 A few years ago, someone called me sounding genuinely frightened. She had found a strange little trinket near her doorstep, along with a hostile note wishing harm on her family.
"Am I cursed?" she asked, her voice trembling. "What do I do?" In a culture fascinated by astrology, tarot, and modern witchcraft, even devout Christians quietly wonder: Can a curse actually harm me? And if I feel spiritually attacked, what do I do? The Christian tradition does not meet that fear with mockery, denial, or fascination. It meets it with steady theology, honest attention to the wounds people carry, and practical pastoral care—all resting on the One who has already claimed you in Holy Baptism. Not All "Curses" Come from a Fortune Teller When we hear the word "curse," most of us picture something dramatic: the “evil eye,” a carnival fortune teller, or some creepy object bought at a flea market. But in real life, the most common—and often the most damaging—"curses" are usually much closer to home. They are spoken judgments, lingering wounds, and toxic patterns that get lodged deep in a person's soul:
Do Spiritual Curses Have Any Real Power? Christian tradition understands an occult curse as an intentional attempt to call on evil powers to harm someone. That can sound terrifying. But Scripture is remarkably unimpressed by such attempts against God's people:
Think of a curse as a letter with a forged signature. It may look official. It may even frighten you for a moment. But it carries no true authority, because the One whose name actually matters has already signed something different over your life. In Baptism, Jesus placed His name upon you. That is why the note on that person’s doorstep mattered, but not in the way she feared. The person who left it most likely wanted to create terror. A threat meant to be found is intimidation, not sorcery. It only works if it tricks us into handing over our peace. In many cultures, tales are told of sorcerers naming someone for death. The story almost always turns on belief: the village believes it, the victim believes it, and terror and isolation do the rest. When someone dies, it is remembered as proof. The many for whom nothing happened are forgotten. A threat like this lives in shared belief. That is why the Church's task is to be the community that flatly refuses to believe the lie, surrounding the frightened person with blessing and truth instead. What About Hidden Threats? I told the person who called me about that strange object that if someone truly skilled in this sort of thing had been trying to harm her family, she probably would not have found the item at all. Malifices tends to work best in secret. Still, that leaves a lingering worry: What if there's a hidden curse or object I haven't found? The answer is still the same. Your safety does not depend on being vigilant enough, spiritually spotless enough, or perceptive enough. It rests entirely on Jesus’s completed victory. Unrepented sin, occult involvement, and agreeing with lies do matter, not because they cancel God's protection, but because they pull us away from the One who protects us. If you are prone to scrupulosity, please hear this gently: God's protection is not a fragile system you must keep from crashing. Even in cases of genuine spiritual harassment, the remedy is never panic or improvised rituals. It is returning to God through the ordinary means of grace, with your pastor's help. What Can Every Believer Do? You do not need a special title or a dramatic deliverance service to walk in freedom. In the Christian tradition, the baptized already have real vocations as believers, parents, neighbors, and members of a household. Here are some ordinary, sturdy practices:
Where the Pastor Comes In Any Christian can speak the comfort of the Gospel to a neighbor. A pastor's role is different, but not because a pastor has some personal spiritual power that ordinary Christians lack. A pastor speaks publicly on behalf of the Church by virtue of a public call. That distinction matters. It protects believers from spiritual overreach, clericalism, and emotional manipulation. When persistent distress or deep guilt remains, a pastor can offer, on the Church's behalf:
When to Seek Other Help Spiritual care and professional care are not mutually exclusive. They work hand in hand. Persistent anxiety, intrusive thoughts, deep hopelessness, or chronic sleeplessness deserve the attention of a physician or licensed mental health professional. There is no shame in that. Wise pastors often refer parishioners to clinical help and work alongside therapists. If you or someone you know is experiencing thoughts of self-harm, call or text 988 in the U.S. for immediate support. Additionally, if you receive a genuinely threatening note or suspicious object on your property, take a photograph, do not confront anyone, keep the evidence, and report it to local law enforcement. Blessing your enemy and locking your doors are completely compatible actions. Living in the Light So, back to that phone call. We did not panic. We did not hunt for counter-spells or search the