Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm but the harm does not interest them. -T.S. Eliot, poet (26 Sep 1888-1965)
Substitute “church” for “world” and maybe “pastors” for “people” and you have what happens in an abusive/cult-like church. Maybe they don’t mean harm to others (some don’t and some do) but they don’t care about the harm done. I don’t think they even consider what harm their words or actions might be, but we as the congregation they preach to are expected to be very mindful to NOT harm the pastor or any of his family with our words or actions. Truly a one way street. They can beat us up verbally and spiritually but we are not allowed one word in question toward them.
In my former church, the pastor emphasized that we can’t be “good enough” for God. I assume that what he meant was that we will never be able to “earn” salvation- it’s a gift. But his statement bothered me because of the way it was used.
Recently I went to a Christian comedian “concert” (Ken Davis). He told a story that his young granddaughter (under six) had gotten lost in the mountains while they were camping a few years ago. They searched for 3 1/2 hours, and couldn’t find her. Called in search and rescue. Nothing. A storm was coming in. He was in a panic, sure, after not finding her in all that time, that she would never be found alive. Then the call came- hikers found her over 2 miles from camp, sitting on a rock. When they brought her back to camp, someone snapped a picture of him talking to her. He was squatted down, holding both her hands, looking straight in her eyes. And he asked us what we thought he was telling her. “Don’t you ever do that again!” “How could you wander off like that!” “You know better!” No. All he could say, again and again, was “I love you, I love you, I love you.” And he asked how we could think God, who loves us so much more, could do any less.
On the way home, I kept thinking about that. There was very little ever said about the love of God in my former church. But His love is very real, and very near. We may not ever be “good enough” to earn salvation, but that’s because it’s free. And if that’s the case, none of us is “bad enough” to slip beyond God’s love and mercy either. We have more than a Savior. We have a Father who loves us more dearly than we can even understand. And I love Him, too.
They make me feel so empty Their words, they cut like knives You tell me to forgive them, But I’m not sure I’ll survive… – TFK, In My Room
“The way you talk about English, you really don’t seem like a dentist to me. You talk about it like you really love it,” Cynthia B. said, shifting in her electric wheelchair.
Cynthia B. was my first friend outside the box. We met in a British literature survey class fall semester 2010.
“I get that the practice is your dad’s gift to you, but maybe there is another way to honor him. Maybe you could take the practice, keep it for a few years, then pass it on to safe hands. And do something with English.”
But I didn’t see how I could be my real self and not disappoint my parents. Since I couldn’t have both, I was sacrificing myself in an attempt to please my parents and protect my siblings.
But my creative soul was reawakening.
My dad said leisure activities were a waste of time since it wasn’t school or work for his office. He said rest was for the dead.
I taught myself to sightread music using a hymnal when a family friend gave us her old piano right after moving to Colorado Springs. Mom had wanted a piano ever since she first married. Dad said I didn’t have time for lessons, but later allowed my sister to learn from our pastor’s wife.
But if Mom or I sat down to play, my dad would call us away within minutes and give us a more useful task.
I hid in my room when I read or wrote poetry or waited until I was alone in the house to play a musical instrument.
Senior year of high school, I took A Beka Academy’s Jaffe Strings orchestra program for the performing arts requirement, using a family heirloom violin from the 1890s.
But Dad didn’t let me play in the orchestra group at church or take private lessons after graduation. He drove me to rehearsals, but had Mom call my mentor and say I couldn’t attend the actual performance. After two times, I gave up.
Later, I drove myself to college, so I paid for violin lessons every other week second semester of freshman year. But June 2010, a week before our group performance in church, Dad told me I couldn’t participate because it was on his birthday.
I called my teacher to back out. She was furious. I hung up, called my mom crying. Mom said I had to obey my dad.
I asked Jesus if I could die now. Breathing hurt.
Trapped at home alone, I dialed Focus on the Family’s number in a panic around 9 a.m., thinking they wouldn’t involve the outside government agencies I feared. I told the elderly lady who answered that I was suicidal and needed to speak to a counselor.
While I waited, I read forum threads online to distract myself and watched the Lifehouse Everything skit on YouTube and sobbed.
