It’s difficult to know where to begin.
Our family spent nearly a decade with this church community and were part of the team that initially moved to plant the church. I want to begin by saying: I have no ill will toward the church, the pastor and his family, or any families who are still there. In fact, I love many of them and have close ones who remain. In honesty, this is part of why I have chosen to participate. There were so many times in our past with this community when we tried to bring up things that we saw to be issues within the community, structure, and our responsibilities, but ultimately felt unheard and dismissed. I want others who experience this to know they aren’t alone in this experience. There are many many stories I could tell about the season of life we spent in this community, but I have chosen to include a few specific experiences that led to our exit from the community.
We came into this community and leadership when we were young and impressionable. I was at a particularly low point in my life with my mental health and when I experienced a cool, trendy group of people who seemed happy living for Jesus, it seemed like the answer to my problems. It didn’t hurt that I also met the love of my life there.
Struggling with depression, anxiety, and undiagnosed adhd and having just left the close knit community of my college days, I think I saw the community as a place that could fix my life and in a sense, that is sort of what evangelical christianity often teaches. So I delved head first into all of it, eventually completely leaving my career, passions and other friends. I thought I was healing and finding Jesus, but now I see that I was really just living in a bubble and running away from my problems. In addition, childhood trauma caused me to have a tendency to feel like there was something inherently wrong with me, so it was easy for me to submit to the gospel as they told it, and ultimately, church leaders. If they said jump, I jumped. I don’t blame the church or leaders for my giant decision to “leave it all behind” but I will say it was definitely an influence.
“…[we] were in the somewhat elusive but undeniable ‘inner circle…'”
Eventually, I did marry that guy and we committed to helping with the initial church plant of this community. It seemed like an exciting adventure that we wanted to be a part of. At first, I think it was. Overtime, as we led and served and were in the somewhat elusive but undeniable “inner circle,” we started to experience some difficult situations. A lot of these situations happened in the small group model of the church which became a huge struggle for us. By nature of the structure, we were separated from the friends we had expected to be in community with; the weight and responsibility of leading the small groups was overwhelming and we dealt with a lot of really difficult situations there.
I think I first realized there was a problem when we were coming home from that group at 2 pm on a Sunday and then needing to spend another 4 hours rehashing what had happened there and trying to brainstorm how to fix it. So many struggles – no one would bring food, difficult co-leaders, no one would serve with the kids, and no matter how much we tried to follow the advice to set the tone of the group, the vibe was always really really weird and, to me, extremely oppressive.
As one of 2-3 women who consistently attended our group, and with a lack of teamwork in the group, we tried to bring up the problems in monthly leader meetings. But it seemed like we were the only ones. Even when directly asking about how to solve the problems, we were blown off or told that “it’s not that way in our group” — that group that all the pastors attended together.
So when we tried to solve those issues ourselves, the only doable way seemed to be for us to do all of it was… ourselves. Before I knew it, my “role” in the group, as a supposed leader, had become to bring a giant casserole to feed everyone (no one would bring food) and to take care of the kids every other time. That meant sitting in a basement with someone else’ kids while the men sat upstairs and got to receive and have fellowship. I felt SO oppressed by this. And, perhaps by the fact that only 2-3 women were in our group, when I did get to attend the group, there was a sense that I shouldn’t speak, which royally pissed me off. I submitted to a lot of things that made me miserable in that group, but I never did stay silent and I’m proud of myself for that.
At this church, it was often communicated how important it is to be generous with your “time, talents, and tithe” to the church. We did this, unquestioningly, generously, consistently — and at times to the detriment of our own best interests. We tithed our 10%+ every month, we served in every way possible, we used our talents to serve the church on an extreme level that sometimes meant being in the church building 3-4 times a week. At the time, this seemed normal. Serving was highly recommended and highly respected in the culture of this church, plus it was something that pleased the pastor.
And you really really wanted to please the pastor.
“Sometimes it got to the point that I wondered — are we trying to be like the pastor — or are we trying to be like Jesus?”
