Spiritual Abuse Survey

Church Abuse.com features a short checklist to help you determine whether your group or church is abusive or not. There are many such checklists online and they are all a little different. Some emphasize certain abusive behaviors and not others, while others will emphasize a different set of abusive traits. Abusive churches come in many varieties and will not likely match up exactly to any of these checklists. Still, they are helpful because they show that these behaviors are common.

Is your church healthy or unhealthy?

Is your church healthy or unhealthy? Battered Sheep credits a Control Techniques pamphlet with this decent overview.

Barnabas Ministry

Barnabas Ministry offers a well-organized site that helps someone in a questionable church decide if their church is leaning toward the unhealthy or dangerous. It summarizes traits from different sources on the subject of spiritual abuse, then gives a list of things to watch for, and then asks some questions that should help anyone who is confused about the direction their church is going. The one problem with the site, however, is that for part of the site (at least in my browsers), you must scroll sideways for a long time in order to read each line. Very annoying.
Some of the evaluation questions:

• What did you spend your time on this week with regards to the group?


• Did you really want to do it, or did you do it only because you were told to do it?


• Did you "filter" anything from a higher-up to a subordinate?


• Do you see problems with the system?


• Do you have any way to bring these up and have them taken seriously?


• Do you find yourself making statements and positions of the leadership more palatable for others?


• Do you really want others to have what you have concerning your church?

On another page of Barnabas Ministry , called Uncovering and Facing Spiritual Abuse, is an account of an abusive situation that may not at first be recognized as abusive.