Wait, who am I following?

Turns out spiritual abuse is an effective and terrible clarifier

This post comes out of my experience of exiting a spiritually abusive church several years ago. Narratives of harmful experiences from explicitly Christian spaces have become more and more common in recent years. However tempting it is to use potent words carelessly, the label, “abuse,” should be used with real discernment. Its use should be met with sincerity as situational details and attitudes lend clarity and color to the meaning of such a broad term. Every experience of abuse is uniquely harmful, and allegations of abuse should always be disturbing. God takes abuse seriously, and so should the church.

Though I have been hesitant to add my voice to the chorus, my desire in sharing is to offer threads of hope to those who find themselves confused, trapped, or reeling from similar circumstances. Trust your gut, talk to people outside of the system that concerns you, and keep your eyes on Jesus. He really is the only one worth following.

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“I am so afraid they will perceive my leaving as betrayal,” I admitted to a friend as we made laps around Jamaica Pond. It was a cold day in late November: bare branches stood stark against a bright blue sky, shards of ice clinked along the edge of the water, and a bitter wind blew the welling tears onto my cheeks. In the thick of the worst kind of epiphany, I finally named the internal conflict that scared me most: the desire to walk faithfully with Jesus, and the desire to remain unscathed by the cost of following him. Though I was still under the delusion that I could wrestle this conflict into submission, I sensed that I was inching towards a fork in the road. “They” were the pastors and leaders of my church at the time, and it shook the ground beneath my feet to think that we could possibly be heading towards an impasse.

For seven years I showed up regularly, ready to be curious towards the Scriptures, to show deference to those in authority, to steward my gifts and talents sacrificially. For seven years I was aware of certain “blind spots,” assuming I was uniquely positioned to help shed light on those areas. I spoke well of the church’s leaders when they were criticized, acknowledging their imperfections while running unbidden to their defense. I invested time, energy, and money into this congregation, built friendships, mentored younger believers, led Bible studies, put myself through seminary, and utterly spent myself to prove my loyalty. Yet after all my years of certainty I was deeply unsettled, holding more questions than answers. I wrestled with the burden of loyalty for which I so fiercely advocated, asking myself: to whom was I really loyal?

After months of prayer and fasting, I began to actively engage my concerns in conversations with the leadership. I knew in my gut that questions would be unwelcome, so I attempted to prove my loyalty to my leaders and friends, meeting their demands while still leaning into my convictions. But further conversations only confirmed my suspicions. The ensuing denials, redirections, intimidation tactics, and personal accusations left me wildly disoriented. Who were these people? Who was I really following? As I began to weigh the cost of options before me, the underlying fear remained: how could I convey that my decision to leave was made out of prayerful love when every question I voiced was perceived as a threat?

“Give ear to my prayer, O God, 
and hide not yourself from my plea for mercy! 
Attend to me, and answer me; 
I am restless in my complaint and I moan, 
because of the noise of the enemy, 
because of the oppression of the wicked. 
For they drop trouble upon me, 
and in anger they bear a grudge against me. 

My heart is in anguish within me; 
the terrors of death have fallen upon me. 
Fear and trembling come upon me, 
and horror overwhelms me. 
And I say, ‘Oh, that I had wings like a dove! 
I would fly away and be at rest; 
yes, I would wander far away; 
I would lodge in the wilderness;    Selah 
I would hurry to find a shelter 
from the raging wing and tempest.’” 

-Psalm 55:1-8 ESV

Historically, I had always been a people pleaser. Nothing made me tick like gaining a person’s trust; nothing gave me anxiety like anticipating a conflict. However, in this season, driven by stirrings from the Spirit, I simply could not sit on my hands and keep my mouth shut. Though I approached each conversation with open-ended curiosity, praying daily to be filled with “a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control,”¹ I was met with words and insinuations that called into question my character, my posture towards authority, and my spiritual stability. I searched the scriptures studiously, analyzing my own heart in order to remove any log from my own eye before pointing out the speck in another’s.²

When I continued to voice my concerns about pastoral harshness, one leader brushed me aside with the reminder that, “Love believes all things.”³ He claimed I should be patient, believing the best about this pastor whose character contrasted starkly with the wisdom from above that James calls “pure, then peaceable, gentle, open to reason, full of mercy and good fruits, impartial, and sincere.”⁴ When my painstaking questions were met with direct pastoral hostility, I was counseled by another leader to take my cues from 1 Peter: “this is a gracious thing, when, mindful of God, one endures sorrows while suffering unjustly…. When [Christ] was reviled, he did not revile in return.”⁵ Though this passage had nothing to do with suffering within the church and everything to do with injustice experienced in the world, it was weaponized to communicate what the leaders most urgently needed to get across to me: get in line and shut up.

After months of prayer, fasting, and persistent engagement, I was a shell of myself. Though I thought these leaders trusted me, I sensed that their efforts to engage were not borne of love, but were designed to manipulate and gaslight me into silence. There was no curiosity directed toward my concerns or those of countless others, but instead they protected themselves at the expense of the sheep.⁶ They labeled all forms of critique as “gossip,” perpetuating a culture of silence from the pulpit. They upheld Matthew 18 as the only biblical model for conflict, sending people like me into private “pastoral” conversations with leaders who weaponized our vulnerability against us. They guilted many into believing we owed them our unquestioning allegiance by repeatedly reminding the congregation of the difficulty of being a pastor. Confused as I was, I knew that what I was hearing was not consistent with the voice of Jesus.

