Voices In My Head Podcast Episode 334: Mary Demuth and We Too: How The Church Can Respond Redemptive

This is Rick Lee James, and the music you are hearing is from my new album, Thunder. The title track, Thunder, is a never-before-released song by the late Rich Mullins. There are also 12 other tracks made up of original music, hymns, and readings to guide the listener on a journey. You can buy Thunder today on clear vinyl and CD, or stream it on Spotify, Apple Music, and almost every other music streaming service. Thunder, hear it today at rickleejames.com. Today's podcast is brought to you by Audible. Get a free audiobook download and 30-day free trial at audibletrial.com/voicesinmyhead. That's audibletrial.com/voicesinmyhead. Over 180,000 titles to choose from for your iPhone, Android, Kindle, or MP3 player. That's audibletrial.com/voicesinmyhead. Give it a try today! Welcome to Voices in My Head, the official podcast of me, Rick Lee James. I'm a recording artist, a singer, a songwriter, an author, a worship leader, and an ordained minister in the Church of the Nazarene. The Voices in My Head podcast is where I discuss music, movies, books, pop culture, theology, and more with friends, colleagues, and sometimes just by myself. Now make sure to let me know what you think of today's episode by leaving me a review on iTunes or by tweeting at me @RickLeeJames on Twitter. And please join my mailing list at RickLeeJames.com where you can receive an email every time a new episode is released. By the way, in case you're interested in a daily dose of kindness and encouragement beyond this podcast, I also run the Twitter account @MrRogersSay. Where I post daily quotes from Fred Rogers, one of the voices in my head. Well, I guess that's it for the intro, so sit back, relax, and listen to the latest episode of Voices in My Head. Welcome back to Voices in My Head. As always, I'm your host, Rick Lee James, and I am so glad that you're here with us for this week's conversation. Rocked by high-profile sexual misconduct allegations, The evangelical church's shortcomings in responding to and protecting the victims of sexual abuse within their walls were largely thrust into the limelight in 2018. My guest today on Voices in My Head is Mary DeMuth. Mary is an advocate, a survivor of sexual abuse, and a popular evangelical author who helps church leaders identify and enact biblically infused responses in order to truly welcome and care for those who've survived abuse and are leaving the church in droves.

Rows.

Her new book, We Too: How the Church Can Respond Redemptively to the Sexual Abuse Crisis, is published by Harvest House Publishers, and it released on August 13, 2019. Mary DeMuth, welcome to Voices in My Head.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be on.

Well, I'm excited to have you here as well, and congratulations on the new book. That's always a special day in an author's life, I know.

It is special and also exhausting.

But yes, I'm sure, and especially because of the subject matter too. It's not exactly an easy thing to write about. And, and, uh, but I'm so grateful for people like you who are doing this difficult work and, and helping, uh, people to actually, um, find healing in the midst of some situations that have been thrust upon them, uh, to— and, and so we are grateful to have this conversation with you today. And I want to talk about your book and find out more about who you are today. But before we you do that, I know that you also host a podcast and it's called Pray Every Day, and it's a really great concept. I wonder if you could tell our listeners a bit about Pray Every Day.

Yes, so I wrote a book called Jesus Every Day where I go through the whole Bible from Genesis to Revelation and I pray for folks, or I give people words to pray back to the Lord. And so it's kind of like the opposite of Jesus Calling. So in Jesus Calling Jesus says stuff to you, but in this one you say stuff to Jesus based on scripture. And so that's where the impetus of Pray Every Day came from. And so it's a very simple format. It's 5 minutes a day, and I read through a verse, and then I pray about it for my listeners. And right now, um, I just started recording October's episode. I'm a little bit ahead, and we're going through the book of John. And so we're going about 10 to 15 verses a day through the book of John, and then I'm praying through them. And it's been a really great practice, and it's been fun to hear from people all over the world who are hearing that, and it's been super encouraging to know that.

