Author: Through Grace

I was raised in a somewhat unhealthy church group within the Nondenominational Christian Church. After graduating high school, I began attending a United Pentecostal Church (UPC). I've been a member of four UPC churches and visited many others. Of the four of which I was a member, I was "encouraged" not to leave the first and then later sent to the second; attended the second where an usher repeatedly attempted to touch me and the pastor told me I should not care about the standards of the organization and was wrong to do so; ran to a third at that point, which threw me out after a couple years; and walked out of a fourth. For these transfers and because I refused to gossip about my former churches, some called me a "wandering star, a cloud without water" (Jude 1:12). I love the fact that when the blind man was healed, questioned by the Pharisees and temple rulers, and expelled from the temple, Jesus went and sought him out. He very rarely did this once someone was healed, but for this man, he did. I believe God has a special place in his heart for those who are abused, wrongfully accused, or condemned by religious leadership. I believe He loves those who are wronged by churchianity--yes, churchianity, not Christianity, because those who do these wrongs follow a church, not Christ. 1 John 4:7-8 7 Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. 8 He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. 9 In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him. 10 Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. 11 Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another.

Memories: Looking for an apartment

I found a group of decade-old notes recently. The quotes are taken from a note from April 2003.

Dear [pastor’s wife]:

I saw a beautiful house for rent today. It has closets and floor space and cabinets. It has a large tub and blue carpet… it has closet doors that open and shut and built in cabinets… it’s in a beautiful, quiet neighborhood and a place to park in the back. There’s even an entranceway….

Oh, my. It’s the little things, hmmm? I believe this was written at a time when I found myself nearly homeless–I’d been engaged, agreed to sublet the apartment, and due to her situation had invited her to stay with me in the apartment until I got married. Then the engagement was called off by the pastor. She refused to let me stay any additional time to get my feet back under me. The pastor told me to get out. I slept at work one night, and at another church member’s apartment a couple nights.

From another note:

I’ve called every landlord that might be decent, but none have any vacancies… [except one on the wrong side of town in an unsafe area]. Can I rent [that one]? I’d feel more secure in a house on the bad side of town than I would begging church people for a place to spend the night or sleeping on someone’s couch…

I thought that after years of being single that God was finally putting some things together in my life. Then they all fell apart. Was I mistaken? Was He not in it? Did I misunderstand or let my feelings override his direction somehow? …Am I doing something horrible that I’m not aware of that causes me to be punished? Am I reaching for dreams I for some reason have been denied? … Am I a failure? What could I have done that would have made this better? What am I supposed to learn from something like this?

For starters, I was asking permission to get a place to live when I had no place to go. For seconds, the pastor backed the roommate’s right to tell me to leave after he called off my wedding, and I was STILL asking permission. There was no discussion of any consideration or compromise that I know of, and I wouldn’t have considered doing what she did to anyone. Above that, weeks before the wedding the pastor called it off, I was losing my apartment and struggling on my job, and my plans to complete my teaching certificate were crumbling. The questions may sound whiny or bitter now, but at the time those questions were a very real part of my life. Then too, this was three years after having been kicked out of a church. A later note says:

it took me quite a while to realize it, but when I left [the church I got kicked out of], I really battled some things and determined that I WOULD be blessed, and in my mind thought that if I wasn’t that God didn’t love me.

Unfortunately, ‘blessings’ are not always what we think they are. That wedding would have been a fiasco, and within a month or two of this time I had bought my first home (in a good area, with closets and cabinets and a place to park) and the problem at work had resolved itself–even ending in a raise and promotion. Unhealthy churches tend to focus or teach us to label things as black and white, either all good or all bad, blessings or curses. Some, including the one I was in, allude to the idea that if bad things happen they are God’s punishment or the devil fighting us, and lead to the types of questions I asked. They undermine our confidence in ourselves and our trust in God.

Things in life aren’t all good or all bad. There is often a mix of good and bad in any situation, and we can choose to focus on either or both. But the best thing to focus on is that God loves us no matter what is happening in our lives. Unhealthy churches may try to rob us of that, and sometimes succeed. But they can’t change the truth.

