“The wicked flee when no one pursues,
but the righteous are bold as a lion.”
Proverbs 28:1
The spring and summer of 2020 was perhaps the most challenging and discouraging season of my life. The COVID Pandemic had just gripped the world and we all went into lock-down, but it wasn’t the uncertainty of the time that plagued me. It was the seeming certainty that toxic leaders would prevail even in the church that brought me to despair. I began to despair over what God was doing in the world. I felt certain that few had the courage to challenge the unethical behavior I witnessed in the church. “[N]o one pursues.”[1]
I have tried to write about my experience many times over the past four years, but the story is so complicated and convoluted, all my efforts just seemed a jumbled mess. It would take a small book to lay it all out and I simply don’t have the interest or energy for that kind of endeavor. So, to state it simply, my motivation in writing this brief article, is (1) to tell the core of the story out loud for my own peace of mind, (2) let others who have had similar experiences know that they are not alone and that the Lord has more for you than just anger and bitterness, and (3) to encourage folks in the church to be as “bold as a lion” in our ministries and to stand up to bad behavior. We must stop bowing at the altar of institutional success. We must not let fear of failure give charismatic but toxic leadership a free hand in our congregations.
In the spring of 2020, I had spent the previous five years working as an assistant and then associate pastor of a large Presbyterian Church in the St. Louis metro area. At the time, I was supervising pastoral care, spiritual formation and informally spurred on outreach efforts. I supervised five staff members, and my role was beginning to look more like an executive pastor, helping the lead pastor manage the overall functioning of the church. Throughout my tenure there, I could see we had some communication problems on staff. Often, the lead pastor didn’t speak with enough clarity or communicated in an off-the-cuff manner that would create confusion. There was serious tension between the worship director and the lead pastor. I sensed growing frustration in our executive administrator as well. Still, we always seemed to work through those issues after some open conversation. However, beginning in the early Fall of 2018, I witnessed a pattern of disregard for the truth, abuse of power and financial maleficence that I could not ignore.
That fall, the lead pastor recruited a part-time church planting intern to work with an organization he had created for planting churches in urban areas. The organization was made up of representatives from area churches and our church had agreed to financially support this organization. I will refer to it as “the network.” However, the intern was actually an employee of our church and paid through our bank accounts. When I asked about whether the intern would be an employee of the network or our church, the lead pastor lied to me. Only when I produced an email he sent to another party where he explained his intent to have the intern work for our church, did he confess his deception. I strongly encouraged him to come clean with session. He said he would but failed to follow through.
Months later I would discover that the “network” wasn’t an organization at all but simply an informal gathering of pastors who agreed to give money to our church for the church plant. They had no bank accounts, no tax ID number, no legal existence at all. The lead pastor planned to use our church as the legal and financial agent for the church plant, a project that may cost as much as $250,000. He was doing this without the consent or knowledge of our leadership. He was actively deceiving them for almost a year about the nature of the project and when he was discovered, he blamed other staff (me in particular) as responsible for this overreach of authority.
When the lead pastor sought to bring the intern on full-time in the Summer of 2019, session realized he planned to use the church as the financial agent of the entire church planting project. Behind the scenes, I had been trying to encourage the pastor to speak more directly with the session, but my patience only served as an opportunity for the pastor to undermine me with lay leaders and other staff. As time passed from Fall 2018 to Summer 2019, I discovered more deception and abuse of power. Over the past year, the lead pastor had directed our accountant to pay for the health insurance for the intern and his family (again, unknown to leadership and contra church policy about part-time staff and un-ordained staff). As we were on-boarding the intern to full-time employment, we discovered that the lead pastor had promised a specific compensation package including benefits that did match current church policy. He did this again without consulting session or the personnel committee. Once session discovered that the lead pastor intended to use our church as the financial agent, he sought to convince our church to take on the project by lying about how much money partner churches had committed to the project.[2]
Manipulation. Lying. Gas-lighting. Abuse of power. Financial malfeasance. All these had been staring me in the face for a few years, but in my mind, I kept explaining it away as miscommunication. In January of 2020, perplexed and feeling more and more isolated as the lead pastor was portraying me as a jealous and disgruntled staff member, I read Chuck DeGroat’s book, When Narcissism Comes to Church. It made sense of my experience and helped me to name what I had been unwilling to concede. I had been lied to… not in isolated instances… but as a practice. Months before, session recognized there was a problem but felt ill equipped to handle it and, frankly, terrified of losing their senior leader and founding pastor. “Would this be the end of the church?” So, instead of addressing it themselves, they sought an outside consultant. The hiring of a consultant took months and again this gave the lead pastor time to position himself and frame the problem as a conflict between me and himself. As the Pandemic took hold in March 2020, it became obvious to me that while individuals in leadership may have had the courage to engage this problem, the overall system of leadership did not and that I would be made a scapegoat.