Well, good. Well, and I do want to recommend it to my listeners as well. I know that many times prayer has been a topic on this show, and it seems like it's, it's hard for some people to get started into praying. And, and yours is, is wonderful because it's not an extremely long podcast. I think maybe around 7 to 10 minutes probably is your average, and you do a wonderful job of sort of leading the prayer conversation, but allowing space for people to actually pray along as well. And I think it's a really good tool. So for people who are listening today, I really encourage you to check out Pray Every Day, Mary's podcast. So, well, let's get into the topic at hand. And you have a new book that just released, as we said, on August 13th, and it's called We Too. And I'd love if you could tell us about your new book and why did you write it, and, and what change do you hope it will inspire?

So as, as a survivor myself, and one who has been vocal about it for many years, I obviously hear a lot of stories and a lot of heartache. And sometimes I feel like my main ministry is just listening to people. And sometimes throughout listening to those stories, I would hear some pretty terrible stories about how people were treated by church leaders, and I felt like this should not be the way it is. And of course, over the past year, we've seen kind of this evangelical mess of big profile leaders, or even small profile leaders, hurting people and then being— having been covered up. And what tends to happen in those kind of situations is if there's a structure that needs to be protected, the structure is protected at all costs. And the one who has survived the allegations— or who not survived the allegations, but survived the hurt are the ones who are maligned. And I felt like there's something that needs to be said to church leaders and to people in ministry from a perspective of someone who loves the church. So I'm in the same ballpark, you know, I'm in the same camp, to say, listen, we can do better. When I look at Jesus in the New Testament and how he's interacting with religious structures versus how he interacts with those who are deeply broken, I see Jesus really dignifying those who have difficult stories. And so the simple question then just becomes, how would Jesus respond to someone who has been violated in that way? And then simply, how can we do better and how can we act more like that through the power of the Holy Spirit, not in our own strength? But so that's kind of the reason that I decided to write the book.

Good. And you know what, you already mentioned it and we're going to get to it in a few minutes, but I do want to talk to you later on about the way that Jesus does God respond to abuse victims and how he did in Scripture. But before we do that, because you have been a person who is a longtime member of the church, but you're also in the unique place of being an abuse victim, and that's something that many of us in church, we don't share that perspective. And so often, because we don't share that perspective, we don't always know what people are feeling and what's going on. Can you help us a little bit to understand the perspective of what victims may be feeling and the way that they are often treated by churches?

You know, it's not necessarily— I mean, we've seen a lot of high-profile cases of victims being maligned, and it's not necessarily that as much, although that's bad. It's more like wanting to be silenced, like we just don't want to deal with the messy stuff. And one of the things that I've noticed over the years of being in church is I can count on one hand, less than one hand actually, how many sermons I've heard about sexual assault and the redemptive pathway forward afterwards. And what that did for me is it cemented in my mind this idea that I was a freak, that I didn't matter, my story didn't matter. And intellectually I understood, like I looked around my church I saw hundreds of people, in the case of my church, thousands of people who are just like me, but who never have seen their story from the front of the church. And it makes us feel really, really alone. We tend to highlight stories like, "Oh, I was addicted to drugs and now I'm not." And that's great, and I love that the gospel intersects that story, but I would also love to see, you know, "This is a messy story and I was abused, but this is how Jesus intersected that story." And so I also think leaders are afraid on a couple levels. One fear is that if they start talking about this and making their church a safer place for victims to even talk about their stories or share it, that they'll have this deluge that they can't handle. And I know pastors are burned out, and I know that like the last thing that they want to do is add to their counseling load. But my encouragement is, if you create the kind of church that grows deeply— and not necessarily widely, but deeply— if you are creating spaces for people to find healing, if you have like Stephen's Ministries or mentoring ministries or recovery ministries or a counseling, you know, department, or however your church does that, there are ways for you to pass that along, to listen, to dignify the story, and then say, I, I want to pray with you about this, and I don't want you to feel like I can't— you know, I don't want to continue to dialogue with you about this, but here's some resources that the church— you may not be aware of, but the church has— and here's some ways that we can walk alongside you, and we really want to. So I think that's one of the fears. I think the other fear is just it's a hard topic, it's a difficult topic. And, and yet if we're preaching through the Bible, we will bump into the topic several times. And so part of my encouragement is let's just preach the whole counsel of Scripture. And yes, there are rape narratives in the Bible, so why can't we talk about it?

