From Silence to Safety: Reclaiming Women’s Stories in Faith Spaces with Therapists Christy & Andrew Bauman
Episode Notes
What does it take to make the church a safer place for women’s voices?
This week Dr Alison is joined by husband-and-wife therapists Dr. Christy Bauman and Dr. Andrew Bauman, who are doing groundbreaking work at the intersection of women’s stories, embodiment, and spiritual safety. Together, they offer both prophetic challenge and practical hope for how we can build healthier faith communities.
In the first half of the episode, Christy takes us into the sacred rites of passage women experience, highlighting women’s voices in the Bible. In the second half, Andrew shares from his extensive research, offering a vision for safe churches where power is shared, voices are honored, and healing is possible.
Together, Christy and Andrew model what’s possible when men and women work side by side for change.
You’ll learn:
- The six symbolic rites of passage women experience over a lifetime—and why reclaiming them matters
- How Christy helps women see their bodies as sacred places of dignity and spiritual depth
- The results of their research with 2,800+ women who work in church settings
- A vision for churches where power is shared and women’s voices are truly honored
A note of care: This episode includes sensitive topics such as pornography, domestic violence, and harm related to women’s bodies. Please listen gently and step away if you need to.
📕 Learn more from Christy and Andrew:
Christy Bauman’s Book: Her Rites: Women’s Rites of Passage, A Sacred Journey for Mind, Body, and Soul
Andrew Bauman’s Book: Safe Church: How to Guard Against Sexism and Abuse in the Church
📥Free Resources from Christy:
- Body Map PDF
- Theology of the Womb Video Course (use code: TOTWcomp)
Learn more about their work at the Christian Counseling Center for Sexual Health & Trauma
📥 Grab your 3 free Boundaries For Your Soul resources here.
📥 Download Alison’s free printable with the five boundary tools when you sign up for her weekly email.
Here are related episodes you might like:
Episode 48: Loving Your Body as a Spiritual Practice, Why the Flesh Isn't the Body, and 3 Heresies We Kind of Believe
Episode 11: How to Start Loving Your Body with Christy Meeks
Episode 126: Restoring Wonder & Play in Intimacy - Navigating Sexual Brokenness, Safety, and Vulnerability with Therapist Sam Jolman
💬 Got a question? Call 307-429-2525 and leave a message for a future episode.
Thanks to our Sponsors!
- Go to Quince.com/bestofyou for 365-day returns, plus free shipping on your order!
- Better sleep starts today! Get a birch mattress and test it out for 100 nights risk-free PLUS a discount for being a listener by visiting birchliving.com/BESTOFYOU.
- If you’re looking for a Bible that helps you live the Word, not just read it, then grab this beautiful one I’m currently using at NIVapplicationbible.com.
- For 20% off your order, head to Reliefband.com and use code BESTOFYOU.
Editing by Giulia Hjort
Sound engineering by Kelly Kramarik
Music by Andy Luiten
While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.
© 2025 Alison Cook. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please do not copy or share the contents of this webpage or transcript without permission from the author.
Transcript
Hey everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of the Best of You. Today's episode is one I've been looking forward to sharing for a while now. It's two back-to-back conversations with a husband and wife team whose work is challenging, harmful norms and helping men and women move toward deeper emotional, spiritual, and relational health.
Today's episode is a little different than what you've heard on the podcast before. In the first conversation I talked with Dr. Christy Bauman. Christy takes us into the lived realities of women's bodies, from menstruation to menopause, infertility to aging, and she reclaims these life cycles as sacred rites of passage.
She helps us see the wisdom and spiritual depth embedded in each season, and she offers practical ways to reconnect with our bodies as places of dignity agency and God given worth. And then in the second conversation, Christy's husband, Dr. Andrew Bauman, also a therapist, shares from his own journey as a former pastor and now therapist, including his early struggles with pornography, his research with nearly 3000 women about their experiences in the church and his call for leaders to confront harmful messages about women, spiritual abuse and misuse of power.
He offers a vision for safe churches, rooted in the example of Jesus, where power is shared, voices are honored and healing is possible for everyone. I wanted to air these two conversations together because they offer such distinct, yet beautifully complimentary perspectives on the same urgent issue, how to make the church a safer place for women's voices in particular.
Side by side, their insights reveal not only the problem of how women's voices have been silenced, but also the power of what happens when men and women work together to create meaningful change. And when I had each of these conversations with Christy and Andrew, it just struck me how beautiful it is that they're doing this work together as a married couple, as a team, and in a culture where it's so easy for one gender to villainize the other, right?
It's so easy for men to villainize women or for women to villainize men. I just found their partnership in tackling this important issue as such a refreshing reminder of what's possible when we learn to listen and honor and work together for the good of all. Before we begin, a quick note in these conversations, we do discuss sensitive topics including pornography, domestic violence, and experiences of harm related to women's bodies.Please take care while listening and step away if you need to.
Together, Dr. Christy and Dr. Andrew Bauman co-direct the Christian Counseling Center for Sexual Health and Trauma, where they lead intensives, workshops and retreats for individuals, couples, and groups. Christie is the author of Her Rites: Women's Rites, a Passage, A Sacred Journey From Mind, body, and Soul.
And as you'll hear in today's episode, she's offering my listeners some free guides based on her work that we'll link to in the show notes. Andrew Bauman is the author of Safe Church, how to Guard Against Sexism and Abuse in the Church. It's based on his extensive research featuring the voices of nearly 3000 women about their everyday experiences in faith communities.
Please enjoy my conversations with Chrisy and Andrew Bauman.
Alison Cook: Christie, I would love to just learn more about the why behind your life's work. You've spent so much time not only working one-on-one. As a clinician, but just really digging into some key ideas, especially as it relates to the body and women's bodies in particular. What originally motivated you and what still drives you to keep doing this work?
