By Charlotte Fontaine
NASHVILLE, TN — Dr. Millicent Y. Black discussed the re-release of her book “Empowering Women Who Suffer from Domestic Abuse” with the powerful tagline “From Victim to Voice.” The book, according to Amazon, “Seeks to affirm those who suffer in silence from domestic abuse/terrorism and can serve as a model to train church and community leaders to become vehicles of empowerment, recovery, and restoration for victims/survivors of domestic abuse.”
“The purpose is two-fold, to validate the plight of battered women from a Christian perspective. The second reason is to provide the church with a manual for starting a ministry that would focus on vitims of domestic abuse,” Black shared. The book was written as her doctoral thesis.
Black is an academic-minded individual who went in multiple directions in her life professionally, before coming back to where she believes she belongs, working in ministry. “I was licensed and ordained in 1998 but hadn’t truly pursued education in ministry until 2012. It wasn’t my plan, I thought God had a sense of humor, he let me get my own career goals out of the way first,” she laughed.
In her re-release, Black is eager to continue to make her work increasingly “more applicable to the victim, in terms of validating the experiences that they go through.” Having gone through two divorces herself, one of her main desires is for victims to receive more acceptance, and corroboration from their church during their healing process, particularly in the early acute stages.
“One of the things that is very important for me, I wrote an invitation for people to find their own hiding place. A place where you can go and just be with God, alone, I encourage time to be in nature, by running water, or a water fall, a place condusive for healing and aware of God and His creation. I wrote a personal letter in this re-release of the book I am so excited to share.”
Available on Amazon, you can get a copy of Dr. Black’s book today, in her words “from beauty to ashes.”