Yeah, you're right. And it is, it is a difficult thing to talk about. And you're right, I had to start thinking through that, and I think you're right. I don't think I've ever heard a sermon addressed on that subject, and I've been in church my whole life. So there are some things that we could do better for sure. Speaking of resources, just right here, I also want to point people to your website as well, and it's marydemuth.com. You've got some wonderful resources that can help us when we're having conversations like these, too, that people really should check out for more insight, especially if you're a pastor listening right now and you may be wondering, "How can I help in my context with people who may be going through this?" Or maybe you're a survivor of abuse as well and you're looking for someplace to go. I really want to recommend Mary's site. Let's talk about Jesus for a minute. You've already talked about— Yes, let's do it. He's always a great thing to talk about. He always is much more interesting than I am, that's for sure. You know, you've already alluded to it, but there are stories in the Bible of people being victimized and abused. So I wonder if you could talk to us a bit about how did Jesus respond to victims of abuse?

It's a great question. I want to back up a little bit and just say that if people need resources about this, there's a special page for pastors, we2.org/pastors. And they will receive a free download of a lot of pages of resources that will help them. And so anyone that needs to know anything about that kind of thing, they can go to we2.org. But to answer your question, how Jesus responded to people is something that I think about a lot. And I wrote a book a while back called The Day I Met Jesus, with, um, with a co-author. And one of the things that we did was we looked at 5 women of the New Testament, and I— my task was to fictionalize their accounts. I used all the scripture that I could, of course, but I also created some backstory and whatnot. And one of those people was the woman at the well. And one of the things I find fascinating about that interaction is here is a woman who most likely was not promiscuous, but we've heard it preached that she was. Most likely a woman was divorced that many times because she was infertile and could not bear children, and she could not provide an heir to her husband. And so most likely she was marginalized, and the reason she was probably living with someone was not promiscuity but economic reasons. And so if you look at her story in light of that, and then you think about the fact that Jesus has the longest theological discussion in the entire narrative of the Gospels with her. Um, that's fascinating to me. So we see this most likely marginalized woman, um, who is an outcast from Israel, who is an outcast as a woman, um, comes to the well and Jesus has this amazing conversation with her and just the dignifying that he did of her in that place. And he did it in such a way where he spoke truth to her, And she was able to say, "Hey, come see a guy that told me everything about myself." And it wasn't a shame-filled thing like, "Oh, this guy read my mind and now I'm freaked out." It's like, "Oh, he told me everything about myself, but I'm so loved, I'm so dignified, I'm so helped, and I can't help to spread the word about him." She was a missionary, one of the first missionaries of Jesus. And recently I was reading in John and it was just so interesting. Interesting that the Pharisees are constantly maligning Jesus. They're testing him all the time. They're arguing with him. And one of them eventually said, "You're a Samaritan." And so here we have Jesus like identifying and talking to someone he was accused of being. And the multilayers of all of that just astound me. This is why I love the Bible so much. But in that interaction, you just see Jesus loving someone who's broken. And that just seems to me so simple.

Wow. Well, I could just listen to this all day. This is, this is so insightful, and I don't think I've ever heard that perspective, but it makes all the sense in the world when I hear it laid out that way. Again, these are, these are great ways to enter into Scripture and to help us think of ways that Jesus did respond to victims of abuse. Because The church is the bride of Christ. We do want to be as much like Jesus as we can, but so often it seems like we do miss the mark when we respond to people who are victims of sexual abuse. Why do you think it is that churches— and you've already talked a little bit about this— but why do you think churches specifically seem to miss the mark in their response? So much to survivors of sexual abuse?