Christy Bauman: I do love that question because it is what I wake up with every day, which is a female body, and so much of what I do in my career has been based on the story that God gave me, and mostly the body to be formed in the Imago day, but to be female is quite an interesting journey. Well, it has been for me because I grew up in southern rural Louisiana, and the idea that.
You were a female who wanted to love God and serve God, and I felt called to preach the gospel, like there was something in me that was such a storyteller and this story of Jesus. I was so ready to tell the story. And one of my favorite moments was when I learned that the first person Jesus revealed himself to was the woman at the well.
And that she ran from him saying, I'm going to tell your story to everyone. And he said, I was really hoping you would do that. And so I wasn't really under the impression that I could be a disciple. The 12 disciples as I grew up, they were all men. And every part of the story, every pastor I knew was male.
And while I wasn't necessarily sad about that, I didn't know where I belonged in this female body. And it put me on a long journey of, Lord, is there something you want me to be particular about in how I use the feminine that is within me to bring your story to the world? And so. You know, a lot of that before I was in grad school was just looking at theology around women's stories in the Bible.
And so even Eve, she's not made from dust like Adam, she's made from bone. And so we are struck just from the very beginning that there's a difference in the makeup of her body. And as we look at the stories of the women in the Bible, we see that they were about the business of the body. Whether that was about birthing or burying, there is something in the continuation that they understood the body.
So then as I went to grad school and started to understand psychology and women's wellbeing and women's psychological wellbeing and spiritual wellbeing, I started to realize that we can't leave the body out for the female.
Alison Cook: It's so interesting to listen to you because even in science, our daughter is starting out on a journey into medical school, right?
And there's such an absence of research, specifically we're seeing in this, in menopause research about women's bodies. Because so much of the scientific research in the medical community has been done by men and on men's bodies as if they're the same. And I remember hearing a woman, she's at Stanford, and I cannot remember for the life of me right now, what her title is, but she's talking about fitness and wellness.
And her quote is, women are not small men, they're different. And so the things that apply to men, especially even if you think about the wellness space, which is so different from what you and I are talking about today. Similarly, if we apply what works for men's bodies, for females, it's different. And so I'm intrigued by what you're saying 'cause there's sort of almost this absence of information and knowledge and deep and meaningful understanding, and I really appreciate that you're speaking directly into that space in this realm of both psychology and theology.
Christy Bauman: It was so helpful to go down that avenue and really to start to look at the mind and the bodies and the hormones of women and the life cycle of women to understand that we are different and that we need to know the difference.
It's helpful to us, like it's actually a gift that we are different.
Alison Cook: So let's talk about it a little bit. There's two aspects of your work I think is really interesting and I'd love for you to kind of dig in for us. One is this idea of the six symbolic rites of passage that women experience over a lifetime and how those kind of help us understand embodied healing.
I think that's really interesting, but then also just on a broader scale, you talk about life cycles in general and how we all go through cycles of life and how that's kind of something none of us is very good at. There is a winter in all of our lives, but how that particularly maps onto these six rites of passage for women. Could you talk a little bit about what those are and how they help us understand not only our bodies, but our emotions and our spiritual lives?
Christy Bauman: Yes, and it's so much to talk about. It is always hard for me to condense it. We as women have very little time and we don't slow down and spend as much time on our bodies, but I do think we serve a God who created us, demanding us to slow down for our own wellbeing and our own health.
And I think as we look at the changing leaves or look at the amount of time the sun is out or the darkness is out, it's God's invitation to us to slow down into the season that we're in. And that constitutes with the age of our children or the age of our marriage. And when we actually get into those particularities.
There's nowhere better to be than right where you are. And the healthiest Jew is actually very clear, like God was kind in making not just a liturgical calendar, but a calendar for us in the world based on our age and our story and our life circumstance, and the seasons of the place we live and the seasons that our own family or whatever we're creating in our story is at.
And so I always begin with story work. You can't do body work before you've done story work. We can see that in the Bible. It's always a story told. And then when we close the Bible and we close that story, we apply it to our bodies and where we are in our current life. And so the rites of passage that I wrote is psychologically a really old model.
It's an old model of understanding that we have a first breath and we have a last breath. Each one of us and only you and I will have our first breath and our last breath. No one else is going to share that with us. And those are the bookends of the rites of passage. So we start with birthright. Then we end with Legacy.
The next one after birthright is we are initiated. So usually for the female, it's when she bleeds for the first time. It's when she is kissed for the first time. It's those coming of age moments where she knows something that she didn't know prior. She was naive too, and then she tasted of something and she had knowledge in a way that initiated her into knowing.
So there's a sense of where our body from First Breath is. Then adolescing, it's growing up.
Alison Cook: I wanna pause and double click on this for one second. Christie, I hear so many stories from women in particular. It's so interesting that you're talking about this as a rite of passage. I have such a complicated relationship with that in my own life.
There's so much shame around it, and I hear so many women talk about that being a time when maybe parents disappeared. Dads didn't know what to do, backed off psychologically. We do see that often when parents don't know how to be present to that particular rite of passage for a young girl. And I know the same could be told about boys.
We're just talking about women here because I know like Sam Jman has done some great work with boys and how important that is. But I hear that story, you know, it's like my dad just didn't know what to do with me, so he was just gone. And that was heartbreaking to me. So I just kind of wanna pause there. It's not just biological. It's such a psychologically and spiritually crucial moment for young girls.
Christy Bauman: Well, and the process of letting go and leaving, it's very vulnerable. And so when we're birthed and we take our first breath, and that's the first time we're outside of our mother's body and her care and her protection.
And so initiation is when our little bodies start to try something on. And it's often where harm and neglect happens, and sometimes abuse, right? Because it's such a vulnerable precipice of time and we don't have the knowledge yet in our own bodies. And if we have a parent who doesn't know how to come alongside or is distracted, so a lot in initiation, I will ask a question.