“It is not an enemy who taunts me—
then I could bear it; 
it is not an adversary who deals insolently with me—
then I could hide from him. 
But it is you, a man, my equal, my companion, my familiar friend. 
We used to take sweet counsel together; 
within God’s house we walked in the throng."

"My companion stretched out his hand against his friends;
he violated his covenant.
His speech was smooth as butter,
yet war was in his heart;
his words were softer than oil,
yet they were drawn swords."

-Psalm 55:12-14, 20-21 ESV

Enjoy this photo by Matthew Smith as a palate cleanser

The parable of the trees in Judges 9 haunted me. In seminary I studied it, noticing the way it explicitly depicted bad leaders using people rather than caring for them. When the trees sought a ruler, three wise trees rejected the opportunity to step into a position of authority. In contrast, the thorns arrogantly took hold of the moment, seizing power for themselves. With generous language, they invited others to take “shelter” in their “shade,” though they were intent on choking out whatever resided beneath them. As I meditated, the parable became personal: I was the plant being choked by the thorns. Something sinister was trapping me, sucking the life out of me. I had to get out, and what’s more, I sensed that the God of the Bible desired for me to escape even more than I did.

“Thus says the Lord God: Ah, shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves! Should not shepherds feed the sheep?... The weak you have not strengthened, the sick you have not healed,… the lost you have not sought, and with force and harshness you have ruled them…. Thus says the Lord God, Behold, I am against the shepherds, and I will require my sheep at their hand…. I will rescue my sheep from their mouths, that they may not be food for them.”

Ezekiel 34:2-10 ESV

“I’m afraid they will perceive my leaving as betrayal,” I admitted.

“They will,” my friend acknowledged bluntly, freeing me to begin counting the cost.

“I feel trapped; like staring at a wall,” I agonized.

“Then pick up a hammer and break through, or pray for God to do it for you.”

The courage, presence, and kindness of my friend gave me hope in the wilderness. If God made a way for the children of Israel, though they were trapped by an army on one side and the sea on the other— death on either side!— then he could create an exit for me.⁷

“But I call to God, 
and the Lord will save me. 
Evening and morning and at noon 
I utter my complaint and moan, 
and he hears my voice. 
He redeems my soul in safety 
from the battle that I wage, 
for many are arrayed against me.” 

-Psalm 55:16-18 ESV

Upon leaving, I found myself I shellshocked, reeling, and alone on the other side of an explosion, “taken into [the territory of grief] unwillingly,… severed from the mainland.”⁸ The persistent silence of long time friends and mentors perpetuated my disorientation and pain in the wake of my exit. It was a silence that kept “falling like ash…, dulling the world and leaving all things… with the mark of [my] emptied hands.”⁹

And yet in the midst of my pain I clung to these words: “The sheep hear [the shepherd’s] voice, and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.”¹⁰ This passage where Jesus revealed himself as the Good Shepherd came directly after the pharisees antagonized a blind man whom Jesus healed. The religious authorities could not accept a narrative that called their way of being into question, and yet the simple sincerity of this mans’ experience so deeply threatened them that they interrogated and shamed him, then excommunicated him from access to their community and their way of worship.

But “Jesus heard that they cast him out, and having found him….”¹¹

Here was the incarnate Son of God going out into the wild to find some poor nobody who was bullied and belittled by people claiming a higher rank in the spiritual food chain. The more I got to know the real Jesus as a tenacious and tender shepherd, the more I liked him. He was consistently filled with the fruit of the Spirit,¹² those beautiful and mysterious elements that still show up in surprising places today.

Like the man in John 9, Jesus found me in my wilderness too. I have deep compassion for people wounded by the church who leave it altogether, but in God’s mercy that is not my story. The wounds still ache, the impatient longings for things to be made right remain, and some days fear still floods my mind. But like Peter I can say, “Lord, to whom will we go? You have the words of eternal life.”¹³ Though I have more questions now than ever, I am now certain of who I am following, and for that I am glad.

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Resources on spiritual abuse that have been helpful to me:

• “Redeeming Power,” by Dr Diane Langberg

• “When Narcissism Comes to Church,” by Chuck DeGroat

• “Bully Pulpit,” by Michael Kruger

• “In the Name of Jesus,” by Henri Nouwen

• “The Pastor,” by Eugene Peterson

• “Glittering Images,” by Susan Howatch

• This post by

  Ron Miller

• This post by

  Karen Swallow Prior

1. 2 Timothy 1:7 ESV

2. Matthew 7:3

3. 1 Corinthians 13:7 ESV

4. James 3:17 ESV

5. 1 Peter 2:19-23 ESV

6. Ezekiel 34

7. Psalm 77:19-20 ESV

8. Francis Weller, “The Wild Edge of Sorrow”

9. Francis Weller, “The Wild Edge of Sorrow”

10. John 10:3b ESV, emphasis mine

11. John 9:35 ESV

12. Galatians 5:22-23 ESV

13. John 6:68 CSB