Bully Pulpit: Confronting the Problem of Spiritual Abuse in the Church

by Michael J. Kruger

Pastors effectively have a “pulpit” inside people’s heads. This is precisely why character matters so much when it comes to whether a person is qualified for the ministry.

As we unpack the definition of spiritual abuse, we come to a second feature: the abusive pastor uses sinful means to control and dominate those under him. When you ask people under abusive leaders to describe what this controlling behavior is like, the same words pop up repeatedly: hypercritical, cruel, threatening, defensive, and manipulative.

A key characteristic of an abusive leader is that they lead through fault-finding.20 They are overly quick to point out deficiencies in the job performance of those under them and eagerly call attention to a person’s character flaws, often without gentleness or patience. Victims often indicate that they feel “watched,” as if the pastor is always looking for some mistake he can grab a hold of and exploit.21

The abusive pastor denigrates others not only to feel better about himself (thus feeding his narcissism) but also to demoralize those under him. The latter is important because demoralized employees or members are more insecure, quicker to submit to commands, and eager to make amends for their perceived shortcomings. Thus, demoralization is a form of control. And bully pastors do it for one simple reason: it works.

abusive pastors often speak cruelly to employees or members. The pastor seems to intentionally hurt the person. This can be done by cutting off a person in a meeting, publicly embarrassing them over some mistake, making fun of them in front of others, or speaking to them in harsh or demeaning ways.22

Most assume that if their pastor doesn’t scream and swear at people, then he must not be abusive. But there are more subtle ways to be cruel to people. While some abusive pastors use “fire” to hurt their victims, others use “ice”—they turn cold, quietly cutting off the person from the ministry of the church and from the relationships therein.

the pastor could bring up a person on charges of church discipline. In both the MacDonald case and the Driscoll case, the elders charged and disciplined the whistleblowers for making accusations against the senior pastor. Abusers are notoriously litigious, willing to invoke church courts if necessary to punish anyone who tries to stand up to them.

pastors can threaten to ruin a person’s reputation. Even if they do not involve formal ecclesiastical charges, such threats can effectively control people. In fact, many abusive churches encourage members to openly confess their sins, insisting that they dig down deep and reveal their darkest secrets. Tragically, once these sins are confessed, sometimes under coercion, they are later used against church members who step out of line. As Kenneth Garrett observed, “In the church that abuses, the confession of sin (whether actual or imagined) is wrung out of members as means of gaining emotional control over them.”27

It is not normal for people to have this sort of fear of their pastor. We need to let that sink in. If many people, across many years, express significant fear of a pastor, then something is very, very wrong.

But what happens when you criticize a spiritually abusive pastor bent on preserving his own authority? In short, it’s war. Abusive pastors are notoriously thin-skinned, seeing even the slightest bit of criticism as a threat to their power. Case after case of spiritual abuse has shown that criticism is often the trigger that leads a pastor to turn on a staff member or parishioner, leading to retaliation, threats, and vindictive behavior. To snuff out criticism, an abusive pastor will often silence, shame, or isolate a person, making them feel like they are insubmissive, insubordinate, and undermining the church’s God-given leadership.

The rich irony here is that the pastor who is unable to take criticism is often highly critical of everyone else. That is not a good combination—and it’s the classic mark of a narcissist.30 Narcissists can’t admit that others may be smarter or more talented than they are, which is why they always critique others. Nor can they admit that they might be inferior or mistaken, which is why they won’t allow critiques of themselves or the ministries they lead.

The first kind of manipulation is structural. Abusers often make sure certain practices are in place to preserve their authority. An example is the notorious “personnel committee,” which is typically a subset of an elder board. By making sure all conflicts are handled discretely in this committee, years of conflict can go unnoticed by the larger governing body. I will address more of these structural issues in chapter 7.

other type of manipulation is relational. Abusers masterfully cultivate an immense amount of loyalty from those they serve with. This is accomplished in a number of ways, usually by flattery (“You are so gifted”), by entrusting someone with a secret (“I am telling only you”), including someone in the inner circle (“Only a select few are invited to this meeting”), or even by confessing selective sins of their own (what DeGroat calls “fauxnerability”).32 In short, the abuser grooms people in a way that is not all that different from what happens in cases of sexual abuse, manipulating them to gain their trust.

