When one has been exposed to spiritual abuse, great harm can be done. While some escape with minimal or no injury, most do not leave unscathed. Those who are particularly harmed are the men and women who were sexually abused, and making that even worse for them, is when a church/minister covers it up and the perpetrator faces no real consequences. By failing to report these to police, I believe these ministers are partially responsible for those who are later assaulted. The stories of sexual abuse are especially heartbreaking as the survivors are forever changed. You will notice that this installment in the series has a different title and it is taken from a woman’s comment that is seen below. I saved these for last due to the nature of their experiences and because this is a lead-in back to my earlier series on the United Pentecostal Church And Sexual Abuse.
In two groups, I asked people to share how they were harmed during their time in the United Pentecostal Church. I received enough responses to make five blogs. [See also Part One, Part Two, Part Three and Part Four.] These are used by permission and are anonymous. Some responses have been edited for spelling and punctuation and emoticons have been removed. Each person is separated between using and not using quotation marks. Note: In the second story, some statements that are included were made in further discussion after the initial statement. These are noted by brackets and placed inside the original statement so that it flows better as compared to adding them all afterward.
Oh how can I even put down every time they hurt me… every time I wasn’t good enough, every time I was shunned. Ministry kicked me many times while I was down, told me to stay away from people. I was kicked out of a UPC Bible college for kissing, lol. I was raped and then threatened by ministry to keep it quiet, because they wouldn’t back me. When I went back to Bible school in the states, as soon as I made the decision to leave, a minister taught a class on how much of an adulteress I was, while one of my friends defended me then [was] kicked to the streets while trying to get the remainder of my belongings. They were afraid of my influence. Then when I left UPC, I had emails telling me how I wasn’t leaving due to theology issues but my heart and how corrupt it was. Other than all of that, the control, the dictatorship and the abuse. The many times I didn’t line up because my hair wasn’t right or my skirt long enough. I have found forgiveness, I have healed a great deal… but these scars will never be able to go away because they are a part of me… they are now who I am. And I have no doubt someone UPC would read this and cast blame on me… perhaps I should have been a better Christian.
Wow. Loaded question. This would take a book.
My parents started going when I was in 3rd grade. My mom was mentally unstable and the UPC gave her a place to hide. I firmly believe that she would never have gotten away with her behaviors if she had lived in “normal” society. So that just set us up for more vulnerability.
I was targeted by an older man, my Sunday school teacher, and was raped by him at 14. He had been sexually assaulting me since the month I turned 12. I was threatened, verbally and psychologically abused by him for years. His friend (who I’m convinced these guys were all there to prey on younger girls), also stuck his hand up my dress/underwear and wouldn’t remove it. When the pastor found out, I was told it would make the church look bad and threatened that I’d get kicked out of the church school. (Which is another point of contention – the lousy education I received.)
Things only got worse. I was kinda forced into marrying my abuser, who was 17 years older than me. I took one for “team UPC.” They got rid of their child molester by marrying him off. Or they thought – because you can’t pray that away.
Needless to say, that marriage was a disaster. He was a “minister,” who couldn’t hold a job, liked porn and young girls, and was a wreck. I finally left, and the church treated me like garbage. I was shunned by everyone. [When I was trying to leave, he drug me up by the baptismal, and yelled at me, asking if I wanted my teeth rearranged, and then punched the wall next to my face. Not a single soul in that church did anything. They all viewed it as “righteous anger” and I was backsliding so I must’ve deserved it.] The pastor told me not to “rock the boat,” among other things, to “encourage” me never to tell, and boom, next thing I knew I was a lesbian, on drugs, had cheated, you name it, they made up rumors about me. [I could go on. Ha. But the control they had over me, the manipulation, the way I was beat down and taken advantage of, is shocking.]
[Sadly, I was not the only one. Our pastor knew of many cases of sexual abuse and only threatened the victims with silence. Never did anything to the perpetrators. It was rampant there. The church’s methods were awful. Truly deeply harmful.
Thankfully I ran. Oh, I’m so happy I left that cesspool of awfulness.
I imagine that my experiences are extreme but it is my experience. My UPC pastor did not report the sexual abuse that I reported to him when I was a child. Not only was it not reported, but many people from the organization still associate with my abuser. I feel that the church I attended did not care about Christ’s general message. When my family was hungry no one helped us. When we didn’t have electricity no one helped us. Your importance within the congregation was directly associated with how much money you gave. I also feel that my self-confidence was damaged because of the way that our church talked and taught about women. I could list many many many more things but we would be here all day.
…I have suffered a lifetime of trauma due to the sermons and teachings around the devil, hell, and the rapture. That is the primary cause of my PTSD.
I feel like my situation was likely more extreme. The Wisconsin UPC in general is pretty messed up but I lucked out with the pastor who was obsessed with unpardonable sins and had the most bitter woman as a wife.