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Memories: Taking vacation in an abusive church

I’m organizing old paperwork and came across some copies of old letters and thoughts, as well as a note to the church office to let them know I would be out of town. I’ll start with the note. Keep in mind that:

I’d already talked to the pastor and his wife. The note was required as well, and directed to the office staff.
I was going to campmeeting two states away. A lot of others were also attending, and everyone at church was aware that it was campmeeting time. My parents’ home was the halfway point in the trip.
“Lord willing” meant “if the church leadership is still OK with this.” If I simply said I was going, I might be told I couldn’t go. If I went without permission or without this note, I would have probably been severely reprimanded on my return.
I was at least 35 years old when this was written.

Everyone–as I talked to [pastor and pastor’s wife] a few days ago, Lord willing I plan to leave for my parents’ house on Friday. I plan to be there through Thursday, then head to [the camp]. I hope to be back late Sunday night. My first service back will probably be [date].

Contact information: [included parents’ names, address, and phone which they should have had on file]

At [camp] I’ll be staying at [hotel/campground info]. I will have both cell phone [and provide their numbers here, which they also had on file]…

Wow. I know that not everyone felt they needed to do this, and perhaps not everyone did at my former church. But soon after starting to attend, I sent a note without getting permission first that I’d be going home for Christmas. I was told I couldn’t go and be ‘right with God.’ And so I backed out of my Christmas plans with family. After that I always asked AND sent a note.

Can you feel the fear in the note? Did you feel fear like this? Did you feel you had to report every move, or have every move you made reported by others? Did your church take attendance and then, if you weren’t there, call on Monday, ask why you weren’t there, ask where you were, and reprimand you for not letting them know in advance, all under the guise of being ‘concerned’?

These requirements are unhealthy and unreasonable. I had a cell phone; they could have reached me any time if they were truly concerned. But missing a service, even a couple of services, shouldn’t be reason for a call from the church office, especially during campmeeting when 10-20% of the church members will attend. These are signs of an unhealthy church, not of love or concern. Love would give the benefit of the doubt, not a lecture. Love would never deny someone their family time or planned vacation.

(Side note–at this campmeeting I heard a sermon that finally completely released me to leave that environment. Within six months, I would leave that church and its organization for good.)

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The hardest thing about spiritual abuse

In early 2000 I was thrown out of a church. The process lasted several agonizing weeks, but things had been very bad for months. There was the man who kept telling me he was praying I’d lose my job because I was a woman and should work close to the church. There were the high standards that made no sense to me, the preaching about begging God for a special revelation of oneness because if you didn’t have that you would surely go to hell… after all, if you didn’t have that, you surely didn’t know God. The pastor bragged about his long fasts and groaned about people not wanting to ‘hear the truth.’ He didn’t share information with everyone, just with the men. The men were to tell their wives at home, which excluded me as a single woman. He told me that I needed a man over me, that I should either get married or move home to my dad’s house. Neither of those was an option. And there was the sermon about how if we leave our local church we have cut ourselves off from God, from life, from forgiveness, as though we have amputated ourselves from the body of Christ.

I remembered last night how, on December 31, 1999, I was terrified that God was going to come back and thought I’d surely be lost. I spent that night on the living room floor, sobbing and begging God to forgive me for who knows what, and never feeling any peace or forgiveness. I realize in my mind now that what I was dealing with was not conviction but condemnation, and fear, not godly sorrow or repentance. There was no peace or forgiveness because I wasn’t repenting of anything. I’d done nothing wrong except attend where I did and believe what I did, and those weren’t things I would recognize should be repented of for many years.

God didn’t come back on December 31, 1999. The pastor told me about a month later that he discerned I had bad thoughts and if I didn’t change, he would throw me out. He then left town for several weeks. How does a person change thoughts someone thinks they have, but they don’t? I ‘repented.’ I spent hours more on the floor, sobbing and asking God to change me. I stopped eating, thinking I would fast until they returned. But I thought they would be gone for a week at most, not several. I finally had to eat, and felt I was condemning myself by doing so. I tried to reach them by phone so that I could talk to them before breaking my fast, but they wouldn’t answer at first and then answered only to tell me to stop calling them. I called everyone at the church asking them to forgive any offense real or imagined, and was later accused of calling them threatening to kill myself instead.

