Healing the Broken

She pioneered the first Christian-based rape crisis service in the UK, writes a controversial agony aunt column in Christianity magazine and is determined that the Church must get more involved in helping victims of rape and sexual abuse. Lucinda van der Hart speaks to Maggie Ellis

‘I have now not been raped for 11 days – thanks to the support of Life Centre. 11 days is amazing; for me it feels like a lifetime and it feels like a dream! I had to let you know because I haven’t felt like this before and it is so good. It is an unbelievable feeling – clean at last! I hope for ever…’

Tears spring to Maggie Ellis’ eyes as she reads this testimony, written by one of her clients. Although she is well known in some Christian circles for her candid column in Christianity magazine – in which she offers advice to readers struggling with a variety of sexual problems – Ellis in fact only spends a tiny fraction of her working life writing. Six years ago she founded the Life Centre in West Sussex. This rape crisis service, which she now runs as director, sees around 77 clients aged between seven and 80 every week. All of them are victims of rape or sexual abuse.

A new direction
Having previously co-led Revelation Church, Chichester (which she and her husband founded at the ages of 18 and 24 respectively) and worked as a history teacher, deciding to set up the Life Centre represented a radical career change for Ellis. The journey began through caring for those in her church who had been raped or sexually abused. ‘One woman that I supported had suffered rape and decided to report to the police. She returned with a scrap of paper with a phone number for a support centre in Brighton on it – this was the extent of emotional support offered. When she called the centre she was told that she was out of their area, and couldn’t be helped,’ Ellis says. ‘I was horrified.’

‘I began to feel a real stirring in my heart to do something specific for people like her, who had been raped or sexually abused,’ she continues. ‘I came to the place where I thought: with all integrity, I can’t worship God each Sunday, believing in justice, believing that the Gospel is for the broken – and knowing that when someone in my city reports rape they are given a useless phone number and there is no support for them.

‘I felt convicted that it’s not enough just to support people in church – what about all those people who aren’t Christians who have no support? It was a matter of justice. I couldn’t live with the fact that in our county there really was no specialised service available and so I decided to set something up.’
The next step was to train appropriately – so Ellis embarked on training as a counsellor, and then specialised in psychosexual therapy, learning how to ‘support people with any form of sexual problem – whether it’s a sexual dysfunction in a heterosexual relationship, an orientation issue or a sexual addiction.’ And then she adds emphatically: ‘Although we live in such a broken society in terms of our sexuality, there are not many psychosexual therapists in the UK – and even fewer Christian ones.’

A unique service
Her training was not the only unusual element to Ellis’ new line of work – while there are many secular rape crisis services in the UK, as far as Ellis is aware, the Life Centre is the only Christian one.

The vision for the work of the Life Centre is taken from the depiction of restoration in Isaiah 61: ‘“restoring beauty instead of shame, bringing release from darkness, freeing the prisoners” – because people often feel so imprisoned and captive to the effects of sexual abuse.’

On a practical level, this is achieved through providing face-to-face and telephone counselling for clients. The centre employs ten professionally qualified counsellors, five support staff and currently has 39 volunteer telephone counsellors, all of whom have completed a 75-hour training before starting work on the telephones. In total the team come from 19 local churches. ‘Anybody who has a direct therapeutic role with our clients has to have a personal Christian faith,’ Ellis explains. People in other support roles are required to work in a way that is actively sympathetic, respectful of and supportive towards the Christian values and work of the charity and the role of prayer within the organisation. The reason for this is that counsellors need to be able to pray with clients if they request it. ‘Our policy is that we would never push prayer on people – the client has to request prayer for it to be given. We are predominantly a counselling service but we do believe there is a wonderful power in prayer to bring . Often people who are not Christians recognise that too and are interested in experiencing a short time of prayer as part of the support they receive.’

