The Demons of Miscommunication

a parable of power and the parachurch

“The long, painful history of the church is the history of people ever and again tempted to choose power over love, control over the cross, being a leader over being led. Those who resisted this temptation to the end and thereby give us hope are the true saints.”

- Henri Nouwen

Note: Doug and Linda’s are not original names; neither is Gather the actual name of the organization. However, I chose to name the leaders above Doug and Linda, along with the so-called “counselors” who worked for the organization. Even though Doug and Linda were abusive leaders, these people above them furthered and empowered their abusive habits. So I chose to name them.

+ + +

“Wow! Jim can do dishes? Amazing!” Linda whipped out her digital camera and started snapping photos, while Jim was in the kitchen continuing to exclaim in mock amazement about my husband’s domestic abilities.

“How is ___ doing?” I inquired after one of the new team members in Yangon, desperate to redirect the woman from her catty observations about men and housework.

“Oh, ___ is so-so,” Linda’s husband, Doug, jumped in. He readily went on from there to illuminate ___’s weaknesses as a team member. I’d only met this man five minutes ago and he was already ragging on the people who worked under him? Trying to change the subject again was looking increasingly risky.

It was December 2013. Jim and I were newly married and making plans to return to Myanmar with Jim’s organization, which I’ll call Gather. Doug and Linda were Gather’s regional team leaders, and I was to be part of their team once I was formally accepted into the organization. Jim had already been a part of the organization for several years, but I was new on the scene. Doug and Linda had expressed affection for Jim and insisted on making a trip out to meet me. It was supposed to be a fun weekend. Chris and Shelly, another young couple also headed to Myanmar, joined us, and I’d planned and prepared for the six of us to have a relaxing weekend, thinking this was going to be a fun intro to my future co-workers. But I’d only been in Doug and Linda’s presence for ten minutes, and I was already having misgivings about a future with them as my leaders.

If I have to work for these people and try to adjust to life in a new culture, I will be utterly miserable, I thought to myself.

+ + +

Jim had joined Gather in 2009, after spending time in Myanmar under the auspices of a handful of other aid and Christian service groups. At the time, Gather didn’t have anyone in Myanmar, and Jim was the one who helped them get there. Doug and Linda had been a part of Gather already for several years and because of their age and tenure in ministry (Doug had formerly been an associate pastor at a mega church in the US), they were given a higher level leadership role within Gather.

Gather’ model for missions work was centered on the (supposedly) bottom up leadership notion of “team.” Teams consisted of two or more units (a unit was either a single person or a married couple), and if there were not two units, approval to set up in a new location was usually denied. While Jim was single, he had been on a team with other single guys, and they all lived together in Western Myanmar. Doug and Linda were officially their team leaders, but lived in a different city, one hour’s flight from the actual team, and rarely saw Jim .

Jim would see Doug and Linda whenever he passed through town on a business trip or if Gather held a mandatory company conference, but in general, they were not a significant part of his life, nor did their presence in Yangon serve to help Jim in his work in Western Myanmar. They had come to visit him there once, but only stayed for a night before flying home, citing the absence of a decent hotel as their reason for a short stay. Doug and Linda frequently would call themselves “obedient wimps.” Despite their self-professed wimpiness, they were not only the leaders of a team that lived nowhere near them, but Gather had also made Doug the area leader for teams in surrounding countries. When Jim, who had already lived in Myanmar for several years, helped Doug and Linda get situated in the country, they automatically became his leaders, despite the fact that they had no experience living there, and almost no knowledge of the language or culture.

Fast forward a few years, and now Jim and I were married and planning to return to Myanmar. I needed to be officially accepted to Gather on my own merits (a surprisingly egalitarian requirement, considering the misogynistic company culture I was about to encounter), and Doug and Linda wanted to meet me and “bond with” me before I made the big move overseas.

+ + +

Much of the weekend was spent listening to Doug monologue about his role as team leader. “It’s a new day in Myanmar!” he kept saying, insisting that everything had changed in the past year and that we were not equipped to cope with it on our own as a newly married couple. He continually addressed Chris and Shelly, who were set to move to Myanmar within a month, telling them they didn’t know a thing about the new Myanmar, that things had changed so much. (This, despite the fact that Chris had already lived in Myanmar for about 5 years.)

