Part 11 - Surrounded by Toxin

The following portion of my journey is something that I had no idea I would write and haven’t shared before because I was still afraid. It’s about the church we left last year. It’s time for me to stop being in total denial about that church and call a spade a spade. If you know me, you’ve figured out that Parts 1-10 were written in the summer of 2012. I waited an entire year before I was ready and felt safe enough to publish them to the blog. This post is new, written this month. I still didn’t feel safe about this subject until recently, and even then, this post and the next one make me just as nervous as the others did, even though the abuse was not as prolonged and wasn’t as severe.

I would like to add some reminders to the members of this church before they go on reading. Again, this is where bad reactions come in. If you feel like I shouldn’t have shared this publicly, trust me, I thought I shouldn’t either. Chances are, I thought about this much longer than you. However, what I am about to share is facts. If you don’t like the facts, do something to change the church’s environment. I don’t like the phrase “airing dirty laundry,” but I think it sums up how some will feel about me sharing this. If you feel like I am airing someone’s dirty laundry, instead of feeling negatively towards me for it, perhaps you should think about the following instead: Feel negatively towards the people who made the laundry dirty. This is my story. I shouldn’t be required to remain silent about things that have influenced my life. Also, keep in mind that it is not my job to reconcile with abusers. It is their job to change and I’m not responsible for them. I’m done going above and beyond for people who know they have been hurtful and haven’t made any attempts to meet me halfway. One more thing. This crushed me a lot more than it did you. I lived this. These pastors and this congregation were dear friends to me. I recognize that they had and still have good intentions throughout my years at Redeemer Evangelical Free Church, but good intentions amount to squat when it comes to abusers.

I started going to this church fresh out of high school as a Bible school student. I loved how healthy the church seemed to me. Looking back, that is highly questionable, considering my own condition. It felt healthy compared to the cults I had just traveled away from! There are good things about this church, and compared to what I knew, man that church is alive and kickin’! Having not known what spiritual abuse was as a college freshman, I wouldn’t have been able to catch the red flags like I can now. I also wondered for a while if it was just me—if all these religious organizations I had been a part of could be so wrong. It eventually made sense to me that I, being a toxic person, had put myself into toxic environments because health bothered me. My communities were reflective of who I was.

Soon before I started taking control back and setting boundaries in my life, this church become more than I could emotionally deal with. I felt frozen, utterly frozen, when I walked through the doors. I was grateful to have a new baby that I could take out of the service at any whim, and I often spent entire services outside of the sanctuary simply because my heart was hurting too much. Speaking of having a baby, I was sick of the breastfeeding criticism I faced from certain people at the church. Multiple people at Redeemer have said publicly that it is immodest and compared breastfeeding to urinating or defecating—“natural, but so is urinating, so please do it behind closed doors.” While the overall congregation was probably fine with it, a select few made me highly uncomfortable as a new mother, so that even if I did want to sit in the service, I was often hiding in a room that appears to be a former closet that was converted into a place for mothers to breastfeed. I found it extremely hot sitting in there on that little loveseat, with a cinder block wall a few feet from my face. To spruce it up, someone had added a picture of Jesus welcoming the little children for me to stare at while I hid the way God created my child to eat from his church. I missed many a sermon because no audio or video of the service is provided in that tiny space.

When the service was over, I couldn’t wait to leave, and upon arriving home, I was completely sapped and often needed to sleep the afternoon away to recover from the feelings I was burying. I didn’t know it, but I was being triggered. I had grown up being abused in a pew, and, much like a soldier could be triggered by the sound of fireworks after a dangerous deployment, being in that environment again set me off. Not going wasn’t an option to me, as that was accompanied by a heavy weight of guilt and shame. And tears. Lots, and lots of tears.

My own worldview was rapidly changing, and I began to understand that certain people there loved to bash people like me. It had (wrongly) never bothered me before because I was yet to move outside of their fences of acceptable opinions and feelings. But as my list of disagreements with the general congregation grew longer and longer, I began to feel like I could no longer use my voice without fearing the backlash. My Facebook posts got comments about how I was focusing too much on love (and how worldly that apparently is) and when someone told me I was turning to the devil (for saying the American church needed to show love to homosexuals better), instead of being called out, his comment got supporting likes from a few church members. Then I would be back in the pew with the same people the next week, who never said anything to me in person about their or my behavior on social media. It made me wonder if they knew it was me they were talking to, a human being, not a keyboard or a computer monitor or a phone. When I tried to set boundaries with one woman, she protested that she was concerned for the people who read my posts. Overall, whenever I used my voice on social media, the shaming caused me to never dare use it when I went in to the church fellowship.

The church’s attitude towards women was positive on the surface, but the underlying sexism eventually became very obvious to my free self. The senior pastor recently (a year after I left) gave a sermon on the role of women in the church, stating that women cannot challenge men in an upfront way, like a man could challenge a man, because men have fragile masculinity. He openly said that he, like all men, cannot handle it when a woman boldly approaches them with a disagreement. It’s somehow hurtful to them and crushes them. I asked my husband after listening to the sermon if he felt that way when I woman approaches him and he said no. I think that means my husband must be female. But in all seriousness, if that were true, I think the more important issue there is that I am not responsible to maintain someone else’s weakness, nor am I required to be silent when something important needs to be said. He also explained that the church let women teach in Sunday School, but they were not permitted to speak from the pulpit because, in the SS context, the woman can be quickly corrected by a man if she’s wrong, whereas in a sermon, they don’t want anyone calling out the speaker during the service. Is it just me, or does that kind of imply that all women are less likely to speak truth than all men? I also do not believe that it makes sense to the culture of Jesus’ day, so it doesn’t seem to be the intent of the original manuscripts. The worst part for me, though, was the opening to the sermon. The prayer, led by the youth pastor, was full of phrases like, “There are a number of passages of your word that are challenging to us. And God I know that there are some of us, even in this midst of a family who want to refuse that these words even exist from Paul. Or perhaps we are squeamish…And I pray that your Spirit would lay on our heart a spirit of submission. I pray that each of us today would not hear what we want to hear, but hear what you want to say. Lord not every passage is easy…and so we ask for open ears and open hearts…” implying that people who disagreed only disagreed because, though they knew God was teaching something else, they were squeamish and couldn’t swallow it, so they went ahead and made up their own theology outside of God’s teaching. Then the senior pastor came out wearing soldier’s gear and staged this little introduction with the message, “Don’t shoot the messenger!” Then he went on to pepper the sermon with phrases like, “God’s word is absolutely clear on this.” He wouldn’t say it was just his interpretation and he did not encourage people to go to other resources and see for themselves. My personal opinion is that pastors are not God’s messengers and need to present their interpretations as their own, not God’s. Anything more is spiritual abuse. When I finished listening, I was glad that someone had finally and blatantly articulated all underlying the sexism I had felt under the surface, as well as the attitude of bullying towards Christians with different beliefs. 

At the end of the day, especially when I added my son and daughter into the equation, my husband and I agreed that it was best to leave. But what I’ve described here was only the tip of the iceberg of hurt. More abuse was occurring behind the scenes, in counseling sessions with the senior pastor, as I sorted through the abuse I received from the hands of my parents.
To be continued…