More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
It’s all too easy for an abusive pastor to convince a room of his fellow, all-male elders that a woman cannot be trusted because she, like all women, is too sensitive and therefore unreliable (unlike him, of course).
why is it that victims of abuse are the only ones whose personal experience affects their judgment? Does the personal experience of church elders not affect their judgment?
couldn’t their friendship with the senior pastor also affect their judgment?
appeals are made to everything this individual has done to bless the church:
How can a man who’s accomplished so much good for the kingdom, or who’s helped so many people, be the same kind of man who would mistreat and bully members of his church? To resolve this cognitive dissonance, people default to assuming the charges can’t possibly be true. This is another way abusive pastors flip the script. They convince people that they, not the victims, are the trustworthy ones.
One side is often warm, caring, and endearing. The other is harsh, cold, and cruel. Most people have seen only the good side of the abusive pastor. So it would not at all be surprising that such an individual might have a plentiful supply of character references. But this does not mean he is not abusive.
Even though the victims of spiritual abuse have suffered greatly (more on this topic in the next chapter), one tactic of abusive leaders is to talk about how much they’ve suffered. They will go to great lengths to describe how much pain they are in because of the unresolved “conflict” with those accusing them.
To produce even more sympathy, some abusive leaders then appeal to how the whole situation has affected their spouse or their family. They might point out how much their wife has suffered or how their kids are heartbroken and disillusioned.
It is his behavior, not that of the victims, that brought pain to his own family.
Not only are they abused by their pastors, but then, in turn, they are not believed or protected by their churches. They are abused twice, often with tragic effects.
Victims fear many outcomes: retaliation from the abusive pastor, the ruining of their reputation, the loss of their job and livelihood, the alienation of their friends and their church. Some also fear making mistakes in the complicated judicial process that often surrounds abuse cases. For example, they might wonder, “Who am I allowed to talk to? What steps should I take? What if I trust someone who then turns against me?” And many fear the future: “Will I ever recover from the pain? Will my life ever be the same?”
Since the abusive leader has been gaslighting them with accusations—you’re insubordinate, you’re a difficult person, you’re the problem—the victims sometimes wonder whether those claims are true. Tragically, victims often struggle to get the words of the abusive pastor out of their heads.
Unlike the trauma of something one can run away from, spiritual abuse often makes the victims feel trapped and immobilized, with no course of action to protect themselves, their families, and their livelihoods.
In this way, the trauma of spiritual and emotional abuse can be similar to the trauma of physical or sexual abuse. Van der Kolk observes, “Emotional abuse and neglect can be just as devastating as physical abuse and sexual molestation.”
Survivors of spiritual abuse testify to having countless relationships destroyed by the behavior of the abusive pastor, who is sometimes enabled by a willing group of supporters and protectors. He accomplishes this destruction by using the retaliatory tactics discussed in chapter 5. These relational rifts are often so severe that most are never healed. The most obvious damage is that victims are often driven out of their own churches, thereby losing their core relational networks and the ministries they worked hard to build.
The trauma of this sort of social ostracization is bigger than just the victims missing their former church. It involves the reality that their former church has now been turned against them and now regards them as divisive, troublesome, and slanderous. In other words, it’s the reversal—moving from faithful member to shunned exile—that is particularly devastating.
Victims of the abuse walk around in shame not because they’ve done anything wrong but because their former church thinks they have. They feel they are “damaged goods.”
These folks who stay behind often defend their decision under the heading that they are neutral and don’t want to “take sides.” But by staying at the church, they are not neutral. They have clearly chosen a side.
“Some of our closest friends didn’t want to hear our story, stayed at the church, and eventually aligned against us. The church as a whole shunned us and we lost many people in friendships/community as well as our reputation that had been built over almost 20 years. The pastor’s word always prevailed.”
If only he had repented, all that relational damage could have been avoided.
it often crushes a person’s spiritual life and calls into question all they believe.
This is why spiritual abuse is a unique kind of abuse. It is perpetrated by God’s appointed leader (a pastor), for God’s appointed ends (church planting, spreading the gospel), often enabled by God’s appointed institution (the church and its elders), and leveled against God’s own people (church members). The spiritual damage can be enormous.
Even hearing a certain passage of Scripture can be painful if the abusive pastor used it to bully and manipulate. In one case I studied, the abuse victim happened to visit a church on a Sunday when they were installing new elders and calling the congregation to submit to their authority. After what she had endured at the hands of her prior elders, it led to a panic attack.
In short, the spiritual abuser takes aspects of church life that are inherently good—preaching, Scripture reading, worship—and makes them a source of pain.
The other reason abuse victims stay away from the church comes down to an issue of trust.26 They don’t feel safe in any congregation, wondering if that church will someday turn against them too.
it can distort people’s image of what God is like.29 Because of the toxic behavior of an abusive pastor, a Christian might think God himself must be that way. They may think God is never satisfied with them and is perpetually looking for failure and eager to punish and humiliate them if they stumble.
There may be a time and a place to probe deeper into whether they are seeing the situation clearly. But surely that should not be the first instinct when we are faced with a suffering believer. When a child comes crying to his mother with a skinned knee, the mother’s first step is not to interrogate the child about whether he was running too fast on the playground. After all, the suffering itself is real, regardless of the cause, and deserves tenderness and care.
The church needs to state that it wants to avoid a culture of fear where people are afraid to speak and instead values a culture where all voices are heard, respected, and valued—even, and perhaps especially, if they are critical of the church leadership. Churches need to be careful that an accountability system is not misused in a way that encourages criticism of the pastor. The goal is not to stir up complaints and grievances. After all, there’s never a shortage of those. Rather, the goal is to create a safe space for concerns to be raised so there isn’t undue retaliation and targeting of
...more
As noted, an abusive leader often flourishes in situations where the people who hold him accountable are either his close friends or yes-men who are unable to stand up to him. If anyone does stand up to him, they are usually isolated and driven out.
churches should not assume the accuser is lying but to take their claims seriously. Or, put bluntly, the accuser should not be accused. They should be afforded the same rights as everyone else: they should be considered innocent until proven guilty.
Imagine a scenario where a woman claims the senior pastor is harsh and heavy-handed. After she makes these claims, she soon finds herself in a room alone with a group of men who all happen to be close friends of the senior pastor. Suddenly they’re peppering her with questions, essentially cross-examining her. It’s not hard to imagine how she might feel like she’s the one under investigation. And the scenario only gets worse when that senior pastor talks to these men offline, weaving a narrative about the woman, claiming she’s difficult or hard to manage or insubordinate.
Typically, such investigations are done in-house, often by friends or colleagues of the abusive pastor and by people who have no real training on how to identify abuse. Of course, many of these in-house investigations end up vindicating the abusive pastor.
“They [the presbytery] were sometimes very dismissive towards us, very not trauma informed, very clearly favoring their colleagues throughout the whole thing.”
When a church is faced with credible claims of spiritual abuse, the standard practice should be to hire an independent, outside organization that understands how to investigate abuse cases properly
In contrast, churches and third-party investigative groups need to develop a victim-sensitive method of communication where the victims are involved from the start, given full disclosure about the progress of the investigation, and allowed to give input and feedback about the content of any public statements or reports.
And the damage is not caused merely by the initial behavior of the abusive leader but by the long and excruciating process that unfolds after the victims come forward. For months, even years, the victims are subjected to the retaliatory tactics of abusive leaders: attacks on their character, broken relationships, legal wranglings, countercharges of slander, and more.
Sadly, most churches spend more time caring for the abusive pastor than for the victims.
Churches instead need to be proactive in supporting the victims spiritually, helping them walk through such an ordeal.
