Welcome to the Bear Marriage Podcast. I'm Sheila Ray-Gregor from Bear Marriage.com where we like to talk about healthy evidence-based biblical advice for your sex life and your marriage.

And before we launch into the podcast today, I just want to do a special thank you to our patrons.

Your support for as little as $5 a month helps us continue our research.

It funds our surveys.

It funds getting the word out there, and we're just so grateful to our patrons. We have such a fun time in our Facebook group and on our unfiltered podcasts so you can join us at patreon.com slash bear marriage. The link is in the podcast notes.

One of the things that I find in the work that we are doing calling out some toxic teachings

and evangelicalism relating to sex and marriage is that there's a lot of overlap with some of the

toxic things that are happening in evangelicalism as a whole.

And so I find that the more that I talk about the problematic teachings that we experience,

the more people show up on the blog and on the podcast talking about some of the problematic things they're going through in their churches.

And so I wanted to dedicate today's podcast on how to recognize

if things that are happening in your church are not okay. Because sometimes when we're in the

middle of it, we can't see it.

And so I have two amazing women that I want to introduce you to

so that we can talk about different aspects of spiritual abuse that can happen in churches.

Well, I am thrilled to bring on to the Bear Marriage Podcast, a friend of mine,

Jana Harris, who is the co-host of the Bodies Behind the Bus podcast. Hello, Jana.

Hi, how are you? Thank you for having me.

Yeah, this is like, I feel like I, this is a long time coming because I've been on your

podcast like what, three times now and we've

got most to grab lives together and yes I feel so honored to like be welcomed into your

little side of the community as well so thank you yeah so here so here's what happened John I will tell you the story. I wanted to talk in the month of December about community and healthy community. You know the whole idea that Christmas, like I love the phrase that always really hits me at Christmas is Emmanuel, God with us, you know, that God is this relational God. Yeah, and that he sent Jesus and Jesus came in order to show us what real relationship was going to be like, relationship that led to wholeness and health and how we are supposed to live in relationship and I want that I mean I know you and I both we spent our lives talking about the difficulties and the bad stuff in churches right?

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