From Harm to Healing: Reimagining Scripture After Violence

This reflection has been written with thanks to Dr Rosie Clare Shorter and Dr Erin Hutton in conversation with Ellaina Welsman from the Common Grace team. 

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Across Australia, victim-survivors of domestic and family violence are navigating the long, complex, and often dangerous journey of leaving abusive relationships. For many, this journey is not only physical or emotional - it is spiritual. It raises questions about God, about Scripture, about the very communities that were meant to be places of safety.

During Domestic and Family Violence Prevention Month 2026, we are invited not just to acknowledge this reality, but to respond. Because the truth is that faith communities hold enormous power. We can either contribute to harm, or we can become places of healing.

It is into this tension that Dr Rosie Shorter and Dr Erin Hutton, Common Grace supporters and co-authors of the Reading the Bible After Violence project, have been listening.

Listening more deeply

Rosie is an academic in Gender Studies at the University of Melbourne, and Erin is an interdisciplinary scholar at the Australian University of Theology. Their current research project sits at the intersection of faith and justice, where following Jesus and the pursuit of equality meet, and where feminism becomes a language for naming harm and imagining a more just world.

This conviction has shaped their involvement with the Common Grace movement, and now their research on the Reading the Bible After Violence project, which Common Grace has the privilege of supporting. 

The project emerged from a repeated finding in research: faith communities can be both harmful and healing. 

The same Scriptures that speak of love and justice have, at times, been used to silence, to minimise, or to justify abuse. Teachings about love, submission, forgiveness, or sacrifice, when stripped of context and care, can become tools that keep people trapped in unsafe situations.

And yet, many survivors do not want to abandon their faith. 

They remain. They wrestle. They hope for something different.

The journey towards healing 

Rosie and Erin’s research pays attention to this fragile, often unseen journey.

It asks what it looks like for someone to slowly re-engage with Scripture after harm. To begin again. To read the Bible not as a source of fear or confusion, but as something that might hold healing.

Rosie says, “We’re asking - how do people move from a place where the Bible has been harmful to a place where the Bible becomes healing again?”

There is no single pathway. For some, it involves reinterpreting passages they were once taught in harmful ways. For others, it means discovering entirely new frameworks for understanding God’s heart for justice, dignity, and safety.

What becomes clear is that healing is not quick, and it is not simple. But it is possible.

And when it happens, it offers the Church something profound: a glimpse into how Scripture can be handled in ways that bring life rather than harm.

Rosie says:

“If we know how people re-engage with Scripture in ways that are healing, we may learn how to prevent harmful readings from occurring in the first place.”

Erin says:

“The saying ‘prevention is better than cure’ has become a bit of a cliché, but that’s because it’s true. Imagine if the church was not only safely responding to gendered violence, but actively preventing it, too.”  

More than a resource problem

It would be easy to assume that the Church’s response to domestic and family violence is limited by a lack of resources or training.

But what is emerging, both in Rosie and Erin’s research and in the experience of many working in this space, is that the issue is not necessarily a lack of knowledge, but a lack of prioritisation. 

There are already many thoughtful, trauma-informed resources available. There are people doing careful, compassionate work. And yet, too often, this work remains on the margins.

Because, unless addressing violence becomes a genuine priority - shaped by leadership, embedded in culture, and named as part of our discipleship to Jesus—it simply doesn’t take hold.

The call, then, is not just to learn more.

It is to move domestic and family violence from the edges of our concern to a core part of our witness.

The power we have 

Rosie is clear about what is at stake.

“Faith communities occupy a powerful space—they can either sustain harm or foster healing.” 

Erin agrees,

 “For decades now, researchers and advocates—and even the Australian Government—have recognised that churches are key (to) communities when it comes to ending gendered violence. We have the potential to create the conditions that prevent violence. We can champion change.”

That power is not abstract. It is exercised in everyday moments - in sermons, in prayers, in pastoral conversations, in the assumptions we carry and the words we choose.

It can feel overwhelming to sit with that responsibility. But Rosie offers a grounded, hopeful reframing:

“I have the capacity in my context to be either an agent of harm or an agent of healing.” 

Not everywhere. Not all at once. But here. In this place. In this moment.

Erin reflects that, “I think, a lot of the time, this looks like listening. Listening to people’s experiences and sitting with them. Just being with them.”

And ultimately, this becomes a question of intention:

“Wherever I can, I want to choose healing,” says Rosie

An invitation to learn together

This is the heart of our upcoming webinar in May: Healing After Leaving Domestic and Family Violence

Together, we will explore what it means to walk alongside victim-survivors in the aftermath of abuse. We will listen to lived experience. We will reflect on pastoral support. And we will consider how our communities can become places where healing is not only possible, but expected.

Dr Rosie Shorter and Dr Erin Hutton, together with Erica Mandi Manga, Gen Farquhar, Heather Ritchie, Ellaina Welsman, and Safina Stewart, will help guide us into this conversation, bringing both theological depth and deep attentiveness to the lived realities of survivors.

If we are to become communities of justice and compassion, we cannot remain on the sidelines of this issue.

We must learn.
We must listen.
And we must act.

We hope you will join us for this important conversation.

Sign Up here and join us on Thursday 21st May 2026.