Pursued

*You can read the previous post in this series here.

Redemption Church

After disbanding our little House Church, Jon and I began praying about attending the church we’d been counseling out of for several years—Redemption Church[1]. Redemption Church graciously allowed us office space for our counseling practice and even sent us several referrals. Through those referrals, we began hearing first-hand accounts regarding the care and concern the leadership showed their people. The more stories we heard of the leadership’s willingness to get involved in the messy realities of people’s lives, the safer we began to feel about potentially making it our church home. The church was small and wrapping up a five-year period of healing from a traumatic break with a prior pastor, yet in spite of their depleted membership, the leaders never once pressured us to attend but simply connected with us as human beings and even sought our counseling insight on a couple matters. We’d never experienced church leaders valuing our insight. Not once in fifteen years. Having our abilities valued by leadership felt so foreign that we struggled to trust it was real, though our interactions with leadership consistently indicated their sincerity. We also knew that attending the church where we counseled could get messy. Through conversations with other biblical counselors across the nation, we’d heard of more than one situation where counselors uncovered abuse within the church, and the leadership, rather than hold the abusers accountable, turned on the counselors.

 So, we waited, prayed, and sought the counsel of others. I reached out to Mary, a dear friend, older sister in the faith, and a tenderhearted soul. When I asked her “Should we attend the church where we counsel?”  she surprised me with “That is a very bad idea! I would not like it if my therapist just showed up at my church one day!” Jon and I felt God cautioning us through Mary to slow down and consider other churches.

City Church

We had no idea where to look for a new church, so I did a Hail Mary google search and a church we’d never heard of—City Church[2]—popped up on the map not far from us. Curious, Jon and I decided to take a drive down to the church on a Saturday morning to see if it was open. We arrived in the postage-stamp parking lot downtown and let ourselves in the back door. We wandered into a book kiosk and found several counseling books stacked on the shelves written by former professors of ours—Ed Welch, David Powlison, and others. Pleasantly surprised, we meandered towards the sanctuary and discovered we’d invaded a church workday. We ran into a single woman, a college student, who engaged us in conversation and asked what we did for a living. She then mentioned the church leadership was pro-biblical counseling and even used counseling materials for small groups. We drove home from that workday sensing the Lord pressing us to attend this church.

However, when we visited City Church for the first time, we were surprised to discover the small church body (around 100) seemed stand-offish, borderline unfriendly. Convinced the Lord sent us there for a purpose, we continued attending, trying to gather a sense of the leadership and people. We met the newly hired assistant pastor, and he initiated a couple get-to-know-you meetings at a coffee shop. He appeared excited to have biblical counselors at his church, even preemptively offered us office space. He, along with the rest of his staff, had affiliations with Mark Dever and Capitol Hill Baptist Church on the East Coast. Capitol Hill had in-house counseling services for members, and this local pastor seemed excited at the idea of replicating a similar structure in his church. When we responded cautiously to his ideas, he pressed to know why we were “reluctant,” to “counsel under church leadership,” to which we responded with a much abbreviated version of our trek through the underbelly of the American church. This pastor seemed open and accepting of our journey, but from then on never initiated getting to know us further.

Meanwhile, my husband felt uneasy about the relationship between the senior pastor and his wife. I asked him why, and he responded, “They never look at each other, touch each other, and there is a coldness between them that is concerning to me.” I played the Devil’s advocate: “Well, maybe they are more intellectual types, not feeling-types, just aren’t all that mushy in public?” To which he replied, “Maybe. But something just doesn’t seem right to me. I just can’t put my finger on it yet.” Having learned to pay attention when my husband says “something isn’t right” we continued attending the church in observation mode for several months. Our kids, being the only teens at the church, struggled to connect. Our third-born astutely observed: “No one talks to us. I feel like some of the people did their duty to say ‘Hi’ the first week but after that they haven’t bothered.” He was right. We all experienced the wider body as relationally cool, almost skittish. I told Jon one day after church “Something must have happened at this church. Everyone acts like they are afraid to talk to us.” Meanwhile, we noticed that several families who used to attend the church weren’t showing up anymore. There appeared to be a slow and steady bleed from an already small congregation. Why?