One of my first memories of the UPC is an adult male church member giving me quarters to sit on his lap. This is beyond not normal/appropriate.
I’ve talked about the anxiety, fear, depression I experienced due to the sermons I was exposed to. My best friend in the UPC was raped by her own brother (also UPC) and he also used to be inappropriate with me…not rape but still not remotely OK. There was a heavy layer of sexual inappropriateness in that church….way beyond normal teen hormones. I remember senior guys in the k-12 school we attended teasing me about being flat chested and they’d lift up our skirts and thought it was funny. I was maybe 11 or 12 at the time.
The pastor dealt with all this because we keep things in the church.
We’d have to kneel in front of the pastor’s wife and if our school uniform skirts didn’t hit the ground we were sent home.
The pastor’s son was/is mentally ill and is now in his 70’s. He used to corner us in the church basement and ask us out when we were around 15. He was well into his late 40’s at that point. He continues to harass young girls to this day and the excuse is “It’s just Michael being Michael.”
These are just a few small examples from my childhood.
I feel like we’ve been hit in every area. Our situation isn’t as tragic as many others, but it has certainly messed with us. Spiritually: I feel like we are in limbo. I don’t know what I believe anymore. I know we have deep grooves in our brain that lead us back to what we’d been indoctrinated with, and fighting our way out of those grooves has been hard. Learning to think outside of the UPC box has been challenging, but we are getting there. I am afraid to trust any “spiritual leader” or walk into a church.
Emotionally: There are so many “triggers“… when I think of anything UPC I cringe. When I think of friends who shunned us because we moved from one church to another when we moved an hour away, I feel abandoned. When I think of the pastors who manipulated us in so many ways, I feel disgust and anger. When I think of people who are still in the UPC and not realizing what is going on, I feel sorry for them. When I think about raising our kids in that environment, I feel guilt. When I think about how judgmental we were, I feel shame. When I look in the mirror I am embarrassed and disgusted. When I think about all the money we sacrificed to the UPC, I feel regret. On and on. It sounds like I’m a mess, and honestly, I’ve never been happier or felt more freedom, but when I am trying to deal with what we’ve been through, all these feeling start to swirl. I know they will decrease in time, and in fact, they are becoming less frequent and intense, but it’s still draining.
Physically: Up until we got into the UPC when I was 27, I was physically active and fit. I water skied, para-sailed, fished, camped, played softball, did Jazzercise, played racquetball, swam, hiked, wore a size 8 or 10 and felt OK about myself. After I got in the UPC and started dressing like a bag, not being active, eating more, spending less time outside, I became overweight. There are other reasons that play into that, too, but much of it is because I just quit doing things I loved. My self esteem is at about zero. I’ve recently reconnected with high school friends, who of course I didn’t spend time with while in the church unless they were interesting in converting. So many of them want to get together, but I’m so ashamed of how I look I can’t face them. I just want to crawl in a hole or starve myself until I am presentable. I hate the clothes I wear. I feel like I stand out with these nasty skirts and t shirts. I can’t wait to change my wardrobe…and it’s coming, but I’ve not yet been able to buy new clothes or feel good about any pants I’ve tried on. It’s coming along, though.
Financially: We totally supported the church with our tithes and sacrificial giving. We have never had extra money, and it took so much self discipline to always give 10% plus another 5 and sometimes10% more! We went without many things. That doesn’t bother me, but what does bother me is how it affected the kids. It was hard on them to see their friends with spending money or new clothes, and they had very little. We weren’t poor, but we were tight all the time. And then to see the pastor and his family living in luxury, being given lavish gifts, vacations, cars, boats, new home, etc. really hurts. It hurts because it’s all at the expense of the people who are living without so they can give to the church. We figured it out and the money that we’ve given to the church could have paid off our house, our car and allowed us to have a savings. Instead [my husband] is working two jobs and I’m making bars of soap to sell in order to make ends meet. It’s just wrong. Why were we so gullible!? Why didn’t [we] see what was going on years and years ago? Regret.
Family: Our family has been damaged. My daughter was preyed upon by an older, married man, and was seduced by him, married him after he divorced his wife, and then was abused by him for 15 years. We were told by the pastor that the person who did this to our daughter would be reported to the police, (before they got married and all that came after), but we recently found out it never was. That’s another story, but my point is, this hurt our family. All three of the kids lost their youth. Their education was lacking. They were not active in community. They didn’t have friends outside the church. We didn’t go on vacations because we didn’t have money and wouldn’t miss church. We always put church first and missed many family milestones, get togethers and events. I know our families resented it and all the while we were holding our noses in the air thinking we were super Christians for doing it. Putrid! I can’t think of any area in our life that wasn’t affected or harmed by being a part of the cult. It will take time, but we will recover and continue to live in freedom! I look forward to what is left of our future.
