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Leaving a church affects us all differently. Some words I’ve used and heard used to describe leaving are: frightening, overwhelming, scary, freeing, confusing, sad, hopeful, and happy. The mix of emotions can be overwhelming, and on top of that there is a struggle to learn what is really OK and what isn’t, what the Bible really says about things (or whether to believe the Bible at all), who we are without the group, how to handle questions or reactions from others, where to go to church or if to go at all, and so forth.

At the same time, we often deal with guilt and shame–and anger at both of these or the reasons for them. We may feel guilty for leaving friends or family in the group, for leaving the group ourselves, and for doing things differently than we were taught. We may feel shame that we believed some of the things we did as well as shame for not believing the same things we once did.

One of the best visuals I’ve ever seen for leaving is from Tangled:

She’s conflicted. She’s thrilled to have left, but she’s worried about what her mother would think and how upset she would be. She’s scared (though that doesn’t show in this clip). She’s excited, but she’s sad too.

When I left, I was relieved, but I was also scared. I told myself I wasn’t leaving THE Truth, just that church. I tried not to question, but the questions were there… and for good reason. I was angry at what had happened and at myself for not having left a bad situation sooner. It would take time before I was comfortable with leaving… (to be continued)

Note from Lois: The first person to comment in reply to this blog and requests it, will receive a used Blu-Ray copy of Tangled.

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Below are some questions for you to ponder, to see if you may be or have been in an unhealthy church. They are yes or no questions.

Are you under the influence of a destructive group or belief system?

• • Does your group discourage doubts, criticism or ideas that differ from their belief system?
  • Do you tend to rationalize whatever the group does even when it goes against your sense of right and wrong?
  • Do you often feel exhausted from lengthy group activities, meetings and projects?
  • Does your group have its own unique words, cliches, slogans, chants, prayers and doctrinal phrases that reinforce the group viewpoint?
  • Are doubts viewed as a lack of faith, dedication, commitment or disloyalty?
  • Have “your thoughts” become “the enemy?”
  • Do you often find yourself doing more and more things in the group, or because of group peer pressure, that you would not have done on your own?
  • Does your group publicly humiliate or criticize members?
  • Does your group have a system of punishments and rewards for behavior?
  • Group paranoia: Does your group obsessively think other groups or people with different beliefs are out to get them?
  • Does the prospect of leaving your group seem scary, difficult?
  • Do you feel the need to leave in secret?
  • Have you been told something bad might happen if you leave?
  • Does your group/belief system think they have/are the only or highest truth, or have the solution for the world’s problems?
  • Are your leader’s ideas or belief system considered beyond reproach or sacred?
  • Do you follow a particular individual or belief system that requires unquestioning obedience and loyalty?
  • Do members of your group feel specially chosen, superior, exclusive, elite?
  • Do you feel the need to save or convert others to your belief system or ideology?
  • Is your group secretive to outsiders about its inner workings, teachings, activities or beliefs?
  • Does your group equate purity and goodness to being in your group, and impurity or evil to those outside your group?
  • Do you place your group’s mission or agenda above your own goals and ideals? Do group interests come before your own interest?
  • Do you find yourself thinking in a we-they, us-versus-them mind set?
  • Does your group/system have a clear outside enemy?
  • Do you see less and less of your family and friends who do not belong to your group or who do not subscribe to your group’s belief system?
  • Does your group use frequent public testimonials, confessions, or sharings that reinforce the group’s mission or agenda?
  • Is communication within, into and out of your group controlled or censored in any manner?
  • Does your group criticize, shun, abandon or demean individuals who leave the group?
  • Do members seek approval or get permission from group leader(s) for personal life choices?
  • Do you feel pressured to attend meetings, events, lectures, seminars? And do you feel guilty if you don’t attend?
  • Do you feel pressured to give a portion of your income to the group, or spend money on courses, books or special projects?
  • Are the group’s financial needs more important than your own economic well-being?
  • Does your group discriminate against anyone regarding race, gender, belief, or sexual orientation?
  • Does your group have a totalitarian structure: a strict, top-down centralized control?

Do you wonder if you have been in a destructive group?

• Do you have difficulty forming new friendships and intimate relationships?
• Do you have low self-esteem, poor self-image or loss of identity?
• Do you have difficulty making simple decisions and choices?
• Do you often feel depressed, anxious and nervous?
• Do you feel isolated, lonely, guilty, cynical?
• Do you feel like you are just now growing up, becoming a mature adult?
• Do you have short-term memory difficulties?
• Do you feel you have nothing to believe in?
• Do you often feel anger and rage towards the group?
• Do you have nightmares or unpleasant dreams?
• Do you find it difficult or impossible to stop mental or other group ritualistic practices?

Copyright 1998 by John D. Goldhammer and Prometheus Books. I believe this is from his book, Under the Influence.