He’s a charismatic guy with an adorable family and is really good at making you feel honored for taking on a position of leadership. Everyone loved him, looked up to him, and tried to model their lives after him. Sometimes it got to the point that I wondered — are we trying to be like the pastor — or are we trying to be like Jesus? People would repeat sayings they had heard from the pastor, some that were based in Bible scripture and some that were, in my opinion, ideas that he had. Those sayings were used in conversations all the time, spoken as fact, sort of like Christianese, but it was more like “pastor-isms.” Then there was the church mission statement, which we were expected to memorize and be able to recite on command. Probably not intentional, but all of these things (and more) feel pretty “culty” in retrospect.
When you have a leader who is put on a pedestal, who is charismatic, and when there is very minimal oversight or overhead leadership, it’s very easy for a community to become unhealthy in this manner. Perhaps if we were able to have a voice as leaders, or had our issues and complaints be taken seriously rather than blown off, it wouldn’t have felt like this. But over time it really REALLY felt like it was a community that was centered around and led by one man. It didn’t help that women weren’t allowed to lead in any real sense and if they did, it was only “with their husbands.”
The message that we weren’t as valuable as men went very deep. I remember how frustrated I was that my husband had been able to attend around 10 mens’ retreats put on by the church, and, at that point, there hadn’t been a SINGLE women’s retreat. Not one. When this was brought up, we were told that a woman’s retreat was unrealistic because the men couldn’t be on their own with the kids for 24 hours…. Are you kidding me? This was exacerbated by the fact that we were told that the pastors would lead the men…. And the men would then lead their wives, the women. What if you didn’t have a husband? Or what if you wanted to be led by a spiritual leader instead of your spouse?
“It was confusing, unsettling, painful, and ultimately showed us that it was not our authentic selves that were so valuable to the church… it was our time, talents and tithe, our service to the church that mattered. Not us.”
In retrospect, I can now see that we gave and gave and gave — and years later, when we encountered the most difficult time of our life and really needed support, we were shocked when the same support we had poured out for years seemed to not show up for us. It was confusing, unsettling, painful, and ultimately showed us that it was not our authentic selves that were so valuable to the church… it was our time, talents and tithe, our service to the church that mattered. Not us.
It took us many years of wanting to leave and move on. But whether it was the fear of losing our friends that were supposed to be “for life” — or the pressure to please the pastor, or just an unhealthy need to please people, we struggled and we stayed.
We stayed even after many of our best friends left. We stayed even when we knew that living in another town would be best for our careers, life and family. We stayed even though on every vacation we ever took, we would discuss how much we wanted to leave. And maybe this pressure to stay was sort of part of the problem.
“…more than anything, when someone left, it felt to me like there was an unspoken attitude toward that person that they were less than, potentially in sin, or maybe even spiritually dangerous. Obviously we didn’t want to be painted in that light…”
You see, when others would leave the church, there always seemed to be an explanation that it was God’s will, that he was “pruning” and cutting off the dead things and making space for new leadership. Or that those who left were too offendable, unforgiving, etc. And more than anything, when someone left, it felt to me like there was an unspoken attitude toward that person that they were less than, potentially in sin, or maybe even spiritually dangerous. Obviously we didn’t want to be painted in that light and since bringing up our concerns never seemed to work, we just suffered in silence for many many years.
Eventually, while hanging out with some of our closest friends in that community, we found that we all felt similarly. We shared our frustrations with each other and connected about how frustrated we were with some of the key structures of the church – the small groups, the divided weeks that left us apart from our friends we wanted to be in community with, the level of service and commitment expected from us, the overwhelm of being a young person and having so responsibility, and for those women in the group – our frustration at how women were viewed and treated. It was therapeutic and helped us feel less alone.
At some point, one of the people who was in our friend group decided to tell one of the leaders about our discussion. And then all hell broke loose.