Is the first time you bled who was around to help you understand that? Where was your mother? Or what did it look like around that story of your bleeding? Because bleeding is such a vulnerable thing and. Here, women are being invited to understand, okay, now I have a body that bleeds and I have to tend to this body.
How do I do that? And there's so much shame and embarrassment around it, and there's so much a sense of covering it up. Just flush it down the toilet, just cover it and go and do what you need to get yourself clean. We've missed so much biblically and psychologically with helping girls who are becoming women understand that this is actually the work for them, for the rest of their life, that this is actually going to lead them into creation.
So you are so right that these stories are usually where evil marks us, because we are so vulnerable, they're vulnerable junctures
Alison Cook: That's so well stated. So what comes next?
Christy Bauman: Then the right of exile, which means that you get left alone. So every woman has known, once she realizes that her body is hers sharing it becomes complex.
And so whether that's with friendship, whether that's in relationship with someone, whether that's with how she's starting to leave her parents and their safety, or that they've already left her, whatever the story looks like. The right of exile is a rite of passage where we've all known what it means to be put in the desert rejection or being left alone where it's us and God in a desert, and we are waiting on his voice to come to us.
And do all women go through that as a sort of rite of passage? Well, historically, yes. There was always a season in which you were sent to the desert. You know, Jesus' story of being in the wilderness and the fasting and where he's tempted. It's the same for the female. She is in the desert and she is trying to figure out what to do with knowing God's voice and her own voice.
She will hear the voice of her mother, whether that's good or bad. She will hear the voice of those jealous of her or who have envied her. She'll hear the voice of being abandoned, or you are by yourself and you find yourself. And then we know when that is done that we are then invited to the rite of creativity or creation.
But it's part of that process that every woman will know that she starts out with her first breath, and that's when she is given a birthright. And then initiation is the first time she bleed. And then exile, is that part of her where she's finding herself.
And then the rite of creation is, what does it mean to break open your body to birth something? I am impregnated with an idea. I birth my podcast. I birth a book that I've written. I birth a physical child that I want to have some dream that she has because we are co-creators. God was really different with women than he was with men when he made us physical co-creators. And we bear life in our womb and we bear the ability to create.
And so that breaking of our body open is the rite of creation. It's understanding how do we break our body open. To create life unto something and knowing that if we follow the women in the Bible, women who are at tombs, so it's like Risa and Abigail who were wives of Saul and they had their sons crucified against their will, and they had to care for their children's bodies after they were crucified.
And so their story in the Bible is a huge one where women are asked to do something when death comes upon the scene. And then you have Mary and Martha, who is that Lazarus tomb, and they have to know what to do with the tomb, how to prepare the body. Then you have that same Mary, Mary, the mother of Jesus and slo.
There are five women at the tomb and they are washing Jesus' body, wrapping it, anointing it with oil, getting it ready. For what we now know was resurrection. The work of the female that she learns in the rite of creation is there's a sense of breaking and bleeding open, much like the crucifixion, so that it's unto creating life.
And so I'm taking these narratives and I'm trying to look at them from the female body's perspective because it's just not common for us to do that.
Alison Cook: It's in the shadows. We don't highlight it. We're looking at it through the lens of men as opposed to kind of highlighting it, putting a spotlight on these different rituals are distinctly feminine and it's really honoring, and I feel in my body listening, I'm like, gosh, it's so interesting to hear about these rituals from a female perspective where it's sort of honoring and I mean, there's pain in it and it's raw, and we kind of have a sense of that, of the male journey even in our movies, right?
You know, there's the warrior and there's some violence to it, and there's this, and there's that. You know, we as women, I think, kind of almost know how to celebrate that on behalf of men. You know, there's some of it that's hard and painful and it's very bodily, and also it is part of our narrative collectively, biblically, psychologically.
And the thing that comes to mind theologically, I think about the Pascal mystery for my listeners. If you go to a liturgical church, you every Sunday say, you know, the mystery of faith is this Christ has died. Christ is risen, Christ will come again. Right? There's that cyclical nature of death, resurrection coming again, that we participate in the lifecycle of.
Christy Bauman: So that's why we start birthright is that females are not highlighted in the Bible as having a birthright. It's the first born son. So if you are a second or further born son, or you are a female, there's not really an understanding of birthright. And so what you just named is we as believers when we commit to this work, we say we join.
This cycle, and I'm just going in and pulling out the particularities of what that looked like for females. Because in the Bible, females were about the work of the red tent, so the bleeding, the birthing, and mid wifeing of children and the next generation, and then being at the tombs, being at the bodies when they're sick.
And when they're dying, they even buried the bodies with the faith that they were going to be resurrected. Now, did they think that was on earth? No. I think those first believers knew Jesus, whatever you're doing, we believe that there's a bigger story. You've told us there's something on the other side of this, so we are going to do your work.
And the work for the female is I'm going to bleed. I am going to birth or help birth, and then I'm going to help birth death, help you die and tend to the body along the way.
Alison Cook: Christie, how does this map on for you personally, because I know that what you're, you're not saying this is women's work. I know you're not saying that. Right. There's something deeper, there's some claiming of our story as women that is honored—and—I could imagine there are also ways in which that narrative of your job is just to have kids and tend to, people can get weaponized.
Christy Bauman: Oh, a hundred percent. For women who write in and say to me, I can have children, what does that mean? I've had a hysterectomy at 25. What does that mean? Right. And so why I am trying to take that psychological sort of rite of passage is it's not actually about physically having a child and birthing a child, but for the most part, all of us women bleed and we will all stop bleeding.
