Day 7: When Speaking on Behalf of God is Risky
Josh Dowton, Executive Pastor at Northside Baptist Church, shares how being in church leadership is risky if it becomes a form of control and coercion.
The Tangible Love of Christ
Restorative justice embedded into church community
TODD DARVAS
“What do you do for work?”.
It’s a pretty common way to break the ice. And it should be an easy enough question to answer, right? I struggle with it.
Firstly, I have two day jobs. Some days I’m a pastor, and on other days I’m a family lawyer. It’s always hard to know which job to lead with. It turns out people have lots of pre-conceived ideas (often negative ones!) about both of those vocations.
I’ve started to make a habit of just saying that I’m in “full time ministry”. When I’m not pastoring H3O Church on Sydney’s Northern Beaches, I work at Horizons Family Law Centre, a Christian not-for-profit that offers free legal advice for people experiencing domestic violence and high conflict family breakdown.
To be honest, my work as a lawyer feels every bit as much an expression of Christian mission as my pastoral ministry. Perhaps even more so if we understand mission as both proclaiming “good news to the poor” and making it a tangible, lived reality for those on the margins.
On Tuesdays, our church becomes a community legal clinic. It’s a simple transformation. I swap my t-shirt for a collar, clear up the mess from playgroup and youth, and a humble sandwich board is placed on the pathway, welcoming a diverse group of predominantly women, but also men, to Horizon’s free Northern Beaches Advice Clinic.
They come at the end of their rope, many having suffered, or still suffering, from the corrosive and isolating impacts of family violence and coercive control.
On that sandwich board are these words of hope - “I know that the Lord maintains the cause of the needy and executes justice for the poor.” Psalm 140:12.
As followers of Jesus who happen to be family lawyers, we get the privilege of offering these people a living, breathing experience of Christ’s justice and mercy.
There’s something beautiful about the clinic being embedded in the local church. There’s a lot of good that Horizons can create in the world through the provision of free and low-cost legal help, but whole-of-life transformation for people escaping coercive control requires more than a solution to a legal problem.
In fact, it usually requires connection to a community – one that embodies the love, grace, mercy and compassion of Jesus. If coercive control is the bad news, surely the good news is the liberating love of Christ, tangibly expressed in communities of Christian faith.
Two years ago a single mum of four who came to our Northern Beaches clinic seeking help to create a life free of violence and coercive control for her and her four teenage children. Over several interactions, we were able to make ground on the multiple legal problems she faced, but it has been her ongoing connection with the local church that has been most transformative. Jan, our wonderful clinic volunteer who’s in her 60’s, ended up mentoring this mum through our church’s COACH Community Mentoring program. After 1.5 years of steadfast support from Jan, she’s now studying at TAFE, working as a teacher’s aide and regaining her sense of agency and independence.
Six months ago, she and her kids started attending H3O Church on Sundays after a gentle invitation from Jan, and her kids are now much-loved members of the youth group.
And then a few weeks ago at our community dinner, I watched as this incredible woman gently and lovingly welcomed another new single mum (also a victim- survivor of domestic violence) who was attending church for the first time. They’d met a year before at the women’s shelter. I didn’t hear their conversation, but it was obvious what was being communicated.
“This community has been good news for me, and it will be good news for you too”.
In that moment of hospitality, she was a living witness to the liberating and transforming love of Christ. For me as a pastor (and a lawyer), this is what God’s restorative justice looks like.
Go Deeper
You may not be a lawyer (or social worker, or Domestic Violence counsellor, or other frontline worker), but we all have a role to play in the fight against coercive control.
Ask yourself, ‘How can I contribute to the formation of healthy church (or other) communities that make the good news of Christ’s liberating love a tangible reality for those who have been isolated and oppressed?
Todd Darvas is the Lead Pastor of H3O Church on the Northern Beaches of Sydney, and a family lawyer at Horizons Family Law Centre, a community legal centre that provides free legal help to people experiencing domestic violence and family breakdown.
About this series
Confronting Coercive Control is Common Grace's daily blog series during 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence, 25 November to 10 December 2024.
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The following Domestic and Family Violence support services are available:
- 1800 RESPECT National Helpline: 1800 737 732
- Women’s Crisis Line: 1800 811 811
- Men’s Referral Service: 1300 766 491
- Lifeline (24 hour crisis line): 131 114
- 13 YARN (Aboriginal Mob): 13 92 76
- Emergency: 000
