Associated Editor of STEPS
National Association for Christian Recovery
Image source: apprising.org
While my
husband, John, and I felt that we had good reasons for leaving our church home,
we didn’t think at first that we had experienced was spiritual abuse.
We had gotten involved in the church knowing that the pastor,
Richard, and his wife Jill (not real names), were young and perhaps immature in
some ways and that they came from a legalistic background. So from the beginning,
we had guarded ourselves from them in the hope of being active in the church
community without experiencing a major conflict.
But as we spent the weeks and months after we left, trying to
sort out our feelings about what had happened, we wondered if we, along with
others, had become the victims of spiritual abuse in spite of trying to keep
our eyes open. We wondered if perhaps our eyes had not been open enough. And if
we should
have responded earlier to the clues like what happened at the first women’s
meeting that I attended, held in someone’s home.
But the group was doomed.
Near the end of the meeting, everyone fell silent as someone asked when we
could meet again (apparently, this was the first women’s meeting in a long
while). One of the two leaders squirmed in her chair, studied her fingernails
for a moment, and replied in a quiet voice, “We may not be able to meet again very
soon. Jill called a few minutes ago and said she has to lead the meetings but
that she’s too busy right now.”
Fire alarms went off
inside me, and the room came alive with protests. “So why can’t one of you lead
the meetings?” some logical person asked, nodding towards the two leaders. The
woman who had spoken earlier said she had volunteered herself and the other
leader but Jill said no. Beneath the woman’s gracious manner, I saw a hint of
bewilderment and disappointment in her eyes.
I left the meeting feeling
angry. If that meeting was any indication, those two women were every bit as
capable of leading a women’s ministry as any pastor’s wife. So why did she refuse
to trust them? Were the deep personal needs that were being met by that group
not important to her? Did she even recognise those needs? And was it not important
to her that other people’s leadership gifts be developed?
I felt discouraged
about the church as I began to wonder how often other people’s needs were being
swept aside because of Jill’s lack of trust and her desire for control, and why
the pastor was allowing such things to happen. Because we were still new at the
church I also wondered with dismay what kind of future John and I would have in
church where the opportunities for people, including ourselves, to share
feelings might be rare.
Then there was the time when Richard asked John and me to meet
with him after he’d heard that we were leaving the church. We scheduled the
appointment and we rehearsed with each other what we’d and wouldn’t say. So we
were caught off guard at the meeting when Richard announced that he wanted to
read us a list he’d made of John’s ‘character flaws.’
Outraged at his presumptuousness, especially because he’d
never bothered to get to know John (a few times they’d gotten together Richard
had done all the talking), John told him he wasn’t interested in hearing what
he had to say about him. When he persisted, we got up from our chairs, only to
be blocked at the door by Richard, still insisting that John listen to his
list. Richard finally relented but asked John to take the list home with him.
We didn’t last long after that. As much as we loved our church
family, we couldn’t continue supporting an organisation whose leaders refused
to see the harm they were doing. We began to question why we hadn’t recognised
sooner what an increasingly legalistic and addictive organisation we had been
supporting.
Legalistic because no one could live up to Richard and Jill’s
standards of performance except – according to their perceptions – Richard and
Jill. And addictive because even those of us who were aware of their addiction
to control seemed addicted to excusing their behaviour. Because we didn’t want
to lose our ‘family,’ we excused their behaviour tacitly by supporting the
church and helping them to stay in positions where they could abuse their power
and injure other people.
Having quietly left the church for the last time we watched
from a distance as more people did the same, many of them spiritually bruised
and bleeding some of them haemorrhaging from a sense of betrayal. And as we
listened to their stories, we learned about the subtleties of spiritual abuse.
Subtleties that we’d noticed but had dismissed as issues that we knew we’d to
put up with – and not talk about – if we were to remain in the church where we
thought God wanted us. In addition, we learned what we would have to do to
eventually become free from the spiritual abuse we’d experienced.
Here are some
of the things we learned:
-
Saying the ‘right words’
means nothing unless the words are backed up with action
-
Leadership, as Jesus
defined, means servanthood
-
I am capable of adding to
the problem of spiritual abuse even if I’m not in an official position of
church leadership
-
Breaking the ‘Don’t Talk’
rule is vital to recovery
-
Grieving our losses is
also vital to recovery
-
We cannot entirely be free
from our spiritual abuse experience until we forgive our abusers
-
Regaining trust probably
takes longer than any other step toward recovery from spiritual abuse
Barbara
Mulligan is the associated editor of STEPS and author of ‘Desperate Hope:
Experiencing God in the Midst of Breast Cancer’ (InterVarsity Press, 1999). The
article that appears here is a considerably shortened version of the original
because it was meant to fit into a small church weekly. For the original full
version of the article called ‘Breaking Free: What I’ve Learned About Spiritual
Abuse,’ you can head to the Spiritual Abuse website at www.spiritualabuse.com/?page_id=41
or find it in STEPS, a publication of the National Association for Christian
Recovery.
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