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Continued…

Well sure enough, we got a call from the assistant pastor to come into his office before church the following Sunday night.  The pastor was out of town but was grooming his son to take over the church and since he came on board, the church took on a stricter tone.  One night, he was preaching and began boasting about measuring his wife’s hair and how long it was.  I remember being sickened by this talk.  I knew God was bigger than the length of my hair!  We went in to see him that evening and he told us due to the fact that I had cut my daughter’s hair, my husband would have to step down from his position in the church leadership and I could no longer teach Sunday school.  You can call me naïve or stupid, yes, I admit to being both concerning what would happen if I broke the rules or maybe, by this time, I just didn’t care.

Now, during this period of my life, I was just beginning to hear the message of God’s grace.   I heard the story of the woman caught in adultery and how Jesus told her “to go and sin no more!”  One of the grace filled preachers I was listening to on the radio put it like this “the only one worthy to condemn you, won’t.”  I was not stepping down without speaking my mind, so I pulled out some of my new found grace speak.  I told the assistant pastor that I felt like the woman caught in adultery except instead of “saying, go and sin no more, you are saying pick up the stones and throw them.”  He did not like my protests and insubordination, it was plain to see.  To reinforce his position of dismissal, he told me that he knew of my past experience with scissors in cutting my oldest daughter’s hair.  Then he proceeded to tell me that cutting my suffering baby’s (not even two years old) hair was just as bad as if I had given her alcohol and cigarettes!  (In a works based church, alcohol and cigarettes rank right up there with lying, cheating, and stealing.)  Yes, that I had harmed her in the same way as if I had given her abusive substances!  It is interesting to note here: the senior pastor called me when he got back in town and told me that he would never have done what his son did!?!

We left church after the meeting, not staying for the service, went home, and went to bed.  While lying there in the dark, a certain kind of death like silence fell between my husband and me that would affect us for the next two years that we stayed in this church.  We could never tell our family members who did not go to a United Pentecostal Church what happened.  To verbalize such a trivial thing as cutting a baby’s hair to cause such a reaction was unthinkable and would have made our church look bad to those unfamiliar with the rules.  We did not get support from our relatives or friends in the church either.  I remember one family member, who is a pastor’s wife saying, “We would have done the same thing.”  Other friends said, “They knew the rules.”

To stay in this church for two more years was one of our biggest mistakes.  I bravely wore the scarlet letter on my chest and grew further and further away from this ideology and these people, as they drew away from me.  I wasn’t cutting hair and I still looked the part but inwardly I came to see that there was no love in this church.  By the end of these two years, my depression over my baby’s illness and the death of all that we had lived for up to that point caused me to want out of my marriage and out of life as I knew it.  The pain my husband and I were going through kept the veil of silence over our marriage; we were just going through the motions.  If we hadn’t left when we did, I firmly believe our marriage would have ended as did the marriages of many of the couples we knew in this church, including the assistant pastor; who eventually took over the church.

Later, I would learn what church discipline should look like.  Jesus didn’t leave us clueless about how to handle discipline for believers who were truly sinning.  It was so important that He gives us step by step instructions.  Reflecting back on the teachings of the United Pentecostal Church and all the things I have learned since leaving makes me realize that they never really emphasized Jesus that much.  Oh, they loved His name for distinction purposes but His death on the cross or any of the words He spoke, not so much.

Moreover if your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone.  If he hears you, you have gained your brother.  But if he will not hear, take with you one or two more, that ‘by the mouth of two or three witnesses every word may be established.  And if he refuses to hear them, tell it to the church.  But if he refuses even to hear the church, let him be to you like a heathen and a tax collector.  Matthew 18:15-17 NKJV

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Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on March 4, 2015 as part of a series. 

Get out your guns, battle’s begun,
are you a saint, or a sinner?
If love’s a fight, then I shall die,
with my heart on a trigger.  – The Cab, Angel with a Shotgun (Nightcore remix)

These are the stories they told me.

“Eleanor, my best friend’s parents told her she can’t drive the car unless she loses weight consistently every week.

I’m really worried about her. Yeah, she could lose some weight, but it’s not that bad, and I don’t think that’s healthy. What do you think I should do?”

My insides went cold, feeling the familiar rigidity and control descend, but this time for someone else.

They say before you start a war,
you better know what you’re fighting for…
if love is what you need, a soldier I will be.

“Eleanor, I’m 26 years old and my mom wants me to get married. She says she’ll send out the word among the [Indian] community to find a man for me. But I don’t want an arranged marriage.”

My friend already had a bachelor’s degree from an ivy league college, wasn’t enjoying her post-baccalaureate pre-med classes, and knew her parents wouldn’t understand her adoption of American culture.

She asked for help in moving her things out of her parents’ house. I rounded up a few friends and she got out.

