of their actions, which is so hard to do. For years, they've trained themselves to rationalize it, minimize it, or deny it. In a group of two or three men, one might pick up on something in another guy that the others are not picking up on and hold him accountable to it.
I do think a lot of it is cultural. I mentioned that I'm preaching through 1 Corinthians, and when we got to chapter 11 and the headship principle, I had my wife help me in that message. We've got a YouTube channel and it's the most rewatched one of our series in 1 Corinthians. People say, "Thank you for handling that in a way that honored women, and it didn't in any way diminish them, and being faithful to scripture at the same time.”
Abigail: So you do make a point of speaking about abuse from the pulpit? That’s rare in Mennonite churches.
Floyd: Well, here's one of the problems. The Mennonite churches tend to teach topically, so they stay away from topics that are uncomfortable. If you're teaching expositionally, where you're going through the Bible, then there are texts [where] you just have to talk about it. There are some days where I think, "I would never choose to speak about whatever is there, but I'm going to because it's there." And the Bible speaks about abuse, even though the word itself may not be there.
Abigail: How do you think that conservative Christian churches can best go about becoming healers in abusive situations and avoid further harming the victims?
Floyd: That's where it gets really practical and also where I get the most discouraged. I see a whole value system that's built on what is visible, and where people are given positions and responsibilities based on things like their outward compliance, their personalities and abilities, as opposed to their character and their personal faith in Christ. And again, it's an unspoken thing. In most cases, people aren’t even aware that that's the value system they're promoting, but it certainly is. That's how we end up with men filling roles of leadership whose wives are suffering under their leadership in the home. We have a wrong metric of who's qualified for ministry. Paul addresses it in 1 Timothy if we just pay attention to it.
I think that number one, every conservative church needs to ask some hard, honest questions about who should have authority in [their] church and why. What makes somebody trustworthy? That's a really good question. And if the answer to that question is anything other than, “We see in him humility and a deep faith in Christ,” then something needs to change.
Secondly, stop trying to be fair. A woman might come [to a church leader], and she has finally worked up the courage because of the pain that she's in to say, "I need help." And the pastor says, “Well, in order to be fair, I should go talk to him. I should get his side of the story.” Pastors do this all the time. I did it and I'm ashamed of it.
As soon as the pastor says that, her heart sinks because she knows how that story's going to end, because her husband’s better at communicating than she is most of the time. And that guy can manipulate his church leaders. He's probably been doing it for years. If he is in a conservative Mennonite church, he might start saying things to the pastor in that meeting: "You know, I've just been really burdened by some of the things that I've seen people wearing in our church." He'll push that pastor's buttons in a way that by the time the meeting is over, that pastor's like, "Ah, he's one of the good guys."
The woman becomes the problem. She just isn't willing to comply and submit. And that pastor will then turn on her and inflict more suffering on a woman who was already suffering. So again, wrong metric. Stop with the, "Well, we need to be fair." What we need to do is we need to be right. Sometimes—in fact, I’m going to say always—doing the right thing is not going to feel fair to an abuser.
Without fail, if the church is handling it well, the abuser will accuse the church leadership of being unfair. If he's upset at them and he's saying, "Oh my goodness, you know, I don't think you guys understand submission," I would probably say that they're handling things [well].
Often the abuser has managed to shift the narrative and the church leadership will start saying, "Actually, I think she's more abusive and manipulative.” When a pastor tells me, "Well, we've got more cases where the woman is the abuser," I just know without even knowing any of the details that he doesn't understand the dynamics. He's doing more harm than good. And I was there; I know what it's like. I've had to go back and apologize for the way I handled a couple situations.
Third, stop imposing culture onto Scripture. Jeremy Pierre says, "You cannot find anywhere in the Bible that a husband is told to make his wife submit." True. But that's kind of earth-shattering for a lot of people in conservative churches, right? "What do you mean? Of course the husband's supposed to make his wife submit." Actually, it's not there. It just doesn't exist in scripture. It's always voluntary, and earned on his part. [He needs to] be trustworthy.