You know, I think so many people mean well. I think they just don't know. They just don't know that actually what we need is Romans 12:15. We need to weep with those who weep. When someone makes an outcry, they're not asking you to fix their problem. They're asking to be heard. And J.D. Greer wrote the, the forward to the book, and he wrote something along the lines of, "This is a book about listening." And so I think we get tongue-tied and we think, "Well, what? I don't relate to it. I don't understand it. I'm sad about it. It's too dark. I don't want to talk about it." But really what the person is asking is, "Do you see me? Do you believe me?" And those are some of the things that are so powerful. "I hear you. I see you. I believe you. I'm sorry that happened. I weep with you if that's how you feel in that moment." and it's not your fault. And those kinds of things are so redemptive, and I think we overthink it and think, "Oh, I have to have the sermon ready to help someone," and really what they need is just to be heard.

Well, I want to talk, if we could, just a little bit about outside the church too, because unfortunately it comes up everywhere. It's unfortunate that it happens in churches, but it— but it's unfortunate that it happens everywhere as well. So often I find that the response, at least in the media often, is to not believe the victim or to not hear them out, like you just said, and not necessarily be very good about listening. Do you find that that is happening in the church a lot as well too, that— that maybe victims are not being believed? And is there— I don't know exactly how to phrase the question, I'm thinking, other than to say, is it much better for us, before we jump to conclusions, obviously, we need to just first listen and first hear? Because so quick, we're quick to pass judgment, I think. I mean, and listening, I guess, would be key to that, right?

It is, and I think we have to distinguish between two things. So when we have a friend who comes to us, then we always err on the side of belief. Of course we do. When it comes— becomes more corporate, like someone is accusing a public figure or someone maybe within the church, then we can still, in that personal space between us and the other person, absolutely we can err on the side of belief. But we also understand that corporately there could be an investigation that would figure out, you know, whether that is a true allegation or not. I will say this in terms of children, it's almost, um, impossible for a child to make an allegation that is false. It almost never happens, um, because they don't have the, uh, evil intent to try to malign someone that way. They don't understand that. And when they make a cry for help, we 100% of the time have to believe them and report to authorities what happened. That's exactly true. In the case of adults, it hovers between 6% and 8% of false accusations, but typically if we bring those to an investigative body, those get sifted out. Now I'm not saying that, you know, "Well, okay, it doesn't hardly ever happen, so let's just pretend it never does," because it does happen, but it's not our job necessarily to figure that out, and also with churches, If a minor comes with an allegation of abuse within the congregation, it is not the church's job to investigate that. Their first job as a mandatory reporter is to place that, uh, a call to 911 and to report the abuse immediately, um, and let the people who are skilled in investigation to do that job. This is why we have CACs all over the United States, Children's Advocacy Centers, that they in one place can determine all of those things for the child and create a very safe space for the child.

Well, I'm so glad you said that because that is just something that, you know, honestly they don't necessarily cover in seminary. Yeah, they don't. And that is so important that the churches do need to report these things because I think, again, there's a lot of people who are well-meaning but don't always know, and that is the number one task when it comes especially to children and minors especially to them. So thank you for saying that, and that is a very helpful thing that probably, you know, it's a thing we might think goes without saying, but it really doesn't always, and people don't always know. Could you give us some examples? Because I know you've done a lot of work in this and have experienced a lot covering up abuse, you know, minimizing it abuse is evil, but I think you've seen some examples of churches that have minimized this. Could you give us some examples of when you've seen churches minimize this, maybe as a way of helping us to not do the same?

