I wanted to start this post with a TW:
This post will discuss emotional & spiritual manipulation, depression, anxiety & PTSD. Please proceed with caution. The two pastors mentioned are the only perpetrators in this story. At least the only two who directly impacted my life in this negative way. I never dealt with manipulation or emotional/spiritual abuse from anyone else I worked with, and I love so many of the people I met during this time in my life. This post is not a vendetta against the people involved in this story, which is why those present will be mentioned under aliases. This decade-long experience is a huge chunk of my mental health journey, and something my kids ask about frequently. I do believe there are plenty of good churches out there, and not all of them are cults. Seven signs your church is a cult are:
1. Opposing critical thinking (This happened.)
2. Isolating members and penalizing them for leaving (This too.)
3. Emphasizing special doctrines outside scripture
4. Seeking inappropriate loyalty to their leaders (This was MAJOR.)
5. Dishonoring the family unit (Yup.)
6. Crossing Biblical boundaries of behavior (versus sexual purity and personal ownership) (Yerp.)
7. Separation from the Church (Originally was a part of the Assemblies of God but was kicked out for being “too radical.”)
If you’d like to see characteristics of a cult leader, you can do so here.
For the sake of sanity, we will be referring to the elder-Senior Pastor as “Ben”, and the son/youth pastor/eventual-senior-pastor/my former boss as “Lance.”My husband will be referred to as “The Dude” to protect his privacy. There will also be quite a bit of church language or, “christianese” as its called, so I will try to mark those words and do a breakdown at the bottom of this post.
Our family used to be heavily involved in church. I met my husband, The Dude, in the youth group when we were 17. We became a part of the youth leadership team, and worked at the venue the church built as an outreach to the community. The reason I was drawn to that youth group in the first place is because I had a major need to feel like I was a part of something. This youth group & venue were geared toward kids in the hardcore/punk music scenes. “Tattoos? Loud music? We love it! Come as you are! We’re going to take over the world!*” [*This should have been a red flag, by the way.] Right up my alley. I had friends who started attending, then I joined in. The church was run by a family. At the time, the Senior Pastor, “Ben,” was the father of the family, and the man who was Youth Pastor at the time (and has since become the Senior Pastor), “Lance,” was one of his sons. Both were charismatic, loud, and after many years I would come to realize, major narcissistic sociopaths. I can say that because, both men were extremely self-important, and very obviously bothered the successes of sister churches*. Everything was a competition, and there was a ton of shit-talking about what another mega church would do. They would discourage church hopping* because it would be “inconsistent” and it make you look flakey, when the reality was they were extremely possessive & wanted our tithe. There was also the factor of, if you had something to offer them personally (a skill, an in with a local business, etc) you were of value. You could be in the “inner circle.” The second that changed, you weren’t even an afterthought. Ben would tell stories about being raised in a racist household, how Jesus changed his heart, but would use the N-Word to display how racist his upbringing was. Lance would tell elaborate stories about seeing punk rock kids with mohawks come to Jesus that weren’t true, and honestly, with the amount of gaslighting & emotional bashing that went on daily, this long ass post won’t even scratch the surface.
We were told that the order which our priorities should go were:
The Church was to be considered a new family. As a part of the leadership team, we were expected to be at every event. Didn’t matter if you had already been there all day for a conference, which usually meant being there from 8AM till Midnight, if it was a holiday; You were expected to be present, even if you weren’t a part of the paid staff. The church had a team of “interns” who were honestly just there for free labor. They would pull weeds, paint buildings, hold signs out in the 100 degree heat for the fireworks booth, etc, all under the guise of learning what it meant to have a servant’s heart.
Part of your participation in the Youth Group (or any other aspect of the church) was that you were to be held accountable by leadership. As much as I believe in the benefits of accountability in some situations, having the church leadership telling young people who they should/shouldn’t or better yet could/could not date is not really appropriate, but it happened. Their word was to hold more value than say, that of your parents. I saw that in many situations with our youth kids. The Dude and I were once told by Lance during our dating relationship that we needed to take a three-month long break. No exceptions. It didn’t last. I remember telling Lance that we were not going to continue the break, and that was the end of that… Until one evening when we were working a hardcore show at the church’s venue. He approached me & pulled me aside to tell me that God had told him that D and I were sleeping together, and that The Dude confirmed it to him. I told him straight up that I knew he was lying. Lance didn’t bring it up again, but I obviously told The Dude about it.
Sexual purity was huge, as it is in many Christian churches. We were not to talk about sex, think about sex, masturbate, etc. That was sinful. Although, if you were married, it was totally fine to be all over your spouse in front of the whole youth group, but I digress. By not talking about it, it became a huge secretive thing. When I did become pregnant with our oldest daughter out of wedlock a year or so after the confrontation with Lance, The Dude and I were pulled into the church office and had the shit guilted out of us by Ben. During a main Sunday service following that meeting, Ben pulled us up in front of the entire congregation and basically exposed all of our sin, but told everyone the church was “going to embrace and support”us. This was a huge cause of major PTSD that I still suffer from and am working through today. It was also the one and only event that I ever received an apology for, 5 or 6 years later from Lance, and only because he made a joke in front of me during a staff meeting about “back when we used to present people’s sin to the church.” Also, apparently what they meant by being “embrace and support” was being put on a mandatory leave from my job in both the church’s nursery & children’s ministry.
