A Story of Spiritual Abuse
It took three years to learn about and understand what happened to me and my family at the church we left in 2017. Through my research and reading the work of others, such as Diane Langberg, Wade Mullen, and Chuck DeGroat, I finally had a name for what happened to us. It’s called spiritual abuse. This is part of my story.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
Since returning from a men’s breakfast at the church, Johnny paced from the living room out to the porch. Back and forth. Over and over again. I ignored it for as long as I could and finally pressed him to tell me.
“Come here,” he said and motioned for me to follow him onto the porch. The porch is for conversations we don’t want the kids to hear. He sat in his chair, lit his cigarette, and took a long draw.
Johnny told me what happened that morning at the church. Our pastor belittled and intimidated the men he speculated had a problem with his recent trip. The pastor used the term “poverty mind-set” to describe the thinking of any men who questioned or envied the spontaneous week-long motorcycle trip he and his wife enjoyed with another pastor couple through Nevada, California, and Oregon. The men hadn’t said anything about the pastor’s sabbatical trip--a trip paid for by the church. The pastor made sure they never would.
Different emotions came over me as Johnny voiced more concerns. Above all, I was relieved. For more than two years, I ignored, stuffed, disregarded, neglected, then tried to pray away the red flags. After Johnny finished, I told him what I’d held in for too long. We talked back and forth for a while. About what we saw. About what we felt but never said before. About what we didn’t want to believe. Then we sat in silence together. Grieved and confused.
Seven months after our conversation on the porch, my family and I left the church we loved and served for eight years. We met with the pastors the first week of March 2017 and told them our decision. It felt strange sitting there across from the pastors, our friends, that way. We communicated our gratefulness to the church, the reasons for our decision, and our sorrow for having to leave.
My family and I were highly involved in the church. Served regularly. Gave faithfully. Led teams. Did small groups. Youth camps. Campus launches. Freedom conference. Community service. Prayer team. Leadership program. Internship.
Eventually, I was on staff for nine months in 2014. My eyes were opened to the culture of the church behind the scenes. Toxic leadership. Bullying. Lack of transparency. No accountability in financial or leadership matters. Fierce loyalty to the institution, the brand, and the leaders.
I prayerfully resigned from my position with the church after nine months. I convinced church leaders and myself that I just wasn’t a good fit and couldn’t keep up with the high-performance culture of the church. It was partly true. Both of my parents were
terminally ill while I was on staff, but I couldn’t be honest about the strain of it. The fast pace and constant change of this kind of “ministry” made it difficult to be broken in any way. An unspoken motto was: Be sorrowful when absolutely necessary, but let it be short-lived and get back to the business of positivity.
I hoped and prayed my feelings about the leaders of our church would change back to what they were before...before I was on staff. Before I knew what I knew. I hoped attending church and serving with my family, without the rigorous demands of staff life, would allow that.
God did that for me. But the red flags didn’t go away.
I pushed them aside and focused on the good the church did in the city. I taught Bible studies, mentored others, and built the team who led small groups for women. I served on the prayer and next steps teams and was part of the core group of leaders building a freedom ministry. I prayed my one-on-one conversations with others pointed them to Jesus and gave them a hunger to study God’s Word. I told myself my work in the church made a difference.
I didn’t talk to others about my concerns, but I prayed fervently for our church leaders. I didn’t tell Johnny because I didn’t know how, and I wanted to be wrong. This church was the first church we’d attended and served together as a family, and that was important to me. Another reason I told no one is that church leadership taught over and over about the damage caused by gossip and a “critical spirit.” I was afraid to dishonor the church or its leaders. Any question, doubt, and healthy criticism were considered dishonoring gossip. To the church, to the leaders, to God. Offenders were reprimanded and shamed, and sometimes removed from leading or serving.
When people I trusted and respected, who loved Jesus, continued to attend, serve, and work for the church, I convinced myself my “rigid personality” caused me to see things that weren’t really there. I made myself believe the toxic environment I witnessed when I was on staff had changed. No one else said anything.
“Everything must be fine,” I told myself.