internet for clearing rituals. We prayed together, asked God to bless the person who left the item, took comfort in Jesus’s promises, and left the rest in His hands. She also kept the note and reported the incident to local authorities. Luther once observed that the best way to drive out the devil, when he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to flout and mock him, for he cannot endure scorn. Whether you are carrying an old judgment spoken by a parent years ago or facing a threatening trinket left on your porch today, the Christian response is never panic or fascination. It is simple, joyful nearness to Jesus Christ. When the Word of God has secured your identity, no word spoken against you gets the final word. If a wounding word has been echoing in you, the answer isn't to fight it harder. It's to be re-anchored in what is true. I've prepared a free companion to this series, A Daily Armor Prayer, a short morning practice based on Ephesians 6. It begins with the Belt of Truth: a daily return to what God says about you in Christ. [Download it here.] Scripture quotations are from the English Standard Version (ESV). This is the first in a five part series called “Deliverance in Context—From the ground up!” Next week: Ground Level Deliverance: There’s Something Not Quite Right About That One House on the Cul-de-Sac. Every neighborhood has one. The house nobody can quite explain, the room that never feels right, the place where three different families all left in a hurry. What pastoral care for a place actually looks like, and why “just pray about it” isn’t an answer. Rev. Dr. Steve Stutz Ordained Lutheran Pastor · Intentional Interim Minister · Certified Spiritual Director La Porte, Texas · Houston Area [Contact] · [LinkedIn] · [The Marginal Note on Substack] The Marginal Note — Theology for people who are still paying attention. Free monthly newsletter. Subscribe at Substack. ©2026 Steve Stutz. All rights reserved. Brief quotes welcome with attribution; full reprints require permission. Details at https://www.stevestutz.com (bottom of page)
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 Last week, Part 1 raised the basic question of whether Christians should still take demonic affliction seriously; this week turns to the harder follow-up: if evil is real, who is actually authorized to confront it? You do not have to read the first essay before this one, but it is worth going back to after you finish.
Most Protestant traditions, Lutheranism included, do not have a formal answer the way Rome does; this essay is written for serious lay readers and pastors who need a safer, more accountable way to think about deliverance ministry. The real dividing line running through everything here is not which tradition you belong to, but whether authority comes from an office, appointed and accountable from above, or from individual initiative, taken up by someone convinced of their own readiness to act. That distinction matters because spiritual confidence without pastoral accountability can quickly become spiritual recklessness. Rome answers with the first. They developed a canonical exorcist role over centuries precisely because untrained intervention is clearly dangerous — spiritually, psychologically, and sometimes even physically. Authority to carry on this work is not left to whoever feels called. It requires a bishop's appointment, ongoing supervision, and increasingly formal medical or clinical consultation, because the differential diagnosis between psychiatric illness and spiritual affliction is real, and error in either direction can harm someone. I have spent time training alongside men preparing for that ministry, under the sponsorship of a priest with direct experience in the field. What struck me was not the drama and special effects that Hollywood assumes is at the center of it all. At the core, it was the discipline. The insistence on ruling out the medical — and the merely spiritual-sounding — before treating a case as demonic. The refusal to let one person act alone. Years of formation before anyone is handed authority to act. There is considerable wisdom in this approach. In recent times (within the last 100 years), there have been serious efforts inside Lutheranism to build a comparable formation without creating a parallel magisterial structure. Kurt Koch (1913-1987), a German pastor and theologian, gives the movement its documentary backbone by publishing case files where mental or physical illness appeared to have a demonstrable spiritual root. Robert Bennett gives the discussion a more explicitly confessional Lutheran footing after fieldwork in Madagascar, where Lutheran pastors casting out demons were not importing a Catholic or Pentecostal practice but exercising ordinary pastoral ministry in that context. Harold Ristau carries the retrieval into the present: an LCMS pastor and former military chaplain whose My First Exorcism treats deliverance ministry as a serious pastoral discipline, with a foreword from John W. Kleinig, whose liturgical scholarship carries real weight in confessional Lutheran