At Sparrow Ministry, we believe that spiritual recovery from a cultic Christian group is aided by knowledge in these key areas:
1. Systematic theology - Wikipedia defines Systematic Theology as a discipline of Christian theology that formulates an orderly, rational, and coherent account of the doctrines of the Christian faith. Spiritually abusive leaders often distort biblical doctrines to set themselves apart from the Christian mainstream.
2. Church history - Abusive and/or cultic Christian groups prey on historical ignorance. It is important to understand Christian church history, because no group or movement exists in a historical vacuum. The ability to place a group and its teachings into an historical context empowers recovery and enables survivors to gain badly needed perspective on their experience. One need not become an historian; a simple understanding of the major events in Christian history is sufficient and, in our opinion, should involve knowledge, at a minimum, of the following:
The early church and church fathers
The church councils and the creeds formulated as a result
How the biblical canon was determined
The East-West Schism
The Protestant Reformation
3. Hermeneutics - It’s common for spiritually abusive leaders to claim, “We only follow the Bible.” This claim implies that the Bible is easy to understand and apply. In this black-and-white understanding, division in Christianity is simply the result of rebellious Christians who are unwilling to obey the scriptures. Abusive leaders use these faulty beliefs as a wedge between themselves and other groups, setting up their church, or movement, as an elite group of people who are obeying God and doing His will, unlike the vast majority of Christendom.
Dictionary.com defines Hermeneutics as the science of interpretation, especially of the Scriptures, and also, the branch of theology that deals with the principles of Biblical exegesis.It goes on to define Exegesis as critical explanation or interpretation of a text or portion of a text, especially of the Bible, as opposed to Eisegesis, an interpretation, especially of Scripture, that expresses the interpreter's own ideas, bias, or thelike, rather than the meaning of the text.
This is a vitally important topic, as spiritually abusive leaders are experts in eisegesis, counting on the biblical ignorance of their followers to keep them unaware of the leader’s faulty teaching and reasoning. Unfortunately, eisegesis is common in mainstream Christian churches as well, so we would all do well to grow in our own understanding and discernment.