In November 2005 we started attending this church.
The first 6 or 7 years were great. This was exactly the church we wanted to attend. It was small, it was full gospel, it was all about teaching the bible and not holding back. It’s just church, nothing more nothing less. The first several years it really seemed like everyone was fine with being a small church.
Then things changed. The pastors of this church, I’ll call them “S” and “M” for some semblance of anonymity, seemed to be growing tired with being small. There were a few hard years even before the recession. People left who had been there a while, people came, and then left, and the church was not growing and may have been shrinking. When we first started attending, S was working as a realtor. Then, not, as things were looking up at first but then the hard years came. We heard later there were times when he didn’t take a paycheck.
During this struggling time, early in our 14 years there, S and M were aggressively looking to “get hooked up” with some large ministries. Sort of a mentorship kind of thing, but from a spiritual standpoint.
They wanted to get hooked up with a large ministry so that the anointing of growth and prosperity would rub off on them. In other words, you become like who you hang around.
They ended up convincing a minister in California to take them under his wing. He has 4 campuses and a total of 20k members — and his people bought him a Bentley for his birthday. He literally lives in a mansion. That’s the kind of hookup they wanted, and they got it. Someone with big numbers and big money.
With this new hookup came a new doctrine. Unfortunately, it isn’t biblical. This new covering pushes a “kings and priests” doctrine which attempts to separate the role of the king and the priest.
Those in full time ministry are priests and those who are not are kings. This means that the pastors of a church are the ones who hear from God and get the vision, and everyone else in the church are responsible for going out and “warring” in business in order to bring in the spoils to support the priest’s vision.
This is a false doctrine and flies in the face of what the bible says. The Jewish model of having priests who get to go into the holy of holies to meet God — and no-one else being allowed to do so — has been done away with.
The veil is torn, it was torn at the crucifixion. Revelation says that WE are kings and priests, and furthermore, we are the body of Christ. Christ is of the order of Melchizedek, who was both a king and a priest, and since we are IN Christ that means (and agrees with Revelation) that we are both king and priest. Bottom line — this doctrine from California is a manipulative cash grab and perpetuates a passive and submissive church — focused on money alone.
This was illustrated vividly when the California pastor came to put on a “Kings and Priests” conference. The meeting on the last night of the conference ended with him telling those in attendance that the conference didn’t meet budget and we couldn’t leave until it did. Everyone was encouraged to give offerings of $1000 — and if you didn’t have it then you could just write it as a pledge on the envelope and believe God to get you that money. Doesn’t the bible say something about this kind of giving? Isn’t this coercion?
During this meeting we saw people who we knew were struggling financially pledge $1000 to this man who lives in a mansion and gets driven around in a Bentley. Were they manipulated? Coerced? Was it all good and they really gave in faith? I can’t say, but it rubbed my spirit the wrong way at the time and it still does.
The perpetuation of this new doctrine carried on for a few years but when things didn’t change much for the church, or if the pastors realized it was unscriptural (they would never admit to that, if it is the case) it pretty much stopped being talked about.
When “brand name” ministers would come to visit, as they make the rounds, it seems more than one encouraged the pastors to move or expand the church to the much larger neighboring city. This was “guaranteed” to grow the church and was a “word from God.” Was it? Or was it a few obvious recommendations from people not from the area?
The church knew of a ministry in the neighboring big city whose pastor had died. They took that ministry over. This adopted ministry had hundreds of regular attenders, but these attenders were predominantly of a different race. Immediately most of them left, only the obedient inner circle of this new congregation stayed. At least they still had the amazing and huge building that came with the adopted church.
The amazing and huge building that the church now had was, due to an unfortunate series of mistakes, immediately overgrown with mold.
After many back breaking weekends by the men of the church attempting amateur (re: cheap) mold remediation the fire suppression system was discovered to be broken and was determined to be unfixable. Thus, the building was condemned due to mold and no functional fire suppression system. This meant moving a decimated new congregation from place to place over the coming years, renting, at great expense of time and money.
The amazing and huge building, now condemned, in foreclosure and abandoned, was ransacked for the copper nightly.
After several years the expansion into the nearby large city has not grown. At any given service there are more attenders from the original congregation attending than new people or people from the adopted congregation. Yet it continues.
During our time at the church, my wife, who is gifted in many areas, almost immediately became a vital resource and quickly a leader in this church. We both became heavily involved from the start, and since she was a stay at home mom she began working many hours a day for the church.
It was at LEAST a full-time job, and really was more than full time since it was essentially all day every day. Our area of focus was technical and media, including all print media, websites, video, audio, radio and TV (but not the sound system). My wife was also involved in a lot of administration regarding the services and events.
