Ken Sande’s article “The Churches’ Role in Preserving and Healing Marriages” was published in The Journal of Biblical Counseling in Winter 2003.1 But it isn’t just an old, irrelevant article from two decades ago. It has shaped a generation of pastors, biblical counselors, and lay leaders in how they think about biblical peacemaking and abuse.
Sande is the founder of Peacemaker Ministries, and his “slippery slope of conflict” diagram (see above) appears in seminaries, small group curricula, and church discipline handbooks across the evangelical world.2 It can be found in dozens of online articles that teach the “biblical peacemaking” concepts Sande spells out in his article.
In 2021, an independent investigation into the “conciliation” model (the system Sande built) concluded that it had been used to traumatize vulnerable people. Sande himself admitted to Christianity Today that if practitioners aren’t trained in power dynamics, this model can “abuse a victim all over again.”3 Even CCEF, the organization that originally published the article, now teaches that “abuse is not a marriage problem” and that traditional marriage counseling will “likely cause more harm than good.”4
Despite these admissions, this 2003 article and its teaching remains uncorrected and in circulation.
To understand why this framework is so dangerous, we have to look at what the article teaches and the bodies it leaves behind. This matters not only for those who were harmed by churches and church leaders who followed Sande’s framework over the past two decades, but also for all the Christian abuse survivors who will surface in the next two decades, desperately looking for help from their church communities.
My hope is that those women will find more biblical help rooted in compassion and Christ’s love for the oppressed.
The article says…
…divorce rates have climbed, and the church has failed to push back. Christians should be leading the fight to preserve marriages. Four cultural “clamps” that once held marriages together are gone, and pastors ought to intervene earlier and more firmly. If they don’t, the sheep suffer.
Sande’s “biblical peacemaking” framework treats every marriage in conflict as a “pressure cooker” containing “two sinners” whose clashing desires produce the heat. His slippery slope places divorce, separation, and litigation on one side as “escape” or “attack” responses. The peaceful middle belongs to discussion, negotiation, mediation, arbitration, and church discipline.
On the surface, Sande’s framework sounds logical and responsible. Biblical. It names sin and calls for peacemaking. And peace is good, right? It gives pastors tools and quotes Matthew 18. Must be from God!
The article cites Barna. It cites Judith Wallerstein. But it does not cite a single abuse survivor. It does not acknowledge that most of the divorces it laments were initiated by women leaving dangerous men. Domestic violence research consistently shows that women file for divorce at higher rates than men and that safety concerns are among the top reasons.
A framework that ignores this data is not describing real marriages. It describes the IDEA of marriage.
The Invisible Assumptions that Keep You Trapped
Three BIG HUGE assumptions shape this article even though Sande never states them directly. It’s important to notice these assumptions because that’s all they are. They are not facts. They are belief systems that serve some people and not others.
The first assumption is symmetry. Sande assumes both spouses bring roughly equal power, roughly equal sin, and roughly equal responsibility to every conflict. Inside that assumption, “peacemaking” CAN work. A skilled mediator can help two parties with equal power, autonomy, and agency find a middle path.
But abuse is not symmetrical. Coercive control is not symmetrical. One person controlling another is not a “pressure cooker” producing “heat and pressure.” It is a power structure. Applying symmetrical conflict tools to asymmetrical power situations always harms the person with less power.
The second assumption is institutional priority. Sande is not primarily concerned with people. He is concerned with an institution (marriage) and the reputation of the church. The article repeatedly frames divorce as damaging to the church’s witness, giving the world “a convenient excuse to label Christians as hypocrites.” (Ironically, the fruit of prioritizing institutions over human lives is one of the biggest reasons other people label Christians as hypocrites. Because they are.)
The problem with this concern is that it puts reputation above reality. Jesus was not worried about what the Pharisees thought of him when he dined with tax collectors. Paul was not worried about how it looked when he rebuked Peter to his face. A church more concerned about its brand than about the people inside its walls has already lost its witness, no matter what its divorce statistics say.
The third assumption is pastoral authority over private discernment. Sande’s framework assumes the pastor is equipped, objective, and spiritually qualified to intervene in marriages. It assumes members owe submission to pastoral judgment on these questions. It assumes the congregation should carry out church discipline against members who do not comply. (Excommunicate those rebellious women who won’t submit to abuse and suffering!)