During the 2008 election season, Ben sent out a “voter’s guide” showing everyone how he was voting, and encouraged us to do the same. We were encouraged to vote republican (obviously) and additionally support Prop 8, which was anti-same sex marriage. They even went so far as to have a protest on the side of one of our city’s main roads, holding signs. I hate to admit that I participated in this. Gay marriage was something I supported before being saved*, and even in the first few years really struggled with the concept that it wasn’t acceptable. Obviously, I allowed myself to be swayed. Which is gross, but also, shows the power this church had in my life. Amazingly enough, homosexuality in the Christian community would be the thing that “woke me up” to the faults of Christianity, but we’ll get there later.
Once people in our group of youth leader friends started getting married, we were encouraged to stop going on “girls only trips” or “guys only trips” because excluding your spouse would create opportunity for the enemy* to slip in. “There were things I liked when we got married that my husband didn’t like to do, so I stopped doing them to focus on things we could do together” was something said by Lance’s wife at one point. The majority of us ignored that, and continued to do those trips.
One of my main sources of anxiety, and the reason I still pile stressful situations onto my plate when I shouldn’t: My job at the church. The Dude and I both took on jobs at there at different points. After my leave, I went back to working at the church nursery, and The Dude would work both with the venue directly & on the church’s campus doing yard work and such. Eventually, this would change into an IT job for him, and an administrative assistant job for me. Our livelihood was tied up in this place completely. At one point, there was an “opportunity” to put money into what was basically a pyramid scheme. Ben and Lance were to gain, and Ben tried to pressure us giving money we didn’t have. We refused this, but a lot of people didn’t. In 2010, the church started to have financial troubles, and lost the property our buildings existed on. Ben & Lance quickly changed the name of the church & all its accounts, and started trying to rebuild in a new location. People gave a ton of money, or even took out second mortgages. Ben & Lance’s families continued to live just fine in their nice homes with their newer vehicles. Ben was still having his car paid for by funds from their ministry network (until they finally couldn’t afford to do it anymore) while the rest of us would go unpaid for weeks. We struggled to pay rent, and even buy groceries sometimes. Lance would brag about the fact that they would pay cash for their cars and get amazing deals, while the rest of us struggled with our old, mostly reliable vehicles. Our old church property had leaky roofs & black mold which we still had to work around. Additionally, I was doing the job of about 3 people. I was scheduling & managing the church nursery, helping with children’s church, took on making all the publications for the church and it’s events, answering phones, and assisting in planning events. We were still a part of the youth ministry, and prophetic ministry teams. It was… A lot. During this time, Ben stepped back as Senior Pastor to focus on their Ministry Network, and Lance took over. Over the following two years, we’d go through a lot of changes. The Dude eventually left to take on an outside job to give us some financial stability. Even after he did so, he would receive last-minute texts or emails from Ben demanding assistance with his laptop or whatever to take with him on a trip. The final time this happened, The Dude was working 12 hour night shifts and was unavailable even for me. Ben didn’t like that he wasn’t getting a response from The Dude, and sent me a scathing Facebook message about all they had done for us just to be ignored. It was gross. I still get the creepy-crawlies thinking about it today. My response was essentially a politer version of: “He doesn’t work for you anymore. He does not owe you anything. Go fuck yourself.” We also gradually lost some really valued staff members, and that was when I knew what was happening wasn’t okay. Two of them are some of the best people I know, and put up with a lot of bullshit. When they began their transition out, I started to feel my personal binds loosen.
In 2013, I became pregnant with our 3rd child, my son. At this point, with The Dude’s new permanent job, I knew we were financially stable enough for me to leave. So, I did. Lance tried to bring me back by offering me the Children’s Pastor position I had wanted & been trained for years before but had been given to someone else. I essentially told him it was too little too late, and I knew that the only reason he wanted me back in that position now was because I was leaving. It was like a bad boyfriend that wouldn’t go away initially, then, they let go, and I sunk into the heaviest part of my depression up until that point in my life. My entire identity was wrapped up in a Christian culture I no longer had a part of. We stopped working in leadership, we stopped coming to services. We were free, but totally lost. I knew something about Christian churches no longer felt like home, but I couldn’t figure out why. Then, I met one of my best friends who is a born and raised Christian, but also gay. Meeting her lifted the veil so-to-speak on an important message this church had been mucking up for so long: Love. Uncomplicated, no-strings-attached love. The amount of manipulation pretending to be love and acceptance that we underwent put a fog on that lens for so long, but now I could see.
It has taken 6 years, therapy, multiple medications and long talks, but I am whole again. I still love God, and that won’t change. I have experienced too much in my personal life to believe anything else, but it looks different now. I still can’t think about going to or being a part of a church without my insides crawling. I don’t ever see myself participating in organized religion again, but I still teach my kids about God and my beliefs. I wouldn’t object to them going, I would just be very cautious about where they go and what they’re being taught. I’m grateful to be able to finally share this story, even if it was excruciatingly long and kind of all over the place. I don’t have any regrets about this time in my life, other than the time I missed with my biological family. They were always there, waiting for me to wake up and come back.
If you’d like to hear me talk about this some with two really cool chicks, subscribe to the podcast This is Uncomfortable hosted by my friend Danna & her friend Katie which is available on iTunes. I will share the link on my social media accounts when the episode becomes available.
Sister Churches: Any church your church was associated with. Typically this meant hosting each other’s worship teams, or Senior Pastors during conferences.
Church hopping: Going to services or events at other churches.
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