We were quickly called in for meeting upon meeting with the lead pastor, suddenly questioned about everything, watched under scrutiny, and literally called the “leaders of the rebellion.” We were made to feel like we had made some egregious mistake by simply communicating with our friends. But ultimately, I don’t know what else we could have done. When you consistently bring up your concerns as a “leader” in the church and those concerns are blown off, dismissed, and often made to be a “you problem”… you are eventually going to stop bringing the concerns up.
But even after emotional meetings with multiple members of the church leadership, there was still this strange tension. At one point, one pastor we viewed as a close friend told us he couldn’t talk to us about this as a friend, because he was our pastor and leader. That really hurt. During another meeting with the head pastor we were essentially told to fake it until we make it in terms of healing the relationship with him. No amount of explaining our feelings or frustration seemed to be heard. It felt like the only thing that mattered to them was that we had “gossipped” and talked poorly about our leadership — when in reality, it was never about that.
“In all their talk about how we should never talk about them — they were clearly talking about us….”
One time, our family was financially unable to travel for our anniversary so we decided to do a little day trip and house project to celebrate. We communicated that we were celebrating our anniversary that day and skipped service for a trip to the farmers market and breakfast. Later that day, we happened to run into the pastor himself while at a local store. Regardless of our communication, when we ran into this person, it felt so uncomfortable and tense and guilt-ridden, like we had somehow made a terrible mistake by missing one service. We tried to shake it off, but as we got into the car to drive home, I got a text from another church leader. The text directly mentioned that the pastor had seen us in town after we missed church that day and was essentially telling us that if we wanted to remain in the areas of leadership we were in, we needed to not ever miss service. It felt so confusing, disrespectful, shocking – and honestly, pretty creepy. In all their talk about how we should never talk about them — they were clearly talking about us….
A year or two later (still trying to hang in there at this church), our daughter unexpectedly arrived 6 weeks early. We had had a high risk pregnancy with a lot of extra monitoring and she was extra small and struggling to grow. Then, we had an extremely traumatic labor and birth and ultimately our daughter was born very tiny, very sick, grey and not breathing or making sounds — and immediately taken to the NICU to save her life. Our little girl suffered a skull fracture and brain bleed. The night of her birth, the NICU doctors told us that she might not survive the head trauma. 1 in 4 don’t. Thankfully, she did survive.
After she stabilized, we made our announcement and allowed friends to visit. But it didn’t exactly go how we expected. After nearly losing our little girl and living in the NICU for a week, the pastor came to visit. Severely traumatized by her near-death experienced, we expected support and heartfelt prayers for her healing. Instead, the pattern of dismissiveness continued… We were told that his daughter was born small and she was fine, and that our daughter didn’t “look that small.” Our trauma and concerns were blown off again, and rather than a prayer for healing and the comfort and support we expected, a brief “God, pour out your grace” was all we got. In and out in 10 minutes. We felt so dismissed and unvalued and unbelieved – and this time it was over our precious child. While other friends did support us at the time, it is difficult to not allow this negative experience to overshadow the good, especially since the pastor was so loved and respected and held up as the ultimate example.
A few weeks later, when our daughter was discharged, the doctors had a stern talk with us, explaining that since it was cold and flu season, she was premature, very tiny, and had already fought so much, we should do everything in our power to keep her away from germs until spring. That meant staying home, avoiding crowds, sickness and protecting her at all costs. After seeing her nearly die in front of our eyes, it was a no-brainer. We received the meal train that every family gets when you come home with a new child. We communicated our leave of absence to the church leadership. And then……. Well, really nothing. We had to avoid in-person church meetings, but we hadn’t expected to be completely forgotten. It was almost like someone had told everyone that we didn’t want support or not to bother us, which wasn’t how we felt. We simply needed to protect our child.
“We were so excited to show her off and see our friends we had missed and be welcomed back to the group, missing the community we had loved. But the first thing we heard upon entering the church doors was ‘Oh, that’s the sick baby? Doesn’t look very sick to me!’ In fact, two separate people said that to us…a lovely gasLIT welcome….”