And all of us as women take our first breath and take a last breath. And so I'm just asking us to step back and look at the cycle that's happening for us, and also the idea that we are in our bodies in a different way than men are. And so that is actually to our benefit. Even if it's hard for us, if we don't shy away from it, it can be our superpower.
Alison Cook: I've thought about this 'cause I'm menopausal, and first of all it's very new. I think generationally that we're actually talking about this as women publicly, which I cannot imagine what it must have been like when we weren't so true. And I have thought about it a little bit of like what is the meaning of this for women?
Because it does feel like a closing down and I didn't have biological children. So for me there's that layer. But I just wanna reiterate, you're onto something here by. Helping us understand the reality of, and also the deeper meaning of what does it mean for us as a woman?
Christy Bauman: Your segue actually is perfect.
Your question of what do I do with perimenopause? Why are we talking about it now? What does it mean? It almost sounds like a fertility death. It almost sounds like we are falling asleep. And what does that mean? And that is in the heartache of ageism, right? It's something like, just stop whatever's coming for us.
Slow it down. Let me be in my rite of initiation again, and my rite of creation. But truthfully, these rites of passage, they happen again and again, but we are collecting them. So right after we're creating. We go into intuition and that's perimenopause. The rite of intuition is when we know what we know, and so where maybe a 20-year-old or 30-year-old in our society is put as the look, we need to have power or be visible in our culture.
The lie of it is that the 40, 50, 60-year-old, she knows something that little girls don't know, that even young women and young mothers don't know. She knows something of survival and of wisdom, and that's why we call her the sage femme, the wise woman. This is what right we're in, and you can't take what she knows away from her.
I can remember waking up at 40, waking up at 45, and feeling different in my actual waking hours, like I didn't care as much as I did when I was 20 or 30, and I wasn't as scared. As I was when I was in my twenties or my thirties, there is something of growing into this body of mine that I started to shed some of those more immature, younger places.
That's something that I don't think we have a culture or society that honors that, and so perimenopause is this beautiful invitation for wise women to have a platform and to speak the wisdom that man, those 20 and 30 year olds. Need us desperately to say, Hey, you are not going to grow old and wrinkled and you have to be afraid of sagging breasts and a terrible sex life.
Like we need to tell them a deeper truth. But there is so much almost again, hiding around it, even though you would say we're at a day and age where women are starting to talk about it. Finally, those women are realizing, I'm not all washed up just because my hormones are changing and my body's changing.
Alison Cook: Yeah, I love that. The wisdom era, and again, the more we talk about that in name, that the more we're bringing it. What comes after that?
Christy Bauman: So next is the right of legacy. And so it's what story are you leaving? So the wise woman is also the initiator. So she gets to be the one who goes back to those going through the right of initiation and she gets to be the protector.
Think of the wise sage who is there while the younger girls are vulnerable. But when those wise women are actually just trying to keep their bodies and trying to hold onto their youth, they're no longer available to protect and lead the younger generation. And so when they aren't stepping into their wisdom or asking their mothers or their fathers to step in and be protectors of those in initiation, then we've realized that.
We've told those women and men, they're not needed. They're perimenopause, they're dying off. And actually we so desperately need them because again, if you pull out into that macro system, we need to keep this going. Like there's something of the maturation that is inviting us into new life. That is what God's all about is this cycle of the new life.
Alison Cook: I find that so powerful. And there's a couple things you're saying I think that are so important to hear, and it gets back to what you're saying about vulnerability. So whether it's perimenopause, whether it's moving into that kind of intuition era, whether it's the legacy, it's vulnerable, there's a death, and you talk about in your work how we have to be willing to talk about that and face those small deaths and there's a vulnerability to the culture, to pain, to abuse, you know, all the things.
But if we are able to move through, we actually move into even more of our God-given birthright, more of our God-given agency, what we have to offer, what we have to bring.
Christy Bauman: Yes, we're right there at legacy. What are you leaving that is gonna come after you, long after you're gone? And the work of the rite of intuition is you are doing things that will outlive you and you're wise enough to know that. And so you are going to invest in the things that leave the world after you and the generations after you impacted because of how you're living.
And that wisdom then, is our legacy when they say, do you remember Allison Cook? Do you remember her words? Do you remember that one podcast when she spoke about this? It has stayed with me. It stayed with me in my kitchen when I'm cooking dinner. It stayed with me. When I'm walking in the forest on a hike, as I've aged, there's something of legacy that again, is about resurrection.
It keeps living on past us. That's a beautiful and hard part of the journey.
Alison Cook: Yeah, it is. I love that language of rite of passage. There's beauty in that, but there's hard in that. You're going through a birthing, to your point, which also involves letting go of something.
Ad Break 1
We talked to your husband, Andrew. I know you guys do some work together in trying to create space for women's stories, space for couples, but in particular space for women's stories. I know you've surveyed. Thousands of women. And you did this together, is that right? Yes. Can you tell us a little bit about your work together and some of your most powerful takeaways as it relates to how you guys are really leaning into this work of coming alongside women and also couples in your work?
Christy Bauman: Yeah. Andrew and I were both, did our masters at a seminary in psychology, two different seminaries. But what we both realized was that women's voices were not being invited to the table. And Andrew was seeing in his own work and in his own story, how he was, in a sense groomed to treat women a certain way and to objectify them and therefore not see them as an equal or hear their story.
And then I was coming from this place of wanting to bring my voice into the work and realizing that there was a lot of loopholes that I had to get through in the Traditionary seminary world. And again, why choosing psychology and science was a little bit safer for me because I was a female who was bringing stats and information that could actually be heard and listened to.
And so I think in us getting married, there was that work where he saw. The need and the importance for a good team to work together. We need the feminine and the masculine to come together to share God's story in completion and in wholeness. And so the advocacy was, well, if we look at the Western Church, the female voice has been marred and has been silenced.