But pastors are not trained in trauma, coercive control, narcissistic abuse, or the dynamics of spiritual manipulation. Most seminaries still do not require a single course in any of these areas. The framework treats pastoral authority as spiritual when it is often institutional, and as wise when it is often untrained and inexperienced.
What the Bible Actually Teaches About Marriage, Suffering, and Leaving an Abusive Marriage
A fair reading of Scripture will reveal a different pattern than the one Sande describes.
God hates oppression. The prophets condemned men who mistreated their wives. Malachi 2 warns men against covering their garments with violence against the wives of their youth. Exodus 21 gives a wife whose husband withholds food, clothing, or marital love the right to walk away free. Isaiah calls God’s people to seek justice, correct oppression, and defend the cause of the fatherless and the widow.
The widow and the orphan are mentioned because they had no male protector in the ancient world and were therefore the most vulnerable to exploitation. A married woman with a violent husband is in a similar position. She has no protector, because the one who was supposed to protect her has become the danger. The prophetic tradition is on her side.
God sees the oppressed. Psalm 10 describes the arrogant man who hunts the weak, whose mouth is full of cursing and deceit and oppression, who says in his heart “God has forgotten.” The psalm insists that God has not forgotten. The God of the Bible is actually NOT neutral between oppressor and oppressed. He takes sides.
The biblical record on oppression inside marriage is not silent. And it does not support Sande’s framework.
Jesus announced his mission in terms the church has largely forgotten. In Luke 4 he reads from Isaiah and says the text is fulfilled in him: good news to the poor, freedom for prisoners, recovery of sight, liberty for the oppressed. He did not say he came to preserve institutions. He said he came to set captives free.
Paul wrote that in cases where an unbelieving spouse departs, the believer is not in bondage. The word Paul uses, dedoulōtai, is the language of slavery. Paul is explicit that marriage, whatever else it is, is not slavery. If a spouse will not remain in covenant, the other is released.
And Jesus himself named an exception. In Matthew 19 he permits divorce for porneia, a broad word in Greek that covers serious sexual betrayal. Evangelical tradition has long debated whether this exception can be extended to other forms of covenant-breaking, like abuse and abandonment.
The permanence view that Sande and his circle promote is actually a narrow minority position, not the historic teaching of the church. Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, and the Westminster Divines all recognized biblical grounds for divorce beyond simple adultery.
The idea that only death ends a marriage is a twentieth-century development, not a recovery of ancient orthodoxy.
Ten Red Flags to Watch For in any “Biblical Peacemaking” Teaching
1. FALSE: Every troubled marriage is a “pressure cooker” of two sinners
Sande frames marriage trouble as mutual sin producing friction. This language is useful for ordinary conflict, but it’s devastating when applied to abuse. It doesn’t distinguish the difference between a husband and wife arguing about money and a husband controlling, terrorizing, and demeaning his wife. Both get called “conflict.” Both get the same prescribed tools. This idea that both spouses are at fault does tremendous damage even before the intervention begins.
The Bible does not treat all conflict as symmetrical. The prophets distinguish between oppressor and oppressed. Jesus distinguishes between the wolves and the sheep. A counseling framework that cannot make these distinctions is not biblical. It only uses biblical language to control. This is spiritual abuse.
2. FALSE: The church’s job is to preserve marriages
The article assumes this without arguing for it. But Scripture does not assign this task to the church. It assigns the church to make disciples, to proclaim Christ, to care for widows and orphans, to confront injustice, to love one another. Marriages happen inside the church because the church is made of humans, and humans marry. But the church does not exist to protect marriage.
When preservation of marriage becomes the church’s central concern in counseling situations, something has shifted. The church has begun treating an institution as the thing to be saved instead of the people inside it. This is idolatry, not orthodoxy.
3. FALSE: Rising divorce rates are the crisis
Sande treats the 400 percent rise in divorce as self-evidently catastrophic. He never asks why. He never acknowledges that the rise coincides with women gaining the legal and economic freedom to leave marriages they could not safely leave before. He never acknowledges that no-fault divorce laws exist in part because fault-based divorce required abused women to prove their abuse in public court while still living with the abuser.
The rise in divorce is not a simple story of moral decay. It is a story of how women are finally able to access escape routes. Some of the marriages that ended should have ended decades earlier. Some of the women who walked away walked away with their lives.