A counselor called back around 2 p.m. I told him my dad controlled me and didn’t let me have friends and I was miserable. He said I should join a college Bible study on campus or at church.
I told him Dad didn’t allow that and asked him how I could move out and honor my parents. He said I needed to keep living at home and seek out friends and a mate in Bible study groups. Then he prayed with me and hung up.
Dad relented, I was in the performance. But he said he didn’t see any value in doing special music at church.
I despaired. The one hotline I trusted to keep my anonymity didn’t understand. Maybe I was the problem, maybe I should accept my loneliness and deaden my desires.
In October 2009, first semester of college, another homeschooled friend I met in driving school invited me to CleanPlace, an online Christian writer’s forum for teens run by a handful of women writers in their 30s. They encouraged my poetry and feedbacked my stories. They didn’t dismiss creativity as a waste of time.
Most of the members were homeschooled, and several of them had been crushed and isolated like me. I found community. I wasn’t the only one stuck in the box.
I started making friends at college, too.
First I befriended my professors, since I was a straight A student and I was used to talking to adults, not my peers.
Then I tutored chemistry in the Science Center on campus, my first real job outside my family or my church.
I’d avoided the punk girl with long pink hair and industrial piercings who yelled F*** at her Analytical Chemistry textbook, but then she befriended me. We debated Christianity and philosophy and traded graphic novels.
After sophomore year, I let myself read for fun again.
That summer and fall, after a discussion with one of my writing mentors, I read the Harry Potter books and later wrote a defense of them as being almost Christian fantasy.
I was happier than I’d been in years.
But my parents saw me changing. And they were afraid.
Editorial Note: The following is reprinted with permission from Eleanor Skelton’s blog. It was originally published on January 9, 2015.
I’ve been trying to erase myself
By trying to be someone else
They say there’s no hope for me
I guess this must be hell… – TFK,In My Room
“I have to go, my dad’s calling me again.” I head for the door of the campus library.
My friend rolls her wheelchair closer to me. “What’s wrong, honey?”
I fidget. I’d never told anyone. Not even a pastor or coworker.
Pause. Deep breath.
“I…I…My dad, sometimes, he gets really angry. He doesn’t hurt us, but if anyone in the family makes him mad, he takes it out on everybody.”
There. I’ve said it. My friend doesn’t shrink away. “Have you thought of talking to TESSA or Social Services?”
“But…won’t they take away my siblings?” I had trained myself to fear any outside interference, to protect my family and their reputation above all.
“No, honey. They don’t just come in and haul people off. They try to help.”
———–
My friend pointed out the tip of the iceberg. I knew my ship was sinking.
From my earliest memories, my family’s unity wobbled on tiptoe, depending on careful balancing. My mom taught us all how to survive.
Don’t do anything to make Daddy angry. He’s the head of the household. God wants us to respect him.
Daddy’s displeasures were arbitrary. He didn’t like any of us girls wearing green, and he said we couldn’t have friends outside the family, even at church.
Until I was nearly seven when my sister was born, I was an isolated only child.
The smoldering, bitter 9 year old who bruised herself to ease her guilt became the submissive 13 year old with separation anxiety too severe to attend the only slumber party that met parental approval.
Weekly panic attacks before Sunday morning church were the norm through adolescence. And our cross-country moves between Texas and Colorado led to attending churches with more and more rules, insulating us from the wider world.
By 14, I wanted to die daily (not in the religious sense) for an entire year. I clenched my arms around myself, blocking out the incessant voices telling me to jump.
My mom read us an HSLDA email newsletter winter 2004 about the homeschooled kid about my age who shot and killed his entire family and then himself. My insides went cold, because part of me is him.
I found some relief when my dad allowed Awanas during my freshman year of high school. I memorized the book of Ephesians with the youth group, and was often allowed phone conversations with Kathleen, my first close friend, for our regular accountability Bible Buddies sessions.
Halfway through 10th grade we moved again. I filled the long, lonely hours between A Beka Academy DVD lessons and homework with lengthy prayer journal entries addressed to Jesus and reading all the Gospels over and over. And twenty page handwritten letters to pen pals and church friends back in Texas.