So, I worked out a severance agreement with the session in June/July 2020 and sought to leave as peaceably as possible. A congregational meeting was set, and I was asked to attend. However, someone (or perhaps multiple people) on leadership began spreading rumors that I was refusing to cooperate with the recommendations from the consultant and that was why I was leaving. In a confidential report, the consultants had accused me of being “disrespectful” to the lead pastor but never gave specific examples and further recommended that I see one of their counselors. I agreed to see a counselor, but not someone on their staff, as I had lost trust in their organization.[3] My counselor was approved by the consultants, and I began sessions with him. Yet, rumors were spreading that I refused to see a counselor. I discussed these rumors with church leadership and pointed out that if I were asked questions about the rumors at the congregational meeting, that would put me in an awkward position. Shortly thereafter, the plans for announcing my departure from staff changed.
A video was made by the session explaining the difficulty with the lead pastor and the steps he was taking to address his behavior. The video then went on to explain my resignation. My departure was framed as a conflict with the senior leader, and I was accused of being insubordinate (something I had never heard before). The video link was sent to over 1000 email addresses. A Zoom congregational meeting followed, and I was asked not to participate. The narrative was set: the lead pastor was a flawed man but willing to address his problems, but I was resentful, angry, and unwilling to cooperate with a process of reconciliation.
This of course hurt, but I have come to accept that the session did this out of a combination of ignorance and fear. Many elders have since left session and many new elders looking for change have come on to leadership. I bear no ill will towards my former church.[4] But does that mean no one should follow-up on the bad behavior of this pastor?
There were attempts to get our regional accountability body involved (presbytery), but again there was no will to engage the pastor of a large church and a leader at the denominational level. The reasoning was: “the lead pastor had made some effort to address his behavior, and we are content to leave it at that.” Colleagues and friends seemed to grow timid and silent even as my reputation continued to be attacked in the months that followed. I decided to stay mostly quiet about my experience, hoping that our denomination structures might come to my defense. They did not. For the next several months I immersed myself in home renovation projects, working with my hands as my heart worked through my disillusionment in the background.
It was strange to have some colleagues call me, concerned that I might hurt myself or disappear into a bottle of whiskey. I suppose they were expressing care and concern, but they were often the same people who actively undermined efforts to seek accountability or simply remained silent. “[N]o one pursues.” I had lost faith in my denomination. I had lost faith in the church. Was I losing faith in Christ?
It was a most unpleasant process. I would like to say that in the intervening years, there has been some measure of justice. But there hasn’t. Many of my relationships at the church were fractured and remain broken. Denominational leaders have continued toside-step concerns about this individual. The senior pastor “moved on” a couple of years later (perhaps evidence of some of that new leadership) but he is now serving as the full-time director for the denomination. He seems to thrive.
