A new book from the Social Research Center at Calvin College takes on a subject many would prefer stays in the shadows.

"Set Us Free" is subtitled "What the Church Needs to Know from Survivors of Abuse." And in its 127 pages are stories from 32 survivors of sexual, physical and emotional abuse.

The stories are horrendous, terrible accounts of unimaginable evils committed against women and men both young and old. Yet it is that starkness, says the book's trio of authors, that made the book necessary.

Initially Calvin professor Michelle Loyd-Paige and the Social Research Center's Ann Annis and Rodger Rice interviewed survivors in the fall of 1992 hoping to gather enough information to put together a comprehensive survey of abuse victims. They intended to do a follow-up to a 1990 survey they had done at the request of the Christian Reformed Church.

But after interviewing 67 survivors they realized that the stories they had heard needed to be told to a larger audience. So they began transcribing hours of interviews, weaving the narratives into the larger context of abuse. The result is "Set Us Free," which puts abuse into a religious context, looking at such issues as how religion is used to justify abuse, how churches deny abuse and finally how the church can recognize and help victims of abuse.

"People need to realize," says Loyd-Paige, "that we're talking about some ugly stuff. When someone is saying 'I've been abused' if you think abuse is mom yelling . . . the magnitude of abuse is much more than that. These survivors told stories of horrible sexual, physical and emotional abuse."

Adds Annis: "Many people told us that the biggest part of their healing was having us listen to them. That's why there was no question that we needed to do this book and get their stories out."

While Annis, Loyd-Paige and Rice were committed to telling the stories to a wider audience it looked for a time as though the project would go nowhere. In fact, it took five years and contacts with 50 publishers for the trio to find someone, Maryland based University Press of America, who would print the manuscript. And, in the end, the Calvin Social Research Center had to put up some of its own funds to bring the book to print.

Annis, Loyd-Paige and Rice say they owed it to those who came forward to tell their stories of abuse to get the book published.

"The church has to respond to abuse," says Rice. "Denial is easy; you don't want to believe it (abuse) could happen. But it does happen. Churches, religion, are not immune to abuse. We'd get back comments when we did the 1990 survey - it doesn't happen here. But in 1990 we found that 28 percent of respondents had suffered abuse. It does happen."

Says Annis: "The stories (in Set Us Free) are very hard. And we had publishers ask us if we could combine them all into one or two composites." Adds Loyd-Paige: "Or some publishers wanted us to be more analytical and make the book less personal. We felt we wanted to tell the stories as they'd been told to us. They are powerful and the church needs to listen to this."

The three authors say survivors of abuse live daily with the effects of abuse. They often have trouble with relationships. They're careful, or even fearful, about intimacy. And often when the abuse has come in a religious context survivors find their relationships with religion altered in permanent ways. They distrust the church. Or stop going to church altogether. Ironically many survivors continue to have a meaningful personal relationship with God, but reject the institutional church.

Says Annis: "The church often further abuses the victim. So the survivors want nothing to do with the church. One abused woman was not allowed by her absuing husband to go to church. When the elders came to visit her they didn't ask why she wasn't going. They threatened to excommunicate her."

That's why in the book's final pages are recommendations for action and a list of resources for churches. Among the suggestions:

• Stop the Biblical justification for abuse
• Substitute denial with positive responses
• Understand the full effect of abuse
• Offer healing assistance to abusers
• Make the church a safe place

"We don't want to come across as bashing religion," says Loyd-Paige, "because that is not our intent." Concludes Rice: "Churches are no worse than society at large in this area. But the dynamics of abuse in a religious context are different. Churches need to be aware of abuse and aware of how abuse fits into a religious context. The time for denial is long past. The time for healing is now."