Right, so I have actually a positive example to share too. So typically what will happen, especially if the church is big, typically an outcry will be made and the governing body, whether that be elders or executive committee, however it's worded in that particular church, will listen but kind of choose the narrative of the perpetrator if the perpetrator's in their midst. And then what will happen after that is the person will bring it to the press after, only because they don't want to see other people harmed. It's not like, oh, I want fame because I've been sexually assaulted. Like, that's the last thing in their mind. But they're so worried that more people are going to be harmed. And then inevitably more people come forward, and then the executive board has to kind of backpedal, and then typically they fire the person who's done the thing, and then they have this nightmare on their hands, and they have publicly maligned victims since that point, and they lose credibility. And the very thing that they're trying to protect, their reputation, is the thing that gets lost, and the very structure that they're trying to preserve crumbles because of it. So I was on a panel at the Southern Baptist Convention this summer, and I was privilege to be sitting next to a guy named Nathan Lino out of Houston, and I think it's Southeast Houston Baptist Church, I believe, is what the church was. And he told this story, and he was at the convention, and I think it was 2007 or 2008, and he got a call that there was a youth pastor that had done something to a congregant. And he flew home, and the first thing he did was he called the police, or whoever heard it called the police. He called a press conference immediately, and this was way before Me Too, and he said, "This happened on our watch. We're so sorry. We're deeply grieved. This is what went on." And then of course he also called a congregational meeting. "This happened on our watch. We're so sorry. We're grieving." And then the church offered to pay for the victims' counseling forever, and they also assigned, mutually assigned between the two of them, a mentor to kind of be a liaison to walk alongside the victim as she processed her grief and her trauma. And so they just, they erred on the side of, "We're not going to hide any of this. We're going to let everyone know that it happened. We are deeply grieved. We're going to relook at our policies. We're going to hire an independent investigator to figure this out and move forward and be a stronger, better church." Tell me, if you were going to either of those two churches I just mentioned, which one would you trust more. You would trust the open one, the authentic one, the one that grieved publicly, the one that wasn't so concerned. And so that's— it seems logical to me. Maybe I'm really naive, and I probably am because I'm not a pastor in a church. But my husband was an elder of a very large church in the South, and we've— we have been able to see that big churches can do this too. We can do better.

Yeah, I think that transparency is so important, and thank you for sharing all of that. This is so much good and helpful information to those of us who are in churches and those of us who work in churches, so thank you for doing that. Speaking about churches today, in your book, In We Too, you talk about 7 crucial misunderstandings that you found When people in churches face becoming safe havens. And I'd love for you to talk to us about the last misunderstanding that you mention, and the misunderstanding is the misunderstanding of what the church is. And I wonder if you could share about that with us while we're on the subject of church today.

That's a great question. And we are a people who are called out, and we are— we're allowing the redemption of Jesus to wash over us. And we need to understand that the church is a place of people with broken stories, and Jesus is the hero of those stories. And, uh, the church is definitely a place for people to find Jesus and to find, uh, solace and to find haven and to find community. It's not a structure to be preserved for our egos. It is a place of, um, protection for those who have been harmed by others. And yeah, we're messy, of course we are. And yes, I hurt other people, of course I do. I wish that I didn't, but we are going to bump into each other. But it's not about platform, it's not about fame, it's not about social media presence, it's not about any of that stuff. We are a called-out people called to love one another. And the simple command that Jesus tells us is twofold. We are to love God with everything within us, to worship him, and then we are also to love each other. And so we have to have that balance. If we love only God and we malign victims or people who are hurting and we just— they're too hard and I just don't want to talk about that— then we're not really, uh, we're not really walking with him. And if we only love people and we, you know, err on the side of justice but never worship and revere the God of the Bible, then we're also off balance. So we need both of those things in tandem.

Yeah, well, you write in— and this is— you write in your book, you say, this is our #WeToo movement, to purposely suffer alongside the sexually broken. So my question is, what are some practical ways that our listeners can suffer alongside abuse survivors today?

We, as I mentioned before, we, we can just simply listen and, and pray. We can pray. Now, I know that there are some who have been harmed in the church, and so we should always ask permission before we do pray because it might be something even triggering to, to someone who's been in that kind of situation. But we can, we can certainly listen. We can certainly weep alongside, as I mentioned before, the Romans 12:15. And we can We can ask questions, but not in an obsessively curious way, but in a way of, "How can we love?" And we can also find resources for people, and that's why on wetu.org/resources, there's hundreds and hundreds of resources that people can say, "Well, you know, this is out of my wheelhouse. I can't help. I can love you and I can walk alongside you, but here's some trauma-informed therapy that you can look at," or here's something else. And so we can offer resources as well.

All right, well, and I want to emphasize that again, and we are going to put these in the show notes of our show at voicesinmyheadpodcast.com. But we2.org/pastors was the first one that you mentioned for resources for pastors, but then you also just mentioned we2.org/resources. And again, we will have those in the show notes at voicesinmyheadpodcast.com, and I do appreciate you sharing those with us today. What kind of damage do we do to victims, in your opinion, when we offer them anything but love when they share their stories with us?

