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Comfort in the Ashes
paperback
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- Length: 208 pages
- Dimensions: 6 × 9 in
- Published: January 14, 2025
- Imprint: IVP Academic
- Item Code: A1034
- ISBN: 9781514010341
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Other Retailers:
Amazon*
*affiliate partner
Navigating Trauma in the Church
It's time for church leaders and believers to stop offering prettily packaged responses from a safe distance. It's time for us to sit in the ashes with the hurting, our Sunday clothes covered in dirt and grime, our faces lined with tears. Trauma brings people to the ash heap, so that is where the church needs to go.
The church should serve as a refuge for people in pain. And yet, we often end up unintentionally causing more hurt to trauma survivors. Theological platitudes and positive thinking aren't simply dismissive to those who suffer, but they inevitably retraumatize the wounded. Does the Bible have anything practical to offer for church leaders as they engage the pain in their congregations?
Biblical scholar Michelle Keener shows us that the book of Job provides embodied and practical answers for the church today. In this incredible tool for ministry leaders and trauma survivors alike, Keener offers:
- deep wisdom at the intersection of trauma theory and the book of Job for Christian communities
- reflection questions for ministry practitioners and those walking alongside those who have experienced trauma
- engagement with the idea of a shattered worldview and how to overcome the effects of that experience.
Comfort in the Ashes helps leaders navigate their own trauma and gives practical guidance for supporting others whose worlds are falling apart. God meets us in our ashes and our pain. It's time for the church to do the same.
"Biblical scholar Michelle Keener has taken up the book of Job and made it sing. And the song it sings, in the hands of this trauma survivor, is surprising and tender. It is a song of grief and loss expressed, of friendship that succeeds and fails, of a shattered world painfully reconstructed. Above all, this book sings of a Scripture that is sensitive to survivors of trauma, and a God who meets them in the ashes."
"Michelle Keener has provided an excellent resource for those who want to become better stewards of other people's pain. Her research on trauma and the book of Job are insightful and invaluable. This book is instructive for individuals as well as church communities on how to deal with trauma in ways that promote healing."
CONTENTS
Introduction
1. What is Trauma
2. Job's Experience of Trauma
3. The Ministry of Presence
4. Talking About Trauma
5. When Words Fail
6. Where is the Justice?
7. Out of the Whirlwind
8. Behemoth, Leviathan, and Job
9. Putting a Shattered World Back Together
10. A Church of Dust and Ashes
11. Conclusion
Bibliography
