Note - As I am in the throes of unpacking from a recent move, here is a lightly edited repost from an old blog that I think deserves another look.

I have been wanting to write these words since before this blog was even a twinkle in my eye.

There is a lot of well meaning but unhelpful advice for new moms out there. Case in point, this post by John Piper, “Soul Care for Exhausted Young Mothers.”

A friend who had recently given birth texted the post to a group of fellow moms not too long after my younger daughter was born. My friend said it had been very encouraging to her.

I, however, found it to be the opposite.

For those of you who also find Mr. Piper’s article encouraging, I am so glad. What I’m writing here is not meant to take away from the encouragement you find in his words. Instead, what I’m writing is meant to offer encouragement to those who, like myself, feel that it is simply adding to the burden we already struggle with. And to hopefully provide insight to Mr. Piper or those in a similar position as to why the words he used can be the opposite of encouraging.

This is not mean to be a take-down, but rather a thoughtful critique of where Mr. Piper could have done better, particularly given his position of influence, as well as things I thought actually encouraging from his response to a struggling new mom.

Context for a Mother’s Question

The exhaustion this new mom is experiencing (“I can barely concentrate on anything”) is not hyperbole. It is very real.

When my kids were that young, there were times when I probably should not have been driving, I was so sleep deprived. And assuming her son is biological instead of adopted, she has just spent the last 1-2 months recovering from the equivalent of a major surgery, on top of sleepless nights. For comparison, triple bypass heart surgery recovery time is 6-12 weeks; delivering a child is 6-8 weeks recovery when there are no complications.

In addition to possible physical limitations, a new mother must also adjust to major constraints on her time, even when fully recovered physically from childbirth. Taking care of a newborn is extremely time consuming. They need to eat every 2-3 hours (even overnight), and each feeding is 20-30 minutes, so lets call that roughly 5 hours every day. (Budget extra time for cleaning bottles, if the baby is not nursing.) Diapers need to be changed roughly as often, and range in time from 5 minutes to 30 minutes (if there is a blowout that involves changing the baby’s clothes and the clothes/linens of whomever/whatever was holding the baby at the time). And some babies will fall asleep quite easily naturally, while others (through no fault of their own or their parents) take a lot longer.

Taking care of a newborn is totally worth it, but totally hard. Many church nurseries won’t accept babies until they’re 8-weeks old. And daycares have a lower infant:teacher ratio than toddler:teacher ratio because of how much hands-on care newborns require. And all of this hands-on care requires time. Lots and lots and lots of time.

Taking care of a newborn also requires inordinate amounts of energy and effort, which can be even more difficult for the estimated 1 in 7 mothers who experience postpartum depression.

Anything Mr. Piper says to Beth needs to take this into account, knowing the numbers of people his words will reach.

Let’s see if Mr. Piper empathizes with her situation.

I am glad to see that Mr. Piper acknowledges he’s never been in her exact situation. But he neglects to offer any sort of sympathy with the exhaustion she is feeling and with the very real and very practical difficulties in finding the time, let alone energy, to pursue devotions in any semblance of what they may have looked like before having a child.

Hopefully this is a minor oversight.

Misplaced Hyperbole

With all due respect, the hyperbole of “your walk with God is as essential for the good of your child as is your milk or the formula” is simply not true.

An infant will survive if his/her parent neglects to pray for them for two weeks. Said child will not, however, survive if their parent neglects to feed them for two weeks. While this metaphor sounds nice as a literary device, I’m confused as to what Mr. Piper is hoping to accomplish with it in this situation.

Also, Mr. Piper slightly misquoted Matthew 4:4. Technically, Scripture states that “man” (or perhaps “mankind”) does not live by bread alone. Not children, specifically. And this verse is in the context of Jesus being tempted in the desert as an adult.

Just saying.

As much as I agree that children should ideally be raised in a home that is saturated in knowledge of Scripture, I think it’s a teeny bit of a stretch to apply this particular verse in a literal manner to a newborn.

And the original question only asked about help continuing a walk with God. Mr. Piper, however, has immediately jumped to the worst-case scenario: “If you lose your communion with God…” This induces fear and shame, not transparency and vulnerability.

In what other context would I ask someone for advice on an aspect of parenting, and it’s normal for the other person to catastrophize? “You’re potty training your toddler? You can get him to pee in the toilet but not poop in the toilet? You’d better get this under control, or he will be wearing diapers for the rest of his life and be mocked on the playground and in the workplace and never get a decent job or a wife because he smells of poopy diapers and it will be all your fault.”

See how silly that sounds? And how unlikely it makes me want to ask that person for advice in the future? Even though I may be genuinely struggling and in need of practical help?

Catastrophizing Instead of Helping

“You want him to know God more than you want him to live.” Two things with this first sentence.

First, I am uncomfortable with Mr. Piper putting words in Beth’s mouth with “you want him to.” Maybe she secretly wants her son to live more than she wants him to know God. When her son is two months old. Because if he doesn’t survive past two months, how is she supposed to know whether or not he really knew God?

Second, why the false dichotomy of “know God” or “live?” Why can’t Beth want both? What is Mr. Piper hoping to accomplish, here?

Third, it’s a little creepy that Mr. Piper talks about anything being more important to a helpless infant than simply being alive. The most important job for a newborn is to stay alive. That’s it. There’s a reason infant mortality rates are tracked so closely, and it’s because babies die so easily.

Let’s remember here that Mr. Piper is speaking to the mother of a two-month-old baby. He’d rather the baby be dead than not “know God?”

God has that baby’s entire lifetime to work. Not that this excuses the baby’s parents from helping build a foundation of faith. But there is no reason for such a sense of urgency in imparting the faith when a baby literally can’t understand anything beyond “I’m physically comfortable” and “I’m physically not comfortable.” Why is Mr. Piper adding this misplaced burden of urgency on a new mother’s shoulders?

Also, the words “maintain a sweet, growing, satisfying walk with your God” imply a standard that is simply not attainable. No relationship, with God or otherwise, is always an upward trajectory of sweet and growing and satisfying. All relationships, including with God, have their ups and downs and backs and forths. Mr. Piper does not acknowledge that the stress of caring for a newborn may simply be one of the down periods in an otherwise normal and healthy relationship, and that it will get better given enough time (and age-appropriate sleep training).

Instead, presenting only the perfectionism of an ideal will again induce fear and anxiety, not peace and hope.

Mr. Piper Loses Sight of His Audience. Again.

Mr. Piper appears here to have lost sight of his audience. The original question was about continuing a walk with God while adjusting to life with an infant. Now Mr. Piper is talking about disciplining older children.

It is true that children need to learn appropriate behavior. It is true that parents need to train children toward that appropriate behavior. It is true that all people, at some point, need to learn that they are not the center of the world.

But what help is this knowledge to a new mother right now who is balancing the very real needs of her helpless infant with the very real needs of her soul?

Babies cry. That is how they were “designed” by God to communicate when they are hungry, tired, in pain, in need of reassurance that a caregiver is near, or in need of a diaper change. That is not selfish, or acting like “a little emperor.” No more than when I tell my husband, “I’m sorry, I really need to go to the bathroom before I have an accident. Can we continue this conversation when I get back?”

And children are not “designed” to be submissive. If they were, there would be no need to “discipline” them, because they’d always automatically do what a caregiver told them to do.

Children push boundaries. That is one of the ways God “designed” them to learn about the world, through curiosity and exploration. Does that make it harder for parents? Sure. It would be nice for both us and the others around us if children were always submissive and obedient.

But your measure as a parent is not whether your children throw a temper tantrum in public. Your measure as a parent is how you then handle said temper tantrum.

This is important, so I am going to repeat it.

Do you become “out of control” yourself and react in anger and embarrassment? Or do you take charge of the situation and calmly enforce an age-appropriate boundary or consequence so your child will learn better behavior for next time?

Moving on to Some “Practical” Advice

While there is truth in this paragraph, that a child of any age “does not need your ever-present attention,” it is not balanced.

The average child of two months is going to need an overwhelming amount of attention compared to a child of two years or five years or twelve years or twenty years. And it takes time, months and years and decades, to gradually train a child toward more independence.

Given the years of experience Mr. Piper himself has in parenting, I am mildly surprised that he did not point this out as a reassurance to a new mom who is at the very beginning of this journey.

As a parent of a newborn your life is supposed to revolve around your infant. Because they are so much more helpless than you. As they grow and mature, it will be appropriate for parents and other adults to gradually disabuse them of the notion that the world revolves around them. But this is a very gradual process that doesn’t even really start until the toddler years. This is not a worry that an exhausted new mother needs added to her burden.

This I agree with, the last sentence in particular. “Let your child become secure not in your ever-present hovering, but in the certainty that you always return in love.” I think this is a beautiful illustration of our relationship with God.

But, again, this is a process of learning that takes a long, long time. The mother of a two-month-old is barely beginning teaching this lesson to her child, and it will be a long while before it sinks in.

This information is mostly helpful and encouraging, particularly the last sentence. Tending to one’s child and tending to one’s soul do not need to be mutually exclusive and can often be done in tandem, and it takes time and practice to nurture an attitude and mindset that lives this way.

My one caveat to finding this information helpful is the phrase “confess” your irritability.

To people who grew up in a culture, family, or church that shamed all negative emotions to an unhealthy degree, “confess” holds a very negative connotations. This is, admittedly, a very gray area. But having a “negative” emotion does not always translate into “sinful” behavior that needs formal repentance and confession, in my opinion. (For further reading, see Peter and/or Geri Scazzero’s works Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, The Emotionally Healthy Church, or The Emotionally Healthy Woman.) Perhaps I am nitpicking, but I think a more appropriate word here would be to “acknowledge” one’s irritation, to then be able to deal with it in a productive manner.

And, while I’m nitpicking, this is the second time Mr. Piper has quoted scripture and the second time he has taken it out of context. This particular section of 1 Corinthians is talking more about the believer’s freedom from legalism, and not so much finding the presence of God in the daily grind. I agree there are verses that can support the idea of finding the presence of God in the daily grind. I just don’t think I Corinthians 10:31 in the proper context is one of them.

Is this a normal habit of Mr. Piper’s?

The Role of the Church

I suspect my husband will see where I am going with this one.

Yes, being involved with other people is good and we should not completely withdraw into solitude. (Though I would point out that solitude, just like community, can also be a spiritual discipline.) But, more importantly, we need to be self-aware enough to realize whether a particular community is life-giving or life-draining.

It is ok to say “not now” to meetings or communities that are draining when your energy needs to be preserved for caring for your infant, yourself, and the rest of your immediate family. And continue to say “yes” to communities that fill your cup. There is only so much of you to go around.

It is ok to set boundaries to preserve yourself for higher priorities, particularly if you are an introvert.

My husband and I were in a small group when each of our children was born, a different group at a different church each time. While we genuinely cared for and enjoyed the company of the individuals in the groups, in many ways these groups were more draining than sustaining.

In the first instance, we were hosting a brand new small group at a small church. The burden of hosting (cleaning both before and after) and preparing a meal every week for people who may or may not actually show up led to a case of burnout over the course of almost a year. We actually hosted a meeting the day after bringing Miss Bee home from the hospital. And then handed the group a housekey and told them to lock up behind themselves when they were done, because the advice nurse had just told us over the phone to take our lethargic Miss Bee to the emergency room. “And if she stops breathing on the way here, pull over and call 911” are the words no parent of a newborn should have to hear. (See note above about the most important job of a newborn being simply to stay alive.) And the church should never have assumed that we would be hosting with an infant who was only days old.

In the second instance, the group met late in the evening and often ran late, which meant I was not getting to bed until 11pm and then getting up exhausted at 4 or 5 am when the baby woke up for the morning (in addition to getting up for 1-2 night feedings). I spent the rest of the next day physically “recovering” from small group, I imagine in ways similar to how one “recovers” the next day from an evening of drinking. But doing it while caring for an infant and a toddler.

I don’t think this is healthy.

And this whole taking verses out of context is getting to be a little ridiculous. 1 Corinthians 12 is all about spiritual gifts, the need for different spiritual gifts within a body of believers, and the importance of not elevating certain gifts over others. It is most emphatically not about the “dangers” of withdrawing into solitude for an individual when that individual’s life is going through a major upheaval.

Again, I think it’s good for believers to regularly be around other believers. But Jesus withdrew into the wilderness for 40 days. A little bit of solitude during an exhausting period of one’s life is not the boogeyman Mr. Piper is making it out to be.

Flat-out Dangerous Advice

This is really awkward, I’m sorry.

I’m sincerely glad this worked for Mr. Piper and his wife, and realize they were probably following the advice of their pediatrician at the time, but the medical community since then has realized that it’s safer for infants to sleep on their backs, on a firm surface like a crib mattress, and without pillows or crib bumpers. It’s been like this for nearly 30 years.

Just saying.

Why did no one in the process of recording, editing, and posting this “interview” on a website with 3.5+ million monthly users stop and say something? That strikes me as fairly negligent.

Also, I’m thinking back to Mr. Piper’s earlier advice, “Let your child become secure not in your ever-present hovering, but in the certainty that you always return in love.” If you leave a two-month-old alone for three hours without responding within a few minutes if the baby starts crying (as is implied by the words Mr. Piper uses, “leave him there for the next three hours”), the baby will learn the opposite of “you always return in love” because their brains aren’t mature enough to handle this. Done too frequently, this type of neglect results in life-long challenges for children. Yet Mr. Piper doesn’t put any qualifiers around his advice to take into account a child’s age, or to be available to respond should the baby wake and not be able to sooth itself back to sleep quickly.

Also, it is not clear, but hopefully Mr. Piper here is being descriptive instead of proscriptive. Some infants can fall asleep (and stay asleep) anywhere and anytime. Others cannot. And this is not your “fault” as a parent.

We believe in an infinitely creative God. Is it any wonder that he would make some infants good sleepers and some good wakers?

Wrapping it Up with More Advice

I am glad to see Mr. Piper encouraging the involvement of both parents, even in the early years of child-rearing. Even if an infant is exclusively nursing, a father can handle the diaper change part of a night feeding while the mother handles the actual feeding part, to help share the load. Mr. Piper only mentioned night wakings, but a father can take turns to do day-time diaper changes, change a baby’s clothes, wash the baby, carry the baby when the whole family goes on an outing, or sooth the baby to sleep as ways to start building a relationship with his child and establishing trust with his newborn that he as a father is also capable of meeting his child’s needs. In the process, this sharing of the load has the added benefit of giving the mother more time and physical and mental energy to devote to her relationship with God.

Or to shower.

Just a thought.

Also, why does the wife need to tell her husband that “Pastor John says so?” Aren’t the wife and husband both adults?

Two things in particular that I like about this advice.

First, I love reading, so of course I’m going to applaud whenever anyone recommends it.

Second, I like that Mr. Piper emphasizes reading the Bible in particular, because I think it should be a priority over other books by Christian authors. Not saying the Bible should be the only thing people are reading, just that it should be the focus if their time and energy is limited.

But I think it would have been helpful if Mr. Piper had shown or encouraged a little more creativity, here. While he does make a nod to audio books, there are so many other ways someone can be “in the Word.”

But that’s a whole other post. Like this one:

A Missing Scripture

Mr. Piper peppered his advice with a few Bible verses. But as I wrap up this post, I’m realizing that he left out an important one.

Scripture talks in several places about parenting, as Mr. Piper notes. Scripture also addresses a specific word this mother used to describe herself – “exhausted.”

But that is, yet again, a post for another day.

So I want to hear from you. If you’ve been through a period of sustained exhaustion, either from caring for a newborn or otherwise, what kinds of things have helped sustain you through that period?

Leave a comment

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Last week I posted about the mis-use of the parable of the lost coin at a former church of mine that I’d left under difficult circumstances. This past Sunday, a now-retired pastor from that same church (whom I still respect) guest preached at my current church, and the parable of the lost coin came up in the sermon.1

So seeking after lost coins was very much on my mind when my husband and I went to see a production of Hadestown - Teen Edition at a local theater that same Sunday afternoon. And because the lost coin is usually given the modern equivalent of a phone or car keys, I was not anticipating my reaction to the play.

Now, anyone who has already seen Hadestown is probably going to roll their eyes at me. Years ago, one of my sisters gave me the soundtrack to the musical Hadestown, by Anaïs Mitchell, because she knows I like Greek mythology. I’ve listened to the CD easily a hundred times, but never actually seen the musical. And because I enjoy Greek mythology, I’m familiar with both the stories of Hades and Persephone (the god of the underworld and the wife he had to kidnap in order to marry) and Orpheus and Eurydice (the musician who descended into the underworld in order to plead for his dead wife’s return to life). So I thought I’d be pretty familiar with the story of Hadestown.

I was wrong.

And if you haven’t seen Hadestown, consider this your spoiler alter.

There were all sorts of details to the story that were missing from the soundtrack. I had no idea that Hades and Persephone actively disliked each other. Or that Eurydice had actively chosen to descend into the underworld. All of a sudden, so many little oddities from the soundtrack were making sense. And I had such a deeper appreciation for the power and storytelling talent behind the lyrics of the soundtrack.

Now, I don’t know enough about music or theater to know whether either is objectively good by any measurable standard; I just know what I happen to like or not like.

Whenever the song “Wait for Me” comes on the CD and I’m (alone, who am I kidding) in my car, I will belt out the lyrics at the top of my lungs. But sitting in the theater, having just watched the backstory unfold on the stage in front of me, performed by seriously talented young actors, I legitimately cried. Like, biting my lip to prevent the random seven-year-old-boy sitting next to me from giving me the side-eye kind of crying.

The song and the play as a whole were just that good. (I don’t think it was just me, the audience gave a standing ovation at the end.)

The song “Wait for Me” pours from the utter depths of Orpheus’s soul as he is chasing after the love of his life. She has just made an understandable but very poor decision and he is marching past the very gates of Hell itself anyway to rescue her. “Wait for me, I’m comin’” is the song’s refrain. “Wait, I’m comin’ with you. Wait for me, I’m comin’ too.”