Well, I think one of the worst things is to add a Bible cliché, to rip verses out of context. You know, we throw around, "I know the plans I have for you." We forget that that's written to an exiled nation or a nation about to go into exile. We kind of pull out these platitudes and we think that, well, if I stick a little scripture Band-Aid on top of this gaping wound, it's going to be better. There's something to be said about being like Job's friends in the beginning. When they saw him, they just sat with him. They said not a word and they wept. And then they went sideways for the whole rest of the book of Job. Then they started striking him for his, you know, well, you know, this must have happened because of this and you're this and I think there's something really instructive in the Book of Job for all of us. So we learn how to walk alongside people, we weep with them, and we also see what not to do, a cautionary tale. And the Lord's very clear at the very end of the Book of Job, he sanctions those friends and said he did not speak rightly. But then we can also learn from Job too, because he starts the book by hearing God and ends the book by seeing God. And that's the beauty of, and the difficulty of suffering, is that as we bend into it and as we seek him above all else, even if we have terrible friends who blame us for our suffering, we will end up seeing God in a way that we never saw him before, as we tenaciously cling to him in the midst of our pain. And so to be a good friend of someone who suffers is a sacred act. And it's also amazing because I think what we think a lot of times is that broken people are a detriment to the body of Christ. But in 1 Corinthians 12, it talks about the weaker members are actually the ones we dignify the most, that we cover up. And they are actually our tutors to teach us how to be like Jesus, to understand. We find Jesus in the, as Mother Teresa says, in the distressing disguise of the poor. Argue that we see him in the distressing disguise of the traumatized. They, because they are in that weakened state, have more capacity to have the strength of God in them than we do who are strong. And so they are our tutors to teach us more like Jesus, but we have pushed them away. And so instead of viewing them as negative, we need to look at them as actually pathways toward growth and toward Jesus.

Wow. And when we, when we think about even the image of Jesus on the cross, we have an image of who God is and what he does is he literally enters into our hells, you know. He enters into these places of suffering, and that's a powerful image for us that we need to recapture, you know, in the life of the church, that these people are valued jewels in the crown of the kingdom, and we need to treat them as such as well. So thank you for sharing that. A question I have for you that I've just been thinking about a little bit lately, I'd just really like to get your perspective on this. One of my favorite song lyrics is from Andrew Peterson. He has an old song called "The Silence of God," and in the song it's written from the perspective of a person who is dealing with pain and dealing with seemingly the silence of God in the midst of it, with having a broken heart and someone that is really very low. And there's a wonderful line that talks about, you know, reminding us that healing will come. And he says, the aching may remain, but the breaking does not. And I think that's a wonderful line, and it's got me wondering and thinking. So often An alcoholic, for instance, even if they are no longer drinking, they will still always refer to themselves as an alcoholic. As time goes by, they need that reminder that it's part of their identity. And I've been thinking about brokenness, and so this is where I'd love to get your opinion. Is brokenness, you know, for a victim of abuse, a survivor of abuse, Is that something that is sort of like that state that remains, or is it something that we can move on from? Or how do you perceive that, or how do you hope that we can kind of move on from that?

Yeah, there's a teasing out of that, and what I would say is I think there's power in knowing my weakness because then I'll reach for the strength of God. But if I tease that away from identity, I think there's something important there. My identity can never be that I am a survivor of sexual abuse. That's not my identity. My identity is I am a child of God. And so I don't need to live in that story anymore. People ask me, "Well, how can you share that story of your sexual abuse?" And I'm like, "Oh, it doesn't define me. It's the past." I say that because I've spent years and decades healing from it. Someone who has a fresh wound would not be in that same place, and I totally understand that. I'm still healing from it, and I will heal from it until I have, you know, a new body on the other side. So we will all be broken until that moment we're made whole. But we are— our identity always has to be a chosen child of God, and, and that's where I don't have to I don't have to be known as that girl who survived. I can be known as that girl who was rescued by Jesus.

