If you’ve seen the heartache and struggles of those who find themselves married to an abusive spouse, you’d do anything to try to help someone avoid that kind of pain. The problem is that most people have no idea that their spouse will turn out to be abusive until after the wedding. When you’re dating someone, there are so many things that you’re learning about the other person. And the excitement and thrill of being in love inevitably cloud your judgment and keep you from seeing things that you might otherwise notice. In her excellent book, “Is It Abuse?” Darby Strickland defines what the root of oppression is and gives a premarital assessment designed to help you identify the warning signs of abuse before it happens. Let me share some of the insights that stood out to me.
This week, I had a strange experience with two books on marriage. I finished reading Darby Strickland’s book, “Is It Abuse?” and started reading Tim and Kathy Keller’s book, “The Meaning of Marriage.” Both of them are excellent. Both of them address the topic of marriage from the Scriptures. But it’s as if they’re addressed to people from two different worlds. The first helps people to identify whether domestic abuse is present in a relationship and gives strategies for addressing it. The second helps people discover how a marriage can become all it was intended to be. Reading one gave me new awareness in reading the second. I realized that in only approaching marriage from the ideal that the Bible presents, there are principles that can be misunderstood and even used by abusers to manipulate their spouses. Consider the following examples.
As you look through the lists of qualifications for elders in the New Testament, you can’t find words like tough, outspoken, bold, or unrelenting. In their place is the call to gentleness. An elder is someone who is neither quarrelsome nor arrogant but is marked by a considerate attitude toward others. Consider whether you’re gentle enough to do the hard work of Christian leadership.
The most common term to refer to church leaders in the New Testament is “elder,” but it sounds foreign because we value youth so much today. The tech revolution has deemed most people who are over 30 as out-of-date, and so calling leaders “elders” seems to require that they be old and traditional. There’s value in holding onto the term, though. While it doesn’t demand a certain age, designating Christian leaders as “elders” does draw attention to the value of time as a necessary preparation for the role. In response to the question, “How old do you have to be to become an elder?” the Bible seems to answer in several ways.