After our 6 month quarantine (long before COVID), we made our way back into the world and brought our daughter to church. We were so excited to show her off and see our friends we had missed and be welcomed back to the group, missing the community we had loved. But the first thing we heard upon entering the church doors was “Oh, that’s the sick baby? Doesn’t look very sick to me!” In fact, two separate people said that to us…a lovely gasLIT welcome….
Despite all of this, we still tried to go and be a part of our old community. Though it took several years to figure out what was going on, our daughter ultimately had an ultra rare neurological disease. She screamed and cried all day long, had massive food intolerances and was developmentally delayed. As a result, attending service was hard – really really hard. Our daughter had a host of medical issues and she was deeply attached to me so dropping her off in the nursery didn’t work. So, we began to sit in a separate mother-child room, watching service on a TV. Alone. Week after week we would come to church and get a pat on the back for being there, and then I would sit in a room alone with my baby. Not once did anyone ever come and sit with me except my own sister. Not even once. But I was asked many times if I would be willing to start serving again… reinforcing the constant mentality that your worth is in what you do for the church.
One morning after church, the pastor was talking to us and somehow it came into conversation that our daughter wasn’t yet walking. Though she was over a year old, her developmental skills were that of a typical 6-month-old: she couldn’t yet pull-up, stand or walk — and she spent a lot of time experiencing painful muscle contractions called dystonia. I’m not sure if they believed I was faking her illness or holding her back, but this painful memory is seared into my mind. The pastor said something to the effect of “oh…. she can walk, let me see her.” He took her from me and put her down on the ground on her feet, taking her hands and trying to make her walk. Of course, she couldn’t, and flailed hanging by her arms, crying and flopping around. He realized that she really couldn’t walk and gave her back. I’m sure it wasn’t intended to be hurtful, but it really was… because more than anything, it was a continuation of the gaslighting, dismissive statements made toward our experience with our child.
In fact, it seemed like even after seeing us go through a traumatic birth, 2-week NICU stay, two separate week-long hospitalizations with our child, and many stories of her neurological episodes that made her paralyzed — we were still not being believed. We were still encountering statements and actions that seemed to come from an attitude that “she doesn’t look that sick to me.”
Soon after, our daughter had her first very severe and very scary neurological spell and we were hospitalized for a week. Her eyes were locked upward into her head, her body completely floppy, and she was unresponsive for 3 days. During this hospital stay we found out that she had an ultra rare neurological disease that would be very difficult to treat. We were terrified and exhausted. After that, everything changed for us even moreso, as our daughter continued to have scary seizure-like episodes every few weeks with no known cause or treatment. It would take us 2 more years to find her diagnosis, which ultimately was devastating.
“…it taught me to ignore the feelings that I now know to be my body telling me to pay attention to a boundary, that something wasn’t safe. As a result, I often found myself in situations that made me feel deeply uncomfortable and unsafe, since I was told to ignore those feelings.”
In the topic of feelings, I want to add something that continues to come up in our lives, a belief that we now fight against that was ingrained in us from this church culture, that “feelings lie.” Of course, you can have feeling based on an unhealthy belief. However, in our opinions, this was preached in an extreme way that taught church members to ignore their feelings. This harmed us in many ways. For me, it taught me to ignore the feelings that I now know to be my body telling me to pay attention to a boundary, that something wasn’t safe. As a result, I often found myself in situations that made me feel deeply uncomfortable and unsafe, since I was told to ignore those feelings. It also taught me to not speak up, that my feelings didn’t matter and they weren’t true anyway.
As we continued to fight for a diagnosis and medical treatment for our daughter, we felt less and less connected to the church that had been the center of our entire community, friendships, and life. When COVID hit, we of course took it very very seriously – our daughter was one of the most vulnerable.