Yes, wonderful. Well, we're just about done with our conversation today, and I appreciate you staying with me a little bit longer than the 30 minutes I had requested. But just a couple more questions. You're unique in that you're a person who has not abandoned the church. But you've also been a survivor of abuse. And so often I think the response is just to leave. And, you know, a couple weeks ago we had Jennifer Greenberg on the show, who is also an abuse survivor and has remained in the church. And the story that she tells, I'm sure a lot of our listeners would think, "Why in the world would you even stay?" But the fact is that God is so much greater, and his people are so much greater than these evils of abuse. And so you're a person who comes at it as one who's a member of a church, but you're also a champion of both the church and survivors of abuse. And I'd love to know, what would you— what do you want abuse survivors to know specifically? Because there may be some listening today.

Yeah, I would say first of all that if you were hurt in the church, that that's a very hard place to be. And I just want to say I'm so sorry. And that it is very understandable, especially if we understand the nature of trauma, that it may be a very long time for you to be able to walk back in, and that that's okay. It may be difficult for your healing journey to be in the place where it happened. I totally understand that. My perspective is that I think about that interaction where Jesus has this really hard discourse with the disciples. He's like, "You gotta eat my body, you gotta drink my blood," and all these people start leaving him. And he says to his 12, he says, "Are you gonna leave me too?" And Peter says, "Where are we gonna go? You have the words. You have the words of life." And so that's kind of how I ended up, like, where else am I gonna go? And I was raised by wolves, basically. I had no— I literally— other than taking my life, I had nowhere else to turn but Jesus. And so my heart is that people would find him in the midst of their pain, and they would find him in the midst of the depravity that has happened to them. But I also want to say it's okay if that's hard right now for you. It's okay. And it could be very triggering for you to even think about any of this stuff right now because your person that molested you was your pastor, your youth pastor. Of course that's going to be a hard journey. So please hear my empathy. But I also say, I don't know where else I would turn personally. I have gone through lots of different ways of healing, but primarily— and this may get me in trouble— but primarily my healing journey, the lion's share of it, was on the backs of the saints. Who prayed me toward health over and over, who wept with me and prayed and prayed and prayed and prayed for me. And so much of my healing has happened because of that. Um, so I would say a slight encouragement is just please don't, um, write off Jesus because of what his so-called followers have done to you.

Well, Mary, thank you for sharing not only your story through your new book, but for helping the church find a way to redemptively respond to the sexual abuse crisis. And I'd love for you to close out our time together today. Tell people how they can pick up a copy of your new book, We Too.

It's wherever books are sold, and there's a bunch of buy links on wetoo.org. And if you're a new survivor or survivor that's been just battling, like, how do I heal? I just feel stuck. If they go to we2.org/21days, there's a 21-day email sequence of kind of the best practices of things I've learned along the way about sexual abuse. So, and that's of course everything's free. And, um, yeah, that's where you can find the book.

Well, my guest today has been Mary DeMuth. And Mary, it has been great to have you on the podcast today. I recommend We Too: How the Church Can Respond Redemptively To the Sexual Abuse Crisis, and we will have a link to that as well on our website at voicesinmyheadpodcast.com. Please go to marydemuth.com, go to wetoo.org, and find all of the great resources that she has spoken about today. There really is a lot of great material there. So as I say to my guests each week, Mary Demuth, thank you for being one of the Voices in My Head this week.

You're welcome.

Thank you for joining me here this week on Voices in My Head. I hope you'll visit me on my website at rickleejames.com, where you can find out more about me, get my music on vinyl and CD, follow my blog, and even schedule me for a concert or a speaking engagement. Better yet, even a book signing in your neighborhood. You can find all that and more at rickleejames.com. Also, it would mean a great deal to me if you could write a review of this podcast on iTunes. The more positive reviews that we receive, The more visible this podcast will be online. And now for the benediction: May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope. God bless you, and thank you for listening to Voices in My Head. With Podbean, you can create professional podcasts in minutes without any programming knowledge. Best of all, everything is mobile ready right from the start. Visit podbean.com/voices to find out more. That's podbean.com/voices.