UNITED STATES
Ebony
Monica Coleman, pastor and founder of The Dinah Project, offers up healing words and a path to progress for church leaders and congregations who want to help rape survivors
Your spiritual home should be a safe haven, a loving community and the ideal space for healing. Sometimes, that’s the case.
But for some survivors of rape or abuse, church is where their pain is minimized or ignored. For others, it’s where they are blamed for their victimization. For still others, it is where sexual violence actually happens.
It’s hard to believe, but pastors are rarely trained to handle the trauma of sexual assault. Of course, there are churches and clergy well prepared to help survivors heal and to deal with sexual violence and its ramifications with spiritual wisdom and compassion. Some churches are actually agents of change, working to transform society and end rape. Yet it’s important to know that if your church isn’t that kind of place, it’s within your power to help change it. If you are seeking spiritual food for your healing journey, there exist churches where you can get it. In either case, Monica A. Coleman is uniquely qualified to guide you in the right direction.
Coleman is a rape survivor, an ordained A.M.E. minister, an associate professor at the Claremont School of Theology and the author of “The Dinah Project: A Handbook for Congregational Response to Sexual Violence.” In 1997, she created a sexual assault ministry at Metropolitan Interdenominational Church, in Nashville, Tenn.
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