In numerous cases I studied—ranging from the West coast to the Southeast—the bully pastor was known to send other elders or pastors to confront anyone he saw as a threat, to accuse them and keep them in line (usually under the auspices of “shepherding”). At this point, the abuse had become systemic, now involving more than the senior pastor alone.

The third feature of spiritual abuse is that the abusive leader appears to be building God’s kingdom—at least on the outside—but is actually protecting his own power and authority. Spiritual abuse usually happens because a pastor is desperately trying to control his ministry and keep it on track. He wants to control his staff, control the vision, control the direction of the church. Loyalty must be maintained at all costs. Nothing can be allowed to diminish his position or take away his power. And when people fall out of line (which tends to happen with human beings), then he cracks the whip.

Johnson and VanVonderen: “It’s possible to become so determined to defend a spiritual place of authority, a doctrine or a way of doing things, that you wound and abuse anyone who questions, or disagrees, or doesn’t ‘behave’ spiritually the way you want them to.”33

he may be convinced he is building God’s kingdom, not his own. In his mind, he is so significant to the work of the kingdom, so important, so valuable that he feels justified in doing nearly anything to keep that ministry on track. If people get run over, then that’s because they got in the way of the great kingdom work he’s doing—collateral damage, so to speak. In a sick, twisted way, he is crushing people for the glory of God.

abusive pastors are both aware and unaware of what they are doing. Yes, they know they are hurting people (though they often don’t know how badly). Yes, they are doing it on purpose. But their own narcissistic illusions about the greatness of their ministry allows them to dismiss their behavior as a normal, inevitable part of the advancement of the kingdom.34

Here’s the reality: pastors accused of spiritual abuse are often accomplishing something helpful for the kingdom—expanding the reach of the gospel, planting churches, helping the poor. Their ministries look blessed. This appearance of blessing not only makes the abusive pastor sure that he’s done nothing wrong, but it also convinces others of his innocence. They refuse to believe any accusations. To allow such a possibility would wreck the tidy world they have built around that spiritual leader.

AN INTIMIDATING PERSONALITY. There is a difference between intentionally intimidating others through threats, attacks, and bullying and just having an intimidating personality. I’ve met many Christian leaders who are gifted, talented, and project a confidence that makes other people feel insecure. Most often they are not the warm and fuzzy types who pass around hugs to everyone in the room. So they are often labeled as “intimidating.” But that is not the same as being abusive.

Indeed, my own research has shown that much abuse takes place precisely when a pastor is confronting sin. Remember, this is often the case with abusive police officers. Excessive force is typically used when a person has committed a crime! However, a church member should not have to be sinless and perfect to avoid abuse.

In other words, they are more apt to mistreat a church member when that person is vulnerable. If that pastor were accused of abusive behavior, he would only have to say, “Well, you know how difficult people can be when you point out their sin,” and he would automatically have the backing of the elders.

All these categories are important to understand, lest we (wrongly) label every instance of relational conflict as abuse. As Ken Blue has cautioned, we don’t want to “turn our concern with spiritual abuse into the Salem witch hunt of our time.”38

sins that are more difficult to spot are still sins. Pride may be one of the worst sins, and yet it is remarkably difficult to prove in any given individual. Yet if such difficult-to-spot sins would disqualify a person from ministry (1 Tim. 3:3; Titus 1:7; 1 Peter 5:3; 2 Tim. 2:24), then the church is obligated to assess them even if the task of doing so requires more nuance and care. Can the church ignore these requirements merely because they are more subjective than others? One might argue that the pileup of churches wrecked by domineering leaders over the last decade shows that the church needs to do better in this area. We have ignored these requirements at our peril.

So when people realize their leaders are abusive and oppressive, it can be spiritually debilitating and disillusioning in profound and unique ways. The person supposedly representing Jesus is nearly the opposite of Jesus. And that makes people wonder whether this whole Christianity thing may also be a fraud. As we shall see, the presence of abusive leaders does not surprise God. The history of God’s people is full of them. But he is keen to warn us against them so we can take appropriate action to protect the church. Jesus himself spent a remarkable amount of time calling out bad leaders who mistreated God’s sheep.

We should also remember that Adam was not merely the first husband. As Greg Beale has argued, the garden of Eden had notable parallels to the form and function of Israel’s temple.2 In a sense, then, Eden was the first “archetypal temple in which the first man worshipped God.”3 Consequently, Adam functioned not only as a husband but also as the first priest-king, God’s vice-regent on earth.

