To draw from my own experience again, when my son was in the final month of chemotherapy, had lost his hair, looked gaunt and seriously ill, he went to visit his brother who was a baseball player. His brother took him to a neighborhood Methodist church.

Now James was very sensitive about his bald head and always wore a baseball cap. I would think that when you looked at a youngster who was clearly not in good health, you might guess why he was wearing the cap. But the pastor of the church came to them in the pew and told James that he should remove his cap because “he’d remove it for the national anthem at a ball game, so he should remove it in church.”

That qualifies as extremely hurtful, in my view, and doesn’t involve any physical harm. It did not, as it turned out, cause problems for us as did the pastor who told him he was certain to be healed, because James simply regarded the guy as rude.

Both pastors, incidentally, were United Methodist pastors in good standing–not some offshoot branch of the church of never-never land.

I certainly think that the kick is abhorrent. I also think it’s easy to identify it as such because it’s so stark and it’s visual. I would hope however that all who are justifiably outraged at what they see in Todd Bentley not forget that sometimes deeper harm can be done to people without a physical kick and that our churches and the people in it are sometimes guilty of these “assaults” too even if they aren’t so dramatic and visible.