I went back to cutting senior year of high school. Only blood could wash away sin, right? Jesus’ blood didn’t seem to cover it.
Graduation isn’t enough when you’re decaying from within. I dreaded college.
For a year, my dad had told me dentistry was the best and only valid occupation. He ignored my arguments, even though I devoted hours to researching salaries for other jobs and interviewing people with established careers for a required 12th grade “Vocation Project.”
He said I’d never make it as a high school English teacher or a translator. He ridiculed my desires with off-hand comments.
“You won’t be able to buy clothes like this if you’re just an English teacher.”
“You know, that’s the sort of car an English teacher would drive.”
I graduated, took a gap year to rest for resistance. I worked full-time as a receptionist at my dad’s office, so every waking hour was micromanaged. I gained 20 pounds because my dad didn’t like leftovers in the fridge.
I asked my parents to send to me to Bob Jones or Pensacola Christian College, because I wanted independence but feared the secular world. My dad said I had to study at least two years locally and commute.
When I applied to college, I declared my major in English literature, after a huge fight with my parents in July 2009 when I nearly left home.
Two years in, I’d added a minor in pre-dentistry and I had to be at the house whenever I wasn’t in class. I worked for my dad whenever I wasn’t studying.
And I wasn’t sure who I was anymore.
I hoped maybe I’d be free to make my own choices after dental school, after 6 more years of…well. Hell.
“The only people I owe my loyalty to are the ones who never made me question theirs.”
― Joe Mehl
Were you loyal to your pastor? Did he ever question it?
We had an exodus of about 20 people one year. All at once. It sure took me by surprise. I thought some of them were taking extended vacations that Thanksgiving holiday. But then I realized they had left. Gone. Just gone. I thought “Wow, why, what happened?”
The pastor was obviously upset by it. We lost some of the best workers in the choir, Sunday School and bus ministry we had. How were we going to carry on?
I never did know all the whys and wherefores of that exodus. But it seemed to have something to do with the ones in charge of the Sunday School not being able to fully do their job, which was being very creative. Suddenly (as I remember it happening) we went from doing some really fun things to back to the “old way”. (I thought there was a lot more to it, but I was not privy to all the information).
The pastor suddenly was uncertain of everyone and their loyalty to him, not trusting anyone at all. We had meetings with the department heads (I was one for that year) and all he talked about was how the people who left had been his friends one moment and then enemies the next. We got very little done in the meetings. We began hearing this from the pulpit the same thing. One moment he would be preaching away on a topic and he would suddenly stop and go on about how people had “hurt” him and he was certain more would do the same. We were to be loyal to him. He was the pastor. We were to respect him. He was the pastor. Our leader. This went on for years. Really.
He did not trust any of us. He seemed to think all of us were thinking of leaving. He always told us to “get over it” when we thought he “hurt our feelings.” (He sure was not getting over his “hurt feelings.”) Anytime someone did not show up for church and did not call him, he knew they had left. It was just that we might be sick and just didn’t think to call. Or something had come up, we didn’t always consider his feelings. We were not being loyal to him. We didn’t mean it, really.
I always felt loyalty should go both ways. I have your back, you have mine sort of thing. We came to church and paid our tithes, praised the pastor’s preaching with “amens” and the singing (lead by his wife) with our worship. We were to accept his leadership without question. Sometimes he would say something and someone would tell him that what he said hurt their feelings. He would preach about that later and tell us, “So what if I hurt your feelings? Too bad! Get over it!” After a while I know I stopped feeling sorry for him (so did some other people) as he would go on and on about how people hurt his feelings and made him not trust the rest of us. It didn’t seem we were on a two way street here after that Exodus. I think most of the congregation was over it way before he was. Of course, in a way, we were not directly affected by the exodus the same way the pastor was. They were only our friends. He was their shepherd, pastor, leader.
Those of us left were sure we would never leave that church or pastor and would remain loyal forever. But some of us trickled out over the years just the same. I am not certain but I think his feelings of insecurity toward all of us after that time affected us more that we realized.
How can you be totally loyal to someone if your loyalty is called into question just because a group decided to leave?
Although my leaving took place about 10 years after this incident, I have wondered if there was a change in my thinking or loyalty that helped me out the door.