And so the Enneagram eight that he is, he went on rampant to help women bring their voices back and make safe places. And he believes that the church can be a safe place for women. Again, that's his hope. And he comes back to that scripture of, you know, has been laid down your life for your wife and give yourself up for her as Christ did for the church.
And his belief is that he wants to lead a revolution of safe churches, for women's voices to be brought and that cohesion that's needed to get this work done. And. I, like I mentioned earlier, came into the world, female. And so, you know, my love for God was, Lord, teach me the way you want me to go. And so the research was, well, every woman for 16 years that walked into my counseling office was sharing a story of where she had been targeted or harmed.
There are not stories of women who, it was easy for them to be in a place of power. It does not come easy. And usually their bodies are the ones that are targeted or objectified or marked along the way. When they try to bring their voice, their entire body is usually targeted. And so I started to just take in that information.
How do I help women live longer, speak from their true voice? And my husband was, how do we make a safe place for women to do that in the Christian realm?
Alison Cook: It's really amazing. It's why I wanted to talk to both of you, because I just think there's something really powerful that you're doing it together, this work, and you bring very different voices culturally.
One thing that can happen is there can be a lot of scapegoating and blaming. I mean, I think that's definitely happened to women for sure. And also it can also happen toward men. I'm always just someone of nuance. It's like, wow, what could it look like if we're trying to kind of right some of the wrongs, bring in more of the female voice, but also do it in a partnership.
You're embodying something really beautiful to me.
Christy Bauman: Yeah. I mean, it feels like a great, like, blessing of you saying that over us, I really appreciate it because I know it hasn't been easy, and I also am just aware of, again, in this individualistic culture, we are taught in a sense to protect ourselves. Or if it's for women, it's for women. If it's for men, it's for men.
Alison Cook: and there's a bad guy and a good guy, and the guys are the bad guys, or the women are the problem.
Christy Bauman: And so in that, it's really important for us to come back to if we are made in the imago day, if both male and female are made in the image of God and the masculine and the feminine reside in all of us. All of us bear a little bit of masculine energy and feminine energy, and one is more dominant than the other, but in that it's to know God, it's to know God, and to really see God's face to me is to study that.
And so I do think it isn't that common, and I hope it becomes more common, and I think it is the way of the future for us to be successful in actually moving forward in wellbeing and health, spiritual health in psychological health. I think in physiological health. I think when we start to understand, like you said at the beginning, your daughter's journey in medical school, we know research, particularly in rural doctor's office for women, is 10 to 15 years behind if that's with our medical system.
Can you fathom, like you said, the psychological or spiritual research that we're missing out on. So, man, let's catch up with our female understanding so that then when we put the masculine and the feminine together, both healthy, it will be a revolution we can move forward. And that I think is what Christ was saying about the church, right?
Is that we've got to move into that. But it's been doing a lot of research and asking a lot of women. What has worked, what has not? Where have you been targeted? What parts of your body have been marked or not? And so I think for your listeners, while I do have my book, her Rites, and it goes through each rite of passage, while that can be an incredible resource for women, I would say it's a year of therapy in one book.
And that was my intent when I did it. But what I really would love is that we're gonna put a body map exercise, A PDF. And I think if women could just print out this body map and do this exercise, you can do it one time. You can do it as many times as you want, and you are just trying to map out your scars.
The invisible and the visible, what you've created and what you haven't, how you've been marked, what it's cost you to be birthed and to create in this world. What exile has looked like for you, where you think your legacy is going to come from? Usually the part of the body that we hide the most, it's the one that has the most to say.
And so I would just tell women like, this could be a great practice to do a body map.I've used thousands of these ways of mapping each individual's story on their bodies. We also wanna give the video course for my previous book, theology of the Womb and More Scripture based and historical understanding of what does it mean to bleed, what does it mean to birth, what does it mean to bury?
I have a video course that we wanna gift for free to your listeners if they wanna do that. It's a lot easier if you don't have time to sit and read.
Alison Cook: Amazing, so generous with your time and your talents and the wisdom that God has given you. We're so grateful. Thank you for being here with us today.
Wasn't that such a powerful conversation with Kristi? I love how she brings forth women's voices in the Bible alongside our own lived experiences in our bodies, these incredibly formative milestones, these rites of passage where we can feel so vulnerable and where so many of us have experienced harm, where we can feel so vulnerable.
Yet when we learn to reclaim them, they become tremendous opportunities to grow and to more of our God-given selves, and especially as women reflect the face of God into this world. Now we're gonna shift into my conversation with Andrew Bauman. While Christie speaks more from her personal experience as a woman, Andrew's gonna give us more of a guy's perspective looking at church culture and what it takes to truly create safe churches.
I think you'll notice how their work overlaps in such a beautiful way and how it takes all of us men and women to bring real change. Let's dive into my conversation with Andrew Bauman.
Alison Cook: Andrew, I'm thrilled to have this conversation with you today.
Andrew Bauman: Yes, I am as well. Thank you for having me.
Alison Cook: before we dive in, I wanna find out from you, you've been a pastor, you're now a therapist. We'll get into that, but more to the point, I wanna know what circumstances in your own life, in your own work led you to write a book about guarding against sexism and abuse in the church as a guy.
Andrew Bauman: Totally. There's a few different entry points. So number one, I was a pastor. I also had a hidden addiction to pornography for about 13 years. I was realizing that a degrading view of women and an oppressive theology was kind of mixing with my mindset. And so that was one entry point. I've been sober for about 15 years now of pornography and just realizing, wow, this is actually fairly normal, what I went through as a pastor, but also kind of mixing a degrading view of women and a sexist theology.
There's some tie there. So that was one entry point. The other entry point is my own origin story. So my father was also a pastor, but a prominent evangelical leader in the eighties. He was a vice president of a evangelical Christian college, and he also had a hidden sexual life, cheated on my mom for 20 something years, and that kind of blew up when I was seven years old.