A framework that grieves divorce statistics without grieving the conditions that made those divorces necessary is not measuring the right thing.
4. FALSE: The “slippery slope” is a biblical framework
The slippery slope diagram places suicide, flight, and denial as “escape responses” on one end, and litigation, assault, and murder as “attack responses” on the other. The peaceful middle belongs to discussion, mediation, arbitration, and church discipline.
Consider what this framework tells an abused wife. When she flees, she is on the “escape” side of the diagram, grouped with suicide and denial. When she files for a protective order or initiates divorce proceedings, she is on the “attack” side, grouped with assault and murder. The only peaceful path available to her is to stay, negotiate, and submit to church discipline.
This is not a biblical framework. It is a framework that keeps victims in place.
No passage of Scripture equates a woman fleeing violence with a person taking her own life. No passage equates a woman seeking legal protection with a person committing assault. The diagram imports assumptions that the Bible does not share, then labels those assumptions biblical.
5. FALSE: The “four clamps” holding marriages together were good things
Sande laments the loss of the cultural, legal, and economic pressures that used to keep marriages intact. He treats these “clamps” as protective structures the church should mourn.
But what were the “clamps?” Social shame. Legal barriers to divorce. Women’s economic dependence on husbands. The cultural impossibility of a divorced woman rebuilding a life.
These are not moral structures. They are coercion, plain and simple. Good marriages don’t need “clamps” to force them to stay together. These “clamps” were designed to keep many women trapped with men who hurt them, raped them, and terrorized their children.
I don’t lament the loss of abusive clamps. I celebrate that.
A theology that mourns the loss of female coercion as a loss for the church has not thought carefully about whose side God is on.
6. FALSE: Children are always harmed more by divorce than by their parents’ marriage
Sande cites Wallerstein’s Unexpected Legacy of Divorce to argue that divorce is catastrophic for children.5 He does not cite Mavis Hetherington’s larger and more rigorous longitudinal work, which found that the intense adjustment period typically lasts one to two years, with the vast majority of children of divorce functioning well within normal developmental ranges by year six. 6 He does not cite the substantial literature showing that children raised in high-conflict and abusive homes fare worse than children whose parents divorce.7 He does not mention that children of abusers often experience the divorce itself as a rescue.
Children are not helped by their mothers being beaten. They are not helped by watching their fathers verbally demolish their mothers at dinner. They are not helped by living in a home where love is weaponized and safety is conditional. The claim that divorce is always worse for children than the alternative is not true. The claim that children are better off in a stable, loving home than in a high-conflict one is true, but it does not support the argument Sande is making. It undermines it.
7. FALSE: Divorce damages the church’s witness
The argument is that Christian divorce gives the world a reason to call Christians hypocrites. The concern is about reputation.
But consider what actually damages the church’s witness to the world: pastors who counsel abused women back to their abusers. Elders who excommunicate women for leaving destructive marriages. Churches that protect coercive controllers and liars and shun their victims. Women who walk away from faith altogether because the people of God would not protect them.
The hypocrisy the world notices is not the hypocrisy of Christian divorce. It is the hypocrisy of a church that claims to follow a Savior who set captives free and then holds the door shut on its own daughters. If Sande were actually worried about the witness of the Church, he would be worried about this.
8. FALSE: Matthew 18 governs marital disputes
Sande treats Matthew 18:15-20 as the template for handling marital trouble. The passage describes what to do when a brother sins against you: go to him privately, then with one or two witnesses, then bring it to the church. If he refuses to listen, treat him as an outsider.
This passage was not written as a marital counseling manual. It was written for members of a worshiping community dealing with interpersonal sin between relative equals. Its application to marriage is an extension, not a direct teaching. And its application to abuse is a catastrophe.
Matthew 18 has been used again and again to require abused women to confront their abusers directly, then with “witnesses” who often turn out to be the abuser’s allies, then to bring the matter before the church where the husband is frequently believed over the wife. The passage that was supposed to protect the offended party has become a weapon against her. When the one sinned against is told to confront her sinner, the framework itself has failed her.
Jesus’s teaching assumes fairness and equality which are things that don’t exist in an abusive relationship. A better application of Matthew 18 in abuse situations is to recognize that the brother has already refused to listen, already refused to change, and is already under the judgment the passage describes. The step at that point is not mediation. It is separation and protection.