So, am I writing this to get some measure of justice? No. In ecclesiastical courts, the “statute of limitations” has long run out. I have no desire to re-litigate the past (which is why I don not mentions names of people or organizations though I realize many will be able to connect the dots… an effort to seek accountability is really beside the point of this post). My motivating intent is to demonstrate to those, who think spiritual abuse is in the margins, that the problem is a real. It is not in every church, but it is not a fringe issue. Sexual predation or financial embezzlement seem to be the necessary minimum before we pay any attention to toxic behavior in our leaders and even then, we prefer to look away. It must not be ignored. I am also writing this to let those who have been hurt by similar or worse circumstances, you are not the only one who has experienced this kind of hurt. And these experiences don’t have to define the rest of your spiritual life.
Something profound happened in me through the fires of this season. I had understood most of my Christian life that the church should be the center of my life and the grounding force for it. I should find life in the church so that I could love my neighbor well. But the church turned out to be weak and hypocritical. It turned out to be, not a source of healing, but a place of deep wounding. I must confess, this stoked a fire inside that threatened to consume me. Would this fire temper me or make me brittle? I have seen many other people go through similar experiences in the church and come out brittle… angry and bitter. I understand that anger, but it is a poison in our system. This anger often expresses itself in the most destructive ways. We are tempted to give ourselves over to the resentment. We think this might be a way of processing it. Instead, it turns us into distorted and ugly versions of ourselves that often inflict as much pain as we endured. There is another way… a harder path… but the very path that Christ walked before us: forgiveness.
Christ told us what the church was. She was an adulterous wife. The church was at the same time the Prodigal Son and the Self-Righteous Son. And still Christ loves the church.
37 “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!” Matt. 23:37
I saw that I should never have placed my faith in the church and that the Lord never asked me to. He called me to place my faith in Him… in His mercy… in His love. Then in turn he asked me, not to trust the church, his bride, but to love her. He called on me to love the church despite her deceits and betrayals. He called me to love the church despite her weakness and fears. He called me to love her just as He loved me, in all of my fears and failings. And when I remember the boldness of his love, it helps me rise above my hurts without excusing those who have hurt me. If the Church in America is to become more than what it is right now, we need the boldness of righteous people, willing to love… to engage, challenge, inspire, forgive.
I have no faith in the Church in America. Nor should I. I do have faith in Christ who is working in the Church in America. So, I am going to lean into the boldness that love should give us. I am going to lean against those fears of “pursuing the wicked.” And I am going to stop worrying about whether the pursuit of righteousness is hurting church growth. We all need to start loving the Church as best we can, even if that means lovingly calling out bad behavior. It may be in some small corner of the kingdom and not in a position of prominence, or with some giant social media platform. But I am not called to love the world, and neither are you. We are called to love our neighbor. If you have been hurt in the midst of Christian ministry, I hope you will join me in this effort… this effort to love as bold as a lion… to forgive… to endure… and to put your faith in the Christ that loved you and to love the things that He loves.
It takes time to process the pain we experience so I do not want to rush anybody through that process. I do want to be clear about the destination though: love and forgiveness. Take whatever time you need in getting there. But don’t lose sight of it. Because it’s only there that we experience true healing.
[1] I realize the main point of this verse is to highlight the cowardice of the wicked… running when no one is even chasing. It is also true that often no one purses the wicked because we are either apathetic or afraid. We should not be timid or coward-like. Love should make us bold. That is the theme I am following in this post.
[2] I would like everyone to know that I was in full support of the church plant and the church planting intern. The intern did nothing wrong in this process and if anything was just as much a victim as anyone else. I am happy to report that this church plant is doing incredible work in North County St. Louis.
[3] To be clear, I do not claim to have handled myself perfectly in every circumstance. Sometimes my frustration led me to be very direct with the senior pastor and unfiltered with some of my staff. I did seek the lead pastor out to apologize for these instances. He declined to meet with me in person, so I apologized via email. However, the consultants gave me very little to work with as they claimed wrongdoing without telling me what I had done wrong. As such, I did not trust them with whatever I might say in a counseling session.
[4] In fact, in my role with the presbytery, I helped in approving and installing their new pastor. I may be bringing to light a difficult chapter in their history, but my hope is they will continue on this path that seems healthier than the one they were on a few years ago.
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