Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 25:3 (Summer 2011)
Article: Book Review: Responding to Abuse in Christian Homes Edited by Nancy Nason-Clark, Catherine Clark Kroeger, and Barbara Fisher-Townsend (Wipf and Stock, House of Prisca and Aquila Series, 2011)
Author: Victoria Fahlberg

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Book Review: Responding to Abuse in Christian Homes
Edited by Nancy Nason-Clark, Catherine Clark Kroeger, and Barbara Fisher-Townsend
(Wipf and Stock, House of Prisca and Aquila Series, 2011)

Reviewed by

Victoria Fahlberg

Victoria Fahlberg has a PhD in Clinical Psychology and a Master of Public Health in Population and International Health from Harvard. From 1989 to 1997, she lived in Brazil, where she founded a social service/mental health clinic in a large favela (City of God) in Rio de Janeiro and initiated the first graduate program in Brazil in family violence at Pontificia Universidade Catolica. She was executive director of ONE Lowell, a community-based organization in Lowell, Massachusetts, from 2002 to 2010. She teaches as an adjunct professor at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary’s Center for Urban Ministerial Education in Boston and at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.

Responding to Abuse in Christian Homes: A Challenge to Churches and their Leaders represents the final book edited by Catherine Clark Kroeger, together with her colleagues Nancy Nason-Clark and Barbara Fisher-Townsend. Similar to other publications by the late Dr. Kroeger, this book addresses the link between violence against Christian women by their (oftentimes) believing husbands and the incorrect theological presuppositions which enable the violence to persist. This book was born out of the third international conference by Peace and Safety in the Christian Home (PASCH), a nonprofit organization founded by Dr. Kroeger in 2004 and to which she dedicated the remaining years of her life in her fight against domestic violence. The primary audience for this book is pastors of local congregations. However, the insights into the lives of pastors, congregants, batterers, and victims, including immigrant victims, and their relationships to the secular world of social services, is invaluable to any Christian concerned about the limits and possibilities of accessing support outside the church.

The insight, experience, and wisdom of the book’s twenty-one contributors, including pastors, theologians, social workers, sociologists, psychologists, and others, makes the book both scholarly and practical. It is divided into three sections, each opening with a poem by Robert Pynn. The first section, “A Call to Peace and Safety,” examines what needs to happen for a victim to feel safe in her home, marriage, and church. The opening chapter addresses the importance of the correct interpretation of biblical headship, while chapters 2 through 7 focus on the need for pastors to address intimate partner violence (IPV) effectively, the need for batterers to obtain adequate help, and the importance of peace in the home resulting from those beliefs and behaviors that keep marriages healthy.

Section 2 des...

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