9. FALSE: Church discipline benefits everyone
Sande lists three purposes of church discipline: to restore fallen Christians, to guard God’s honor, and to protect the purity of the church. None of these purposes is protection of the vulnerable. The framework assumes the community’s honor and the sinner’s restoration are the goals. The victim is not even named as a stakeholder.
In practice, church discipline has often been aimed at the wrong person. Victims who leave get disciplined for “breaking covenant.” Abusers who stay get counseled, prayed for, and protected. A framework that can produce this outcome is not a framework that has the vulnerable in view. You can read how this plays out in my book, All the Scary Little Gods.
The biblical tradition does not privilege the reputation of the community over the safety of its members. Ezekiel 34 indicts shepherds who feed themselves and neglect the sheep, who do not bind up the injured, who do not bring back the strayed, who rule with force and harshness. Sande’s framework, applied to abuse, produces exactly the shepherd Ezekiel condemned.
A framework that consistently keeps victims in dangerous situations and calls that obedience serves abusers, pastors who want simple answers, and churches that want to avoid the messiness of protecting victims.
But victims lose. Children of abusers lose. And communities lose the witness of a church that actually looks like Jesus.
10. FALSE: The permanence view of marriage is the biblical view
Running beneath the article is the assumption that marriage is dissolved only by death. This view, sometimes called the permanence view, has become prominent in certain evangelical circles through figures like John Piper and organizations like CCEF and Peacemaker Ministries. It is often presented as the historic Christian teaching.
It is not. The Reformers allowed divorce for adultery and desertion. The Westminster Confession permits divorce for adultery and willful desertion that cannot be remedied. Jesus himself named an exception in Matthew 19. Paul named another in 1 Corinthians 7. Moses, writing under the direction of the Spirit, allowed a husband who withheld food, clothing, or marital rights to release his wife free of charge in Exodus 21.
The permanence view is a recent minority position being sold as ancient orthodoxy. It has gained traction in part because it provides clean, simple answers to pastors who do not want to exercise discernment. But clean and simple is not the same as true. And the cost of this view falls almost entirely on women, who make up the vast majority of people staying in marriages they should have left.
Warning for Religious Leaders Who Treat a Deep Wound Lightly
Jeremiah 6:14 describes religious leaders who treat a deep wound lightly, telling the people “peace, peace” when there is no peace. The verse was a warning to prophets and priests who smoothed over destruction to keep life comfortable and their positions secure.
This is what happens when a pastor, armed with Sande’s framework, walks into an abusive marriage and prescribes mediation, church discipline, and renewed commitment. He says peace when there is no peace. He treats a deep wound lightly. He tells a drowning woman that her real problem is that she has not learned to swim alongside her attacker.
The church does have a role in marriage. It is not the role Sande describes. It is the role Jesus describes. Protect the vulnerable. Defend the oppressed. Proclaim freedom for captives. Tell the truth about what is happening. Confront the powerful. Believe the wounded. And when a woman says she is not safe, take her seriously the first time.
Anything else is not biblical counseling. It is institutional self-protection dressed in biblical language. The church that wants to follow Jesus has to do better, and the first step is to stop using frameworks that have hurt so many of its daughters.
Why Even the “Experts” Are Reconsidering this “Biblical Peacemaking” Model
In 2021, Ken Sande led an independent investigation of Judy Dabler, a prominent Christian conciliator who had used the Peacemaker model at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries, Mars Hill Church, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, and dozens of other churches and ministries. The investigation concluded that Dabler was unfit for counseling, coaching, or conciliation, and that her approach had traumatized the very people she was supposed to help.8
In the course of that investigation, Sande told Christianity Today: “People can misuse and abuse the conciliation process. If people are not trained to understand power imbalance and the dynamics of abuse, well-meaning Christian conciliators can make serious mistakes and, in that process, can abuse a victim all over again.”
Read that carefully. The founder of Peacemaker Ministries is acknowledging that the method he built and promoted across forty years of ministry can abuse victims when it is applied without training in power dynamics. He is not speaking hypothetically. He is describing what did happen, in ministry after ministry, under the banner of biblical conciliation.
The same Christianity Today article cites Wade Mullen, director of the Master of Divinity program at Lancaster Bible College, making the structural point even more plainly: the conciliation model “is too simplistic to apply to all conflicts. It assumes, for example, that both parties bear some responsibility for the problem and are roughly equal.” This is the symmetry problem at the center of Sande’s 2003 article, named by a credentialed evangelical scholar in a major evangelical publication. The critique is not coming only from the margins anymore.
