One of the most painful realities in religious trauma healing is a paradox: we need community to heal; but community is what harmed us and thus feels dangerous. So how can we heal? One helpful avenue is through a support group of fellow sufferers who share your specific pain. While it doesn’t alleviate all of the reasonable doubts and fears, it often feels safer to heal alongside others healing from the same or similar experience. “Safety is the treatment,” and I put safety first in the designs for this group.

Scattered and Found is a support group, but specifically it is a book group, and so it has two elements: a book, and a group. I’m going to explain them in that order, but please don’t mistake the order for priority. The group is just as important as the book, and in some respects, more so. One can engage a book, even a book of the Bible, in isolation. Not so with a group.

The Book

Scattered & Found is centered on a slow reading of the Gospel of John, for a very important and perhaps surprising reason: John was written for Christians suffering from trauma caused by religious abuse and oppression. John’s audience—sometimes referred to as the Johannine Community, ie the community of John—was expelled from of the Jewish synagogue and the entirety of their Jewish community because of their belief in Jesus. While there are many layers to this—ethnicity, culture, politics, and religion—it is the religious component that makes John especially relevant for religious trauma survivors in any setting. It’s a surprising suggestion, but members consistently see healing connections between John’s Gospel and their experiences of spiritual harm.

As Barbara Stewart put it when describing her trauma recovery groups for war veterans reading through Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad, “It is a book group where we put the text in the middle of the room and allow its meanings to resonate.” In Scattered & Found, we put the Fourth Gospel in the middle of the room and allow its meanings to resonate. Additionally, following Stewart, “[John] offers [survivors] a map for coming home. The reading group provides the opportunity to read the map.” Like traumatized war veterans being guided home in their reading of the Odyssey, John guides traumatized believers to the home promised by Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (John 14:2, 17, 23). Only, as Jesus tells us, we have a distinct advantage: Jesus promised his Spirit to all disciples, and promised that the Spirit “will teach you all things and remind you of everything I have told you” (14:26). The Spirit leads us to the words of the Word in the Gospel of John so that they are not just words but, as Jesus said, “The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and are life” (6:63).

The Group

One of John’s programmatic, foundational themes is that famous statement in John 1:14, “The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.” This group is a way for the Word to become flesh. After Jesus, the enfleshed Word, was raised and ascended to heaven, he sent the Spirit and became Word again in the pages of Scripture. We encounter the enfleshed Word in the Bible. 

And, as 1 John 4:12 makes clear, we encounter the divine Word in other brothers and sisters: “No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.” We are invited into a process, of Word becoming flesh [incarnation], expressed in words [inspired Scripture], and then those words put on flesh again among us in our love for one another. And we participate in the divine Word when we likewise allow the Word to be enfleshed among us.

It’s a reciprocal dynamic of finding our story in this story of the Word, which sheds further light on our story, which then invites the Word into our lives today by the presence of the Spirit who mediates the divine Word and the written Word.

Format

The basic format of the group is simple—on the surface more like a 12-step meeting or a Bible study. But it is a support group, and it’s not a traditional Bible study, nor is it a 12-step meeting. 22 of the meetings will be devoted to each of John’s 21 chapters (reading John 9 twice). Additionally, there is a final closing session, and an (optional) individual session with me. Each meeting we will read the chapter aloud in the group, go through a round of sharing, read the chapter again, and then a second round of sharing. We also practice a short time of silence, starting at one minute and gradually working up to five minutes.

24 Weeks?

24 weeks is long. That’s basically six months. Healing and repair, when lasting, takes time. I recognize six months might sound like too much. As a survivor of religious trauma you may not even know what your life will look like in 6 months, what job you will have, where you will live. That’s okay. You will get more out of this group if you can attend consistently, but you won’t be kicked out for missing meetings. I am asking members to commit to a minimum of 18 sessions (about 75% of the group). General consistency is for the good of the group as well as each member, and a consistent place of belonging can re-ignite and sustain hope, whatever your unique season of life.