So the fall had implications for more than husband-wife relationships. It also had implications for the way priest-kings would rule and govern. Going forward, husbands would need to guard against sinfully dominating their wives, and priests and kings would need to guard against harshly ruling their people. Sadly, much of the history of Israel would be characterized by priests and kings making exactly this mistake.

Remarkably and tragically, these bad shepherds of Israel had reversed the roles entirely. Instead of offering protection and care for the sheep, they provided it for themselves. Instead of giving their own lives as a sacrifice, they sacrificed the lives of the sheep. One might say they were the quintessential example of spiritual abuse. As Timothy Laniak observed, this passage is “a picture of sheep that are abused by those charged to care for them.”

God was going to do something about bad shepherds: “Behold, I am against the shepherds. . . . I will rescue my sheep from their mouths” (v. 10). How would he do this? By sending new shepherds? No, by coming himself to be the Great Shepherd: “I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I myself will make them lie down, declares the Lord GOD” (v. 15).

With this promise in mind, the words of Jesus take on new significance: “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep” (John 10:11). Jesus is declaring that he is the Lord God keeping the promise of Ezekiel 34 to shepherd his people. And he will do the opposite of what the bad shepherds of Israel did. They saved their lives at the expense of the sheep, whereas Jesus will save the sheep at the expense of his own life.

God does more than judge the bad shepherds. He also promises again that he will do something to make things right. He will send a new and better shepherd: “Behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness” (v. 5). In other words, he will be a just and good shepherd for the people. Who is this righteous branch of David? This is none other than Jesus, the Messiah, the “Son of David” (Matt. 9:27).

It gets worse. The individual bringing the sacrifice would sometimes challenge Hophni and Phineas’s bad behavior. That person would recognize something was amiss and would resist giving the best meat to the priests rather than to the Lord. And what was done in response? The servant of Hophni and Phineas would threaten the person bringing the sacrifice: “No, you must give it now, and if not, I will take it by force” (1 Sam. 2:16). We see that the problem with Hophni and Phinehas was not just sexual abuse but also what we are calling spiritual abuse (the two often go hand in hand). They were shepherds who bullied the sheep; they intimidated them to get what they wanted. They even had servants who helped them do their dirty work.

Here we see a critically important principle: God will hold accountable not only the bad shepherds but also those who protect and enable them. This is a weighty warning to all churches and the elder boards that lead them. Those who prop up bad leaders and turn a blind eye to their abusive behavior will someday have to give an account of their own actions.

The word translated “servant” (diakonos) is particularly intriguing because of the fluidity of its application. While it is often used for household servants (for example, John 2:5, 9), as well as the office of deacon (1 Tim. 3:8, 12), it is also often translated “minister” (for example, 1 Cor. 3:5; Eph. 3:7; 6:21; Col. 1:7), including Paul’s description of his own labors (2 Cor. 3:6; Eph. 3:7; Col. 1:23). The nature of this word suggests that a Christian minister should be characterized by a posture of servanthood. This connection is missed by most modern churches that expect servant-like qualities in their deacons but not in their pastors or elders.

Part of the reason for this expectation is that the English word minister doesn’t make the connection to servanthood obvious (one would have to know Greek). To capture the servant aspect more plainly, pastors would do well to use a different title (at least in their own mind). Rather than something like senior pastor, I suggest something like servant minister. These titles communicate very different aspects of the role.

The minister of Christ’s church is not to be a person who accomplishes goals by manipulation or intimidation or with a demanding spirit. In other words, a spiritually abusive person is disqualified from ministry.

One is hard pressed to come up with two words more opposed to the characteristics of a bully pastor, which is precisely why such pastors should be disqualified from ministry. Bully pastors lack gentleness, compassion, and understanding. They put enormous burdens on the backs of people, are hypercritical, and are hardly ever pleased. Moreover, instead of being humble, abusive pastors are notoriously arrogant, convinced they (and their churches) are truly special. Not all pastors wear their pride on their sleeves. But even if it’s just in their own minds, they genuinely see themselves as above others, which is why they are unwilling to receive criticism or correction. Conveniently for us, Paul combined these two qualifications for ministry in a single verse. He wrote, “An overseer, as God’s administrator, must be . . . not arrogant . . . not a bully” (Titus 1:7 HCSB, emphases mine). It’s almost as if Paul based the qualifications for ministry on Jesus himself. If a person is not gentle and lowly, but instead a bully and arrogant, then he should not be a pastor. Of course, to say a pastor should be gentle is not to say that’s everything he should be. No one is suggesting that pastors are only gentle and nothing else. Sometimes Christian leaders should be bold and courageous, even firm and direct, especially as they contend for the truth in a hostile world (Josh. 1:18; 2 Cor. 10:5–6). The problem is that more and more churches seem to prefer only the latter. If they have a mod...