Eurydice is the lost coin, I thought to myself, tears trickling down. It’s not just a phone or car keys or a coin. I am the lost coin, and Jesus is Orpheus coming to rescue me.

Big revelation, I know. But sometimes the reminder hits us in the solar plexus all over again.

But there is a twist to Orpheus’s story.

He’s unsuccessful.

Against all odds, he convinces Hades to let him take Eurydice back to the land of the living. But Hades imposes a condition, that Orpheus cannot look back to make sure the love of his life is following.

And Orpheus gets so close! So close that I thought maybe Anaïs Mitchell decided to re-write the ending of the story. So close that my husband told me afterwards that he was glad I’d warned him about the ending beforehand.

At the very last moment, when Orpheus has almost managed to get Eurydice back to the land of the living, he fails. He turns back to look. He violates Hades’s condition. And Eurydice slips back into the underworld again. Doomed, again.

So, my fellow lost coins. Know you that you are being sought after by a Savior who is greater than Orpheus, a Savior who will rescue you successfully even from beyond the gates of Hell itself.

And that is a Savior worth following.

Amen.

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Your husband doesn’t get much opportunity to preach in “big” church, being the youth pastor and all. So I can imagine how excited he was and the extra time he took that week to put into sermon prep. I can also imagine the look of pleading on his face when he told you he had the perfect idea for a sermon illustration, but he needed to run it by you, first.

You. You were the sermon illustration. More specifically, your ability to lose your phone with annoying frequency just as the whole family is trying to get out the door to church in the morning.1

As a sermon illustration for the parable of the widow searching for her lost coin2 it was just perfect. Wasn’t it.

Wasn’t it?

What Your Husband Probably Didn’t See

[I am clearly conjecturing about this specific couple. The following is based off my experience observing the dynamics of parents of young children in more than one strictly complementarian church. Not all couples fit this pattern, by any means.]

What your husband probably didn’t see was you getting all three children out of bed that morning. You getting the younger two dressed while supervising the oldest and making sure her outfit was weather and church appropriate. You changing the baby’s diaper and taking the potty-training toddler to the toilet. Three different times. Making sure the oldest went to the bathroom. And washed her hands. With soap.

Your husband probably didn’t see you making breakfast for yourself and all three children at the same time while weathering complaints of “I’m not hungry” and “I don’t want toast.” You making sure the younger two get their milk in sippy cups while the oldest gets a “big girl” cup. You reminding the oldest to put her dishes in the sink while cleaning up the dishes of the two kids too young to reach the sink. You wiping jelly off the tabletop before it has time to dry and become even harder to clean off.

Your husband probably didn’t see you brushing the teeth of the younger two children and remembering which kid gets which toothbrush. You using a finger to scrub the glob of toothpaste off the counter from the toddler learning to squeeze her own toothpaste, before it dries and gets harder to clean off. You prying the toothbrush away from the baby because it’s really time to get a move on and the ensuing protest from someone too young to reason with who was enjoying gnawing away at the rubber banana shape. You supervising the older kid to make sure she actually used toothpaste and actually brushed. You hastily wiping toothpaste spit off the faucet with toilet paper before it dries and becomes even harder to clean off, because your toddler is still learning to spit down into the sink instead of spitting while watching herself in the mirror.

Your husband probably didn’t see you putting extra diapers and snacks into the diaper bag, because it’s Sunday, and he always stays late to talk with people after service and the kids get cranky with the overstimulation and the long wait for lunch. He doesn’t see you put a change of clothes and a ziplock bag in for your potty training toddler, just in case there is an accident. Because if you don’t, there will be an accident. Guaranteed.

Your husband probably didn’t see you grabbing the parenting book you told a struggling mom that you’d loan her. You remembering to pack the sweater that one of the teens accidentally left behind at Thursday’s youth group event at your house. Because you’re the pastor’s wife, and those are the kinds of things a good pastor’s wife does.

Your husband probably didn’t see you remembering that you forgot to pack water bottles for all three kids and going ahead and packing water bottles because, again, it’s Sunday and he always stays late to talk with people after service and the kids get cranky with the overstimulation and the long wait for lunch.

Your husband probably didn’t see you getting shoes on the two youngest children and patiently coaching the oldest through putting on and fastening her own shoes. You hunting for the toddler’s only two matching shoes and making a mental note to get new ones soon because these are really rather worn.

Your husband probably managed to get himself dressed and presentable for the day without needing any help. As you did. He probably even got himself breakfast and cleaned up after himself.3 As you did. He possibly even took the initiative to take 20 minutes for a quiet walk by himself as the sun was just peeking over the horizon in order to prepare his heart for the Sunday service. As you…

… didn’t get a chance to.

See, if your husband had actually seen all this, he probably wouldn’t have complained about you losing your phone so often. He would have seen all the other things you’d already had to keep track of that morning in addition to getting yourself dressed, fed, and out the door and he would have been too grateful to you for taking care of all these niggling matters to even think of complaining about something so trivial as having to wait in the car for two whole minutes that morning while you backtracked your steps and found your phone.

Wouldn’t he have?

To the pastor’s wife whose husband complained about her from the pulpit - I see you. And you deserved better.

You still do.

To the Pastor Who Complained About His Wife from the Pulpit

Dude. That was painfully immature. I really hope an older, spiritual mother or father took you aside afterwards and lovingly told you so.

And please don’t pull up the old “Well, I asked and she said it was ok!” excuse. Frankly, you shouldn’t have put her in the position of being asked in the first place.

The pastor’s wife’s (unspoken) job is to make her husband look good. And in strict complementarian churches in particular, wives are encouraged to follow their husband’s leads, to trust their husband’s judgment more than their own, and to bow to their husband’s wants and desires even at the sacrifice of their own reputation. This may be yet another thing you probably don’t see, but this unspoken pressure on your wife is very real. Even more so when she is a pastor’s wife.

Unless, of course, you are in turn giving your wife permission to stand up in church and tell the whole congregation about your habit of picking your nose and eating the booger afterwards.4 In that situation, by all means, complain from the pulpit about her habit of losing track of her phone.

And just a reminder that you were speaking literally from behind the pulpit. Even if your wife thinks it’s hilarious that she loses her phone all the time, too,5 take a moment to think about all the other wives in the congregation. Even if you are a fully engaged partner in the household and have a fantastic relationship with your wife, that is not the case for every woman sitting in front of you. To the women who are routinely belittled by their husbands, you just gave tacit permission for their husbands to continue to do the same.

Is this the kind of example you want to be setting for other husbands? Or the kind of behavior you want your daughters to find acceptable to receive from their future husbands?

Next time, do better. If you have to make fun of someone from the pulpit, punch up, not down. There’s no honor in punching down.

Epilogue

Only after writing the first draft of this post did I realize that I’d forgotten that the pastor’s kids still need their hair brushed. Whoops… This is my literal day job as a stay-at-home-mom, and even I forgot something, there is so much to keep track of.

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Because when we ask for forgiveness, we may be pressuring the person we harmed into something they’re not ready to do, yet. And that is placing just one more burden and expectation on their shoulders.

How This Thought Process Started

This is a scenario I’ve personally seen play out a few different times over the years:

Person A significantly hurts Person B. Person A, sometimes after a little time and sometimes after a long time, recognizes the error of their ways. Person A asks Person B for their forgiveness. But Person B isn’t ready to forgive, and Person A gets frustrated. They’ve done what they were supposed to, and still aren’t forgiven.

But here’s the thing. Your standing with God doesn’t depend on whether or not the person you hurt forgives. Your standing with God depends on whether or not you repented, where repentance is defined as a coming to your senses and a genuine effort to make amends (where appropriate) and do better in the future.

As Romans 8 tells us, “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Someone else’s unforgiveness cannot separate us from the love of God, either.

As to whether or not the other person forgives? Well, that’s between them and God.

Would it be nice if they forgave and your relationship was restored and we could credit another happy ending to God’s account book, All Glory Be To God Amen?

Of course. It’s natural to want that.

But life is often more complicated, as some of my own experiences of being on the receiving end of “repentance” have shown.

When Repentance Is Insincere

I’ve recounted before the story of the church elder who lied to me and questioned my character using shaky evidence in front of my husband and children. In his final email to us, said elder asked for forgiveness for not pausing conversation when I left briefly to take care of my toddler. Which, in the big scheme of all the things that went wrong at that meeting, was really a minor infraction. His asking for forgiveness for this one minor thing showed that he clearly didn’t realize the magnitude of his transgressions.

His asking for forgiveness for this one minor thing also felt frankly manipulative, like he was calling our bluff on being “good” Christians, because “good” Christians must always forgive.

But I forgave him anyway, for both that and for everything else. Not for his sake, but for the sake of my own sanity.

At a different church, a pastor publicly told my husband that he wasn’t “a true follower of Christ” because of how he voted in a gubernatorial recall election. When my husband rightfully called him out on such nonsense (the pastor had by this time established a pattern of hot-headedness and divisiveness), the pastor apologized. We were pleasantly surprised.

That very next Sunday, my father-in-law (who was still attending the church at the time) told us that the conversation had made it’s way into the sermon. The pastor used it as a brag to show how he’d apologized to preserve unity in the church, instead of admitting that his multiple occasions of harsh words and lack of ability to hold his temper were so divisive that they were the direct cause of our family leaving that church.

My eyes rolled so hard the neighbors probably heard them across the street.

And it was these instances of an apology being 100% manipulative instead of genuine that finally led me to this conclusion:

In other words, stop asking yet one more thing of the person you’ve hurt. And do them the courtesy of giving them the space and time to come to forgiveness on their terms, not yours.

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This is not a story I’d ever planned to share here. But as I’ve written more about toxic churches and authoritarian leadership, I’ve found myself needing to reference back to my first experience with an unhealthy church and think it will be helpful to have the whole saga in one place. The account that follows is lightly edited from an email I wrote giving background information to a counselor in April 2021, roughly four years after we’d left the church.

I’m not publicly naming the church here because the church is now closed, and that is important for a variety of reasons. The church website no longer exists, so I can’t hold this post to my usual standards of citing sources and providing evidence. Because the church is closed, it is no longer in a position to hurt other people. And, as far as I can tell, the founding/senior pastor is no longer in vocational ministry and therefore not in a position to widely spread harmful practices.

The church was part of the Acts 29 network, which was headed by Mark Driscoll and then Matt Chandler while we were in attendance. Both of whom had to step down from leadership under problematic circumstances. And our senior pastor served in some capacity at the regional level of the network, in addition to his pastoral duties. I say this because patterns of dysfunction in my story below were later reflected in other accounts out of the A29 network, even before the now famous “Rise and Fall of Mars Hill Church” podcast by Mike Cosper.

My husband, David, and I had left our previous church in search of reformed theology (him) and inter-generational community (me). We thought we’d found it at a small church that was meeting in a not-for-profit coffee shop whose profits went to fight sex trafficking. The coffee shop was also founded by the church.

This was a small church and a recent plant (about six years old when we first started attending). The pastor was in his 40s and the congregation was mostly young. The pastor was a gifted speaker and the church emphasized small group community and “covenant” membership, with emphasis on the super spiritual word “covenant.”

Cracks In the Foundation

Our first year here was great. We got connected with a small group and felt part of a community. We were asked to lead a small group, ourselves, and that’s when cracks started to appear. These weren’t the only issues, but the bigger ones we ran into were burnout, a lack of financial oversight, white-washing of problems, and hero worship of the pastor.

Burnout was openly acknowledged from the pulpit as a problem, but little was done to counteract it. I experienced this first when we led a small group, which involved hosting, cooking a meal (theoretically, it was a potluck, but other people’s contributions were inconsistent at best), and leading discussion/teaching. I was pregnant with Miss Bee (our oldest) when we first started leading, and we asked for co-leads to help share the burden, but co-leads never materialized. We asked several times for other specific help, but help was never forthcoming. When it became too much for me, we finally dissolved the group and joined a different one.

Around the same time, a man was elevated to an elder/pastor position (the church used the terms synonymously).1 David and I had concerns, because the elder had told us privately that he let his first wife have full custody of their children even when she married someone that this elder had reasonable suspicion to consider abusive. (He had subsequently remarried, and was still married to his second wife while we knew him.) We also observed a lot of fawning in how he interacted with the senior pastor. David did not feel comfortable sharing our concerns about this elder’s promotion with the pastor, and I didn’t feel comfortable doing so without David’s support. 2

David was becoming discontent at the church, but I didn’t listen to his concerns. (I now know better.)

The Cracks Widen

The church then had to let go of the associate pastor for financial reasons. I was not surprised by the announcement, because I had been paying attention to the scanty budget information that leadership shared, but many in the church were taken aback because all information was shared in the context of “everything is awesome and God is good.” The associate pastor stayed on as volunteer staff, and I will continue to refer to him as “associate pastor” in this narrative.

The church had a denominational consultant come in at some point afterward, and he conducted group interviews with quite a large number of people, including David and myself. During a Sunday service, the consultant told the congregation that the church was healthy and awesome. He wrote a report, but leadership never shared it.

The Cracks Become Personal

I started volunteering as the church’s administrative assistant and quickly experienced burnout again. What was billed as 3-5 hours/week quickly became 6-10 hours/week and was 15 by the time I quit by literally turning in my keys and walking out the door. The work had been manageable for the first couple of months (while the senior pastor was on his summer sabbatical, which was the solution to his burnout), but became untenable when he returned.

I had been an administrative assistant for seven years in a professional setting, had earned an outstanding reputation within the organization, and had loved my job. The problem wasn’t my skill set, it was the senior pastor’s unrealistic expectations.

I expressed multiple times to the senior pastor that I could not continue to do what was being asked of me, but was not listened to. When I finally said, “You need to find someone else. I will do these specific tasks until you find someone else, and these other tasks I’m no longer doing,” he still expected me to do the no-longer tasks. We literally had an interaction where he said, “The copier is broken.” I said, “I’m not responsible for that anymore.” Later that same day I said I needed to leave from our meeting to go home and meet an AC technician, and he said, “Oh, you’re meeting the copier repair guy?” It was almost comical.

On the heels of the pastor pressuring me to “let the church honor me for my service” in a very public manner in spite of my adamant insistence to the contrary, I told David that I felt more like a robot with a particular skill set the pastor wanted to exploit, and not like an actual person to be respected and appreciated. The best thing leadership could do to “honor me” would be to listen to me, but they didn’t seem interested in that.

I found out at a baby shower for my replacement that the pastor was telling people I had to step down because I was having a “difficult” pregnancy. While it’s true I was pregnant (with Queen Bee) and experiencing some fatigue with that, I was stepping down because of his unrealistic expectations. I found out at this same baby shower from the wife of another former volunteer that her husband had also stepped down because of unrealistic expectations of his time. But the congregation was told he stepped down because the position wasn’t “in his wheelhouse.”

The whitewashing of problems felt disingenuous and only allowed problems to continue.

Yet More Cracks Appear

A series of small incidents piled up.

I had a couple weird interactions that seemed to indicate hero-worship of the senior pastor. On a night David and I happened not to be there, our small group recorded themselves praying for the pastor and sent him a copy of the recording. While praying for the pastor is good, and even mentioning that to him to encourage him can be good, David and I were both glad we hadn’t been there for the recording, because it felt performative.

Another time, the pastor commented from the pulpit how well the women’s ministry was doing (this is true, it was flourishing), but that it was a shame they didn’t have the benefit of teaching from the A-team (i.e., himself and the other elders). I later heard this repeated by another male leader in the congregation. This is ironic because the men’s ministry (which had the benefit of the “A-team”) was struggling at the time and, frankly, many of the women teaching in women’s ministry were better speakers than the elder mentioned above.

Yet another time, the pastor commented during a small group training that people needed to get on board with his vision “or get out of the way,” and everyone seemed to take it in stride. This is now a major red flag for me.

Back to the topic of women in the church, the pastor commented in a sermon that Lydia (from the book of Acts) led an all-female household. As a history student, I know how very implausible that is. I never said anything, since it wasn’t really relevant to the rest of the sermon, but it struck me as odd.

Lastly, the pastor practiced the “Billy Graham rule” against me when I was volunteering as his administrative assistant. It left a bad taste in my mouth because (a) it implied he and his wife didn’t trust me and (b), as much as I respected him, he was most definitely not my type.

The Straw that Broke the Camels Back

David and I were already talking about leaving the church at this point, but the kicker came with how the church handled a financial crisis.

Leadership held a volunteer staff retreat where they said they’d made their annual budget and pledged to pay me a stipend as administrative assistant. Without having checked with me to see if I wanted the paid position. I didn’t. I’d already told David I’d be stepping down when I next met one-on-one with the pastor.

Within the space of about a week, there was suddenly an “emergency communication meeting” announced to ministry leads. I predicated to David, “They’re insolvent.” He said, “What?!” Turns out they weren’t technically insolvent, but they came within spitting distance.

When leadership finally shared the barest outline of a budget with the congregation, it was pretty obvious why (and should have been embarrassing for a leadership that taught Financial Peace University). For example, the “tide us over the summer when tithes typically drop” bucket was the same as the “emergency savings” bucket was the same as the “future growth” bucket.

Leadership placed all blame for the crisis on the lack of the congregation’s giving and absolved themselves completely of all responsibility. “This is not because of neglect or error on the part of leadership” were the senior pastor’s specific words. I was flabbergasted. To me, it seemed the only other option was intentionally leading the church toward insolvency, but people we talked to seemed to take it in stride.3

A Different Definition of “Reconciliation”

When David and I left, we communicated via email our concerns and that we were taking a break because we were burnt out. We acknowledged that we were only seeing one side of the story and said that if the pastors/elders wanted to meet to fill in any gaps and ask/answer questions, we were open to that.

The senior pastor emailed that he was sorry for “any miscommunication and missed opportunities” and that he valued reconciliation. The former associate pastor sent us a very gracious reply in which he apologized for any ways he contributed to our hurt and said he’d be willing to meet even if we ultimately decided not to return. (His response has become our gold-standard.) The elder was silent.