These things had a psychological impact, but the spiritual impact was greater. I’d started attending there with a fairly healthy view of God and faith. By the time I left, my self confidence had been torn out from under me (I felt guilty just for being invited out to eat, because ‘saints’ shouldn’t eat with the ungodly-1 Cor 5:11), but more than that, my faith in God had been shredded as well. I repented, but I hadn’t felt forgiveness, and certainly hadn’t seen any forgiveness from others at the church, not even the ‘man of God,’ the pastor. I begged God for the special revelation we supposedly must have, but never really understood or experienced anything about this ‘revelation’ as the pastor described it. I fasted for days but was still thrown out. My pastor had discerned something evil in me, some thought I didn’t know I had, and though I’d prayed and fasted and repented, things only got worse.

Above all of this, these things had happened during a time when I’d thought I was closest to God. I was praying in tongues often, studying the bible, feeling the emotionalism in church, living by the high standards set, close to the pastor and his family (at least in my mind), repeatedly playing the sermons and music I was told to, and was very involved in bus ministry, Sunday School, and music at church.

All of these ended the night the pastor called me and told me never to come back. No one but me ever realized they ended, because that night I lost every person who might have known. I went to another similar church, but was told there to pretend nothing had happened and just ‘move on’. I couldn’t move on, though, and I couldn’t talk about the reasons I couldn’t, since I was to pretend nothing was wrong… and since admitting these things would have been good reason for the new pastor to label me ‘backslid.’ The only thing to do at that point would be to ‘pray through’. More fear, more nights on the floor sobbing, begging God for something that at that point I knew wouldn’t happen. To make matters worse, just as I would start to heal somewhat and begin to feel that there might be hope, something else would happen and the doubts would come back, as well as all of the memories.

Of everything that happened in my 19 years in Pentecost, that’s what had the most lasting damage. That combination–the fear, the condemnation, the false teachings that backed them, but most of all the doubt that they instilled. Not just self doubt, but faith shattering doubt of the Bible and of God.

Things are better now. I am healing, slowly. There have been times I wanted to just walk away from all of it. It would be easier not to believe than to fight through the mess that was left after everything happened. But there have also been times of learning and growth, and for me, these have been the most healing, times when I saw the scriptures that were used against me in a different light and I realized how wrongly they’d be used, times when I recognized some of what caused the damage and was able to rebuild, to heal, and to finally move forward, not as though nothing had happened, but in spite of what has.

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Rebuilding beliefs

One thing that’s common in leaving groups like my former one is that, in leaving, people have to rebuild everything they believe. They have to sort through what the group taught, what they agree with and what they don’t, what others teach and what they can accept as safe and true… it’s a lot to process, and many of us want to process it all fairly quickly. It leaves us in a state of not knowing what we believe… We disagree with the unhealthy group on a few points (ie that if we don’t attend their church we’re going to hell) but don’t know what we do believe on other points (certain staunch beliefs on things like baptism, worship styles, and communion were very much ingrained in me at my former church and were difficult to study out and accept others’ beliefs on).

Thankfully, there have been people I could safely pose questions to. “OK, my former church taught _____. Why do you teach _______?” has been a common theme. Another has been, “That word/phrase doesn’t mean to me what it does to you. Please explain what you mean without that term.” When I don’t have answers to these questions, I start getting depressed sometimes. I don’t want to pray and don’t want to go to church. I want to run far away from all of it. When someone takes the time to explain what they mean, and then change their wording slightly, the fear lessens dramatically. When I’m allowed the time to work through things and come to my own conclusions, when those conclusions are accepted, I am relieved. In those times I grow.

I’m guessing sometimes we know what we believe, but we haven’t realized it yet because we still see how much we have to sort out, how far we want to go, rather than how far we’ve come. And sometimes we just need a little definition and space to see things in a different way and to gain a healthier understanding.

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Dear pastor: wolves in shepherds’ clothing

Ah, yes, Jesus warned about wolves in sheeps’ clothing. Wolves seem to have evolved since the Bible. Many have stopped masquerading as sheep. They instead call themselves shepherds, leading people back to their lairs.

John 10:

14“I am the good shepherd; I know my own sheep, and they know me, 15just as my Father knows me and I know the Father. So I sacrifice my life for the sheep. 16I have other sheep, too, that are not in this sheepfold. I must bring them also. They will listen to my voice, and there will be one flock with one shepherd.

I’m thankful I have a Shepherd, a great shepherd who has already given everything for me.

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