2). In other words, the hallmark of a bad shepherd is that they are in it for themselves.

Even the church fathers observed this problem of self-gain in ministers. John Chrysostom reminded his readers that if Paul “did more than he was commanded by God and never aimed at any advantage for himself, but only for those under his direction, was always in fear, because he kept in view the magnitude of his responsibility, what will become of us, who often aim at our own advantage?”23

In case after case of spiritual abuse, there is a pattern of self-protection and self-gain by the abusive pastor. It’s not necessarily monetary gain, though sometimes that is the case. In addition to James MacDonald’s bullying tactics, he was accused of excessive spending on himself and his family.

This first negative quality—doing ministry for one’s own gain—leads to the second. If someone is motivated to protect their power and authority, then that naturally leads to being willing to domineer their flocks. Peter uses the same Greek word (katakurieuō) that Jesus used in Mark 10:42, which literally means “to lord it over.”

People don’t expect kindness from their leaders. We might expect them to be confident, focused, resilient, and decisive. And we might not even be surprised if they have a bit of an ego. But we do not expect them to be kind. How very sad.

Seeing all these traits laid out together, we are faced with an inescapable and rather sobering conclusion: many churches have been looking for the wrong kind of leaders. One might even say the forbidden traits in this list are precisely the traits some churches tolerate in their leaders. Instead, we should look for pastors who are humble, kind, gentle servants. Perhaps there is a silver lining as we face the problem of the bully pastor. With the enormous debris field of broken relationships plainly evident across our churches, let us hope we will finally realize that a change in trajectory is desperately needed.

In story after story of abuse, the same tragic series of events play out. The abusive pastor engages in destructive behavior for years until someone finally has the courage to speak up. But even then, most churches do nothing. (And as we shall see in the next chapter, some churches attack the one speaking up.) Even if the church does something, it’s often a half-hearted, inadequate response. When the rare church finally removes a pastor for abuse, that just leads to the next questions: Why did it take you so long to act? Why did you tolerate this behavior for twenty-five years?

In short, abusive pastors leave a “trail of dead bodies” behind them.5 That’s what monsters do. So why don’t churches see the trail of dead bodies? Why don’t they connect the dots? As we shall see, the problem isn’t just a single, abusive pastor. Sometimes the problem is a church culture that enables (knowingly or unknowingly) the abuse.6 Or, as Oakley and Kinmond observed, “We [tend to] focus on the bad apple and what is wrong with it, rather than looking at the barrel in which it is kept.”7 In this chapter, we will look at the barrel.

The first reason some churches don’t see the dead bodies is because those bodies have been hidden. The abusive pastor has buried them in the backyard, so to speak, and the inadequate accountability structure of the church means it is unable to see what is happening (and sometimes doesn’t want to see what’s happening).

First, many victims of abusive pastors are silenced or forced to leave. In story after story of spiritual abuse, the recipients of that abuse are isolated and driven out of that ministry. People don’t see the overall pattern because the victims of abuse don’t speak out for fear of reprisal. They just leave, and the abusive pastor remains. And if the abusive pastor remains, then he gets to control the narrative. As we shall see in the next chapter, the victims are sometimes blamed for the whole affair. They are the problem, not the abusive pastor.

Wade Mullen observed, “Many victims have found that their report of abuse to an organization was handled by a dedicated response team or kept within a small group of board members instead of shared with the entire board.”8

The reason minimizations like this are so effective is that they are partly true. Every ministry has some conflict. We live in a fallen world where clashes are part of any church.

The relational debris field of an abusive pastor is different not only in volume of conflicts but also the depth of those conflicts. Often the lives in his wake are genuinely destroyed; many leave the ministry and others abandon the Christian faith altogether. Also, abusive pastors often have unresolved conflict. They are typically estranged from many of the people they used to work with.