In January 2016, I applied for an intense eighteen-month church leadership class that promised to put me on the path to divine growth and help me be all God wanted me to be. I was excited to dive into Systematic Theology and be part of a group of others who wanted to grow.
Within days of the first leadership class, the old warnings came back and new ones emerged. I wasn’t wrong and everything was not fine.
Bizarre things happened regularly in our leadership class. The teaching veered from lessons in Systematic Theology into whiteboard diagrams on why we should seek a second income and build a legacy, how to go to our next level, how social media can make or break a platform, and the four competencies of emotional intelligence. It felt more like a multi-level marketing scheme than a theology class.
One Sunday afternoon, our leadership class was given the task of putting up and decorating the Christmas tree in the lobby. Several of us rightly and quietly questioned among ourselves why the leaders had not better organized the long and tedious task. The scissor lift wasn’t in place. The greenery wasn’t gathered. We didn’t have enough spray paint. The ornaments were nowhere to be found. We wanted to do a good job, but we also wanted to be with our families.
Another staff member heard the questions and told other leaders and pastors the group was complaining. In the following week’s leadership class, the women were named and scolded by two male team leaders for dishonoring the pastors and church leadership. The accused tried several times to tell what really happened, but were cut off and told not to explain. I raised my hand to say I’d also questioned, but was ignored. The women would be expelled immediately from the leadership class if anything like it happened again.
I saw more and more of the dark underbelly of the toxic church culture through the leadership class, through working closely with staff on special events, and through serving guests brought in from other churches and ministries.
Our eyes were fully opened to the truth once we allowed ourselves to talk freely and honestly about the issues with one another and consider all we knew, saw, and experienced. Our fellow brothers and sisters in Christ, the ones outside our church, the ones not within the system who could see clearly, confirmed it.
We could no longer support the church or be part of what was happening there. We left the way they taught us to leave: quietly and quickly.
Because of our involvement in the church, leaving quickly was a challenge. We waited to talk to our children about the troubling issues at the church until after I resigned my role with small groups for women in December 2016.
By the time we talked with them, our oldest daughter only attended sporadically. Our youngest saw problems within the intern program and endured spiritual bullying, and our son was only surprised how long it took us to see what he saw years before. We decided as a family to leave the church and discussed the quietest way to do it.
We thought we left on good terms, because we left the way they taught us to leave. We found out, there is no good way to leave an unhealthy church.
We could never have known what leaving would mean. We witnessed what others endured before us, but because no one talked about it and we never asked, there was no guidance, no pathway, no advice on how to walk it out.
I was unprepared for the intensity of my emotions. The pain of leaving our church, the heartbreak over the abrupt end to so many friendships, and coming to terms with the spiritual abuse, overwhelmed me at times.
We visited new churches but eventually dropped off until the fall of 2018. We found a small church and enjoyed it. We have not been back since the pandemic paused the gatherings. We are still healing, but I can say I am thankful. Through this experience, God stripped away everything unnecessary. Everything I leaned on to make me a “good Christian”, and false beliefs, were exposed.
Learning about spiritual abuse opened my eyes to other problems in the Church. We tend to elevate institutions over the people in them, such as churches and marriages. I’ve learned about other issues and teachings within the Church which cause harm, such as celebrity culture, patriarchy, male-only ordination, spiritual authority, the biblical manhood and womanhood movement, and misogyny. The way many pastors counsel those with mental health issues, chronic illness, or marital issues is problematic. Even still, I love the Church. I love God’s people. They are my brothers and sisters; we are family.
Jesus looks at the Church and has compassion, “When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them because they were confused and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.” Matthew 9:36
We are confused and don’t know it. I want to help people know God’s love, especially those who are hurt by the Church. I will keep telling my story and speaking out about it. What I’m most passionate about is pointing others to the True Shepherd. The One who looks on us with compassion, the One who bent low, the One who gave His life for the Church.
Follow hard after Christ, not after Christendom, with its allure and promises.Christendom is not Jesus Christ. Seek for him to be the culture in which you live and move and have your being. —Diane Langberg, Redeeming Power
Read more from Marie at Life Like it Matters
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