A lot of underlying things like that need to be addressed. Those [unconscious beliefs] contribute to that 96% of women who say, "I wouldn't go back."
Another thing I’d mention: [Don’t say], "Well, let's put them both in the same room and have a conversation with them." I always tell guys, "Don't do that." She can't tell you. She’s going to be punished for what she says in that room.
Or this: "Okay, she told me about the abuse. I'm going to go force a conversation with him and correct him.” When she has not given permission for that? Big no-no, because she's going to be punished for that.
The thing that has often gotten me in trouble, and probably does other church leaders, too, is thinking that we know. One of the things that Sydney Millage often says is: "You need to be the dumbest person in the room." In other words, you just need to keep asking questions. Don't assume you know everything. And that's been so helpful for me—not coming in with, "I need to say this," but coming from a posture of, "Help me understand."
Pastors also need to have the humility to know where their own limitations are. It is perfectly acceptable, in fact, it's probably necessary in many of these cases to say, "I'll provide pastoral care for you, but I don't have the tools, the ability to help you from a counseling standpoint." It's our arrogance that makes us think we can do both. We can't. Training other people in church, involving them in that—again, we have to release control. Sometimes we're control freaks.
Abigail: As someone who’s experienced abuse in the past, I can testify that a lot of relational energy is taken up by gauging the trustworthiness of pastors that I interact with. Often it’s not worth the emotional risk to share anything, and I think that's common for a lot of women in Anabaptist settings. Many women within the church have had really horrific experiences with their fathers or their husbands, and it's just something they carry within themselves and they don't share because it's not safe or wise to do so.
Floyd: It’s really sad to have to walk through those things alone.
There is a religious pride at the root of this unteachableness, of not being willing to learn anything from somebody who is not like them. And in every one of the conservative circles, there's a high premium on sameness. The culture is driven by sameness, so everything that's different is viewed with suspicion.
One of the saddest things that I encounter regularly as we keep doing more Light in the Darkness trainings, is who shows up for those trainings. The average group is usually around 20 to 25 in any given setting. And I would like that to represent about 15 pastors and maybe five or six other people. Instead, it's usually two or three pastors, and everybody else is either women who have been survivors or somebody who's working with women who are survivors. Every time I just look around and think, "Where are the pastors?” They were invited, so it's not that they aren't aware that it’s happening. What's going on in their heart and mind that says, "I don't need to be trained. I don't need any training with this stuff?”
That's probably the biggest thing I've struggled with in this work: this sense of frustration with pastors. And I get it. I am a pastor. We are busy. But sometimes we're just busy doing busy work as opposed to doing something that would be helpful. That's been one of the things that I’ve been praying about: Is there a better way that we could engage with pastors to where they're hearing some of this stuff? I just don't know how to get to the leaders, because that’s where the change has to begin. If the leaders won't humble themselves and learn how to handle things better, then we're going to keep seeing these cycles again and again.
I'm at the point where I’m willing to go out on a limb and say, if you're in a church where the leadership is unwilling to be taught on these issues, move on. I'd find a different church. And that's pretty strong. But I’m not sure how the blessing of God is going to rest on that kind of leadership and unteachableness.
Abigail: Final question: What gives you energy in your educational work and your pastoral work? What keeps you going?
Floyd: The little wins. But maybe I need to restate that. The failures actually give me energy too because it's that driving force of, “Okay, could we have done this better” In some cases, no. We did it as well as we could.
A win to me is when a woman says, "Thank you for being a safe place and I really have found help. I'm glad I reached out." My wife and I were meeting with this precious lady from our church, and she said, "You have no idea how I felt so lonely for so many years, and like anybody I talk to is not going to be able to understand. And here you are. I can shoot you a text with a question, we can meet." And she said, "I've never felt like this wasn't a safe place." That's a win! That really gives me energy. This is close to God's heart. Jesus went out of his way to care about anybody who was being mistreated and abused and had no power to make it stop. He just cared about them. And that's not a political thing—it's just the work of the church.