It is coming from inside the building.
The article also documents a concrete case at an Evangelical Free church in 2013. A woman in an abusive marriage was told in conciliation that she needed to repent her “sinful fear” as a precondition to working on the marriage, even before her husband, who was talking about buying a gun, dealt with his anger. Her fear and his threatened violence were treated as “roughly equal weight, ‘speck and log’ or ‘log and speck.'” This is what the symmetrical framework does in practice. A woman is told that her fear of being killed is a sin she must repent before her would-be killer is required to address his rage. The framework is not a neutral tool that occasionally gets misapplied. It produces this outcome by design, because symmetrical tools applied to asymmetrical situations always transfer the burden to the person with less power.
CCEF’s Shift
The organization that published Sande’s article in 2004 has itself moved, without formally retracting anything.
CCEF now offers a course called Counseling Abusive Marriages.9 The course description states plainly that “abuse is not a marriage problem” and warns that “traditional marriage counseling will likely cause us to do more harm than good.” In 2024, CCEF released Becoming a Refuge,10 a guided video series equipping churches to respond to domestic abuse. The framing in these newer resources is recognizably different from Sande’s 2003 article. They name abuse as abuse, distinguish it from marital conflict, and acknowledge that the standard tools harm victims when applied to abuse situations.
And yet, as of the time of this article in April, 2026, Sande’s article is still available for purchase on CCEF’s website.11 Pastors ordering it today in 2026 receive a document whose framework CCEF’s own newer materials contradict. The organization has updated its practice without updating its inventory.
This matters for anyone engaging Sande’s argument. The framework is not being defended on its merits anymore, even by the institution that built it, even while it’s still being sold. That isn’t resolution. It’s brand management. Victims who walked into biblical counseling rooms informed by Sande’s model over the last two decades deserve more than a pivot.
They deserve an accounting.
Where to Read Further
On the biblical grounds for divorce and the history of Christian teaching on marriage, David Instone-Brewer’s Divorce and Remarriage in the Bible is the major academic treatment. Craig Keener’s And Marries Another is shorter and more accessible for lay readers. These are not fringe works. They, and others like them, demonstrate that the permanence view is a recent minority position, not the historic teaching of the church.
On abuse and the church, Darby Strickland’s Is It Abuse? is particularly useful because Strickland works inside the biblical counseling world and was published by P&R. Her critique is difficult for conservative readers to dismiss as liberal encroachment. Steven Tracy’s Mending the Soul is widely respected across evangelical lines. Diane Langberg’s Redeeming Power is excellent on the dynamics of spiritual abuse and institutional harm. Gretchen Baskerville’s, The Life Saving Divorce is a well researched book on why divorce is a critical necessity when it comes to dealing with abuse. And my own book, Is It Me? Making Sense of Your Confusing Marriage, has been life-changing for a generation of Christian women trying to name covert and spiritual abuse happening in their homes.
For the broader question of how Christian institutions form leaders who harm the vulnerable, Chuck DeGroat’s When Narcissism Comes to Church is essential reading. Anything by Diane Langberg, who has spent five decades counseling trauma survivors and writing about power, is worth the time.
For the secular research backbone on coercive control, Evan Stark’s Coercive Control remains the standard academic source. Lundy Bancroft’s Why Does He Do That? is the most widely read popular treatment and has helped more women name their reality than almost any other book in the field.
A Final Word
None of this argument is new in the sense that no one has ever made it. Survivors have been making it for decades, often at the cost of their churches, their communities, and their faith. What is new, perhaps, is that the institutions that trained pastors to apply the frameworks being critiqued here are beginning to concede the problem. The work now is to finish what they have started. To name what was done in the name of Christ. To tell the truth about frameworks that hurt people. And to build something better in their place, something that actually looks like the Jesus who set captives free.
The women who were sent back into dangerous homes under the banner of biblical peacemaking are still there, many of them. Some are still married. Some are dead. Some walked out and lost everything. Some are rebuilding lives and faith from the ground up. They are not statistics or case studies. They are the point. Any framework, any theology, any counseling method, any church discipline process that cannot see them first is not worth defending, no matter how many Bible verses are attached to it.
The church can do better. It has to.
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