In an attempt to understand, we began attending Sunday school with a handful of others (as in 5-15). One elder consistently sat to the right of us, and every Sunday we’d make a move to introduce ourselves, and he’d avert his eyes and make a beeline for the door. It didn’t feel personal, just bizarrely awkward, especially given the small size of the congregation. The Sunday School material itself was pulled directly from the 9 Marks of a Healthy Church curriculum. Yet the manner in which the material was presented came off as heavy-handed and authoritarian, with a strong emphasis on the congregant’s duty to submit to leadership, treat them with deference and respect, and little mention of the leader’s responsibility to love and equip the flock to do ministry. During one of these classes, the senior pastor spoke up saying he would not receive “criticism” from a congregant unless that congregant first came and complimented him on all he was doing well. The comment came off as immature as best, controlling at worst, and not biblically accurate—nowhere in Scripture are congregants obligated to offer compliments prior to giving a constructive “criticism.” Jon and I simply filed his comment away with our growing collection of observations.

Then came the Sunday School lesson on “Excommunication.” The teacher (an elder) stood behind his podium and declared that “if someone at this church disagrees with leadership and leaves the church without our permission, we will track down the person’s next church to warn them, and then excommunicate that congregant.” Alarm bells started ringing in my ears. I raised my hand and said, “If the person has already left the church and refused your counsel, couldn’t your actions be considered harassment?” The leader side-stepped my question and declared: “It’s not harassment.” A feisty old lady named Esther raised her hand from the back row, “So are you saying that if someone left your church because they disagreed with you, you’d call up their next church and say, ‘Watch out for this guy?!’” Esther’s candid though perhaps unintentional exposure of the leadership’s ludicrous power-play triggered a bout of silent-belly laughing in our three teenage boys. Meanwhile, the leader responded to Esther without hesitation, “Yes, we would.”

Jon and I went home that day and debated whether or not to stop attending City Church due to our growing concerns regarding what seemed to be a heavy-handed approach to leadership. We wondered if that might explain the skittishness of the congregation. Without more concrete information, we weren’t sure what to do and pondered why on earth God would bring us to yet another church with serious power and control issues. Then seemingly out of the blue, we found out the senior pastor was leaving to take a new pastoral position on the East Coast, and the assistant pastor was being recommended to step into the senior pastor position. The church was holding a member’s meeting to fill in the details. We thought attending might give us helpful information as we discerned next steps, so we emailed the assistant pastor asking permission to attend. He said, “If you are considering membership, you can.” We were considering whether we wanted to even consider joining this church, so we said “yes.”

The members’ meeting was mostly non-descript, except for two instances. The first was a series of announcements regarding individuals leaving the church. We were surprised to discover that the first person we’d ever laid eyes on in the church—the single, female college student—had written a letter explaining why she was transferring her membership to another church. In her letter, she stated that “I believe remaining at this church would be harmful to my spiritual health.” Once again, alarm bells went off in our heads—if someone declares a church “harmful” to her spiritual health, that is not a good sign.

 Later in the meeting, the senior pastor got up to give a little speech. He began with what appeared to be an attempt to compliment his wife, but then described her as a woman who put going to the gym over her family and only made her kids food when she got home “if they hadn’t made it for themselves.” He then identified her primary spiritual gift as the ability to “Say NO!” to lots of things he wanted to do, and then declared her loyalty to him her most important character trait. He went on to compliment other elder’s wives in general terms but said nothing about their husbands, his fellow elders. At this point, our mental alarm bells were blaring. Whether anyone else picked up on it or not, the pastor had publicly painted his wife as a selfish human being then flattered other women not his wife. Giving his wife a public shaming under the guise of a compliment while at the same time flattering other elder’s wives seemed both manipulative and cruel.

