I have just returned from Asia where I had the chance to witness the incredible work that Tearfund is doing to help care for children rescued from the sex trade. I was moved as I met with the children, some as young as 10 years old, who had been sold into sexual slavery.

I also visited a ministry that works particularly with young people who have been sexually abused within their own families or by close social contacts. It offers counsel, support, and perhaps most importantly, hope. It was of course, both sad and sobering, but all the more so because one of the counsellors said that in his experience much of this abuse was occurring within the church. The story of one small girl touched my heart in a special way.

The counsellor told me that the little girl came from a church-going family and had been abused by her father. After years of suffering, the dreadful secret came out. She said that she expected that others in the church would now come to her aid, and at last there would be an end to her on-going trauma. The church did indeed confront her father and he admitted to what he had been doing. He asked everyone, including God, to forgive him. He said he was determined never to do it again. The church believed him – and the abuse went on.

And then the counsellor told me the comment he’d heard this small girl make: ‘I’d rather have a Buddhist friend than a Christian one because they believe there are consequences to their actions.’ This girl, bought up in the cradle of the church, was articulating the idea of what some have called ‘cheap grace’. It is the notion that our theology of forgiveness is not robust enough; that often it leaves the victim feeling utterly let down.

It is not that those who have been hurt are seeking vengeance, or that they are not prepared to try to work through the pain of forgiving those who have hurt them. It is certainly not that they don’t realise how much God has forgiven them personally, or that they fail to acknowledge that if we do not forgive, we will not be forgiven. No, it is more that they come to believe that at both an individual and corporate level, Christians deal with forgiveness badly. It is used as a reason to handle things sloppily, almost to pretend it didn’t happen – that everything can immediately be alright again.

I have preached forgiveness for all of my adult life. I have pleaded for it in families, in local churches, in organisations. It matters to me because I know the alternative is devastation. The old Chinese proverb is right: ‘The man or woman who will not forgive must dig two graves.’ And yet as I listen to a young Asian girl who was old before her time, I was challenged as to how often we have made it sound too easy, too instant – too cheap.

I think now of a woman who said to me, ‘I am trying to forgive my husband for leaving me for another woman, but what I find so hard is that other Christians seem to have shrugged their shoulders. He and the new woman in his life are totally accepted, and in some ways I believe that’s right, but it’s just that forgiveness seems to have turned out to be everybody acting as if nothing has really happened. But he has broken the hearts of me and my children.’

I know there are no easy answers to these issues. All I am saying is that having talked about forgiveness for so many years, I was suddenly faced with a young girl on the other side of the world who rocked me back on my heels and who said, in essence, ‘Don’t give your forgiveness so cheaply that you join in my abuse’. And I can’t get her out of my mind.

This article originally appeared in ‘Christianity’. Rob Parsons is the executive director of Care for the Family and the author of several books.

How right Rob is! Forgiveness is something incredibly hard to do when a person has been abused. It can take years and is, more often than not, a gradual process. Forgiveness does not let the abuser ‘off the hook’. Neither does it negate the seriousness of what has happened. The church needs to understand that forgiveness extended towards a perpetrator does not mean things can carry on as if the abuse did not happen. Due to the addictive nature of sexual abuse in particular, this stance could put children’s, young people and adults lives at further risk of abuse. The CCPAS book, ‘Uncomfortable Reality’, offers positive, practical and biblical models for addressing this difficult area.
Pauline Pearson (CCPAS Trainer and Counsellor)

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