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How was I harmed?
– Professional growth and career choices in the military were limited.
– Family ties were strained.
– My relationship with a former girlfriend was ruined.
– My marriage was hurt.
– My ability to trust churches and leadership was wrecked.
– My leadership skills were stunted.
– Social skills were stunted.
Thank you for sharing your story. A young woman in mid thirties has come in to my life who was raised in Apostolic church and left several years ago. My heart aches for the pain created by such evil acts. Now, This has given me a glimpse of her hell and helps me understand her emotional trauma. How does one get healing from these horrid lies?
For me, I needed to learn what, if anything, the Bible actually taught on various issues, so that meant doing a lot of searching in the Scriptures. Educating yourself on spiritual abuse/cults is very important and will also help to prevent the person from getting tangled up in yet another unhealthy group. Many have also found that professional counseling is helpful. We also offer a support group on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/groups/813830865371192/
I was born and raised in UPC/Apostolic churches, first the Apostolic church in the desert of west Texas, then we moved to the “sister church” in the San Bernardino Valley of CA. I’ve written a ton about my experiences already, and will likely continue, as long as I have the strength to do it, so there’s no need to go into a lot of detail here, even if there were the space to do so. But I just wanted to add my testimony here to the voices of other survivors. Maybe someone can relate; maybe not.
The Apostolic/UPC churches I was involved in were full of child molesters and abusers of all types. Personally speaking, my mother (a “good little Pentecostal woman,” by outside standards, at any rate) was extremely physically violent, as well as mentally and emotionally abusive, but this was the normal “spare the rod spoil the child” type of thinking that seemingly gave many parents in those churches the license to abuse their children emotionally, mentally, and physically. Of course, this violence and abuse was fostered and encouraged through the teachings from the pulpit, and if anyone spoke up about it, they were reprimanded, shamed, shunned (sometimes “ex-communicated”), blasted from the pulpit, etc, depending upon the circumstances.
I was also sexually assaulted by my step-grandfather who went to the Apostolic church in Texas (he was my mother’s stepdad, who ended up getting into trouble with the law several years back for child porn, but I think he somehow got by with it, probably because the law in that town is corrupt to the extreme, but that’s a different story). I was also sexually assaulted by my stepdad’s best church pal (who shared my stepdad’s interest in illicit drugs and young girls), and repeatedly raped by my stepfather over the course of several years.
I wasn’t the only one who suffered sexual abuse from church members, however. There have been many people who have since come out (as of several years ago) and said that they, too, were raped and sexually assaulted by some of the leaders in that church. I have no idea if anything was ever done about it. I tried to give my testimony to the police, but I was so traumatized just thinking about, much less talking about it, and I didn’t do such a great job of expressing what had happened. And besides, it wasn’t until recently that I was finally able to put together the snippets of memories and make sense of them… to finally be in a safe and stable enough place to be able to fully remember… to be able to finally admit to myself (much less others) that yes, I was raped, and no, it wasn’t okay, and no, it wasn’t my fault (that was a common theme: if little girls got raped by the men in the church it’s because the little girls were “over-sexualized” and were coming on to the men).
Anyway, trying to tell other people about something that I didn’t fully understand or even remember was an awful feeling, and made only worse by talking to an indifferent law officer over the telephone.
But back to stepdad….
Stepdad was a “good little Pentecostal man” as far as everyone could tell. He spoke in tongues regularly, ran the aisles in church, participated in outreaches sometimes and in Bible studies. Except, he wasn’t what people thought he was. Not only was he a disgusting pedophile and a horribly physically abusive man, but he was also a Satanist, and through him, I was put into contact with some well-known Satanists in the greater Los Angeles area, and went through different sorts of abuses that a lot of people would probably have a hard time believing. And I can’t really blame them, I guess, seeing as how the propaganda surrounding such abuses have dulled people’s minds to the reality of it. All of this was with my mother’s help of course, because she wasn’t who everyone thought she was, either. Her belief system was along the lines of Luciferianism rather than Satanism, however, following familial tradition (as I’ve since realized).
All that to say this: those churches, and others like them, are cesspools of evil, and because of their cult-ish nature, as well as because of the false doctrines they teach, they nurture and protect and defend the godless and the abusive, and vilify and malign and murder the spirits of the victims whose lives are irrevocably damaged by the abuses they were forced to suffer at the hands of so-called “Christians.”
The damage that has been done to me is too overwhelming to describe in a single comment… in an entire blog, even. And I don’t know if I’ll ever be “all better” (whatever that means…), and maybe I’m not as good as I could be, but on some days, I’m better than I was. It’s one day at a time over here. Sometimes one breath at a time. I guess that’s all any of us can ever do: take it one breath at a time, and hope and pray for God’s mercy.