One of my favorite passages about living peacefully with others is Matthew 5: 23–24: "When you bring your gift to the altar and there remember that someone has something against you, leave your gift beside the altar and first be reconciled with that person. Then come and offer your sacrifice to God."

These words were spoken as part of the Sermon on the Mount and they offer a powerful message about how God may view our earthly relationships. It is clear from these verses that our gifts to Jesus are not acceptable unless our human relationships are in order.

At the time Jesus spoke these words, people offered sacrifices as a way to make their relationships right with God. Jesus is reminding us in these verses that he cannot be rightly related to us if we are not active in making our earthly relationships right with each other. In fact, this needs to be our first work. Jesus says, "First reconcile yourself to your brother or sister, then offer your gift."

We don’t hear this passage often from the front of the church. It’s hard for me to imagine a call for the offering sounding something like this: "Let’s take some time to think over our relationships today before we take up the offering. If there is a problem you’re experiencing in some relationship, please don’t give today. Instead, leave right now and make things right with that person. Then, come back next week prepared to give an offering after patching things up."

I can imagine that if people were to take that invitation to heart more than half the church would clear out.

The title of the lesson, "Homes of Peace and Healing," brings to my mind the question, "How peaceful and healing are Adventist homes, really?" I was privileged to lead a research team for the past few years that investigated intimate partner violence (spouse abuse) among Adventists in the North Pacific Union Conference of the North American Division. The research team has done considerable work analyzing the data and trying to understand the phenomenon of intimate partner violence. We believe the results can be generalized to Adventism throughout North America.

Our data reflect a fairly representative group of church attendees from each conference in the North Pacific Union, with a total of 1,431 responses. The results reveal a pattern of hurting people in our congregations. About one-third of the females and 20 percent of males reported being assaulted by an intimate partner. Almost half of the survey respondents identified a behavior at the hands of a husband, wife, or intimate partner that was identifiable as abusive. This does not sound peaceful or healing to me.

As we investigated opinions about spouse abuse, we learned that more than half (54 percent) of the survey participants in our study did not agree with the statement, "Domestic abuse is a serious problem in the Adventist church." Given the reality of congregants’ victimization experiences, challenging this perception must become a priority. It is imperative that abuse of any kind be clearly and consistently condemned from the pulpit and that the Church take responsibility for promoting healthy relationship skills.

Recognizing that abuse is a real problem in our congregations, what is our church doing to make changes in marital relationships? What is it doing to help those who have been victimized? I don’t have the answers to these questions, but I would like to relate a story that happened in one community with a well-established Adventist congregation.

Five years ago on May 9, in a rural Midwestern town, an emergency room physician was arrested on charges of solicitation for murder. He tried to hire someone to kill his wife—the worst kind of domestic violence. He had six children. He and his wife were members of no particular church, although he had been raised as an Adventist. The local Adventist Church was well aware of the situation because the man’s parents were lifelong members when the story hit the local media.

The nearby Baptist Church also tuned into the big news of this small rural place. The day after the media ran the story; members from the Baptist Church went and plopped down six bags of groceries and two hundred dollars on this woman’s kitchen table. Down the road, the Adventist pastor suggested to the parents that a Steps to Christ might be just what the offender needed. The Adventist Church did nothing to help address the victim’s needs or the needs of her children. Today, the woman, the potential target of death, and her children are members of that Baptist Church.

It’s a mystery to me how we can organize literally millions of people, empowering well-known Adventist evangelists to warn people about the Three Horns and the Mark of the Beast, and not have a clue about helping hurting people. Churches make it a priority to invest in equipment and structural revisions so that certain well-worn messages can be flashed on screens by satellites from thousands of miles away to congregations all over the world, but we can’t seem to figure out practical ways to help hurting people in our own families and congregations.

If the statistics in our domestic violence study are any indication of the state of our church’s health in regard to intimate relationships, we need help. If our families are to become genuine places of peace and healing, perhaps when we bring our gifts to the altar, we need to follow the advice of Matthew 5 instead of following the Gospel of Widespread TV Evangelism.

It is my prayer that members of the Adventist Church will take the initiative to become icons of peace and healing to hurting and broken people, not only in our own homes and congregations, but also in our own communities and throughout the world.

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