circles. This is not a fringe curiosity being smuggled in from elsewhere. It is Lutheran pastors and scholars publishing through recognized presses and endorsed by seminary faculty, doing the slow work of historical and liturgical retrieval. That said, the case should be made with precision: the problem is not that Lutheranism has no resources, but that many Lutheran institutions have not yet worked those resources intentionally into pastoral formation, supervision, and lay ministry training. The Other Model Formal ecclesial authority is not the only serious way to handle this. I have also spent time with healing ministry in charismatic-renewal streams — under Mike Flynn, an Episcopal priest and Vineyard pastor (mentored by John Wimber) whose own mentorship shaped how I think about this. Additionally, pastors such as Francis MacNutt, Dennis Bennett, Sam Storms, Charles Kraft, and Neil T. Anderson approach the issue from a different angle: spiritual gifts of discernment before intervention, a team rather than a solo operator, and a theology built around authority in Christ rather than technique against an enemy. There are fewer rules, permissions, and protocols in this way of operating, and that distinction matters. At its best, the charismatic-renewal model moves quickly, prays boldly, and relies on discernment in community; at its worst, it tempts the inexperienced to find a demon behind every symptom and to confront situations that may be medical, psychological, relational, or simply ordinary. You cannot “cast out” something that is not there. The people most likely to need a real answer to the question are often the ones least likely to receive it from their own pastor, because most clergy formation does not address the question directly. That leaves people improvising — reaching for whatever they can find and MacGyvering together something at their own kitchen table that no seminary, synod, or bishop ever authorized, simply because no one taught them there was a slower, safer, more accountable way to ask for help. The Insight From the Margins There is a population inside the church that knows this territory better than most seminary faculties: people who have lived through addiction, incarceration, and homelessness rarely need convincing that both psychiatric and spiritual affliction are real. Many have experienced something that closed in, took hold, and had to be broken, not merely managed. This is the bridge between high ecclesiology and real-world pastoral life — the place where the abstract question of authority meets concrete suffering. A congregation shaped by that community can hold a serious conversation about these matters. It is often the more comfortable, more credentialed wings of mainline Protestantism that have lost the category altogether — not because the affliction is absent, but because the people with formal training have stopped expecting to meet it. Where That Leaves You As a layperson, you do have real authority, but only within your own sphere: your household, minor children, property, and business. That is the authority Scripture gives you under the Fourth Commandment. Inside that sphere, you are not powerless and you are not required to wait for permission to pray, bless, or renounce evil over your own home and family. But when something feels larger than your actual standing to address, the decision path should be simple: pray faithfully within your sphere, involve your pastor early, and resist the impulse to search the internet for a rite you were never given authority to use. A responsible pastor should investigate the claim, pray with you, and help distinguish spiritual affliction from medical, psychological, or household factors that require other forms of care. If an initial visit settles the matter, good — that is the system working as designed. If it does not, the next step is not private escalation but accountable pastoral escalation: a second visit, a stronger rite if warranted, the Eucharist if appropriate, consultation with experienced clergy, and clinical discernment where necessary. What you should not do is keep trolling the internet for advice and tools to “try out.” Improvising past the point where you have actual standing to act is dangerous because sincerity does not create authority, and spiritual authority should never be performed in isolation, panic, or curiosity. If this essay has one practical conclusion, it is this: pray where you have been given responsibility, involve the church where the burden exceeds that responsibility, and do not mistake access to online rituals for a call to use them. Rev. Dr. Steve Stutz Ordained Lutheran Pastor · Intentional Interim Minister · Certified Spiritual Director La Porte, Texas · Houston Area [Contact] · [LinkedIn] · [The Marginal Note on Substack] The Marginal Note — Theology for people who are still paying attention. Free monthly newsletter. Subscribe at Substack. ©2026 Steve Stutz. All rights reserved. Brief quotes welcome with attribution; full reprints require permission. Details at https://www.stevestutz.com (bottom of page) |