Over the 14 years I became head of security as well, and even ministered from the front a few times. My wife went on many trips with M as her assistant, we went on vacation once with S and M and their family, and went on many trips with them with other members of the church to visit the California congregation and attend conferences put on by their mentor.
In fact, we were so involved S saw fit to try and rope us into the MLM he has been involved with for decades. That didn’t work out. In this area MLM are smelled a mile away and simply never work like they do in other regions.
A few years into this, probably around 2009, I became concerned with the level of involvement of my wife. She was so involved with them I was informed — by her — that if they moved away, she would go with them. It was implied, but not spoken, that it wouldn’t matter if I agreed to it or not.
I was concerned and I raised this concern with S. The response was for S and M to punish my wife. We were taught from the front to get close to the pastors, we were taught to serve as if unto the Lord, we were taught to not grow weary in doing good. Yet the abuse heaped upon her was very real and significant.
There were many instances of abuse. Not physical or sexual, it was mental and spiritual abuse. You should look it up, because I have, and this was textbook. They expected perfection, but if she overstepped her boundaries to ensure perfection she was punished. If she said the wrong thing to the wrong person she was punished. The “wrong person” is someone who is more important than her. Either in position “above” the pastors or someone of a higher giving potential. In other words, if she ticks off a big giver or says anything of any consequence to someone who outranks them.
These things happened and the scars of the “correction” (abuse) remain.
If something I had built or was responsible for stopped working, my wife was confronted about it — simply because she was there much of the time. If I was working, in order to make money to give to these people and put food on the table, and thus not available to come fix it immediately, that “showed where my heart was at.”
Here is an illustration of the abuse:
The blessing of the Lord, which anyone would obviously want, would come from the top down through the pastors. By serving the pastors she was serving the Lord. She needed them, yet they were her abusers. She wanted out, but that would separate her from the people who were her source of blessing. She needed to serve because she wanted to please God, but it would invariably result in pain. This blending of tormentor and helper is classic mental abuse. It is a type of torture.
I was told by my wife, after we left, that by 2013 she wanted out but felt trapped. She was afraid to leave. She was afraid of “betraying” the pastors because we were taught that would result in punishment by God. She didn’t care about herself, she didn’t want to bring it upon the family.
I wanted out before that time, but didn’t want to leave her in that place. She hid her feelings so well I never knew she also wanted to leave until roughly 9 months before we left.
This almost ruined our marriage. It stole my kid’s mom from them. It stole my kid’s childhood from my wife. The obscene amount of giving we did drove us into debt and stole away any hope of paying for our kid’s college. The moonlighting I had to do to make ends meet stole my free time and my health. The enormous stress and long hours stole my wife’s health and well-being and all her time. Yet, it was all done willingly because it was “the right thing to do” because it was “serving the Lord.”
Now I find out that for much of the time she wasn’t doing it willingly.
When my wife tried to get a job to help ends meet (and to get her away from S and M) she was admonished because that meant less of her time would be available for them.
This church brought in a teaching that instructed churches how to run the church like a business. This is fitting because most churches are incorporated under the 501c3 not-for-profit corporation.
Yet this church is conflicted, and I’m guessing many others if not all are similarly conflicted.
It is organized like a business with an executive leadership team, which we were on, the head pastor is the president, yet it attempts to make decisions from a spiritual standpoint not a business standpoint. If it would apply common business sense it would make sound decisions such as scrap the expansion into the big city, which has been a terrible financial and time burden with literally no benefit.
In May of 2019, my wife and I began to realize that we were on the same page and all this work was pointless and fruitless and definitely not of God.
By this time S and M had found the next big thing to grow churches — Facebook. Unfortunately, Facebook is the platform everyone loves to hate and was several years past its prime. Nevertheless, grasping at any ray of hope for growth, the church was “all-in” for using Facebook to help growth.
S, privately, claimed that he would be able to get the people “all-in” to support the expense — essentially through manipulation. This meant the church would be paying money for promotions (to Facebook and to Google) and requiring certain people to constantly monitor the church’s page for prayer requests. They would then type prayers onto the Facebook page as a response to the prayer requests.
The goal was to grow the church, to get butts in the seats. The promotions were paid and targeted to the geographical area of the 2 church “campuses.” Almost immediately the prayer requests exploded and were coming in from people who were from other cities, states and maybe even countries — and many of whom were already attending a church.
When this promotional package was introduced it resulted, invariably and immediately, in a potentially large amount of work for my wife. She refused. She was given it anyway, despite saying she didn’t want to do it.
In October my wife stepped down. She essentially quit everything, immediately. She was having nightmares; she was having heart palpitations and would have anxiety attacks when sitting down at her computer. She was not sleeping well.