Then Jon and I did what counselors do—asked more questions to uncover the truth. I emailed the college student asking if she’d be willing to share more. She replied saying that about a year prior, the former assistant pastor had been excommunicated for “unrepentant slander against the senior pastor.” This single woman, along with the rest of the congregation, was asked by the elder board to vote “yes” or “no” to excommunicating this assistant pastor without being given all the facts of what actually happened. What little facts were given painted the senior pastor as a saintly martyr and a victim of slander. The kicker of this madness—the members were required to vote by a public raise of hands. Talk about pressure to conform! We later learned that many individuals in the congregation carried guilt and shame over their forced, uninformed votes. They felt they’d betrayed not only the former assistant pastor, but also their own consciences.

Given our church experiences and counseling background, we knew that truth-tellers were often labeled “slanderers” by abusive leadership and forced out of the church. From our perspective, the senior pastor had a growing list of behaviors and comments that fit the profile of an oppressive church leader. But we needed more concrete proof. It took Jon all of five minutes to track down the excommunicated pastor and his wife who confirmed that they brought an accusation of spiritual abuse against the senior pastor, and, long story short, found themselves excommunicated for “slander.” We secured from them over thirty pages of documentation which clearly painted a picture of the senior pastor’s patterns of cruel, spiritually abusive, manipulative, and deceitful behaviors. Texts, emails, letters written back and forth between the elder board (and their wives), the pastor, and the assistant pastor—fit the patterns of a church being led by an oppressive leader and his complicit elders. This information also explained why the church members were so skittish—they were hypervigilant and not sure who to trust.

We asked the excommunicated pastor and his wife if they’d be willing to meet with us and share more of their story in hopes that the Lord might allow us to play a role in bringing understanding and healing to City Church in the wake of their experience with oppressive leadership. At this point, the abusive senior pastor had left for his new job on the East Coast, so the Lord seemed to be clearing a path to bring healing. Or so we hoped.

After meeting with the excommunicated couple and bearing witness to the pain and injustice they experienced at the hands of the senior pastor, we felt a burden for the hurting and abused left at City Church. We realized the slow bleed of church attenders during our time there was directly connected to the wrongful excommunication of this pastor. The excommunicated couple passed along our names and information to other hurting souls who had already left the church in hopes that they would share their stories with us.

At this point, Jon felt it wise to approach the current assistant pastor. The pastor was in a period of waiting to see if he’d be approved for the now-vacant senior pastor position. Jon called him up and informed him of what we’d discovered and that we planned to meet with individuals who’d left his church for the purpose of hearing their stories and helping them heal. Jon kept all details and names confidential.

 The pastor’s response was guarded and revealed none of his own assessments of the situation, although he explained that his main job since he was hired had been addressing the trail of human debris, hurt, and questions in the aftermath of the excommunication. He asked only one question: “Do you feel there is abuse here?” To which Jon replied, “Yes, the documentation and stories we have clearly indicate abuse happened here.” Jon also explained that throughout the conflict with the senior pastor, the assistant pastor accused of “slander” repeatedly pleaded with the leadership to bring in an objective third party to assess the situation. The leadership refused, even though they had zero experience, understanding, or training in abuse. With the senior pastor gone, the church now had an opportunity to make wrongs right, if the leadership was interested in going that direction. Jon offered to play the role of an objective third party, if that’s something the current leadership wanted. Jon didn’t press for an answer, simply let the pastor sit with the idea. Our hope and prayer was the pastor’s heart would be convicted to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with his God (Micah 6:8) to bring healing and right past wrongs.

Our unspoken question for City Church leadership was this: are you willing to face your failure to discern or wisely handle accusations of abuse, humbly open yourself to education on abuse dynamics, and pursue a path of repentance, healing and growth?

Reflection

• As you reflect on your story of church trauma, consider the overall atmosphere of the church—was it friendly to outsiders, or were outsiders treated with suspicion and/or fear?
• Were questions and concerns welcomed, or treated with fear and suspicion? (i.e. seen as ‘unsubmissive’).
• How did fear and suspicion play a role in silencing your voice and keep you trapped in the unhealthy church system?

*You can read other posts in this series here.

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[1] A pseudonym, not the real name. 

[2] A pseudonym, not the real name.