I’m an angel with a shotgun,
fighting ’til the war’s won,
I don’t care if heaven won’t take me back.
I’ll throw away my faith …  just to keep you safe…
and I wanna live not just survive tonight.

“Did you know Mike died?”

“No, I just talked to him last week. He was trying to start a chapter of the F.A.S.T. club at his graduate school.”

The coroner ruled Mike’s death a suicide. Mike grew up in the Colorado Springs homeschool community, although I didn’t meet him until college.

Questions about his death still linger with me and my friends.

Sometimes to win, you’ve got to sin,
don’t mean I’m not a believer...
Yeah, they still say I’m a dreamer.

Text messages from Cynthia Jeub, September 2, 2013:

“I need help. My dad is angry because he’s not making enough money. Can you help Lydia and me get out and find a place to sleep until our apartment paperwork goes through?”

“Dad was yelling at me when you tried to call. I never thought this would happen. We have a friend who will help, we might need help from you when we get back.”

“Dad says he might turn off my phone and Internet. Tell [a friend] to come if you don’t hear back again.”

I was five hours away up in the mountains and couldn’t come get her on the day that they were kicked out.

They say before you start a war,
you better know what you’re fighting for…
if love is what you need, a soldier I will be.

Google chat conversation, June 2013:

“I just want to go Home and be with Him. It’d be so easy… one bullet, one noose, two cuts, but I can’t bear to think of facing Him when I got there… For being a coward. For not trusting him enough… I really just want to escape. Wouldn’t you eventually get over it [grieving for me]. Death is a natural part of this life.”

A younger friend was suicidal again. She’d done this off and on since she was 13, and a couple of friends and I had talked her out of it, over and over.

“As long as I’m in class, getting A’s and studying all the time without a boyfriend or any other distractions, no one really pays me much mind. A fight’s brewing. So I’ll let you know after it happens if it does happen.”

Once again, her parents crushed her with unrealistic expectations.

I’m an angel with a shotgun,
fighting ’til the war’s won,
I don’t care if heaven won’t take me back
...and I wanna live not just survive tonight.

I didn’t become an activist because it was another hobby. Friends came to me with their wounds, their struggles. And I couldn’t just let them keep bleeding.

This is a series on helping isolated homeschoolers and religiously oppressed young adults escape cults and abusive households.

These are the ones I fight for.

…and I’m gonna hide, hide, hide my wings tonight.

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Okay, I did it.  I admit it.  I cut my hair and my daughter’s hair.  I can still remember the first time I cut my hair.  We were probably about six years into the United Pentecostal Experience, when I was sitting on the toilet and fearing my hair was going to go in, I grabbed a pair of scissors, sat back down and cut the tail end that could get wet.  I don’t remember feeling guilty or that it might not grow after anymore.  This fear of hair not re-growing after trimming had been expressed to me by another woman in the church.  Yes, Pentecostal women talk about cutting their hair.  Oddly, her hair was only shoulder length.  I guess it was due to the teasing, etc. that goes into maintaining the elaborate hairdos she wore.  I also remember while sitting in a restaurant one lady sighing “if we could only get enough grace to cut our hair.”  This woman was one of a group of older women in our church who resorted to wearing those Gibson Girl style wigs all the time.  Honestly, I think they just got tired of dealing with all that hair!

As time went by, I was blessed with a little girl who had beautiful hair.  Again, I confess!  I did not want her to have long stringy, scraggly hair, so while she was a toddler to probably age 6 or so, I kept it shoulder length.  I stopped trimming it when she got older; when she told me someone said something to her about it.  No one ever said anything to me about it; however, there were those who were spying out my liberty! (Gal 2:4 NKJV)  Ha-ha, there is no such thing as liberty in the UPC holiness standards.  By this time, it was the late ‘80’s when the super curly hairdos were in, and frankly, you could cut your hair as much as you wanted and no one could tell.  Those pink sponge rollers, along with the concrete mousse it took to set those curls, could take off five inches of your hair length!

My second daughter was born six years later and while still an infant she developed a health problem.  She was a precious baby but she had a mind of her own!  She was not going to dutifully wear the barrettes and other hair restraints young Pentecostal girls are forced to wear to hold their hair in place, due to the rules for no cutting or trimming of their hair.  She would pull out everything I put in her hair and along with the restraint, out came a handful of hair.  When she had pulled out enough hair to create a bald spot on her head, I took matters into my own hands.  I did not consult with my husband or anyone else.  I found the best children’s salon and had her hair cut, along with (gasp!) bangs.  I brazenly took her to church that Wednesday night, not thinking anything of it.  I thought she looked adorable!  I would do anything to help my poor, precious baby!  No one said anything to me about it that night except my husband who said, “You know they will ask us to step down.”

To be continued…

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