🚨⚠️ This post discusses sexual assault, spiritual abuse, and institutional betrayal. If these topics are tender or activating for you, please take care of yourself as you read. You are free to pause, step away, or choose another space on this site. You matter.
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When the Church Is Not Safe, and God Still Is
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There are some stories we do not tell because we are in hiding. Others, because we are surviving. For a long time, mine lived in the second category.
Many of you have asked why I moved churches after fourteen years. Why my voice changed. Why my ministry direction shifted. I have often answered vaguely, not because the truth isn’t important, but because there is a cost to telling it.
This was not one wound. For nearly three years, I have been walking through cancer, surgeries, and treatment while also carrying the weight of a deep violation, the silence that followed, and the consequences that came with telling the truth. My body was fighting to survive. My heart was trying to make sense of betrayal. My spirit was learning how to endure more than I thought possible.
Here is what I can say now, carefully and honestly.
I was sexually assaulted in a church setting. Before that, the same church pressured me into silence so the congregation would not “panic“ at the awareness that registered sex offenders were roaming the halls. I was treated as a “conflict” to be managed instead of a person to be protected.
A couple weeks after my double mastectomy and lymph node dissection, with surgical drains still in place, the church arranged transportation so I could keep my promise to the incarcerated women at CCWF. I had told them the ministry event would happen no matter what.
I was not told that the man assigned to transport me and my Bibles was a registered sex offender. I was given only his name and told he was a respected Bible teacher.
After a thirteen-hour day and a terrifying five-hour drive home, I asked for a chaplain-to-chaplain debriefing. I was made to wait thirty days, all while undergoing dose-dense chemotherapy. Instead of concern or compassion, I was treated like the villain, not the victim.
Exposure is the secondary infection; while chemotherapy was meant to kill the cancer in my body, the church’s negligence introduced a toxicity to my soul that no medicine can treat.
What I endured on that drive home was psychological trauma that will never leave me. The lack of transparency, the lack of care, and the lack of protection turned an already devastating season into layered trauma.
One year later, while I was still in cancer treatment and still serving my church, the unconscionable happened. I was sexually assaulted by a weekly-attending member, right outside the prayer room door!
To continue reading… please visit me over at Loved Shack and the link will guide you to “When the Church Is Not Safe, and God Still Is.”
Until next time…
Tammy Ingram 