While David and I were on our break from the church, the former associate pastor left the church completely. He was open in saying that he’d realized he couldn’t stay on as volunteer elder/pastor without it (i.e. workload) being too much of a burden for his family.

After taking a month or two to process, David and I realized that, even if the church were interested in implementing changes, we weren’t in a position to help due to simple exhaustion. I was still pregnant with Queen Bee (our younger daughter) and knew the newborn phase is all-consuming. We communicated this to the pastors, but said we were still willing to meet and hear their side, etc.

The senior pastor quickly emailed that he no longer saw any reason to meet (apparently his idea of “reconciliation” only included us returning to the church) and within minutes kicked us out of the church’s communication platform.

That hurt.

Epilogue

David and I left the church at the end of 2016, after being there nearly three years. It took extended stays at a couple more churches before David and I finally landed in a healthier one.

As for this Acts 29 church, the senior/founding pastor left in early/mid 2019 for a position as a campus pastor at a multi-site church out-of-state. In October 2020, I found out by happenstance that the church he’d left behind closed.

While I have no doubt covid shut-downs hastened the church’s demise, I also have no doubt that it was already headed there, anyway.

This ended up not being the only time David and I had to wrestle with this particular question, and I’m curious to hear your thoughts on the matter.

At what point should someone leave a church rather than continue trying to fix it?

Leave a comment

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And it’s the devil.

That’s right, folks, the devil. At least, that’s what a recent article from The Gospel Coalition, offering advice on “Where Weary Women Find Strength,” thinks the problem is.1

And I want you to hold onto this thought, because we’ll circle back around to it.

But what if it’s more complicated than that? And what if advice like that given by the article above is actually part of the problem?

Pat Answers Are Too Generic to Actually Help

There are two big critiques I have with this article.

First, the article offers only pat answers to what is quite probably an audience with a diverse set of situations that require more targeted advice. After an introduction describing the problem(s) weary women of our generation face, the three “truths that can help us find rest” become the article’s sub-headings:

1. We’re engaged in a spiritual battle.

2. We need strength more than solutions.

3. We have the armor of God.

Let’s look at how these land when considering a couple of real-world scenarios:

Do you see the difference? In Scenario A, a woman is struggling because of circumstances she (and her husband) have limited control over. In Scenario B, a woman is struggling because of circumstances she and her husband (both individually and together) largely created and control.2

And I think this article may actually offer a lot of hope to the woman stuck in Scenario A: “We can have joy amid trouble. We can have peace amid chaos. We can obey amid temptation. Our circumstances may not change, but by God’s power and strength working in us, we can stand strong.”

If I were re-writing a similar sentiment in everyday English, I’d say that God sees our circumstances and doesn’t want to add to our burdens. His yoke is easy, and his burden is light. Don’t worry about trying to be perfect and do all the things. Give yourself grace, just like God does. Resting in the knowledge of God’s grace can help your day-to-day attitude and give you emotional peace, even if your physical circumstances are not changing.

But the woman stuck in Scenario B? This is a whole different kind of spiritual struggle.

The “True” Source of Women’s Struggles?

The second big critique I have of the article is that over-spiritualizing the nature of women’s weariness distracts from what may actually be the problem, particularly for women caught in Scenario B.

And the article is so close! It has bits of truth sprinkled particularly in the beginning. Our generation is often still weary in spite of all our conveniences. It is truly impossible to be all things to all people at all times. And we do live in a broken and sinful world.

But instead of developing these themes more fully, the article jumps straight to spiritual warfare. “But Paul explains in Ephesians 6:11–12 that the real battle we’re fighting is a spiritual one. Our daily struggles are manifestations of our deeper struggle against the world, the flesh, and the Devil (2:2–3).”

And thus we jump straight into offering spiritual solutions to what may be non-spiritual problems.

And that doesn’t actually help women stuck in Scenario B.

Over-spiritualization Distracts from Practical Solutions

Pat answers and over-spiritualization of weariness leave us women spinning our wheels instead of encouraging growth in our spiritual walk because they only present half the picture.

According to the author, we must look at Paul’s teaching on the armor of God in Ephesians 6:10-18 in order to “understand the true nature of our struggles and the true source of our strength… There may be practical changes we could make to lighten our load, but they won’t address our spiritual struggle. We’re wearing ourselves out trying to fix what’s outside of us when the peace and rest we crave comes from God’s strength and presence inside of us.”

The problem being, of course, that this is a false dichotomy. Why must it be spiritual warfare or practical solutions? Why can’t it be both? Why can’t we seek and find practical solutions while praying to God for the strength and peace to endure in the meantime?

The article brings up the “battle against hormones and aging.” Speaking of hormones, maybe the remedy for a woman’s fatigue is as simple as getting tested and treated for Hashimoto’s disease or one of the other autoimmune disorders that women are more prone to.3 Or there’s the “battle with the 2-year old over using the potty.” Maybe the remedy for this is that your toddler isn’t ready for potty training, and you try it again in six months to a year. Maybe the solution to a woman’s weariness is really that simple and isn’t solved by a homily on spiritual warfare.

Promoting Unrealistic Expectations

“Seeking spiritual strength instead of putting our hope in material solutions turns our focus to Christ, allowing us to rest in him,” the article claims.

But here’s the rub. Someone may be able to endure an untenable situation for days, weeks, even years, but at some point something will break if there is not meaningful change in circumstances. There will be no practical “rest” if the only actions taken are to trust in the nebulous concept of “spiritual strength.”

I’ve said this before about Bible reading, but I think it applies equally well to engaging in spiritual warfare in general:

First, the Bible is not a magic wand. Reading it will not fix an addiction, will not heal an abusive or dysfunctional relationship, will not cure mental illness, and will not wipe the slate clean of past trauma. The Bible can be one piece of a multi-pronged approach. A multi-pronged approach that may also include accountability groups, healthy boundaries, evidence-based therapy, healthy community, maybe even medication.

God absolutely does miracles through scripture reading, but they are not the norm. Just because God can work an instantaneous miracle does not give anyone a free pass from having to do the hard work of actively pursuing emotional or relational healing. Sometimes the miracle is that God gives someone the endurance to pursue healing over the course of months and years and the grace to continue even through setbacks. But when we tell people “just read the Bible and such-and-such problem will go away” and it doesn’t work, it pushes people to walk away from the Bible and even God completely.

The Elephant in the Bible Reading Room

Enabling Dysfunction instead of Healthy Change

When we are engaged in “spiritual warfare,” it makes us feel more important than we may actually be in the big scheme of things. I mean, who doesn’t want to be a mighty warrior doing mighty things for God?

And spiritual warfare tactics like Bible reading and prayer help us feel productive because we’re theoretically doing something about the problem.

But emphasizing prayer or being in the Word and leaving it at that when there are actually practical things that can be done to alleviate practical problems is not helpful. It is the opposite of helpful. It perpetuates problems, it enables immaturity, it is spiritual gaslighting into thinking everything is ok, it is classic conflict-avoidance.

Praying is the best place to start. Reading the Bible can help ground you in the way of Christ. But that does not mean we stop there. God gives us agency to do other things, as well.

This is the kind of spiritual struggle where you can pray for wisdom to prioritize appropriately, for courage to say a respectful “no” when necessary, and for strength to stand firm even in the midst of pushback. Or the humility to put aside pride and ask for help!

Maybe women should pray and address unrealistic expectations in their lives. Not just their expectations, but their husband’s, their children’s, their workplace’s, their extended family’s, their church’s… (Gasp! Yes, I really did go there. Your church can also have unrealistic expectations of you.)

And this is why I think the Gospel Coalition article stops short of encouraging this kind of spiritual warfare from weary women. Because women would no longer be encouraged to just ‘put on the helmet of salvation’ without complementary encouragement to address unrealistic expectations, particularly those of other people. Because women engaging in this kind of spiritual warfare would involve women making waves and would quite probably require change and adjustment and work from their spouses and their churches, among other things.

But who is that really helping?

And I’ve intentionally assumed good intentions on the part of women’s spouses and churches here. But think about the even more complicated circumstances when a weary woman is dealing with marital abuse, spousal addiction, or a spiritually unhealthy church environment. In situations like this, practical solutions and outside support may be absolutely necessary.

Circling Back Around to the Devil

Now, I am not one who has a strong opinion on whether or not literal demons exist. But whether you think the devil is real or metaphorical, I believe the following still holds true.

You know what the devil is probably actually delighting in? Bone-weary women continuing to struggle alone in their exhaustion, burning the candle at both ends and ignoring practical and life-changing solutions because someone told them to “put on the armor of God” while minimizing the help that practical solutions can also bring. Because then those women won’t have the time and energy to actually go out and win souls to Jesus, to preach good news to the poor in spirit, to free the prisoners of oppression, and to give sight to the spiritually blind.

You know who wins when we over-spiritualize women’s weariness? Ironically enough, the devil.

So if you are a weary woman, don’t go to essays or influencers or teachers whose main takeaway is still that you can do it all by yourself, if only you are spiritual enough. Instead, go to resources that point you to Jesus without keeping you stuck in your current conditions. Resources like some of the ones below:

• “The Emotionally Healthy Woman: Eight Things You Have to Quit to Change Your Life” by Geri and Peter Scazzero

• “The Marriage You Want: Moving Beyond Stereotypes for a Relationship Built on Scripture, New Data, and Emotional Health” by and Dr. Keith Gregoire

• “Tired of Trying to Measure Up: Getting Free from the Demands, Expectations, and Intimidation of Well-meaning People” by Jeff VanVonderen

• “Changes That Heal: Four Practical Steps to a Happier, Healthier You” by Dr. Henry Cloud

Go, and find grace.

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I love books, but I know they’re not everyone’s thing, so this isn’t pressure or a brag. Just offering up a menu of options. (And a couple to avoid.) If you’re looking to try something new, take a gander below and see if something strikes your fancy from the ones I’ve finished in the last six months.

The list organized by non-fiction, fiction, and young adult literature. Because young adult lit often packs just as solid of a punch in a more digestible format.

Non-fiction

• Heretic: Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God

  • by Catherine Nixey

  • A fascinating read about the sects (my word) of the early church that didn’t make it mainstream, plus a few pagan saviors (her word) thrown in just for funsies. Five stars on source citation, still very accessible. Her other book is on my nightstand, waiting to be read.

• A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland

  • by Samuel Johnson

  • A delightful, first-hand account of an 18th century Londonite traveling to the outer reaches of Scotland for the first time and forced to confront his preconceived notions. I loved his writing style, and it will likely help expand your vocabulary knowledge.

• Narrative, Calling, and Missional Identity in 1 Peter: Between Promise and Inheritance

  • by

  • This book is like kale for your brain, a treatise on the Biblical book of 1 Peter. See some reflections here.

• Wonder: 52 Conversations to Help Kids Fall in Love With Scripture, a Grown-up’s Guide to Exploring the Bible With Children

  • by

  • Like a cross between a children’s Bible and study Bible. This was a great book, see my review here. I don’t know that this is its intended audience, but I’ll be giving a copy to my pre-teen as a stepping stone between children’s Bibles and a teen study Bible.

• For the Love of Women: Uprooting and Healing Misogyny in America

  • by

  • Meticulously researched, five stars for source citation. Richly theological and hope-filled. Review here.

• Autopsy of a Deceased Church: 12 Ways to Keep Yours Alive

  • by Thom S. Rainer

  • At least it was short.

  • I think specific examples and precise definitions and suggested strategies instead of sweeping generalizations would have been more helpful. Also, it’s hard to trust his estimates for how many churches are healthy, in decline, etc. when it’s based purely on his gut and not actual research.

• Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived

  • by Rob Bell

  • This wasn’t as controversial as I’d thought it would be. It asked some good questions and made some worthwhile observations, but felt repetitive and wandering.

• How Far to the Promised Land: One Black Family’s Story of Hope and Survival in the American South

  • by

  • I read this in less than two days. So appreciated this story, found it reflective and insightful; it refused to be put in a box. I finished it and jumped right into another of his books:

• Reading While Black: African American Biblical Interpretation as an Exercise in Hope

  • by

  • Five stars. Review forthcoming.

• Hunger for Righteousness: A Lenten Journey Towards Intimacy with God and Loving Our Neighbor

  • by

    • I very much appreciated her encouraging, pastoral tone throughout. Written from a Coptic Orthodox perspective. I’m not Orthodox, but this was not a barrier to understanding the book as the author takes the time to briefly explain Orthodox practices throughout. Rich in both Scripture and church history, a lot is packed into its mere 141 pages.

• The Power of Showing Up: How Parental Presence Shapes Who Our Kids Become and How Their Brains Get Wired

  • by Daniel J. Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson

  • An introduction to attachment theory in the context of raising children, written by two experts in the field. I’d give the book 3/5 stars.

  • This book felt incomplete. I actually agree with their attitude toward how to preparing children for eventual adulthood (for example, don’t shelter children from age-appropriate pain and trials, but show they don’t have to go through these trials alone). And I have no reason to distrust their theories (though I’d note they cited zero studies; is this normal in pop-science books?). But the book was entirely about nurturing relationship (which is good!) without also giving practical guidance on how to enforce healthy boundaries and consequences. It talked quite frequently about the need for healthy boundaries, but spent exactly three pages of text (I counted) on how those might be enforced in real life. For parents moving out of authoritarian1 parenting styles, which I think the book is geared to, they’re going to need help with both sides of the nurture and boundaries equation, so parents don’t either veer too far into permissive parenting or fall back into old habits of control.

Fiction

• Corregidora

  • by Gayl Jones

  • A frankly disturbing read from beginning to end, which I think was the point. A story of generational sexual trauma in the aftermath of American slavery, written before the concept of “generational trauma” became mainstream.

• Lydia, A Story

  • by Paula Gooder

  • A fictional account of what happened to Lydia of Thyatira from the Biblical book of Acts, followed by extensive notes on historical and cultural context. The narrative piece felt forced to me; I actually got more out of the historical notes and felt the book is worth reading for those alone. I appreciated how she put a human face on the early sources of tension within the church.

• Wind and Truth: Book Five of The Stormlight Archive

  • by Brandon Sanderson

  • I’m not sure I can do this epic fantasy series anymore. I really enjoyed the first three books in this series and am still invested in the characters. But 1,329 pages that cover ten days of timeline and don’t come to a resolution, with five more books in the series to go? I’ll probably read book six and decide after that whether to continue.

• The Bear and the Nightingale: Book One of the Winternight Trilogy

  • by Katherine Arden

  • This book kept me up too late reading. I thoroughly enjoyed this re-telling of a Russian folktale and loved the author’s writing style.

  • I was exchanging titles with my physical therapist during a recent appointment (still recovering from a broken ankle), and this was one we both got excited about.

• The Winter of the Witch: Book Three of the Winternight Trilogy

  • by Katherine Arden

  • A fitting conclusion to the trilogy, loved every minute of it. (I happened to read the middle book first by accident last year, and liked it so much I went back to read the other two.)

• Esther, A Novel (previously published as “Esther, The Star and the Scepter)

  • by Gini Andrews

  • A thoroughly enjoyable re-telling that stays true to the Biblical text while creating actually believable and nuanced characters. I don’t know much about Ancient Persia, so can’t speak to how historically accurate it might be.

  • I think it’s also out of print, check the online used book market.

• Lore Olympus, Volume Ten

  • by Rachel Smythe

  • I don’t usually read graphic novels. But this series, based on a re-telling of the Hades and Persephone myth that turns Hades into a sympathetic character, is outstanding. The graphics (see sample above), the storyline, the character development (oh my land, the character development), and how the author weaves in themes of family, betrayal, trauma, and healing are excellent. (FYI, topics of toxic relationships and sexual assault are also addressed.) Start with the first book in the series.

Young Adult

• Emily Windsnap and the Tides of Time

  • by Liz Kessler

  • A recommendation from Miss Bee (age 10). This is one of a of a series about a girl who is half-mermaid and half-human, will make more sense if you start with the first book in the series.

• Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH

  • by Robert C. O’Brien

  • A widowed mouse mother, in a desperate bid to save her ill young son, reaches out to a mysterious colony of rats for help and discovers a previously unknown connection to her late husband.

  • Read this Newberry Award winner with the Bees, it was just as good now as it was when I was their age. Watched the movie (The Secret of NIMH) afterward as a family and everyone liked the book better.

• Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

  • by J.K. Rowling

  • We are working our way through this series with the Bees before bedtime every night.

• Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

  • by J.K. Rowling

• Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

  • by J.K. Rowling

• A Long Walk to Water

  • by Linda Sue Park

  • I overheard part of this book while volunteering in Miss Bee’s classroom and was intrigued enough to borrow my own copy from the library. It was a gut-wrenching, harrowing story based on the life of a “lost boy” of South Sudan, separated by war from his family. Highly recommend.

• Knee-knock Rise

  • by Natalie Babbitt

  • A boy goes to visit his aunt and uncle in a community overshadowed by a mysterious monster. A Newberry Award winner, started out a bit oddly, but an interesting philosophical question at the end. A quick read.

• Follow my Leader

  • by James B. Garfield

  • A young boy is blinded in an accident and learns to navigate the world with the help of a guide dog. This fictional story is a bit dated, sometimes endearingly and sometimes not, but is overall a positive tale of resilience and forgiveness.

• David and the Phoenix

  • by Edward Ormondroyd

  • A young boy moves to a new community, befriends a wise old phoenix hiding out in the nearby hills, and tries to save his companion from a scientist who is up to no good. Another older book, kinda cute.

• Unpublished Manuscript

  • by my dad

  • A historical fiction novel based on his mother’s experiences as a child in Nazi Germany and World War II. Bluffing their way through a challenge from the Gestapo, scrawling a message on the wall of their bombed-out home so their soldier father would know where they’d taken refuge, and a daring escape when they ended up on the wrong side of the East-West Germany divide at the end of the war.