So my mom went numb to survive her own trauma, and then I found myself, you know, going to church. Five times a week and you know, kind of an orphan. And the church took me in, the church began to mother me, father me. And so those were a few entry points of kind of the why so much. You know, I dedicated this book to my mom and just kind of watching her struggle, longing to be a good Christian wife, whatever that meant.
And yet my father's inability to love her well or become a healthy man himself. And then in 2018, I read a study called The Elephant in the Valley, which was a study on sexism in Silicon Valley. And then I was like, huh. I wonder about another male dominated space that I know very well. Like I wonder what those statistics are.
I wonder what that is. So that kind of set me in 2018 on the journey to begin to discover, okay, what are women saying about their own experiences of sexism and abuse in the church?
Alison Cook: Tell me a little bit about the move from being a pastor to being a therapist.
Andrew Bauman: Yeah, it didn't last very long, you know, it was a year and a half or so just realizing I couldn't be as honest as I wanted to be.
You know, I enjoyed the teaching, but I realized I had this big story of trauma, my own sexual abuse, my own stories of addiction, and I just felt like I wasn't being real. I wasn't being as authentic as I wanted to be. So I, you know, began to read some of Dan Allen's books 25 years ago or something, and kind of realized, okay, I kind of want to go in this direction and want to be more authentic with my life. Life and actually help people in a deeper way.
Alison Cook: Okay, so there's a lot to unpack here. You've spent the last three years conducting research and really listening to the stories of women. You've surveyed over 3000 women, is that right? In church settings?
Andrew Bauman: Yeah. Yeah. Over 2,800 women. Yeah.
Alison Cook: And gimme some highlights of what those stories revealed about women's experiences.
Andrew Bauman: Yeah, so these are women that worked in the church. So 16% of them worked 25 years or longer in the church. Another 25% worked 16 years or longer in the church. So these are women in the front lines of ministry and a few of the significant discoveries were 82% said they believe sexism plays a role in their church.
What is sexism? You know, think of prejudice, discrimination, stereotyping, just because of someone's sex. There's different types of sexism. We won't go into that, but 82%. I was blown away. Maybe as women or women listeners, maybe you won't be surprised, but me as a male are like, that's a lot.
A few of the other significant results, 62% of women said they wouldn't be surprised if they heard a sexist joke in church, right? So women in the kitchen, women drivers like this is stuff I grew up with hearing and became normalized. And then in 2008, Dr. Thomas Ford did some research called More Than Just a Joke.
And what he realized, what he came up with is he said, sexist humor acts as a releaser of preexisting prejudice and antagonistic attitudes that one already has about women. So it's a releaser, it's a release valve. So what that is saying is that these pastors are already have a low view of women and already have a sexist view of women.
And in a sense, these sexist jokes that are so common that these women shared with me are normative and it's incredibly sad.
Alison Cook: I almost wanna back into this question because we know this isn't how God sees women. We know this isn't how Jesus. Sees women, right? So how does a church become a place where this is okay?
Andrew Bauman: Yeah. I mean there's so many different, there's so many different avenues. You know, I tend to think, you know, 'cause I work with a lot of men and unwanted sexual behavior, some of barn's, research of 50% of pastors have some type of relationship with pornography. You know, I see that as one entry point. I also see incredibly simple interpretations of scripture that have been used and weaponized and interpreted in a certain way that is so heavily impacted by patriarchal societies of the Bible.
You know, early Roman Greek culture. And then the sexist interpretations have then eased their way into the norm and they think that's what God wants. And so a few of these scripture verses, which we, you know, we can dive into if we want, but they've become, oh, this is how God sees women. This is how God wants the church to run.
And really it's based on misogyny. It's based on actually a deep hatred of women and not on what God actually wants.
Alison Cook: So I hear what you're saying. There's a lot of different ways that it kind of sneaks in. I don't even know if it sneaks in the back door, comes in the front door and gets embedded in a theology that whether well intended or harmfully intended almost reinforces this low view of women. And then women to some degree might internalize some of this and it creates this sort of entangled. Mess.
I wanna understand the relationship between what you're describing and spiritual abuse, abusive cultures.
Andrew Bauman: You know, spiritual abuse is one of the most vile of all abuses, right? You have emotional abuse, psychological abuse, sexual abuse, financial abuse, physical abuse, all these abuses.
But you know, simply thinking of abuse as power over rather than power shared. And when you throw in spirituality, when I as your spiritual leader represent God, like that's the ultimate Trump card in a sense. I can do whatever I want to retain power and control over others if I have God on my side. So it's incredibly dark because who can argue with God, right?
And so when God is used in that manipulative way, the harm is deep. And so many women who are just like, I don't go to church anymore. I've lost my faith. But many of 'em said, no, actually I love Jesus more than ever. I just, I can't be a part of a church. I can't be a part of the system. Right? And it reminds me of the legendary Diane Langberger, her quote in her book, redeeming Power, she says.
People are image bearers of God, not systems. We're called to speak truth to power, but many times we feel like we can't actually speak the truth to the system. And yet the system itself isn't the image bearer of God, it's actually the ones who are a part of the system.
Alison Cook: How do men in particular, disentangle from bad theology, disentangle from this idea of power over versus shared power? I had a conversation with Sheila Ray Gregoire, and we talked about how harmful messages definitely harm women and also harm men because this isn't what God means by spiritual leadership, whatever that means.
Andrew Bauman: Right, exactly.
Alison Cook: How do men begin to do this work of disentangling from these harmful toxins? I know, you know, don't tell sexist jokes, but it's deeper than that. It is. It's much deeper than that.
Andrew Bauman: I mean, one, we've gotta first see that there is a problem, right? Because of our privilege, because that we don't, well, I don't experience it.