Also, since she had many years of abusive “come to my office” meetings with S and M, she knew the game. If she stepped down, which she desperately needed to do and I was encouraging her to do, and then went to “the office” to “talk about it” she would be admonished, coerced, manipulated and abused into returning to her duties.
So, when she did quit, everything including the leadership team, she refused to talk to them about it. This, to them, was heresy.
This meant she was “offended” and “leaving the church” and “would lead to her destruction.”
They literally told her she was going to be destroyed. At the time, we didn’t intend to leave the church. After all, where would we go? This is all we had known for 14 years.
So she quit. She handed her duties over to other women in the church who had the time to do them. This went on for a week or 2. After a week or 2 S called me in for a meeting. I figured this was to remove me from the leadership team, which I had not quit. It was not about that.
He had been assuming that I was not in favor of her quitting her work. He had been assuming that I was not on her side and did not approve. But, since her heresy had been going on for a week or 2, he assumed that I was not being successful in getting her back on board. This meeting was going to fix that.
I had to be encouraged to realize the severity of her problem. I had to become upset with her enough about what she was doing that I would get her back on track. They couldn’t get to her, but they could get to me.
To accomplish this, S informed me that my wife was “Going around telling bald faced lies” about him and M. This was a shock to me, because I knew full well she wasn’t going around talking to anyone about anything. She was, literally, resting and recovering from years of stress and abuse. My kids were overjoyed because they had their mom back.
I told S I didn’t believe him and that nothing he said would convince me that my wife was a liar. I pressed him to tell me who she had told lies to and what the lies were about. He refused. I told him I fully supported and encouraged my wife quitting her work.
He told me that he was going to have to tell the leadership team, at that week’s meeting, that my wife had quit and refused to talk to them about it. I asked him if I was going to have to sit there while he told my friends that my wife was a liar. He said that he was not planning to bring that up. Of course, the implication was that he could, or might bring it up at some point later.
An hour later when I recovered from the shock of what he had attempted to do I called S and voiced my anger at what he had done.
I asked S during this phone call, did he really say that my wife is “going around telling bald faced lies” about him and his wife. And to my shock and horror he said that he didn’t say that. 1 hour after he did, he claimed he didn’t. After much arguing, yelling and confrontation eventually he admitted that he did say that.
This is gas lighting and blatant manipulation and quite frankly pathetic and obvious, as it is a standard tactic of hard-core manipulation and abuse.
During this phone call he revealed one of the two people who my wife had been “telling lies to.” The “lie” was a misunderstood conversation from about 9 months prior. This conversation between my wife and this other woman was one that my wife did not remember. It was, based on the recounting of it, brief, irrelevant and obviously a conversation that could have led to misunderstanding. And it was 9 months to a year prior.
I stayed on the phone with S for at least an hour, arguing with him, and eventually he gave my wife, over the phone, a halfhearted apology and that was that.
This was a Thursday, and the next Sunday I went to the leadership meeting and informed them all that I and my family were leaving the church effective immediately.
I’ve spoken about this, in varying degrees of detail, to a few people, but no-one has come to us and asked us why we left so suddenly.
Here’s one possible explanation: We heard through the grapevine that a rumor circulated in the church saying we left because we were worshiping the devil. Through deduction and strategic inquiries, I determined that rumor could only have come from the top.
If this story makes its way into that church these words will be dissected, torn apart and any typo or detail open to debate or interpretation or dispute will have me branded a liar. I don’t really care, given they already think we left the church to worship the devil.
I assure you; everything here is as carefully and accurately recounted as I can possibly manage. And we aren’t worshiping the devil.
Also, there are things I have chosen to not include, and be assured the many instances of abuse my wife suffered were greatly glossed over.
Church abuse, also known as spiritual abuse, is a real thing. A search on the topic of “church abuse” typically results in discussion about Catholic priests and young boys, however a search about “spiritual abuse” results in a lot of discussion about what we went through.
It appears that this type of abuse, spiritual abuse, is widespread and people are waking up to it.
Also it should be said that the clergy who spiritually abuse the souls entrusted to them by God often don’t know they are being abusive. They think that the sheep need a strong hand, and they see their actions as just being strong.
Some questions:
What kind of shepherd would chain his sheep to the plow and then whip them when they falter? People go to church for healing and to be refreshed, not to be worked to death.
Whose kingdom are they building? God’s kingdom? Or are they propping up a building tied to a 501c3 corporation that sits empty over 95% of the time?
Are S and M feeling just as trapped as my wife and I did?
If you are feeling trapped in an abusive church, just get out. I’ll tell you what God told me right before I decided I had no choice but to leave.
“You don’t owe them anything.”
Book Resources:
Pagan Christianity — Viola/Barna
Reimagining Church — Viola
The Subtle Power of Spiritual Abuse — David Johnson