  • The manuscript has been sitting on a shelf for roughly 30 years, and I recently asked if I could borrow a copy to share with my daughters.

  • If you think this manuscript sounds worth reviving, sound off in the comments, and we’ll see if we can convince Dad to take another crack at it. He is a retired elementary school teacher who decided in retirement to go back and get the degree he’d always wanted, a Master’s in History. So he comes at the story with an eye toward both what kids actually find interesting and toward preserving the historical record.

And if that wasn’t enough books for you…

Greco defines misogyny as the “belief that men’s ideas, wants, needs, and experiences are more important than women’s and that political, religious, and social systems, as well as intimate relationships, should uphold this principle. This belief system subsequently influences the laws, practices, and ethos of a given culture, eventually harming everyone…” (emphasis added)

If, like me, you openly agree that society is still living with the ripple effects of patriarchy, you will find affirmation in this book. When Greco described her decades-long process of getting an accurate diagnosis for a relatively common medical condition, I found myself nodding along in empathy.1

But it is perhaps because of Greco’s case that misogyny harms men as well as women that the book is a worthwhile read particularly for the skeptic. “Because I’m the mother of three sons, debunking the fallacy that misogyny doesn’t harm men is one of the motivating factors for writing this book,” she writes.

Don’t Mistake Progress for Victory

Greco immediately sets the tone in her introduction.

I’m a journalist with pastoral instincts who writes from a faith-based perspective. My desire to follow Jesus influences all of who I am and how I move through the world. You don’t have to agree with my beliefs to appreciate this work.

Dorothy Littell Greco, “For the Love of Women”

Greco readily acknowledges that misogyny is not nearly as prevalent as it used to be, but says that is no reason to stop now: “Progress should not be mistaken for victory.” She proceeds with seven chapters documenting misogyny’s continued presence in healthcare, in the workplace, in the government, in media and entertainment, in sexual relationships, and in the church. Her background as a journalist clearly shows in how smoothly the writing flows. She is also meticulous in both her research and in citing her sources; only three of these chapters have less than 50 source citations.

There are so many examples that the burden of evidence sits firmly in Greco’s corner, even if readers may disagree with some of the particular sources she cites. For example, in the chapter “In the Flesh, Misogyny in Sexual Relationships,” you may disagree that accusations of sexual assault against a particular man Greco cites are credible. But he is included in a list of at least five influential figures, and it is hard to credibly say that all five of the accused perpetrators are more likely to be innocent of the sometimes dozens of accusations.

Greco does not stop at pointing out specific problems but also frequently offers solutions, both individual and communal. While she doesn’t answer all rebuttals to her proposed solutions, I also don’t think that’s the aim of this specific book. (At least not if it’s going to be a still-reasonable length.) I also think that you can acknowledge the reality of the problems she identifies while disagreeing with some of the specific solutions she proposes.

And on that note, I think someone who cannot accept critiques of capitalism as an economic system will have challenges reading the book. Greco does not offer a wholesale denouncement of capitalism, but also does not hesitate to point out where flaws in the current system have allowed wide swathes of people to fall through the cracks.

The book also does not shy away from other difficult topics like complementarianism and abortion, among others.2 I personally found Greco’s approach to complementarianism (and other difficult subjects) to be even-handed and nuanced, but she doesn’t mince words in her challenge to complementarian men, in particular.

The belief that all men will faithfully protect women and consistently create spaces (whether familial or institutional) for women to be safe and flourish is noble. But it’s an ideal that doesn’t consistently work as intended, because misogyny is so endemic and the pull to worldly power is so strong… But when that lone wolf (or in some cases, pack of wolves) starts preying on the flock and women call for help, some of the same men who encouraged them to submit and promised to protect them either become strangely silent or blame or discredit the women… One obvious problem is that not enough men are holding those who abuse power accountable…

Dorothy Littell Greco, “For the Love of Women”

But how the book ends is what really sets it apart from the crowd.

What I Especially Appreciated

Greco’s faith is evident throughout the book, and her writing is richly theological.

Power is not inherently bad. But when it’s used to manipulate, control, subjugate, silence, harass, deceive, or violate others, it becomes a manifestation of evil. Some of Jesus’s harshest words were directed to men who abused power. His rebukes are every bit as applicable and necessary today as they were two thousand years ago.

Dorothy Littell Greco, “For the Love of Women”

And it is how she ends with words of hope and a picture for a better future, for both recipients and perpetrators of misogyny, that I particularly appreciated.

So I will let her have the last words for this review:

Jesus invites all of us who have been wounded or sidelined by misogyny to forgive those who have wounded us, just as he invites all who have perpetuated misogyny within the church to both repent and restore the church to its full potential.

~ ~ ~

Shame can convince us that we’re hopelessly broken, worthless, and unlovable - essentially sucking us into a vortex of self-hatred, anger, and isolation. Or it can convict us of our mistakes and propel us toward maturity and wholeness.

Dorothy Littell Greco, “For the Love of Women”

Go, and be whole.

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Knowing “how” is important because it helps us identify warning signs for when to beat a hasty exit. The “how” can also show us what to look for in our own systems that may indicate we are going off course.

But knowing “why” people are drawn to authoritarian churches is just as important to outsiders, because it gives us a better framework for understanding, for engaging with, and for hopefully changing people’s minds.

And, if materials cited in last week’s post are any indication, can help us hold onto our own humanity in the process of confronting evil.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but it’s tempting to dismiss people in cult-like churches as “stupid” or “fearful.” This misconception helps alleviate our own fear, to think that we would never find ourselves in a similar situation because we are smarter than that.

But when we look at the “why” for ordinary members drawn into these systems, it challenges our preconceived notions.

Quick note before diving in - this is more of an insider’s perspective than an expert’s perspective. I am not a therapist or spiritual abuse expert. Though I’ve consumed a decent number of materials about spiritual abuse (see here for my personal recommendations), what follows is primarily based on observations from two different heavy-handed churches, plus two additional churches that started the transition to authoritarian leadership structures during my family’s tenure there.

Who Gets Sucked into High-control Groups

People in authoritarian churches are rich and poor. They are young and old. They are highly educated, or not. They may even have seminary degrees, or not. They are business owners, teachers, stay-at-home-moms, government employees, students, landscapers, retired. They’ve been homeschooled, public schooled, and private schooled.

I think you get the idea.

They are people who love their children, are trying to do right by their parents, and want to do the right thing.

But somewhere along the way, “the right thing” for people in cult-like churches starts to look a lot differently than it does for outsiders.

The Right Impulses in the Wrong Direction

Because they are normal people, just like you and me, people in high-control groups have the same basic human needs and tendencies that you and I do. They need a sense of belonging and community. They’re searching for purpose and meaning.

The difficulty is, both healthy churches and authoritarian churches offer these things to people.

But where healthy churches use these basic needs to encourage personal growth and maturity in the life of individuals believers and communities, cult-like churches abuse normal human impulses for their own personal benefits, whether that is financial or psychological.

In my observation, one thing that might set apart people pulled into authoritarian churches is that they are often looking for certainty. While I think it a normal human impulse to lean toward certainty, because it eliminates risk and takes less mental energy, there is a point where the quest for certainty becomes a hinderance rather than a help.

Authoritarian churches play into this quest for certainty by leaning heavily into black-and-white thinking and eliminating ambiguity. They guarantee that if you follow specific steps, i.e. “do the right thing,” your relationships will improve. Or your children are guaranteed to follow Jesus. Or you’ll be leaving behind a more stable and Godly community for the next generation. Worse comes to worst, your reward will be great in heaven because of all the effort you put in! The problem being, of course, that there is no way to verify that the promised process actually works until it is too late.

This tactic works for cult-like churches because we humans only have so much bandwidth to go around. With so many other worthwhile things clamoring for our attention (jobs, home maintenance, children, elderly parents, health situations, etc.) it is normal to delegate having to think about some things to trusted authorities, like following a physical therapist’s advice for recovering from an injury, or a mechanic’s advice for getting a reliable car. Authoritarian churches, however, pretend to be authorities/experts in things that they frequently have no actual authority/expertise to speak to, whether that is childrearing, mental health or psychological conditions, abusive relationships, etc. All to increase people’s reliance on the church and to narrow people’s outside support systems.

And when it comes to eliminating risk, authoritarian churches also play towards people’s natural fears. A little bit of caution is normal; it’s what prompts us to look both ways before we cross the street. But high-control churches exacerbate normal human fears to the point where individuals and congregations seem to loose critical thinking skills. “They’re coming for the children” is a particularly common theme.

And here’s where we need to approach with curiosity and nuance, because sometimes that fear is in response to a legitimate concern.

For example, purity culture. I openly acknowledge the unintended consequences and harms from “purity culture” of the 1990’s and early 2000s, having experienced some of them myself. But this movement was also born out of a time of rising teen pregnancy and a very real desire to keep daughters safe from the life-altering consequences of unintended pregnancy. Because, let’s face it, girls and women are the ones who have to face the short-term medical realities of pregnancy and are unfortunately the ones to usually bear the long-term social and economic costs of unplanned pregnancy, as well. Purity culture was undoubtedly born out of a culture still dealing with the aftereffects of patriarchy. But for many parents, youth pastors, etc., purity culture was also born out of a genuine desire to keep girls safe.

Purity culture also nicely illustrates an additional difficulty for those trying to reach people inside high-control groups. Sometimes the above-average desire for control inside authoritarianism groups is motivated by fear (i.e. keeping girls safe), but sometimes it is motivated by entitlement (i.e. the lingering influence of patriarchy).

When dealing with the “fear” aspect, at least, we need to approach those in authoritarian churches with curiosity, data, and feasible alternatives, not shame and dismissiveness. Frankly, I don’t know what to do about the “entitlement” aspect, but we’ll touch a bit more on that below.

An Uncomfortable Reality for Former Members

Authoritarian churches play to more than simply people’s legitimate fears and valid desires to do the right thing.

Heavy-handed churches also play to people’s pride. They claim that their doctrine (and basically everything they do) and theology is more “Biblical” and holy, more insightful, more orthodox than other churches. And, by extension, their congregations are more discerning for having discovered this church, more moral or devoted to God for following the lifestyle and holding the values espoused by the church, and smarter for having discovered the church.

Like both fear and desire to doing the right thing, having a certain amount of pride in one’s associations is normal. But pride needs to be tempered with humility (not the false kind that’s just there for laughs) and should not involve the active putting-down of other churches by comparison.

And here is where it is difficult for me, because even while I can see how and why they were deceived, I do think people in such systems bear some level of responsibility for allowing their pride to overlook problems within the church. But not as much as others, even outside of formal leadership or staff structures, who might benefit from the system either financially or reputationally, and thus enable the system to a greater degree of responsibility than the average member.

For example, spouses of both paid staff and lay leaders will enjoy not just their spouse’s salary (where applicable) but also the fringe benefits of greater reputation and influence than the average member. And men in more patriarchal systems will clearly enjoy more status within the system than they may outside the system, not to mention the requirement in many patriarchal systems that their wives defer to their decisions. This is where entitlement on the part of certain authoritarian church members comes into play, and that I frankly don’t know how to address. Except perhaps to warn outsiders away, starve it of oxygen and new life, and let it slowly wither away.

So cult-like churches take normal human tendencies toward pride, toward protecting future generations, toward certainty, and toward a desire to do the right thing, then mis-use these tendencies for the glory of that particular church.

But there’s an ace up their sleeve we haven’t talked about, yet.

Community Gone Wrong

Even if people realize that their church is unhealthy, it’s often more complicated than a simple “why can’t they just leave?” Because the strongest (in my opinion) thing keeping people in cult-like churches is the sense of community.

Leaving a church in general can be difficult if you have a strong sense of community with fellow members. And it can be particularly difficult in cult-like churches, because those churches tend to emphasize church community over all else. There is sometimes no other relational support system for those looking to leave.

Authoritarian churches encourage, goad, or guilt-trip members into spending as much time as possible on church-related activities, to the exclusion of relationships outside the church. Individually, the activities can all be good: Bible study, Sunday services, volunteering for the church, small groups, men’s and women’s discipleship, outreach activities, etc. But when there is pressure to be involved in every single activity (which there often is in high-control churches), it quickly sucks up all free time, to the exclusion of outside relationships.

In offering members community, cult-like churches encourage their members’ entire lives to revolve around church.1 This is related to the black-and-white thinking mentioned above. Authoritarian churches divide people into approved “in” groups and questionable “out” groups, and promise that if you only spend time with the “in” group, that will help keep you and your family safe from “negative” or “unGodly” influences.

In high-control churches, your entire friend group might belong to the church. And your extended family. And your boss. And your kids might go to the church school. And if you leave (or become “difficult” and get kicked out) you can loose all your friends, relationships with extended family, your job, and your kids’ school. Same goes for your spouse. And your kids.

See how that might be a lot, and not so easy anymore?

And for people who have grown up in high-control families and/or churches, this might be simply all they know. In an inversion of reality, being controlled feels safe and like “home.”

For additional perspectives, Dr. Steven Hassan, a former cult member whom I’ve mentioned before, has helpful observations in Top 11 Insights Cult Survivors Wish Therapists Knew, as does Julie Anne Smith of Spiritual Sounding Board.

Where Does This Leave Us?

Particularly with groups that are causing harm to innocent people and outsiders, I understand the need to avoid sin-leveling. There still need to be lines of moral and acceptable behavior, and we don’t want to excuse the harm done to others.

But we also need to strike a balance and not pathologize normal human tendencies that are abused and mis-used by leaders in such groups. When that happens, we dehumanize those within cult-like churches and make growth, healing, and reconciliation that much harder.

In Case You Missed It

This is always easier to see in other people than it is in ourselves.

And as I sit in the polarized United States, where it’s not even Christians against the world but Christians against Christians, this is an especially hard one to sit with. But a perspective from outside our context helped bring clarity.

A friend and former pastor of mine, Australian , had the courtesy to send me a copy of his dissertation “Narrative, Calling, and Missional Identity in 1 Peter: Between Promise and Inheritance.” And while much of it was frankly over my head, one chapter in particular really hit home. That chapter was titled “The Commitment of the Calling” and focuses on 1 Peter 3:8-17.

To give some background information, the book of 1 Peter was written to early Christians who had been scattered in Anatolia, located in modern-day Turkey.

“… the Anatolian churches likely endured verbal and physical assault, legal actions, potential domestic violence, economic oppression, social ostracism, and spiritual affliction. The temptation to revile in return for reviling would have been immense.”

Shaw

And it is to these churches that Peter writes:

Repay evil with a blessing.

What does that even look like?

Being a Blessing

“One of the central themes… is the emphasis on the non-retaliatory behaviour1 of Jesus in the face of suffering... In this sense, one might say that the first act of blessing is the (in)action of non-retaliation. While this may appear to be a passive response, it is rather a summons to actively absorb evil, thus preventing its perpetuation.” (emphasis original)

Shaw

As to why we might want to “actively absorb evil,” I would say that depends partially on what your goal is, based on my experiences having both changed my mind and having watched others be resistant to change.2

Here’s how this played out in my own life, when I saw people being a blessing in the face of a sub-culture that looked down on them. I was raised in a household that spanked and attended churches where spanking was common. (“Spank” defined as an open palm on a child’s fully clothed bottom.) For a brief period of time, I spanked my own children. I no longer do. And what changed my mind wasn’t the condescending comments of “I could never imagine hitting a child” or “you clearly didn’t ‘turn out ok’ if you think it’s ok to hit a child.” What changed my mind was (a) seeing how it clearly wasn’t working with my own children combined with (b) seeing mothers whose relationships with their children I respected non-judgmentally say “yeah, that’s just not something we do” and (c) hearing a Christian influencer I respected non-judgmentally cite a research study showing that spanking outcomes were shown to be either neutral or harmful.

In other words, I didn’t change my mind or behaviors because of shame or in reaction to attacks on my character. I changed because of non-judgmental evidence and viable alternatives.3 The experience of changing my mind on something pretty foundational also changed how I think about disagreement in general.

So if your goal is to make yourself feel better and to look good to those who already agree with you, by all means, continue on the path of polarization.

But if your real goal is to change people’s minds, to reach those who might be on the fence or starting to doubt, then the inflammatory rhetoric, the name-calling, the mocking, the insults and dehumanization needs to go.

“The primary goal of blessing one’s opponent is that they might see a demonstration of God’s character and come to know him in the person of Christ… this is demonstrated in one’s refusal to retaliate and… in the active seeking of peace with one’s opponent(s).” (emphasis original)

Shaw

This is what it means to be a blessing, to seek someone’s good instead of seeking to win.

But also raises an obvious question.

Seeking Good without Enabling Harm

Seeking good does not mean ignoring or enabling harm.

We can still defend ourselves or innocent people when those bent on destruction (or their unwitting pawns) are trying to harm us. In fact, I’ve written about the need to hold people accountable and the necessity of repentance in Uriah’s Wife. Jesus is a God of justice as much as he is a God of mercy.

But how we act toward those who are wrong says just as much about us as it says about those we are opposed to.

For me, this isn’t just theoretical. As someone whose forbearers were on the losing side of both World Wars, this hits deep. Deeply enough that I had to walk out of a guest sermon given by a military chaplain a few years ago, because of how he was describing enemy combatants. There is an uncomfortable tension in knowing that what your family members did was ultimately categorically wrong,4 and in being grateful that the country of your birth, the United States of America, was gracious in her victory. Imperfectly, undeniably. But tending toward grace in gestures like the Marshall Plan in Europe and the reconstruction of Japan, and in welcoming citizens of the defeated countries as immigrants and eventual citizens.

And I’ll admit, I’ve had to confront this tendency to escalate in myself, too. While re-reading the chapter about repaying evil with a blessing, I was also writing the series on the church that gave me post-traumatic church disorder. And I had to go back and re-write some things. Because the end goal is not revenge or retaliation. The end goal is to interrupt cycles of harm.

