Sanctuary of Healing
Transforming Churches into Trauma-Informed Spaces
By Julia Matallana Freedman
Church Publishing, 224 pages, $19.95
Julia Matallana Freedman’s Sanctuary of Healing: Transforming Churches into Trauma-Informed Spaces is a timely book for the church. The last decade’s focus on the ubiquity of trauma has led to trauma-informed healthcare, classrooms, therapy, and even yoga studios.
In standard fashion, the church has been a little late to the game but has followed this needed trend in a world that is very aware of how wounded we are by war, abuse, disease, religion, and politics. This book helps church leaders, clergy and laity, make practical steps toward ensuring their parish is a place where traumatized people can fully participate and grow in their healing journey.
Church leaders will appreciate the practicality of this book, as it offers concrete practices and events that will help transform their church into a trauma-informed space. Many church leaders have done things like guided meditation, grounding exercises, and group art projects at retreats and seminary, but not in their church building. If they have not, this book will provide the starting point for such healing endeavors.
Sanctuary of Healing will also help church leaders think about the traumatic events in their lives and how those can bleed into their interactions with parishioners. The opportunities and space for journaling and reflection encourages clergy to do the work they ask their flocks to do. It also addresses the problems inherent in making one’s church a trauma-informed space. Part of pastoral ministry is creating clear boundaries, a needed element in churches that offer healing of trauma.
A theme that resonated with me was how we were all traumatized by the COVID pandemic. It reminded me how every church I have been part of or visited recently has shared stories of the pandemic with me. These stories were not dissimilar to how people tell you where they were on 9/11. Has your church found ways to heal from the wounds of the pandemic? If not, Sanctuary of Healing is a must-read.
In every section, Freedman shares resources from the Book of Common Prayer. For church workers and active participants, it is easy to forget the prayer book as our main communal resource for healing. Healing services that specifically focus on trauma, prayers, anointing, and the service of Holy Communion are the ways the healing power of the sacraments meet us. It is good for the church to be reminded of these healing resources that are right in front of us. A well-used prayer book and the principles of this book will save a lot of Christians from the isolation and despair of a traumatized world.
Freedman writes about her experiences in finding the Episcopal Church in her search for healing, a journey that many have made in this first quarter of the 21st century. Like every demographic shift, this has changed the church. The second section of the book offers detailed descriptions of several categories of people who are finding us.
Victims of domestic violence, racial trauma, and spiritual and religious abuse need certain things from churches. Recognizing that many people with these experiences are joining a church that has been historically defined by male leadership, white membership, and a disdain for many forms of evangelicalism and Catholicism can be a challenge. If you have anxiety about a changing church, this book will help you navigate that in your local setting.
Sanctuary of Healing is a powerful reminder to the church that we have deep resources to help people heal from trauma. Trauma is a word from the original Greek of the New Testament and, as Freedman writes, “Jesus was raised from the dead and the scars remained.” This book will encourage your creativity to minister to people inside and outside your church who need to meet Jesus and see his scars in the sanctuary of healing he founded 2,000 years ago.
The Rev. David W. Peters is a priest of the Diocese of Texas and author of Post-Traumatic Jesus: Reading the Gospel with the Wounded.