While the centre was originally set up for people in Sussex, the telephone helpline has already become a national resource. ‘Recently we had a call from someone who was raped in one of England’s big cities. Within an hour of the rape she phoned directory enquiries and was put through to us,’ Ellis says. ‘A lot of people under 18 too, who are in ongoing situations of sexual abuse are using the phone service. It’s an amazing privilege to be able to give them a safe place to offload the hideous realities that they are facing. It is their human right not to be raped, to be safe, to be respected – but often they have lost hold of the knowledge that this safety is their right. We try to impart that knowledge to them.’

Leaning on God
Because of the weighty nature of what is listened to during sessions with clients Ellis and the Life Centre team feel the need to remain close to God. ‘We do a lot as a team in order to make sure that we don’t end up burnt out because what we hear is very distressing and we are constantly touching darkness,’ she says. ‘I often think of the words in Psalm 23: “though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I fear no evil.” I believe that we can fearlessly walk through dark valleys and the shadows of death. How we do that in practise is that all counsellors have structured and regular supervision, and good team support on an ongoing basis – so that we are supporting and sharing with one another. We also use prayer as a way to offload.’

Financing the centre is another very real concern. While funding has previously primarily come through secular sources, the centre’s recent lottery grant application was rejected on the basis of Life Centre’s location in Chichester – and that the fund is so oversubscribed. It costs £1,000 to put one client through a year of counselling – and about £10,000 per month to run the centre. Ellis, who lets on that she is losing sleep over her concerns about securing funding for the months ahead, is putting measures in place to encourage individuals and churches to consider funding a client through their therapy, or pay £350 to cover the cost of running the centre for a day.

Pioneers in crime prevention
All the main agencies working with victims of rape and sexual abuse in West Sussex use Life Centre directly, and Ellis is pioneering some innovative schemes in association with local police in order to help reduce crime levels. ‘Many rape or sexual abuse victims don’t want to report to the police because of a huge number of fears and pressures,’ she explains. ‘But they do want the perpetrator to be stopped from attacking others – which is highly likely as many rape or sexual abuse offenders make serial offences.’

The Life Centre plays ‘middle man’ to the police and victims of rape or abuse – hence Ellis is developing a scheme whereby clients can pass on detailed information of the sexual crime they have suffered to the centre, without attaching their name to it. The facts of the crime are passed onto the police who can use this to trace repeat offenders.

What’s the church doing?
One in five women in the UK have experienced rape, yet Ellis believes that generally churches are ‘hopelessly ill-equipped’ to deal effectively with victims of rape and sexual abuse. ‘Look and see if you do have a rape crisis service in your region and if you do, start working with them,’ she advises. ‘But it is a postcode lottery in Britain in terms of support for survivors of rape and sexual abuse. There are whole regions of the country where there is no service available. We would love to help Christians or churches in parts of the country where there is no service to set up branches of the Life Centre. We have developed a model that we know works, with policies and procedures in place – it is something that is very reproducible. This is a fantastic way to bring the heart of the Gospel to people and to reach out to our communities; to go to the most broken and the most suffering.’

Client Testimonies

‘I never had anyone to speak to about my Dad raping me for four years as a child. When I was older I would pray when my boyfriend was strangling me that God would rescue me, but He never heard my prayer. So eventually I decided God wasn’t there and stopped praying. I never had anyone to tell what I had gone through. But now you at Life Centre, after 43 years, have been that person to understand. That’s all I needed. You have been God to me.’

‘I have gained a greater insight into myself through Life Centre, which I feel for me has proved a much healthier and positive outcome. It has been very constructive, a safe place, and has empowered me to carry on living.’

‘The telephone counsellors called the police for me last night – so that is two days now that I have not been punched and sexually abused. Without their help he would have hurt me. Having help makes me feel a bit weaker, but that’s OK because he didn’t rape me. Thank you for always looking for what you can praise me about, when I’m not sure it’s due. I will keep working at being safe because I feel very close to being unsafe.’

Maggie Ellis would love to hear from other Christian psychosexual therapists, or churches interested in setting up a branch of the Life Centre in their locality.

Email: info@lifecentre.uk.com or phone 01243 786349
www.lifecentre.uk.com