Get angry with the systems while remembering the humanity of the people caught up in them. Use that anger to affect productive change that arcs toward justice and is tempered by mercy. And in the heat of combating harm or oppression, don’t become the thing you hate.

Because there’s another layer to this that “Narrative, Calling, and Missional Identity in 1 Peter” brings out clearly.

Being a Blessing Benefits Us, Too

Dehumanizing our opponents is probably a useful survival mechanism to help guard our hearts and our brains in the heat of the moment. It shields us from discomfort and feels like protection. But it keeps things simplistic, it enables immaturity, and it hampers our own healing.

“Psychiatrist Jonathan Shay, investigating the impact of combat trauma on US soldiers in Vietnam, notes how dehumanizing the enemy led to psychological damage of the soldiers, writing: ‘Restoring honor to the enemy is an essential step in recovering from combat PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). While other things are obviously needed as well, the veteran’s self-respect never fully recovers so long as he is unable to see the enemy as worthy.’”

Shaw, with quote from Jonathan Shay5

In other words, soldiers who dehumanize the enemy often struggle to recover their own sense of humanity.

Let’s sit here for a moment.

Maybe when Peter encourages the Anatolians to repay evil with a blessing so that they might “inherit a blessing,” he wasn’t thinking just about the afterlife. Maybe he was also thinking about their ability to live with themselves in the here and now.

So are we doing this right now? Are we seeing those we disagree with, even those we think are morally wrong, as fully human? And are we acting like those we disagree with are fully human?

Maybe this is what it means to be faithful and counter-cultural in the United States right now, especially in a time of polarization and political violence. To refuse to escalate. To be mindful of who may be listening when we speak, online or in public.

To stop feeding negative algorithms online by not consuming and rewarding voices that profit from our fear and anger.

To be merciful in victory and gracious in defeat.

Maybe this is how we heal a divided church and a divided nation, with one small step at a time.

Next week, we’ll be looking at resisting dehumanization from a different angle. Subscribe below if you’d like to stick around for it.

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That was “great is your faithfulness” for me.

The phrase fits nicely on the cover of a prayer journal or wall art and simply begs to be set to music, whether a traditional hymn or contemporary Christian music.

But where does it show up in the Bible?

The book of Lamentations. Which is just as cheerful as it sounds.

Lamentations is a short book full of bone deep grief. The kind of grief that makes someone buckle at the knees and fall to the ground unable to breath.

Lamentations expresses the grief of an entire city that has been betrayed, that is desolate, that has fallen to the enemy. A city whose inhabitants are facing starvation, death, and exile. A city that has suffered the utter devastation of war and defeat. A city where mothers are forced to watch their children waste away from starvation.

And here’s the really uncomfortable part.

It’s their fault.

Sidebar. I want to emphasize a few things before going further.

First, Lamentations is a book of both prophecy and poetry. Both prophecy and poetry in the Bible use metaphor, hyperbole, and imagery and are not always meant to be taken literally. So, handle with care.

Second, Lamentations (and much of the Old Testament prophets, frankly) addresses sin and transgression at a community, societal level. Not at an individual level. Even though “the city” as an entity has sinned and now has to bear God’s wrath, this does not mean all the individuals in said city actively participated in the sin, even if they now have to bear the consequences to their community. For a more modern example, think how even German resistors who helped Jewish people hide or escape during the Holocaust still had to endure the bombings and privations of war.

Lastly, Lamentations showing a community facing the penalty of their collective sin does not directly translate to someone right now (or some community right now) going through hardship because God is punishing them or teaching them something. Sometimes hardship is part-and-parcel of living in a fallen world where disease and death and oppression still abound, and not necessarily because of a consequence of their actions. And sometimes hardship is a consequence of other people’s sin, and not your own.1 (See back to previous paragraph.)

Now, back to your regularly scheduled programming.

While detailed specifics regarding the community’s perversion of justice are not shared, the book of Lamentations makes clear that God is angry with the community because of actions they have deliberately taken. As a consequence, God has deliberately turned the city over to its enemies.

This makes the situation in Lamentations seem doubly hopeless.

Yet in the midst of the double-whammy of crushing despair and deserved guilt, hope endures.

Even though the book of Lamentations both begins and ends with expressions of despair, right in the middle of the lament, the author consciously reminds himself of this eternal truth and responds in prayer:

But this I call to mind,
     and therefore I have hope:
The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases,
     his mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning;
     great is your faithfulness.

I love this reminder. The reminder that we sometimes loose sight of God’s love and that it's ok to have to remind ourselves that God still cares. Even when we are stuck in a mess of our own making or living through the repercussions of our own terrible, sinful decisions.

When we realize the full context of the verse “great is your faithfulness,” we are hit by the actual magnitude of God’s mercy and his grace.

Amen.

But I’d love to know what you think of it all. Were you aware of the context already of the slogan “great is your faithfulness?” If not, does knowing more about Lamentations change how you view that one person’s favorite coffee mug?

Leave a comment

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And I want to emphasize, different people’s journeys will look different in terms of timing, route, and perhaps even eventual destination. And that doesn’t necessarily make it better or worse.2 So feel free to take anything from the lists below that are helpful and just leave behind anything that isn’t.

In retrospect, I was fortunate in that I’d had good experiences at healthy churches prior to my string of negative experiences, and that helped me hold out hope for the future. I’d also had a personal experience that had already made me question my trust in God, so was able to separate out trust in God on the one hand from trust in His church and followers on the other hand. This distinction between God on the one hand and his church on the other hand is one that heavy-handed churches often blur in the wake of leadership’s lust for control over their congregations, which can make it difficult to detangle when leaving an abusive church.

Lastly, all the resources listed below are from a Christian perspective, if that is helpful to know.

And as a side-note, if you are not inside of a high-control group yourself and are worried about someone who may be, I found Julie Anne Smith’s perspective on Spiritual Sounding Board to be helpful. She left an abusive church and was (unsuccessfully) sued by her former pastor for leaving a negative Google review, and can give an insider’s perspective of sorts.

The Story of our Former Toxic Church Unfolds Over Four Posts

• How We Got Sucked In to a Cult-like Church

• What You Learn When Leaders Get Caught with Egg on Their Face

• Church Called My Honest Feedback “Possibly Aggressive”

• From Small-group Recruit to Church Pariah

• Epilogue: Moving On After Spiritual Abuse (this post)

  Trying to figure out what’s healthy (and what’s not) in church can be harder than it should. Why Have We Fasted is a newsletter about recognizing unhealthy church dynamics, thinking critically about faith, and re-examining what we’ve been taught without walking away from belief. If you’d like more of this, subscribe for new posts every Thursday.

In the Immediate Aftermath

I want to take a moment to acknowledge that leaving a church, even one that is toxic, can be incredibly hard. In some ways, it’s even harder to leave a toxic church because many cult-like churches encourage members to make church their entire life and their only sense of community. And when that is gone, when you loose your main support network and sense of belonging, it can be devastating.

In some ways, my husband and I were fortunate in that we had family living nearby (with whom we have good relationships) and local friends who didn’t go to the same church we did.

In fact, one of the most healing things I did was talk privately to people from outside the church about the experience. As I noted in the last post, some were people who had known David and I for years, whether family or friends, and could affirm that we were not crazy in our assessment of what happened. Some were Christian and some were not, and I found both perspectives helpful.

One of the most helpful pieces of advice I received in the immediate aftermath was to write a letter to my friends at my former church. Not necessarily with the intent to send it, but because one of the hardest things about leaving was knowing that people I cared deeply about would likely experience the same hurt that I had just gone through. Writing was a helpful way to process. For those who are not much into writing, perhaps recording a video or audio message would accomplish the same purpose.

I also stumbled across the idea to write a restoration plan for church leadership. Again, not that it would go anywhere, but writing it helped as a way to process. This might help particularly if problem solving is your first instinct in times of stress.

Reading the Gospels also brought me comfort, because of the focus on Jesus. The Gospel of John is my favorite and one I often return to, and Matthew 23 is a powerful denunciation against religious leaders specifically who abuse their power. Others, like my husband and lay theologian Rebecca Davis, recommend reading the Psalms. If reading the Bible is difficult because of how it’s been weaponized, consider switching to a new-to-you translation. Perhaps The Message, The First Nation’s Version, or the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition (a mouthful, I know). And if it’s simply too hard to read the Bible right now, give yourself the grace to take a sabbath from it.

Reading children’s Bibles to my children was also healing, because they are gentle and emphasize God’s love. Not all children’s Bibles are alike; my personal recommendations are in the post Navigating the Minefield of Children’s Bibles.

There was also a point where I had to take a sabbath from church. There are ways to find community with other Christians that don’t involve a formal worship service and may be less taxing in the immediate aftermath. After our third negative church experience in a row, my family took a break for a few months. We eventually made our way back into the church dating scene, which was not without its pitfalls. But looking back from the perspective of seven years, and from the perspective of having finally landed in a not-spiritually-abusive church, I’m glad we stuck it out.

I also followed the advice to “find something just for you.” For me, it’s reading fiction. Others might dust off the sketchbook, the power tools, or running shoes. But something (healthy!) to do purely for the joy of it and not because it benefits anyone else helped bring peace.

And I know this is cheesy, but it worked. I prayed for the people who’d hurt us. As I said in a previous post, it took a while to find a prayer that didn’t seem like a back-handed-complement sort of prayer. But it helped me to eventually let go of the unhealthy part of my anger.

As Time Went On

Frankly, just letting time pass helped. As I’ve noted before, I’m writing this from the perspective of seven years after leaving Doxa Church Rocklin and three years after finally landing in a healthier church.

But I also didn’t let time pass passively. When I was able and had the head space, I’d read books, listen to podcasts, and engage with online articles learning about how spiritual abuse works, why it is toxic, and how to process and recover.

My personal recommendations are below and, as noted above, all approach spiritual abuse from a faith-based perspective.3 I also gravitated toward those who approach faith and church with nuance instead of black-and-white thinking. Lastly, I prioritized resources either from licensed therapists or counselors, or those that regularly engage with licensed therapists or counselors.

And on that note, I also occasionally engaged with licensed therapy,4 myself. I was finally able to let go of undeserved guilt for getting myself into spiritually abusive situations when a therapist, after hearing the entire sordid story of three different churches, told me directly, “Sarah, you didn’t do anything wrong.”

And if you think something on this list would be helpful for someone you know, please feel free to share.

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Favorite Resources

• Books

  • The Subtle Power of Spiritual Abuse: Recognizing and Escaping Spiritual Manipulation and False Spiritual Authority

    • by Jeff VanVonderen and David Johnson

    • A classic, gives a good overview of how people and leaders can get caught up in spiritual abuse in churches and how to move into recovery. One author is a pastor and the other an interventionist for substance addiction.

  • When Narcissism Comes to Church: Healing Your Community from Emotional and Spiritual Abuse

    • by

    • Helped identify patterns of narcissism in churches and how systems can recover. I particularly appreciated his ability to offer care for survivors and call abuse what it is, while also offering hope and healing for perpetrators. The author is both a therapist and a professor of pastoral care.

  • Redeeming Power: Understanding Authority and Abuse in the Church

    • by

    • Written by someone with decades of clinical work with abuse victims, richly theological approach to how power and authority can and should be used in churches and the devastating effects of mis-use.

  • Something’s Not Right: Decoding the Hidden Tactics of Abuse and Freeing Yourself From It’s Power

    • by

    • Appreciate that it touched on abuse in many different formats, not just in church settings. Helps give vocabulary to what’s wrong and identify PR-type language typical in abusive situations. I particularly appreciated how he addressed the dynamics within congregations that can enable abuse.

  • The Last Battle, Book 7 of the Chronicles of Narnia

    • by C.S. Lewis

    • If you’ve read this one already as a child, it hits a lot differently after getting out of an authoritarian religious setting.

• Online Resources

  • The Wartburg Watch

    • One of the original discernment blogs, includes a number of posts about the problems with church discipline, issues with membership “covenants,” and how to resign from a church. Also home to a lively community of commenters.

  • Julie Roys’s podcast

    • Has exposes and opinion pieces, but scroll through to also find a number of talks (transcript or video/audio all available) about recognizing and recovering from spiritual abuse, many from other advocates mentioned in this list. Hosted by a journalist who was (unsuccessfully) sued by a church in the course of reporting on spiritual abuse.

  • Walking the Middle Path with

    • Includes advice, resources, and practices for healing from toxic beliefs while holding onto faith, particularly recovering from purity culture, reparenting one’s self, and learning to parent better. Hosted by a licensed psychologist, and I particularly appreciate her balanced and nuanced approach.

  • Here’s the Joy with Rebecca Davis

    • Holds to the mission of untwisting scriptures and finding joy in Jesus, and is particularly good for a fresh perspective on commonly weaponized Bible verses. Written by a lay theologian.

  • Futurist Guy

    • A blog about recognizing spiritual abuse, recovering from it, and how it works on an institutional level, among other things. I particularly appreciated his descriptions of the different layers and and players in high-control systems.

• Books Tangental to Spiritual Abuse

  • Is It Me? Making Sense of Your Confusing Marriage: A Christian Woman’s Guide to Hidden Emotional and Spiritual Abuse5

    • by Natalie Hoffman

    • A Christ-filled perspective on identifying often confusing emotional and spiritual abuse in marriage, also provides a path forward for survivors.

  • Try Softer: A Fresh Approach to Move Us out of Anxiety, Stress and Survival Mode – and into a Life of Connection and Joy

    • by

    • Appreciated her “window of tolerance” approach toward healing in a way that is more sustainable.

  • The Great Sex Rescue: The Lies You’ve Been Taught and How To Recover What God Intended; and She Deserves Better: Raising Girls to Resist Toxic Teachings on Sex, Self, and Speaking up

    • by , Rebecca Gregoire Lindenbach, and Joanna Sawatsky

    • For those coming out of complementarian or patriarchal churches in particular, stops sweeping relational problems under the rug and offers paths forward to actual health. Based on actual research and not just some random person’s gut feeling.

  • Tired of Trying to Measure Up: Getting Free from the Demands, Expectations, and Intimidation of Well-meaning People

    • by Jeff VanVonderen

    • As a recovering perfectionist, I found this helpful in identifying and putting restrictions around my work-based-faith tendencies. The book explores moving away from shame and toward making choices more freely.

  • Pivot: The Priorities, Practices, and Powers That Can Transform Your Church into a Tov Culture

    • by and

    • A follow-up to their first book “A Church Called Tov,” I liked that this one provided a kind of “what next” roadmap for churches seeking health.

  • The Emotionally Healthy Church: A Strategy for Discipleship that Actually Changes Lives

    • by Peter Scazzero

    • Ties emotional health to spiritual health of both leaders and members and offers strategies for identifying and healing from problems.

• Online Resources Tangental to Spiritual Abuse

  • Bare Marriage with , et al.

    • Aims to “strip away all the pat answers and the Christian-ese and get back to healthy, biblical, evidence-based advice for your marriage and your sex life.”

  • Flying Free with Natalie Hoffman

    • Provides “help for women in difficult Christian marriages.”

  • Wilderness to Wild with Sarah McDugal

    • Mission to “provide resources for healing and survival strategy to mamas who are rebuilding healthy solo-parent families and are protecting their children from further harm, while navigating ongoing trauma caused by the family court system after escaping abuse.”

What Would You Add?

I know there is a growing number of resources out there for recovering from spiritual abuse and toxic churches. And there is at least one additional book on my shelf waiting to be read. Are there any you’d suggest checking out and possibly adding to this list?

Leave a comment

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Something about this story has never added up for me. If Jesus was without sin, and one of the ten commandments is to honor your father and your mother, why is he being so disrespectful,1 here?

But what if we’ve been looking at this story all wrong?

On the third day there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there. Jesus and his disciples had also been invited to the wedding. When the wine gave out, the mother of Jesus said to him, “They have no wine.” And Jesus said to her, “Woman, what concern is that to me and to you? My hour has not yet come.” His mother said to the servants, “Do whatever he tells you.” Now standing there were six stone water jars for the Jewish rites of purification, each holding twenty or thirty gallons. Jesus said to them, “Fill the jars with water.” And they filled them up to the brim. He said to them, “Now draw some out, and take it to the person in charge of the banquet.” So they took it. When the person in charge tasted the water that had become wine and did not know where it came from (though the servants who had drawn the water knew), that person called the bridegroom and said to him, “Everyone serves the good wine first and then the inferior wine after the guests have become drunk. But you have kept the good wine until now.” Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee and revealed his glory, and his disciples believed in him.

(John 2:1-11, NRSVU)

Let me tell a story.2

My grandma is German. And it was in studying German and especially seeing it used in everyday life that hit home for me that addressing someone as “woman,” or “Frau” in German, is not an insult like it is in English. It’s more like the English phrase “ma’am” that’s used more commonly in the American south.

Then I learned that it’s the same way in ancient Greek, the language the New Testament was originally written in.

And then, years later, I happened to be pregnant while reading the first several chapters of the Gospel of John. And I read how Jesus was baptized and a voice from heaven came down and acknowledged him.

The next day, Jesus starts gathering disciples.

The next day, he’s at a wedding in Cana with his mom and these disciples.

And the host runs out of wine.

Jesus’ mom, the same mom who was personally visited by an archangel 30 years ago and now sees these random guys who’ve started following her son around, can probably put two and two together and nudges her son. She asks if Jesus can do anything about this lack-of-wine problem.

Now, in 99% of English translations, Jesus says (and you can almost imagine him wagging his finger while speaking), “Woman! It is not my time.”

Which begs the question. Why on earth is it not “his time?” He just received affirmation from his heavenly father, the Lord God Most High. He just received affirmation from his peers, these new disciples.

When you remove the disrespect and the dismissiveness, the paradigm shifts.

