""Abuse is a problem that needs to be understood, addressed, and challenged. The abused are humans in the image of God who need to be protected, loved, and empowered to stand with us and walk through life with respect and dignity. When God brings a victim to us, we have a responsibility to love them as we want to be loved and be faithful to that responsibility. We must make sure that they and their children are safe, protected, and given the chance to live in peace and love. Abusers are also humans who are in the image of God, and they need to be taught how to live and respect all others. They must be confronted and challenged to change or face prosecution by our legal system and our spiritual communities. ""I believe that the faith community is in a great position to address this problem. We have a God who grieves over the violence that occurs in families. Yet we have a God who grieves even more over the fact that spiritual leaders have failed to act as servants of Yahweh in this respect. ""The rest of this book is an appeal to you to gain an understanding of what it really means to face domestic violence and how to help bring peace and wholeness to victims and their children caught in the web of abuse. It is an appeal to you to confront those who abuse others rather than shut your eyes . . . ."" --from the Introduction Setting the Captives Free should be required reading in every seminary Ron Clark's knowledge on the dynamics of domestic violence, including the power and control issues surrounding the cycle of abuse is essential for clergy and Christian Counselors alike. I highly recommend this book to anyone wanting to know more about how they might better assist victims of domestic violence in the faith community. --Patricia Riddle Gaddis, MA Director & Founder of The Family Peace Project Author of Battered But Not Broken: Help for Abused Wives and their Church Families and Dangerous Dating: Helping Young Women Say No To Abuse. Every few years a book comes along which opens the eyes of the church to a critical spiritual need in the world and the alarming gap in our theology which has closed our eyes to that need. ""Setting the Captives Free"" is one of those books. Just as Barna's books have done concerning the lost, just as Sider's books have done concerning poverty, so Ron's book does concerning domestic abuse. Ron opens the church's eyes to the dark world of domestic abuse victims and the gap in our theology which has kept us blind to their needs. After reading the book, I feel to my knees in repentance for not leading our church to minister to these victims. Ron gave me the tools and the theology to begin talking to our congregation about these needs. --Dr. Chris Altrock, Minister, Highland Street Church of Christ, Memphis, TN Author The Cross: Saved by the Shame of It All and Preaching to Pluralists This is a groundbreaking book that is well worth reading. It really grasps the issues of abuse and provides practical, spiritual answers to anyone who has been impacted directly, or indirectly. --Bettie Williams-Watson, Founder, Executive Director of Multi-Communities (M.I.C.), Seattle, WA. Ron Clark is the Minister for the Agape Church of Christ in Portland, Oregon. He has led training seminars on domestic violence for pastors, law enforcement groups, and congregations. His articles on abuse have appeared in both religion and counseling journals.