I didn't hear that joke. It doesn't impact me. We have to realize this is an issue. We are the ones perpetrating it. I say it time and time again, you know, domestic violence, sexual abuse, like who are the main perpetrators of these things? It's mostly men. Yes, women abuse, of course, but yet the statistics say mostly men are perpetrating domestic violence.
So we've gotta realize we've got a violence problem. We've gotta begin to do the hard work. And especially for, you know, church leaders. You can't lead others where you haven't gone yourself. So if you haven't done work on your own sexuality, if you haven't begun the hard therapeutic work of self-discovery, you've got to, you've gotta look at your own life.
What was femininity to you growing up? What was masculinity? What was your socialization of being a man growing up? Like you've gotta do that hard work and unlearn so you can relearn. Actually, I think what's much more God pleasing and much more mutuality. And I'm reminded of the verse, Galatians 3 28, right?
There's no Jew or Greek, no slavery free, no male or female, but we are one in Christ. There's no hierarchy in Christ. And yet, if you grew up in a much more traditional home and you saw, okay, a woman played this role. Man played this role. Not necessarily wrong if that's what they mutually agreed to, but so many times, and I hear time and time again with the men that I work with is, no, this is God's role.
This is what she has to do to fulfill her call. And what we've really confused, kind of patriarchal norms and sexist attitudes, as you know, theological in God, honoring.
Alison Cook: and to come again to this idea of how Jesus saw women, right? This is the actual model of what a guy needs to try to get to the root of, not only for her health, and this is what always feels so important to me to say. But also for his health.
Andrew Bauman: Yes. That was a huge thing of realizing, interviewing all these women and then realizing, wow, how we have treated women. And then when I begin to look at Jesus' life, the disconnect is just wild because here he is, you know, just breaking down these huge barriers for women, right?
When Jesus starts his ministry, what Jesus is born into is this wildly oppressive Roman rule. And then Jesus comes in, you know the story, one of my favorites is the woman at the well, right? In John four. And the Samaritan woman is not only oppressed by her own people, she's an outcast among outcasts. And then Jesus goes up and he offers a drink to share spit with an unclean woman.
I mean, it's so scandalous, right? It's so wild. And then he tells her he's launches his ministry. Go tell the world. Go tell the world who I am, and it's like, oh wow. Right. The story of the alabaster jar, you know, in Luke 7 36, the Canaanite woman in Matthew 1521 and the other amazing one of Mary Magdalene in John 20.
The most important of the gospel, the resurrection. He says, I'm gonna entrust this to a woman to go preach and tell the world that I have risen. And yet growing up, that was the most absurd thing to hear a woman preach. Like, I remember I'm about to go to grad school and looking for a job in Seattle. And I was like, oh, I could do this youth pastor.
'cause I was a youth pastor at the time and a college pastor. I was like, I could do this youth pastor stuff in my sleep and you know, make money on the side and, you know, it'd be easy. And so I applied, I was in a national search and I was down to the final, like two people. So I had an interview with, you know, the deacon board.
I'm making 'em laugh and I've got the job in the back and they finally ask at the end of the interview, do you know that we have a woman pastor? And I like almost fell outta my seat. I didn't even know that existed. It was like, what in the world? And I tried to make some joke and act like I was cool with it, but I was like, well, I know what the Bible says.
And then I removed myself the next day from the thing. But like that's how deep I was thinking that no, I wanted to honor God. Yet the stories Jesus did was the exact opposite, but I had taken those few scripture verses and made them in a sense, the gospel.
Alison Cook: Yeah. Sometimes I do think about if Jesus were to walk the earth again today, you know, just to imagine, you know, him coming into our current context, you know, who are those people he would be sharing spit with? It's mind blowing how we repeat patterns.
Andrew, what are practical steps, like how do we actually change cultures? Because there's a lot of different things you've just talked about. There's theologies and some people aren't gonna change their theologies, and that doesn't necessarily mean they have to be abusive and toxic.
You've talked about guys changing their internalized messages about women, but I guess when we kind of circle back to the church, which is the topic of your book, we're not gonna be perfect, but what are some practical steps a church can take to become safer?
Andrew Bauman: I think the most simple one is like number one. Can we just start this conversation? When's the last time you heard a sermon on sexual abuse? One out of three women are impacted by sexual abuse. When's the last sermon you heard on domestic violence? That's one out of four. And so let's just start the conversation, and if your church isn't starting it, well, what'd it take for you to start it?
Hey, can I do a book club on this book? Because the more we normalize it, the less it'll be secret, the less it'll be in the dark. We have to begin to talk about these things. Number two, I'm thinking, how do we begin to change the church? We have to use trusted, researched resources. That's something that Sheila talks about all the time, right?
It's like there's so much bad stuff out there that's not well researched. It's just I think somebody's pathologized, unaddressed trauma coming out as a normal theology or something rather than actually from a healed place. And then they. Represent God. Another thing I like to tell people is we can't do this alone, right?
We gotta find our tribe. And so a lot of times people are isolated. Well, there's no churches in my area, there's nobody's talking about this. It's like, I get it. And online communities can be incredibly helpful. And then finally, what I tell women a lot, if they don't hold positions of power, what can I do?
And a big thing that I often say is begin to trust your gut. I think a woman's intuition has been so attacked. Her body has been deemed dangerous. And you know, whether it's purity culture, or whether it's just from male projection teaching about modesty or whatever, making it a woman's fault. A woman actually needs to double down on her intuition on trusting her own body.
I believe God lives in our bodies, and so we must trust the voice of our body. And I think when we can begin to trust our gut, then we can begin to speak from that centered place. Rather than that insecure place or that traumatized place that we can actually begin to trust our own goodness.
Alison Cook: One of the things I say to women, and a lot of it's outta my own experience of kind of having a knowing of, okay, I am not gonna be fully respected here.