My Take

In places where we want a novel-like description of a scene and dialogue, scripture often gives us just the bare-bones script. Filling in the details of this exchange, knowing that there was no disrespect in Jesus’s use of the word “woman,” and assuming Mary had heard the reports of Jesus’s baptism from either Jesus himself or this random group of men suddenly following her son around everywhere, this is the picture in my mind now when I read this passage:

When the wine runs out, Jesus’ mother says to him, “Jesus, honey, they’re all out of wine. Can you do anything about it? With, like, [gesturing with her hands] you know?”

“Muh-ther!” Jesus replies with a put-upon inflection in his voice. “I’m not ready!”

Mary, with a knowing smile that says You’ve got this, baby more than words ever could, gestures to the anxious servants. “Do whatever he tells you.”

Jesus squares his shoulders, pushes up his sleeves, and gets to work.

And miracle ensues.

Sarah’s Revised Version

Isn’t this a beautiful picture of the enduring strength of a child’s bond with their mother?

When Miss Bee was six years old, I learned that sometimes all she needs in order to try something new and scary is my calm assumption that she is perfectly capable.

There’s a neighborhood playground we go to sometimes with a three-story tube slide. Won’t lie, I find it a little intimidating. David and I had been encouraging Miss Bee for a while to try the slide, affirming that she is big enough and brave enough to handle it. Even though she’d expressed interest in it and climbed the staircase all the way to the top (only to then climb it all the way back down), it seemed as though the more David and I encouraged, the more Miss Bee’s knee-jerk reaction was, “I can’t!”

She was feeling too much pressure to perform.

So, one day at the playground, David and I tried a different tact. Whenever Miss Bee mentioned wanting to try to big tube slide, we simply said, “Ok, sweetie,” and moved on with the conversation. When we saw her climb all the way up the staircase and dawdle at the mouth of the giant slide, we kept our mouths shut. When we saw her climb all the way back down the staircase or choose a shorter slide, we kept our mouths shut. This sequence repeated several times.

It was agonizing not to say anything.

Then, suddenly, Miss Bee was no longer dawdling at the top of the slide. She was no longer somewhere in the middle of the staircase. Instead, the tube slide was rattling as she thumped her way down and shot out the bottom with a triumphant grin on her face.

David and I finally opened our mouths and erupted into cheers.

And I imagine Mary felt a similar feeling in that moment at Cana.

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Between hesitation over the distance to the new location and uncertainty over the pressure to start a new small group, David and I were uncertain what our future at Doxa Church might look like.

We decided to commit to both the new church location and launching a small group for a year before reassessing, in order to help with Doxa Church’s relocation transition. When we communicated this to the small group leaders and associate pastor, they invited themselves to our house, ate a meal that I had prepared for them, and only then stated the actual purpose of the requested meeting.

This Story Unfolds Over Four Posts

• How We Got Sucked In to a Cult-like Church

• What You Learn When Leaders Get Caught with Egg on Their Face

• Church Called My Honest Feedback “Possibly Aggressive”

• From Small-group Recruit to Church Pariah (this post)

• Epilogue: Moving On After Spiritual Abuse (forthcoming)

The elder started by saying, “We’re wondering where your hearts are at.”

I’d excused myself to the kitchen to fix my squirmy four-year old a snack. David and I glanced across the room at each other, confused. We thought we’d been perfectly clear about our hesitations but our willingness to commit.

Then the elder literally turned his chair around to face me, standing in the kitchen and holding my four-year-old, and said, “And especially you, Sarah. We’re wondering if you can submit to leadership and training.”

When I later texted a close childhood friend, she replied, “I hope you ran, not walked, away… I cannot roll my eyes hard enough. So glad you dodged that bullet.”

When David and I told my parents, my dad choked out, “Are they a cult?”

And my in-laws sent sympathy flowers.

I was in shock. Shock that a church elder would have the temerity to ask this of anyone in their congregation. Shock that I was having to have this conversation with zero warning and in front of my children.

Shock that his wife and the associate pastor seemed to think this was normal.

But that wasn’t the worst part.

As I was fumbling my way through an answer, my equally shocked husband broke in and said, “Actually, I have the same concerns Sarah does.”

Tone of the conversation immediately changed. And that’s when it hit me.

The elder had expected my husband to take his side.

Not only was he trying to put me in my place. But by having this conversation in front of my husband instead of privately with me and by being surprised that my husband would agree with me, his wife, the elder was also trying to come between my husband and me. (intentionally or not)

But back to his question.

What Exactly Was The Problem?

I had no idea where this “can you submit” question was coming from. I tried to say, “Yes, as long as it is not heavy-handed,” but am not sure I communicated that well.

The elder followed up saying that there was a “pattern of communications” that were “yellow flags.” As I tried to address the three specific incidents, this is when David broke in and tone of the conversation changed. While there was no swearing or yelling (it was all very civil in that sense), there was a distinct lack of the fruits of the Spirit. The elder interrupted and fact-checked David and I, our words were parsed multiple times, and our perceptions were questioned by everyone there. Both David and I were accused of being fearful (ironic, given what was happening) and projecting our negative experience at a previous church onto Doxa Church, even though no one there knew any of the details of that prior experience.

At one point, I used my two-year-old as an excuse to walk outside, broke down in tears, composed myself, and returned resolved to end the evening holding on to whatever shreds of dignity I could retain.

Their three areas of concern?

1. The communication about the pastor’s mistake regarding the Lord’s Prayer. The same communication where the elder had refused to admit the pastor could make a mistake. Where he said he’d “enjoyed” our conversation. And that I had deliberately decided to let go in spite of lingering concerns.

2. A minor misunderstanding between the elder’s wife and myself that we had already talked about, cleared up, and put behind us. That he had not even checked with his wife about before bringing it up, as she (bless her) had to interrupt him and say, “It’s ok, we talked, we’re ok.”

3. My solicited response to their feedback form.

It quickly became clear that the associate pastor had not seen the text or email exchange about the Lord’s Prayer. As I was trying to summarize it to him, I commented, “Daron suggested I listen to the sermon again and…” and the elder sharply interrupted me. “I didn’t say you should listen to it again! I said I listened to it again!” Confused, but wanting to make sure I had the story straight, I offered to go back and pull up the text message to check. His response? “No, that’s not necessary.”

Guess who was right? Hint - it wasn’t him. (And now you know why I attached the text message chain to that post in this series.)

And later, when I expressed confusion as to what exactly I’d said that was problematic in the feedback form, the associate pastor said that if they didn’t already know me and my heart, the feedback could be perceived as “possibly aggressive.”

At that point, I have to admit, I mentally checked out of the conversation, because I realized they weren’t living in the real world. I worked for seven years as a non-teaching staff member in academia. I have seen aggressive. I have been on the receiving end of aggressive. And while what I wrote was clearly a critique, it was not aggressive.

Needless to say, by the end of the evening, we had all agreed that God was no longer telling David and I to lead a small group. The meeting wrapped up with the elder saying that he wanted to meet again with David/us in person to hear more about his/our concerns. After everyone left and we’d finally put the kids to bed, David and I agreed that we were simply done.

At which point I broke into tears again, at the thought of having to tell dear friends that we would be leaving the church.

And given that the elder had just misrepresented two things that he had said to me a few months prior, David and I no longer trusted to an in-person meeting.

The Other Concerning Twist

As we were walking to our car the next day, David told me, genuinely puzzled, "I don't understand. I told Daron the same thing you did about the building location, even more directly, and he seemed ok with it."

Still furious about what had happened the night before, I whirled around and said, "I love you, and I know you're complementarian, but it's sh** [I'm not normally prone to swearing] like this that makes it really hard for me to be in a complementarian church."

David has since acknowledged to me and others that this was likely a "gender issue," which is a big deal given that he used to regard this elder as a friend and even now still leans toward the complementarian theology he studied in seminary.

Our Final Communications

A few days later, we emailed the elder and the associate pastor (cc’ing the senior pastor). We outlined our concerns and said that we would be leaving the church. To be fair, this was written while we were still in a place of hurt. We acknowledged this in the email and were intentional to offer multiple apologies, affirmations of gifting in leadership, and affirmations of things we appreciated and loved about the church.

The elder emailed back that they’d received the email, were saddened, and would be taking time to process before responding more. We thought this an appropriate response.

We did note that he removed the pastor’s email address from his reply.

When the elder sent a longer response about a week later, I literally laughed out loud with disbelief. Among other things, it was implied that David and I had sought out the position of small group leaders and were the ones behind the accelerated start date and that we had decided to leave the church to avoid following Matthew 18 (because we thought we had something to fear from church discipline?!).

Our Resignation Letter

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Our Resignation Letter Attachment

84.7KB ∙ PDF file

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The Manipulative Response

95KB ∙ PDF file

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My initial reaction to this email was “bring it.” But, as my husband pointed out, we had zero reason to trust in the honesty of a system that had just acted in the way it did. And the insistence on an “in-person” meeting would mean a distinct lack of documentation. Documentation which we considered important because of how the elder misrepresented things he’d previously told me during our last in-person meeting.

The manipulation of details and the inaccurate reading into our motives was clear affirmation that we made the right decision to leave.

It took another month and a dozen drafts, but I finally wrote and sent a response that I felt was honest but gracious and that I would not be embarrassed if my mother happened to read someday.

Despite the elder trying to cut the senior pastor out of the loop again, we cc’d him on that email, too.

What I Learned Later about High Control Religions

I started this series about Doxa Church Rocklin with the post “How We Got Sucked in to a Cult-like Church.” The reason I call it “cult-like” instead of a flat-out cult is because, at the end, they let us leave.

In the days and weeks after we left, I finally came to a prayer that I felt was honest and not a backhanded-complement sort of prayer. “God, I pray you help them love others well.” It finally struck me that this is the prayer I (still, seven years later) pray with my children at the end of the day. “Jesus, we pray you help us love you better and love others better, too.”

I was fortunate in that several books about spiritual abuse were published in the year or so following our departure from Doxa Church (more on that in the epilogue to this series). One of them was When Narcissism Comes to Church, Healing your Community from Emotional and Spiritual Abuse, by licensed therapist and professor of pastoral care .

GIANT DISCLAIMER - I am not a therapist and am in no way saying the people involved in this story have narcissism.

But this book described patterns that I recognized and helped give me sympathy for the situations and circumstances that might cause people to feel they have no choice but to control and manipulate in order to maintain a certain image.

[Quoting the novel “Glittering Images” by Susan Howatch, a conversation where a priest is confronted about his false self, his “glittering image,” by a spiritual director]

I’m becoming interested in this other self of yours, the self nobody meets. I’d like to help him come out from behind the glittering image and set down this appalling burden which has been tormenting him for so long… [W]hen a traveler’s staggering along with a back-breaking amount of luggage he doesn’t need someone to pat him on the head and tell him how wonderful he is. He needs someone who’ll offer to share the load.

DeGroat, pgs 152-153

It’s not easy to change. And it will need to start with truth and honesty. But we believe in a Savior who works miracles in people’s hearts and changes them for the betterment of all humanity. He can do that even with those drawn to and caught up in authoritarian systems.

Looking back at our first few weeks and months at what became Doxa Church Rocklin, there are clear signs of an authoritarian organization that we missed.

• the fast-track to membership

  • encourage commitment before patterns of dysfunction have time to emerge

• the love-bombing and ego-stoking

  • lull people into a false sense of security

• all the emphasis on sin in small group discussion notes

  • because it is easier to control people who have internalized that they are not worthy

• individual participation tracking

  • like a stalker boyfriend

• leadership’s words equated with Biblical authority

  • ignoring that we humans can have imperfect interpretations even as we hold to a high view of Scripture

• and later…

  • the inability of leaders to admit to a mistake

  • criticism labelled as insubordination

After leaving Doxa Church Rocklin, I came across Dr. Steven Hassan’s BITE Model of Authoritarian Control. Dr. Hassan is a former cult-member who was deprogrammed and went on to research what leads people into situations like the ones we found ourself with at Doxa. And while clearly the church as we knew it seven years ago does not fit most or even the most extreme methods of indoctrination, there are certainly enough indicators to give one pause.

• “Deception… distort information to make it more acceptable”

  • the 3-mile search radius quickly becoming “three to five-ish”

  • the elder and associate pastor being less-than-forthcoming about the reason for our April 29 meeting

  • the elder lying twice during the April 29 meeting

  • the elder implying that David and I sought out becoming small group leaders in his email response

• “keep members busy so they don’t have time to think and investigate”

  • the only “valid” reasons for missing a church activity were being ill or out of town, leaving no grace for an unusually busy work schedule, caregiving commitments for elderly or disabled relatives, the simple state of being an introvert, etc.

• “unethical use of confession”

  • I had been open with the elder’s wife and associate pastor about having had a bad church experience in the past. This was used against us at the April 29 meeting to imply we were projecting our previous bad experience onto Doxa Church, even though they knew zero details of our previous experience

• “require members to internalize the group’s doctrine as truth”

  • everything the church did was “Biblical,” with no acknowledgement that there are many interpretations of church governance, for example, that fall under the “Biblical” umbrella

• “rejection of rational analysis, critical thinking, constructive criticism”

  • the elder’s reaction to my noticing of a sermon mistake

  • leadership’s reaction to my solicited feedback form

• “forbid critical questions about leader, doctrine, or policy”

  • the entirety of the April 29 meeting

• “labeling alternative belief systems as illegitimate, evil, or just not useful”

  • the frequent comparison to other churches in the area, even other Protestant Christian churches, as less-than because they didn’t “preach the Bible” like Doxa Church did1

• “instill fear, such as fear of… the outside world”

  • homeschooling was promoted even when we attended. And while I don’t have problems with homeschooling on a philosophical level, now the church website flat-out “applauds” the exodus from “government controlled education.” Instead of promoting homeschool as a flexible option that can be tailored to individual learners’ needs, the church has to use the government as a fear-mongering boogeyman to goad families to commit yet another piece of their lives to the church-controlled realm

  • licensed therapy was discouraged, and church-controlled, non-accountable “soul care” was promoted in its place

What Do You Think?

So these are the questions I leave you with.

How many similarities between a church and a cult is too many?

And would you believe me if I told you that I’ve been at churches that have zero similarities, and still manage to reach the community for Jesus?

Leave a comment

On Thursday, we’ll take a small break from the heaviness of spiritual abuse for a Mother’s Day reflection. And next week, I’ll conclude this series by discussing resources and practices that helped me personally to recover and move on, while still retaining my faith in Jesus.

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During our second year at Doxa Church, James MacDonald of the founding church had a rather major fall from grace due to a pattern of bullying and fostering an environment of fear and intimidation. It was only briefly talked about by Doxa leadership, when MacDonald voluntarily stepped away from leading the network “to focus on his own church” because things “had become an overwhelming weight.”1 There were no further announcements to the congregation, even as later information and formal charges from his own church came to light that put MacDonald’s need for “refocus” in a different light. There was nothing ever said about the scores of people he wounded and drove away from the church with his behavior, or what Doxa Church was doing to make sure it did not repeat the sins of its metaphorical father.

Contrast that with leadership’s announcement that the pastor of a church in Cameroon they’d planted was let go because of an extramarital affair.2 With the international church plant, news was precise and action was swift. This seemed like a strange double-standard.

Not too long after, the church changed its name from Harvest Bible Chapel Sacramento to Doxa Church.3

And double-standards became the least of our problems.

This Story Unfolds Over Four Posts

• How We Got Sucked In to a Cult-like Church

• What You Learn When Leaders Get Caught with Egg on Their Face

• Church Called My Honest Feedback “Possibly Aggressive” (this post)

• From Small-group Recruit to Church Pariah (forthcoming)

• Epilogue: Moving On After Spiritual Abuse (forthcoming)

When a Building Search Turns Tense

You might remember from my first post that Doxa Church was renting space from Granite Bay High School when we first arrived at the beginning of 2017. We’d started attending at a point when the church was considering purchasing a plot of agricultural land in the community to eventually build a church campus. It was serious enough that the church had run a capitol campaign prior to us arriving there.

Even as that particular plan fell through after pushback from the local community, church leadership promised to continue the search for a new building and committed to staying within a three-mile search radius of the current meeting location.

Remember this, because it will come into play later.

In early 2019, Doxa Church announced a “Prayer and Vision Night,”4 held at what would eventually become it’s current location.

Which was seven miles away, more than twice the original search radius.

Now, because David enjoys following real estate, and because the elder who led our small group happened to be spearheading the search for the new location, David would ask occasionally how the search was going. The elder always seemed happy to oblige. At one point previous, the church had been considering a different location that was also outside the stated search radius. The elder had even asked David for his opinion, what he thought of the location being so far away. “You know people are going to leave,” was David’s response at the time. The elder took the feedback with equanimity.

However, other than a request in the fall of 2018 for a season of prayer and fasting,5 leadership had made no formal announcements to the congregation at large with updates on the building search that had now been going on for almost two years. And while I can empathize with not always wanting everything to be about the building and not wanting too many cooks in the kitchen, this created difficulties later.

At the 2019 “Prayer and Vision Night,”6 a panel consisting of the elders and the senior and associate pastors described why they thought the new, further away building was a great fit, where the church stood financially, what a purchase process could look like, etc. Panel members answered questions from attendees that were texted in, pledging to answer every single question. When time ran out, the senior and associate pastors answered the remaining questions in a video7, which was emailed to the entire congregation. David and I attended the meeting and watched the follow-up video.

To their credit, leadership appeared to answer every single question that had been sent in. Even the questions that were rather tersely worded and appeared to be from unhappy campers.

I want to take a moment to acknowledge how hard this can be and that I appreciated this effort.

However.

The stated search radius quickly morphed from a “3-mile” radius to a “3 to 5-ish mile” radius. (The new location was 7 miles away from the original meeting location of Granite Bay High School.) And people who were not excited about the prospect of a suddenly much longer drive were quickly labelled “unwilling” instead of “unable” to drive so far.

Instead of simply admitting they’d chosen a building outside the search radius and explaining why, and gracefully parting ways with those who decided to leave as a result, leadership became defensive and started to re-write history.