The day before the government’s 2-week mandated quarantine, we had finished a very difficult day with our daughter. She had been crying in pain all day, having painful dystonia and one-sided paralysis and had been unable to nap or rest all day. She had finally gotten to sleep around 8:45 pm and we were exhausted and ready to try to relax. Suddenly, we heard what sounded like a car accident in front of our house – horns honking, screaming and yelling. I ran outside to see what on earth was going on, and saw that it was actually a few cars full of the church pastors and their families, yelling and honking the horns, waving in excitement. They were driving around to church members’ houses to surprise people before the mandated stay-home period. I waved awkwardly, hoping they would stop the racket soon, as our daughter was sleeping and our neighbors were coming out to see what was going on.
Someone asked where our daughter was, and I replied, “she’s sleeping,” to which someone else laughingly said “not anymore!” My heart dropped as I realized they were right – she was awake and screaming and crying. I ran up to her room to get her and it took another 4 hours to get her back to sleep. While I’m sure it wasn’t meant to harm, I found tears falling as I rocked and rocked her. Tears because I was so angry that she had been woken up on a day when she really really needed the sleep and I really really needed the break. “Not anymore!” rang in my ears, reinforcing the mentality that we should lighten up, that we were being dramatic and our daughter wasn’t really that sick. That night was when my husband was done with this church: he felt it showed just how out of touch the leaders were with our life.
I wasn’t done with that church at any specific moment. It happened over time, over years, and over reflection. In truth, the pandemic did us a big favor. It allowed us the space, time and quiet to be honest with ourselves. And our daughter did us an even bigger favor: she showed us what really matters in life and revealed to us that the loving atmosphere at this church was conditional and not a safe place for us any longer.
“For nearly 10 years I centered my entire life around this church. I gave my money, my free time, and my talents to serve at an extreme level. And when my family experienced the most difficult time of our life, the deepest grief and most challenging circumstances,…we felt dismissed, isolated, and unvalued.”
My reason for cutting ties is pretty simple. For nearly 10 years I centered my entire life around this church. I gave my money, my free time, and my talents to serve at an extreme level. And when my family experienced the most difficult time of our life, the deepest grief and most challenging circumstances, we expected moral support, empathetic listeners, offers to support us after hospital stays and prayers for our little girl. There were admittedly outliers and occasional efforts to support us, and I don’t disregard those. But overall, we felt dismissed, isolated, and unvalued.
In some ways I wish I could have shared those feelings instead of ghosting, which I ultimately did. But after the years of many meetings where we had felt unheard and dismissed, it didn’t feel like it would be effective or safe. And since the narrative seemed to have been already written for us ahead of our return to the church, it seemed like our experience with our daughter’s very real and very devastating ultra rare disease would continue to be diminished and unbelieved, so I didn’t feel like it would be worth the effort. One can only stand being dismissed, isolated and misunderstood for so long before the wounds are too deep to cover.
So we left.
Leaving was one of the scariest moments, and yet most fruitful decisions we have ever made.
Years later, we have moved away, re-started our life and centered it around our daughter. We have revisited previous careers, hobbies, and interests we had given up or not had time for. We have allowed our beliefs to crumble around us and started to rebuild our faith on our own terms and convictions. We re-found ourselves, apart from the deep indoctrination. We continue to re-build our marriage on friendship, mutual respect, and teamwork, rather than traditional gender roles. And I feel SO free.
I love that I am finally able to fully love and support my LGBTQIA+ friends, to be open with my liberal political beliefs, and to be able to use my gifts and talents in ways outside of service to the church. I leaned into mental health and therapy and found that the symptoms I had struggled with my whole life were, in fact, attributed to ADHD, rather than some sort of demonic influence. (L.O.L!)
My life is centered in greater love to ALL human beings, greater advocacy and greater service than I ever experienced while leading in multiple ways there.
I hope that sharing my story will help those who remain to understand why we did what we did. I also hope it will give others the ability to be honest with themselves and to make their own best decisions. And finally, that sharing my story could shine light on the truth and that that truth could, too, set others free.