And also being an empathetic person, especially where again, there's that spectrum of toxicity, there's bad theology, and otherwise decent humans, there's really toxic pathology. And so for me, what I'll sometimes say to women is that trusting of the body doesn't mean you have to go burn the house down.
Sometimes it does. Sometimes you do. Sometimes it means I need to find myself in another location to get somewhere where I do feel valued. I do feel honored. I do feel respected. That's what's most important, just taking that simple step of surrounding yourself with people where you do feel valued, it's just such a basic step, but so important.
Andrew Bauman: Totally. And so many women in the church don't feel like they're valued or their gifts aren't being fully utilized.
Alison Cook: Andrew, what gives you hope for the future of the church regarding men and women coming together in a beautiful, wholehearted way that is reflective of original design, of original goodness of men and women? What gives you hope about that?
Andrew Bauman: One, all of the new voices and the voices that are coming out and speaking up against this stuff and the new resources that are coming out that are speaking up, but then also even more poignantly the work that I do on the ground, right? So every month, you know, we have our four day men's workshops folks, men coming in from all over the world and like dealing with their darkness, wrestling with their glory.
Like they're doing the work to heal their unprocessed trauma so they, they can stop oozing on the people they say they love. And that gives me a lot of hope. The most profound workshop that we do under the co-ed workshops. What happens if we actually get together and face each other and deal with our gendered wounds and heal and not be scared of that, but actually begin to engage what we will most fear.
That gives me hope. Those groups that we do are just so powerful.
Alison Cook: Why is this where the church, the place where we can't, as men and women, brothers and sisters come together and honor and love each other and respect each other and not shame each other and also call each other, and I can think of a number of different angles on that, but I'm curious to hear your response to that as someone who's been in church ministry.
Andrew Bauman: Yeah, I mean, I truly believe we can't be spiritually healthy unless we're emotionally healthy. And I feel like we've neglected the inner world, so many leaders, we have become charismatic, you know, so we can get more people and you know, kind of the CEO model, but we have it focused on the inner world, and so that oozes over unprocessed trauma is always reenacted in our present day life.
Always. And so I think that's what we're seeing is this unprocessed trauma coming out and oozing out in the way people lead.
Alison Cook: Yeah, I like that because it gives us a place to start. We're not gonna fix 2000 years, but we can start with our own unprocessed trauma.
Andrew Bauman: Yes, exactly.
Alison Cook: At the very least, the church can become a place that doesn't skim across the surface of that, but actually moves us into deeper health internally, which is inevitably gonna lead us back to each other.
Andrew Bauman: Exactly. So when we look at like scripture, you know, if we're all dealing with all these unprocessed wounds and oh, I feel insecure inside, I need then to try to feel big. I'm gonna go to power and control. So of course spiritual abuse becomes a thing, right? Or when I think of how scripture was used in, what was it?
1807, the slave Bible was created and you know, based on slaves obey your earthly masters was the verse, right? So they basically developed an entire Bible to help oppress entire people group. And they took out the story of Exodus from that Bible because they did not want to empower an oppressed people.
And so this is where scripture can be weaponized.
Alison Cook: Yeah, it goes right back to your point, Jesus words, out of the overflow of the heart, the mouse speaks. That same integrity has always been the most important thing no matter what era. Of atrocities you are living in. If that inner integrity is not there, you will use all that trauma, all that pain, all that sin, Whatever word you wanna use will come out against other people. And at the same time, in those same context, whether it's 1807 or whether it's now integrity in the body, to your point about it being in the body says this isn't right. I don't care what scriptures you're using to justify it. This isn't right.
This isn't good, this isn't true. This isn't honorable. This isn't leading me more to love of God, love of self and love of neighbor.
Andrew Bauman: Exactly.
Alison Cook: Andrew, tell my listeners about this book you've written. You're doing a lot of work in this space, so tell us specifically about the book and about the other places where people could find your work.
Andrew Bauman: So Safe Church is the book of over 2,800 women in the research of, you know, how to fight against sexism and abuse. You can also find it on the website, safe Church us. Definitely check it out. Share it with your friends. I think it's super important. I mean, obviously I'm a little biased since it took me five years to write it, but this conversation is vital.
Our churches need to be safe for everyone, right? And we need to look at these blind spots. Speaking up against the church doesn't mean that you're bad. It actually means I care about it, right? It actually means that I love the church and I want it to be a safer, more equitable place of liberation rather than trauma.
And then my wife and I, we run the Christian Counseling Center. For sexual health and trauma, and you can find@christiancc.org. And we run workshops and retreats and all sorts of offerings as well. And then my wife's new book with Penguin Random House is called her rights, R-I-T-E-S. But Women's Rites of Passage, a Sacred Journey for Mind, body, and Soul. Her rights, so you can check that out as well.
Alison Cook: I just wanna say, you know, we've all benefited so much from Diane Berg's work over the years and she writes about this and there's some other voices, but it is just the fact that as a man you are doing this work to speak to it. 'cause it isn't just women. You have to do this work and I really appreciate your putting yourself out there in that way. I'm sure it's not always easy and I think it's really important toward the end of healing, we've gotta heal together. To your point, the answer is not to just silo off from each other. So I really appreciate you're doing that work.
Andrew Bauman: Thank you very much, and thank you so much for having me on. It was great to finally meet you.
Thank you for joining me for this week's episode of The Best of You. It would mean so much if you take a moment to subscribe. You can go to Apple, Spotify, Amazon music, or wherever you listen to podcasts, and click the plus or follow button that will ensure you don't miss an episode, and it helps get the word out to others while you're there.
I'd love it if you leave your five star review. I look forward to seeing you back here next Thursday. And remember, as you become the best of who you are, you honor God. You heal others and you stay true to your God given self.