Leaders brushed aside a concern voiced about the large number of churches already near the future building. But at a different point, used the large number of churches already near the high school as an excuse for widening the search radius, with the implication that people living near the high school could still be adequately fed by those other churches. But at another point encouraged people who were nowhere near the proposed new location that “a church alive is worth the drive,” which implies that there are no other “alive” churches closer to wherever those people might call home.

In other words, different standards were applied depending on what best fit the narrative that got the most people to relocate with the church.

While I was impressed with the building and thought it would ultimately be a good move for Doxa Church, I was disquieted by some of the answers leadership gave to very valid concerns from some congregation members. I remember thinking, confused, “Leadership is acting like the congregation owes them or something. Do they not realize people are here voluntarily and can leave at any time?”

The Feedback Form that Become Prophetic

Not too long afterwards, leadership emailed a feedback form to the congregation, asking everyone to give feedback on the new building. To my recollection, it was rather brief. It asked whether or not you would attend at the new location (with “yes” or “no” being the only option) and required you to include your name.

The feedback survey also asked two open-ended-response questions. In the interest of full disclosure, the entirety of my response to the open-ended questions is included in the attachment, below.

Building Feedback Response

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I said the building looked great and that it was easily apparent why leadership was interested. I empathized with the difficulty of the search process and all the closed doors.

And then I made a mistake.

I observed that leadership hadn’t been keeping the congregation in-the-loop and that many in the church were surprised by the sudden change in search radius. I suggested that leaders explain more fully what made them look so far away and perhaps even apologize for springing it on the congregation.

I included the very same observation my husband had made to the elder earlier about the distance being a problem, and that people would leave because of it. I suggested that the elders and pastors were men of gracious character who could handle this move better than I’d seen pastors at a previous church handle moves. I commended them for their frank discussion of finances and for how well they seemed to have stewarded and prepared for this move and building purchase.

And then I made an even bigger mistake.

I critiqued their survey. Including that people could not submit feedback anonymously. “I think you are intelligent enough and even-tempered enough to be able to weed out anonymous responses of people who simply have a chip on their shoulder from those of people who may have valid concerns but are intimidated by the thought of seven ‘spiritual giants’ putting them under the microscope for voicing a dissenting opinion.”

So, what do you think? Is this enough to qualify as “aggressive?”

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As it became increasingly clear that the church would be moving ahead with the relocation, David and I were torn.

We realized that Doxa Church was on its way to becoming a mega church. While we have nothing against mega churches (I became a believer through a mega church), we also knew from personal experience that we experience more growth and community in small to mid-size churches. We also weren’t sure if we wanted to commit to a church in Rocklin, a community 25 minutes away from our home to which we have no other ties and felt zero sense of personal calling. Our previous church had also been in Rocklin, so we already knew the challenges that come with being involved in church life when church isn’t actually local.

Meanwhile…

But let’s back up a little.

In January 2019, prior to the announcement of a possible new location for the church, David and I met with our small group leaders (remember, the husband was also an elder) to talk about small group options. The format of this particular group just wasn’t working for us as a couple, where husbands met one week, wives met the opposite weeks, and family events were only rarely held. We were hoping the leaders would either be open to trying family-friendly activities more frequently or have a recommendation for us as to a different group.

We were incredibly humbled by their receptiveness and response. “We think God is leading you to be small group leaders.” The elder even pulled up a calendar and mentioned April as a starting date at some point (we said this felt much too soon, and his wife laughingly told him to give us some time to think about it). As we were saying goodbye, the elder was texting the associate pastor, who oversaw the small group ministry, to get us connected to him.

David and I were not sure we had the bandwidth to make this kind of commitment, having led a small group before at our previous church, but were willing to explore options. We talked with the associate pastor and received similar levels of encouragement that “maybe God is telling you to lead a small group.” Like the elder, the associate pastor also encouraged a start date of April (more than once).

We went through leadership training and talked with a couple of families the associate pastor connected us with about possibly leading a group, while also being open about our hesitations. In the meantime, the elder signed us up for an additional training, and his wife asked if I would like to take on additional responsibilities in our current group as I “transitioned to leading [my] own small group.” (I declined, since we hadn’t even decided if we were going to lead.)

I think it is fair to say that we were being pressured.

Small Group Communications

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David and I were having trouble coming to a decision. I finally had the idea of committing for a year to both Doxa Church and leading a small group, and seeing how it went from there. David liked that and emailed the associate pastor to let him know that we were on board and planed on a soft launch the first week of May (barely missing their wish of an April start date).

The pastor emailed back that he and our current small group leaders would have to meet with us before we started. He suggested we meet at our house. David and I assumed it would be to talk about logistics of a new group, and I offered to cook everyone dinner.

And within a few weeks, I went from a trusted small group leader recruit to something else entirely.

Previous post: What You Learn When Leaders Get Caught with Egg on Their Face

Next post: From Small Group Recruit to Church Pariah

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In our nearly two years at Doxa Church, my husband, David, and I had quickly become members and regularly attended a weekly small group hosted by an elder and his wife. We attended Sunday morning services faithfully and served in the church nursery (me) and on the set-up team (David).

But a pattern of legalism that seemed to mirror our experience at our previous church was appearing at Doxa. This experience had led to burnout amongst both congregation and pastoral staff that was openly acknowledged from the pulpit, and had been echoed by others from our old church who later turned up at Doxa Church.

At the same time, I was noticing a second pattern at Doxa Church that concerned me just as much.

This Story Unfolds Over Four Posts

• How We Got Sucked In to a Cult-like Church

• What You Learn When Leaders Get Caught with Egg on Their Face (this post)

• Church Called My Honest Feedback “Possibly Aggressive” (forthcoming)

• From Small-group Recruit to Church Pariah (forthcoming)

• Epilogue: Moving On After Spiritual Abuse (forthcoming)

  I write about church dynamics, spiritual abuse, and how to hold onto faith while learning to think for yourself. If this resonates, consider subscribing below. Posts in this series will be released twice a week.

I was disconcerted by blind spots the senior pastor seemed to display regarding women in the Bible. Even my husband, who has a Master of Divinity from a well-respected evangelical seminary and whose theology leans complementarian just like Doxa Church, picked up on these.

For example, when the conception of Ishmael came up in a sermon, the senior pastor placed 100% of the blame for the situation on Sarah. Thus ignoring that Ishmael’s conception would have been literally impossible without the active participation of Abraham. (On the drive home from church that morning, without my prompting David quipped, “I probably don’t need to ask what you thought of the sermon today.”)

In a different sermon, this time talking about the birth of Isaac, the senior pastor said the true miracle was Abraham’s faith and ability to sire a child at an advanced age. Thus completely ignoring the far greater miracle of formerly-barren Sarah being able to (1) conceive, (2) carry a child to term, and (3) survive childbirth (4) at the age of 90. Also ignoring that the Bible tells us Abraham had additional sons with a different woman after Sarah died.

And in yet a third sermon, when preaching from Genesis 5:1-2 (which echos Genesis 1:26-27), the senior pastor emphasized that God created man. “Now I understand that in naming the message this morning ‘Man’ I can already be offending some of you. Ok. Why didn’t you name it ‘persons’ or ‘humankind’ [sarcastically]? Uh. Listen, I’m not trying to offend anybody. I’m simply trying to use the word that God uses when he describes his own creation.”

In other words, the senior pastor ignored the context of “male and female he created them“ (emphasis added) in the very verse he put on the screen, which shows a more appropriate translation that many Bible translation teams choose into contemporary English is “manKIND,” not simply “man.”1 Particularly since the “word that God uses” here is adam, a Hebrew word that can also mean “humanity” or “mankind.”2

I’d heard of pastors reading their biases into the text, and even seen it action when the pastor at our former church said (with zero basis in historical fact) that Lydia of Thyatira’s household was all female.

But this ignoring of Biblical context itself was getting to be ridiculous.

Between the apparent blind spots regarding women in the Biblical record and the misapplication of scriptures to promote a kind of legalism, I was becoming increasingly suspicious about the senior pastor’s claims toward “Biblical” preaching.

Then, an opportunity to test the waters presented itself when the senior pastor made an easily refutable, black-and-white mistake in a sermon.

Setting the Stage

In November 2018, the senior pastor preached a message (“Prayed Up”) at the end of a sermon series regarding the Lord’s Prayer. The following was a minor digression toward the beginning of the sermon:

“How many have a Catholic background or are waiting for the real ending, which is ‘For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, Amen!’ … You want to pray like that? Is that untrue to pray? No! It’s 100% true! And it’s awesome! But I, here’s where I have a problem with this. What I have a problem with is not what it expresses. But I have a problem with someone deciding whether it is abrupt or not in its ending. I have a problem with when Jesus wants it to end somewhere that we let it end and understand from Jesus’ perspective why it would end in the place that it does…” [emphasis added]

Now, at first I took the senior pastor at his word, that this particular ending to the Lord’s Prayer is more common in Catholic churches.

But I happened to spend a semester in London, and the first time I’d heard this ending to the Lord’s Prayer was at Westminster Abbey, which is Church of England. And because I happen to dabble in Tudor history,3 I knew that the Church of England was most definitely not Catholic. Being curious, I decided to investigate why on earth a Church of England church would be praying a Catholic prayer.

To my honest surprise, I discovered that this ending is in the King James Version of the Bible, which is the translation commissioned by the Protestant King James I of England and favored by traditional Protestant churches. Catholic Bibles do not in fact have the alternate ending to the Lord’s Prayer.4

Whoopsie on the senior pastor’s part. Especially since he made such a big deal of it with his four “I have a problem” statements about why the alternative ending should not have been added.

At the women’s half of our small group that week, I mentioned this mistake during conversation. (The group was for young families; husbands and wives met on alternating weeks.) The leader, who was also an elder’s wife, affirmed that the Protestant tradition she grew up in used this version and that she appreciated the beauty of the language. It was a minor point, and group conversation moved smoothly to the rest of the sermon and discussion questions.

So far, so good.

Wait, Aren’t You Seeing What I’m Seeing?

Since the elder’s wife acknowledged the mistake, I wondered how open the senior pastor would be to receiving feedback. Just so that he’d know better in the future and not make himself look foolish in front of anyone who happened to be of a Catholic background.

So I texted her.

I mentioned the alternate ending to the Lord’s Prayer, and asked if there was anyone who said anything when a pastor or staff member made a public error like that. I said that I realized his main point was not to bash on Catholics, but that the bashing on Catholics detracted from his main point, and asked if there was some kind of check in place for simple things like that.

I was expecting her to reply something along the lines of, “If it’s something that bothers you or you feel important to address, just email him directly.” Instead, she said she’d have to talk to her husband (the elder) and get back to me.

Weird. But whatever.

Her husband texted me a few days later, not including his wife.

The entire text and email exchange is included here as an attachment, so you can verify for yourselves what was said. (More on that, later.)

Lords Prayer Communication

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There were a few things about his text that ranged from odd to mildly concerning:

• He responded to me directly and cut his wife out of the conversation, perhaps unintentionally, but it seemed like an unwarranted escalation.

• He did not seem to understand the question and did not answer it directly.

• He did not admit to the possibility of a mistake, however innocent, on the senior pastor’s part.

• He suggested that I re-listen to the message, implying I’d misunderstood the pastor. I had in fact already re-listened before texting his wife, to make sure I wasn’t going around with egg on my face.

When I showed my husband the text, he was frankly taken aback by the tone. David even offered to talk to the elder for me, as he considered the elder a friend. While I appreciated his offer, I also felt that I should handle this like an adult and didn’t need my husband to speak on my behalf.

So I listened to the sermon a third time and was left with the same question.

Round Two of Obfuscation

So I asked the elder if I could email to provide more clarification, and he agreed.

In the email, I apologized for any confusion or tone on my part. I said I took the elder’s suggestion to listen to the sermon again, that it was a strong sermon with an important message, and that the mistake I noticed did not detract from the sermon’s main point. I quoted the pastor directly and provided sources to demonstrate that the pastor was, in fact, wrong. I emphasized numerous times that it was a minor mistake and apologized if I’d inadvertently poked a stick into a hornet’s nest. I also directly asked (again) if there was a mechanism in place for alerting a speaker when they’d made a mistake in a sermon.

Frankly, I didn’t understand why this was such a big deal. Why couldn’t either the elder or his wife simply say, “Sure, just email the pastor if it’s something you think is important enough for him to be aware of.” Or, “Yeah, that’s mildly embarrassing. I’ll let him know so he doesn’t make the same kind of mistake again.”

The elder’s reply was unsettling. He still did not accept that the pastor had made a mistake, however inadvertent or minor.

To this day, I still don’t understand what was holding the elder back from acknowledging such a minor “whoopsie.”

And I found this concerning from someone who was theoretically supposed to be both mentoring the senior pastor (who was about 30-years-old at the time) and holding him accountable. While there is definitely a way to go to the other extreme, not telling people about a blatant error in the course of their job is not helping them, it’s just giving them a way to avoid growth.

The elder told me, “we have elders in place to address instances where speakers miscommunicate or could communicate better. As elders, our ‘job description’ is to address Doctrine, Discipline and Direction in our church... [capitols his] We have had a few instances where we have discussed and addressed an error or tone that maybe detracted from effective communication. By God’s grace, we have not had to address any doctrinal issues with those who speak publicly at our church.”

I was puzzled as to how to reply, or even whether to, since it seemed as though I was spinning my wheels.

The elder solved this problem for me. Our small group coincidentally had a Christmas gathering the very next day, which David and I hosted. When the elder arrived, he greeted me and said he’d “enjoyed” our conversation and wanted to make sure everything was “good” between us.

Bewildered, because the tone of his email suggested anything but enjoyment, I agreed that things were fine between us and deliberately made the decision to let it go. My husband considered approaching the elder separately about it at some point, as a friend, but never got around to it.

Where This Left Us

This was the first time I realized feedback at Doxa Church wasn’t actually welcome.

The second time, leadership made it impossible to ignore. And we’ll look at that story in Thursday’s post.

In the meantime, I’m curious. Have you ever had a similar Inigo-Montoya-style “I don’t think that means what you think it means” moment in church? Let me know below, I’m genuinely interested in hearing your story.

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Previous post: How We Got Sucked into a Cult-like Church

Next post: Church Called my Honest Feedback “Possibly Aggressive”

We’ve debated on-and-off for years whether to tell this story publicly. But since seven is often a symbol of completion in the Bible, this feels like a fitting time.

It may also seem like a long time ago, with memories easily fading, but certain moments are unforgettable. Like the elder asking me point-blank, while I balanced my four-year-old on my hip, “Especially you, Sarah. Can you submit to leadership and training?” Other parts of this story are based on text messages, emails, and notes that I wrote in the months that followed as an attempt to process everything. And I find enough time has passed that I can see patterns more clearly, now that I’m not caught in the shock of the moment.

I write this now to preserve a record of what happened and to show how well-intentioned Christians can get caught-up unawares in cult-like movements. And also to show how patterns of dysfunction and heavy-handed leadership emerge over time, where leaders may preach accountability and transparency to members but aren’t themselves willing to be transparent or held accountable.

As this is a first-hand account of church leaders acting in their leadership capacity, it is neither gossip1 nor libel. Anyone who followed the story of Mark Driscoll at Mars Hill Church, or James MacDonald at Harvest Bible Chapel, or Steve Timmis at the Acts 29 Network2 knows that these kind of stories rarely happen in a vacuum. Should more stories come to light at some point in the future, this will be a testament to the depth of the problems. And if this turns out to be a one-off situation, then I’m glad that those involved have changed their ways.

But it’s my continued encounters with the church’s growing influence that have promoted me to now write.

Their small groups have spread throughout the area and they now have a podcast and a pastoral internship program. Random people I know in the community have told me they’re checking it out, or that it’s really popular in their moms’ group or homeschool community. In 2022 we left a church we’d attended for a year and considered joining, in part because we found out the interim pastor was in Doxa Church’s pastoral training program,3 but also because we saw indicators that he was setting the church up to replicate Doxa’s style of leadership. We later found out by happenstance that this same little church was being formally re-planted by Doxa and that the new, permanent pastor was also a graduate of Doxa’s pastoral internship program.4

The amount of influence Doxa Church Rocklin has come to enjoy was not always the case, and certainly was not when my husband and I started attending in early 2017.

This Story Unfolds Over Four Posts

• How We Got Sucked In to a Cult-like Church (this post)

• What You Learn When Leaders Get Caught with Egg on Their Face (forthcoming)

• Church Called My Honest Feedback “Possibly Aggressive” (forthcoming)

• From Small-group Recruit to Church Pariah (forthcoming)

• Epilogue: Moving On After Spiritual Abuse (forthcoming)

My husband, David, and I arrived at Doxa Church in early 2017 with a toddler in tow, with a baby on the way, and bruised by burnout from our former church. Back then, Doxa was a fairly new church plant meeting at Granite Bay High School. It went by the name Harvest Bible Chapel Sacramento and belonged to the Harvest Bible Fellowship church-planting network, founded by James MacDonald.

Yes, the same James MacDonald who was later let go by the church he’d founded and pastored for 30 years because of bullying and creating a toxic work environment, among other things.

Remember this, because it will come back to haunt this story later.

While this series will focus on the negative, there were clearly things Doxa Church was doing right, otherwise we wouldn’t have joined in the first place. There were many gracious people there, some of whom I made treasured friendships with. That was honestly the hardest thing to live with later, knowing that I’d be leaving those relationships behind, and that the hurts my family had received were quite probably going to continue upon other people.

After the experience at our previous church, where we had felt more like resources to be used rather than spiritual family members to be cherished, Doxa’s slogan “you are loved” felt like a healing balm. A cheerful team of greeters went out of their way to make people feel welcome the minute they arrived. Small groups were heavily promoted from the stage, and membership was encouraged early and often.5

But even now, my type A personality looks back on our “getting plugged in” to church life with the same admiration I give to the workings of a well-oiled machine. In January, we started attending. By February or March, we were attending a small group. By May, we were formal members.

At the time, this speed felt efficient. Now it feels like the first warning sign. While the warmth was real,6 there was an expectation that people would move quickly from casual visitor to fully committed member. From my current vantage point, the system pressured us to make significant commitments before we had really seen how the church handled conflict or criticism and before possible patterns of dysfunction had time to emerge.

Attendance was tracked. Not just a generic head-count that is more common in churches, but a literal sign-in card or phone app for individual families every single Sunday.7 When we missed three Sundays in a row because Queen Bee was born, David even got a phone call from a staff member to check on us.8 At the time, this seemed like an efficient way to stay connected with congregation members. Now, it feels more like big-brother surveillance.

We were even impressed by the senior pastor’s humility. He sometimes shared how his first church plant had failed. How it was weird being a pastor in a church that met at the same high school he had graduated from as a student. Then there was the time David and I were walking back from picking up Miss Bee from the nursery, and he went out of his way to introduce himself even though it was quite clear that David and I had stumbled upon him taking a moment for himself in between services.

I don’t think this was a facade. But I still don’t know what changed.

What especially drew us was the senior pastor’s preaching. He was a particularly charismatic and gifted speaker. The associate pastor was no slouch, either, but the senior pastor was on another level.

The senior pastor always emphasized how biblical it all was. The preaching was biblical, because expository preaching is the only way to be true to the text. The worship songs were biblical because of the theology in the lyrics. The governance format was biblical because clearly the Bible shows elder-led churches. The church was biblical because of how doctrinally sound it was. The membership agreement was biblical because they tacked the spiritual word “covenant” on to it and emphasized theology and submission.

With the implication through it all, naturally, that other churches in the area weren’t quite as biblical as Doxa Church was. After all, how many other congregations could sit through a solid hour of theologically and doctrinally rich sermons week after week after week?

Clearly, it was all being done for the glory of God.

And clearly, our egos were being stoked.

At the time, it felt like we’d finally found the church we’d been searching for.

History Might Not Repeat Itself, But…

As a year-and-a-half passed, three other families from our previous church turned up, echoing our tales of burnout. Burnout had been common in that previous church, from the senior pastor and other leaders on down to ordinary volunteers, and had been openly acknowledged from the pulpit. The stories of others who turned up at Doxa Church were sometimes heartbreaking to hear, particularly the strain on families and marriages. But they also helped affirm for David and I that the problems we thought we’d perceived at this previous church were real all along.

The only problem was, now I was seeing similar signs at Doxa Church.

In retrospect, I think one of the causes of burnout at our former church was a form of legalism. “Good” members (like me) attended Sundays and small groups regularly, attended discipleship or Bible studies, and served in at least one capacity in the church. But in all of this “doing” for God, I had zero prayer life, didn’t read the Bible, and was stressed and crabby with my family. My spiritual well was dry. I had no time to simply enjoy God’s presence because I was so busy “doing” for the church.

And while these acts of participation are good, turning them into a formula of “do this and you will feel more spiritual” or “do this and your relationships will improve” is just another way of having our salvation rely on acts of man and not on the gift of grace offered by Jesus (Galatians 2:21).

But back to Doxa Church. My newborn was finally sleeping through the night, and I had more bandwidth to pay attention in church. I was noticing a black-and-white attitude toward participation in congregational life that bothered me:

• The senior pastor said from the pulpit “This is not optional!” about attending Prayer and Worship Nights.9 (To which I would posit that prayer and worship and Christian community are all encouraged in the Bible, but specific manifestations are not stipulated.)

• I read in the small group notes that you must sow seeds in order to reap a harvest.10 (Yet the parable of the sower does not actually show the sower being the one to reap the harvest, with a fascinating corollary from Paul in 1 Corinthians 3:4-9.)

• It was stated more than once that the only good reasons for missing Sunday morning/small group/whatever is illness or being out-of-town. (Which gives no grace for disability of one’s self or family members, or a particularly busy work season, or the simple state of being an introvert.)

• And small group leader notes once said that members should be encouraged to be in the Word at least 5x per week. (To which I would borrow Paul’s words, “You foolish Galatians!”)

Again, encouraging spiritual practices is a good thing. But making a mandate of them is a bad thing and runs the risk of both legalism and, as we learned at our previous church, of burnout.

How open to feedback was Doxa Church leadership, I wondered. Leadership at our previous church had not been, and it negatively affected not just the congregation but also pastoral leadership itself, in matters of both church-wide burnout and a financial crisis.11

My husband is seminary trained and a former pastor, and we count pastors among our friends, so we have a certain sympathy for those in church leadership. While also realizing that they are fully human and as prone to mistakes and accidental missteps as the rest of us.

So when an opportunity presented itself, I decided to test the waters.

Next Tuesday, we’ll look at how a minor mistake in a sermon exposed deeper flaws in leadership structure. Because this is a long story, I’ve spread it over four posts. And even though I feel compelled to share this story so that it may serve as a warning to others, I also don’t want to spend the next month immersed in Doxa Church Rocklin, for the sake of my own sanity. So posts will be released twice-a-week instead of the usual once-a-week for the duration of this series.

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In the meantime, if you’ve ever had to leave a high-control church, what were the early days like for you? What attracted you to the church? What were things that, looking back, were early indicators of future problems?

I’d love to hear from you.

Leave a comment

Next in this series: What You Learn When Leaders Get Caught with Egg on Their Face

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In the second week, we looked at why I, as a layperson, think regular Bible reading is worth the time and effort. It is more than simply a beautiful piece of literature, but has provided hope and consistency during times of change and trial, and helped me retain my faith in God when my faith in his church was shaken.

In the last week, we looked at some tips that have helped me stay sane while successfully reading the Bible cover to cover, multiple times over the years. Mostly importantly, we discussed how to intentionally build grace into a sustainable practice and how to appropriately place the priority of Scripture reading.

And in this appendix, I’ll share the books, videos, websites, and podcasts that this pew peon has found both approachable and actually helpful for both better understanding the Bible and for building a sustainable approach to regular Scripture reading.

I’ll be coming back periodically to update this list as I come across others, but here’s what I personally have found helpful so far. (There might be a couple books on my nightstand as we speak, waiting to be read, but who’s counting?)

Posts in this Collection1

1. The Elephant in the Bible Reading Room

2. Why Read the Bible - Not Your Pastor’s Perspective

3. How to Actually Survive Regular Bible Reading

4. Appendices

   1. A Shame-free, Grace-filled Option for Reading the Bible When You’re Busy or Overwhelmed

   2. A Do-able Plan for Reading the Bible in a Year

   3. A Normal Person’s Resources for How to Read the Bible Better (this post)

   4. Navigating the Minefield of Children’s Bibles

   5. Blessed is the Church That - A Call to Worship

Getting a Better Grasp of the Big Picture

• the book The Liquid Bible, Recapturing the Flow of the Great Story of God

  • by Paul Thome, a now-retired former pastor of mine (whom I still respect) and seminary professor

  • only 60 pages, very approachable and a great primer

  • From Amazon: “The Liquid Bible is a retelling of the story of the Bible chronologically, from beginning to end, in everyday language. It is designed to give readers an concise, simple, yet accurate orientation to the Bible in order to help them connect with it's essential message.”

• video playlists from The Bible Project

  • by Tim Mackie and Jon Collins

  • videos are easily digestible and run 5-10 minutes each. I’ve found them personally insightful and also watched them with my elementary-aged children

  • How to Read the Bible

    • gives a brief overview and then dives deeper into things like genre, writing styles, plot, design narratives, etc., and how knowing these provides context to Biblical insights and interpretation

  • Old Testament Animated Overviews and New Testament Animated Overviews

    • big-picture overviews of every single book in the Bible, trace themes and show structure for each of the books

    • when following a Bible reading plan, try watching the corresponding video either before or after reading a particular book of the Bible

Going Deeper

• the book Living by the Book, The Art and Science of Reading the Bible

  • By Howard G. and William D. Hendricks

  • at 400 pages, slightly more academic (I commandeered it from my husband’s collection of seminary books)

  • if you’ve only been taught one way to read/study the Bible, this book can be helpful because it offers a lot of different strategies and ideas, even while following an overarching theme. I found it surprisingly liberating

  • From Amazon: “For every person who draws strength and direction from the Bible, there are many more who struggle with it. Some call it a long book with fine print and obscure meaning. Some call it a mystery, a chore to read, or an undecipherable puzzle. The good news is you can easily solve this problem. With over 300,000 sold, this revised and expanded edition of Living by the Book will remove the barriers that keep Scripture from transforming your life. In a simple, step-by-step fashion, the authors explain how to glean truth from Scripture. It is practical, readable, and applicable. By following its easy-to-apply principles, you'll soon find yourself drawing great nourishment from the Word—and enjoying the process! The Living by the Book Workbook is the perfect compliment to provide practical application of lessons.”

• the website Text & Canon Institute, Illuminating the History of the Bible

  • https://textandcanon.org/, founded by Phoenix Seminary

  • a collection of articles “illuminating the history of the Bible”

  • organized by both topic and by difficulty level on themes such as why we worry when choosing a Bible translation, how the two testaments became one Bible, and the context of Paul and first-century letter writing

• the NIV Archaeological Study Bible, An Illustrated Walk through Biblical History and Culture

  • by Walter C. Kaiser, Jr. and Duane Garrett

  • I found a lot of the historical context both helpful and insightful

Reading the Bible After Spiritual Abuse

• this podcast episode from Flying Free by Natalie Hoffman

  • Learning the Love the Bible Again After You’ve Been Spiritually Abused

  • from the description: “Women of faith in emotionally and spiritually abusive relationships have been bruised by Bible bombs over and over again. Religious abusers love to use the Bible as a weapon of control. As we walk through the healing process, how do we learn to love the Bible again?

    Our guest today is Stacey Wynn, a high powered career woman and abuse survivor who left the corporate world to go to seminary and help other survivors. She’s going to teach us how to take back the Word of God and use it as a healing tool, the way it was intended.”

• the blog Here’s the Joy with Rebecca Davis

  • https://heresthejoy.com/

  • from the description: “Untwisting Scriptures from spiritual abuse and offering the joy that is to be found in Jesus Christ”

• and the books in my post about children’s Bibles, because they are gentle

  • Navigating the Minefield of Children’s Bibles

A Final Note

And I’d like to wrap up with this encouragement from the children’s book “What Is the Bible?” by Rachel Held Evans and Matthew Paul Turner: “And if a story in [the Bible] is confusing or scary or sad, we can imagine how Jesus, who loves us, might tell us that story.”

So I’m curious. What kinds of resources have you found helpful? Or not? Let me know in the comments below.

You might also like…

We often focus on the obedience aspect of the story, and how Abraham’s obedience to God was rewarded. And I won’t lie, Genesis 22:1 does say that God “tested” Abraham.

But why do we stop there?

It seems that at some point in the development of many cultures, human sacrifice becomes unthinkable, and animals are from then on substituted for human victims. The story of the Binding of Isaac in Genesis may constitute symbolically just such a turning point in the history of the Jews - when Abraham’s God tells him it is no longer required that he sacrifices his only son, but may substitute a ram instead.

I wasn’t reading this in a Bible study, in a study Bible, or in a book of theology, but rather in the pop history book How the Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill.

And it made so much sense.

It fit with how God decries to Moses the human sacrifice done by other nations in both Leviticus and Deuteronomy.3 It fit with the prophet Micah using the idea of child sacrifice as hyperbole and sarcasm when calling God’s people to repentance.4 It fit with God’s dismay in the prophecies of Jeremiah and Ezekiel that his people are sacrificing children when God most assuredly did not order them to.5

Stories which had always seemed at odds with God asking Abraham to commit human sacrifice.

Reframing the story of God’s call for Abraham to sacrifice his son into the historical context of “human sacrifice was culturally normative back then” fit so much better with the rest of the Biblical narrative. Because now what stands out is not God asking for a human sacrifice, but God bringing an end to the practice and providing an alternative.

It took a paradigm shift for me to see a deeper meaning behind this initially disturbing story. A meaning that fit better into the context of the Bible as a whole and better with the character of the God I’ve come to love.

And to look at sacrifice from a different angle… remember this the next time somebody tries to decide on your behalf what you should be willing to sacrifice toward their ministry goal. If a leader is stressing how you should obey like Abraham and trust like Isaac, remember first that this story is about obedience and trust in God, and not in imperfect, fallible humans. And that God has put an end to human sacrifice.

Epilogue

So I had finished this post and scheduled it to publish. I’d wrestled whether to draw a more concrete link from the focus on Abraham’s obedience to spiritually abusive churches and systems, but decided to end the post as you see above.

Two days before the post was scheduled to publish, I happened to watch the first episode of “Shiny Happy People - Season Two” on Amazon. It’s described as “a shocking cult exposé with former member statements.” And, like many things, God’s timing was perfect. From the video:

But let me ask you something. What are you willing to give up for the Lord? What is your life? The time may come when God is going to ask us all to give up the comforts that we enjoy and go to live for him in a different way. We don’t know what is down the road, but it seems like some heartache and suffering is in store.

Unnamed, Grandfatherly, Pastoral Looking Man in a Suit

And then the episode jumps right into a preview for the upcoming episode with quotes from former participants of control, unquestioning obedience, and spiritual abuse of impressionable teenagers.

So, I’m just going to say it loud and clear.

If someone is using the message of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son to encourage your obedience, ask what’s in it for them. We should all be obedient to God. But you have just as much access to God’s hopes and desires for your life as human spiritual leaders do6 and you are capable of determining for yourself whether God is actually the one calling you to obedience. Or if it’s merely a human authority figure who wants to use you for their own ends.

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I came to the coffee shop to enjoy some much needed relaxation while my car was down the street with the mechanic. When I headed to the row of two-person tables, there you were at one end, Bible on the table in front of you.

My heart sank.

I sat at the furthest available table from you and hoped you wouldn’t notice. Maybe this time will be different, I wished.

I had brought my Bible, too, but kept to my habit of keeping it discreet as I read. You were engrossed in reading and jotting in your journal, to my relief.

I knew I was running a risk with my next book, but by then my back was tired of being haunched over the table. So I leaned back in my chair and propped the book, whose title was dismayingly displayed in size gazillion-point font, against the table.

Orthodoxy.2 A title just about everyone else in the coffee shop would not think twice about. Or would steer clear of. But one that, if my suspicions were right, would soon be leading to an uncomfortable situation.

I could see from the corner of my eye the moment you noticed. Leaning forward to make sure you’d gotten the title right. Leaning forward more to try and get my attention.

“What are you reading?”

You saw what I’m reading. And if it were Outlander, you wouldn’t be asking, would you, I groaned to myself.

“Orthodoxy.”

“What’s it about?”

At this point, more than two years later, I don’t frankly remember much else of the subsequent conversation. Other than the rapid-fire barrage of Socratic questioning that quickly followed and got you nowhere beyond making me at first uncomfortable and then frankly angry. I don’t know you, I remember thinking. Why are you presuming to teach me when I don’t know enough about you to trust anything you have to say?

There was never an attempt to get to know me as a person or to see what kind of background knowledge I had coming into the conversation. Never a “so what made you start reading the book” or “do you go to church” or “are you Christian” or “how did you hear about the author.”

At one point, trying desperately to change the topic I asked, “So what do you do for a living?” suspecting the answer to be pastor, particularly since at one point you’d mentioned having just met with a group of guys for discussion. “Tree trimmer,” you replied without missing a beat.3 Then, back to the interrogation.

At one point during your questioning, I started stumbling over my words. Instead of taking this as a sign that I was increasingly uncomfortable and that you should give it a rest, you had the nerve to tell me to take my time. I’d like to take my time back, I groused internally. I don’t owe you anything, including my time. I wish I’d had the nerve to say that out loud, but making a scene in public is unfortunately not my forte, especially as a woman not knowing how a strange man would be likely to react.4

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I don’t remember how our conversation ended, only the sense of relief that it was finally over. And the frustration with which I later described the encounter to my husband. Because all of those Socratic questions made it seem as though you viewed me as a child and yourself as the wise teacher leading me to the correct answer. I could accept this from my parents (because they’ve earned that privilege) or from a teacher/pastor/therapist I’d approached, because they would have already demonstrated that they were worth listening to.

But from you, a complete stranger who had done absolutely nothing to show me you had anything worth listening to?

Rude. That’s what your whole approach was. Rude.

David, I’m assuming you had the best of intentions going into this conversation. And if you had approached me without making presumptions and while being open about your intentions, I might have actually engaged in and enjoyed our conversation. Like I did recently with a man old enough to be my grandfather, who asked about a book I was reading on modern-day misogyny. He proceeded to share a heartfelt and encouraging childhood remembrance of his mother’s hopes for the future. Direct. Straightforward. No hidden agenda.

If you had started the conversation in any way that had been upfront and put us on a level playing field, I would have been much more willing to engage. Something like, “I’ve heard of that author but never read him, how is the book?” Or, “Sorry to bother you, but I recognized your book. I read it a few years ago and really liked it.”

Then I might have actually been more open and less guarded. I might have admitted that the book, frankly, was above my head. That the only chapter I’d really grasped so far was, oddly enough, the one on paradoxes. That philosophy and theology aren’t really my thing, but I’m interested in reading outside my evangelical bubble, and the book was deceptively short so I thought it wouldn’t be so bad.

Then, David, you might have actually learned something other than that I, like most people out there, don’t like being a faceless conquest, a number to add to your conversion tally.5 And I might remember more about you other than that you could use a serious revamp of how to (1) approach women you don’t know in public and (2) win converts to your cause.

Signed,

That Random Coffee Shop Woman Who is Still Annoyed with You6

PS - A few weeks later, I witnessed the most delightful conversation in the waiting room of an auto shop. The receptionist, a young woman, said to a grey-haired grandpa-type sitting nearby, “Is that the Bible you’re reading? I’ve been trying to read mine a little every day. I’m in Numbers right now.” He warmly replied, and what followed was a beautiful example of believers encouraging each other to run the race well.7

Let’s be more like them.

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