In between Doug’s monologues, Doug and Linda would not infrequently exchange harsh words with one another, and on occasion turn back to us brightly, saying, “marriage is not supposed to make you happy, it’s supposed to make you holy!” as if holiness and petty marital spats were meant to be peas in a pod. Doug was eager to remind us that he and Linda had been married for 38 years; he and Linda insisted that if both of us couples were not situated near to them for marital guidance when we settled in Myanmar, things could go very poorly for us. He casually assured us that there was no way he would give any of us permission for us to live far from his home in Yangon until he’d had time in proximity to be convinced of our maturity as a couple.

Suddenly, we all felt alarmed. Doug was basically telling us that we couldn’t go back to the community where Jim had already worked for several years. This made no sense. For one thing, Jim had lived in Myanmar since 2006, and he was fluent in two of the main languages spoken in Myanmar, while Doug and Linda’s language proficiency, even after a three year span, was squarely in the Beginner category. For another, Doug and Linda spent a good deal of their time traveling outside of Myanmar. In the past year, they had only been in Myanmar for a total of 12 weeks (much of their time was spent making fundraising trips to the US, or traveling to other parts of SE Asia and overseeing missionaries in other places).

We’d heard repeatedly from many people on their team that they were notoriously lax about visiting and looking after the other missionaries who worked under them. Their care for their teammates was largely contingent on everyone coming to their house. One couple lived in a building (one block away) that didn’t have an elevator; Linda visited them once, and never returned; citing the long walk up the stairs as too much of a hindrance. One time, while we were still in the U.S., Doug contacted us from Yangon to ask for the cell phone number of one of his team members. There had been an life-threatening emergency involving civil unrest, but he had no contact information for the person under his leadership, (which, as Doug often liked to remind us was a shepherding style of leadership).

“The fact is,” Doug insisted, looking at Jim and Chris “You don’t really know how to take care of your wives. You need to be close to us so that we can help you. We don’t trust you yet. There is no way we will permit you to live elsewhere until you’ve spent a year close to us and we can be assured of your maturity.”

We were troubled by these heavy-handed threats. Not only did Doug and Linda seem ill-equipped to be of any practical help to us should we need it, but they seemed completely disinterested in actually engaging with us in order to ascertain our maturity, both of them preferring to monologue about how it’s impossible to trust someone you have just met. Doug made it clear several times that he didn’t trust me or the other young wife, Shelly; it did not look like he or Linda had any future plans to build trust either. During their three-day stay in my home, they did not ask me a single question about myself or about my recent visit to Myanmar. During our breaks between speeches from Doug, Linda eagerly showed me photos of her latest trip to Disneyland, and her Mickey Mouse manicure.

Shelly had been in tears multiple times after Doug declared he didn’t trust her and would not give permission for her to live in Western Myanmar (Western Myanmar was where she and her husband Chris intended to move, and Chris, like Jim had spent the past several years living there). Doug simply sat and looked at Shelly as she wept, shaking his head and telling her that he could see she “was being really emotional right now.” When we protested that he was being callous toward Shelly, Doug became angry and hurt. He told us he was “flabbergasted” that everyone was taking his good intentions so poorly, and he made a point of reminding us that he had “counseled hundreds of people throughout his ministry career.”

So we backed off and kept letting him monologue and elicit tears and frustration from the other people in our living room. After a day and a half of this, Jim decided to be more forthright in expressing our concerns. Jim told him we didn’t feel comfortable with him saying that our whole future would hinge on first spending a year living close to him in order to “prove” ourselves, especially when Jim had already spent so many years in Western Myanmar. When Jim said these things aloud, Doug was dismissive and brushed Jim off. “It’s just that I am like a father to you all,” he said. “You’re like my kids, and I want to make sure you are okay.” Doug refused to discuss it further.

His poor kids, I thought grimly. The prospect of Christian service work seemed complicated enough without voluntarily taking on an extra abusive parent in the meantime. When Jim tried to bring it up again, insisting that we found Doug’s requirements for us troubling and nonsensical. Doug shut down the conversation. Not unlike a domineering father, Doug refused to concede that we had any skills or competency to offer, insisted that he knew best, and reiterated his main concern, that our new marriages would suffer without his close supervision. He repeated his favorite examples of how much the country had changed in the past year, and how he knew it was going to throw us all for a loop; his primary example being that there were several huge new foreign-made car dealerships in the city of Yangon.

“You will get to Myanmar,” Linda assured us emphatically, like a mother comforting a grounded schoolkid. “The precious people of Myanmar need you. Myanmar needs you.”

Actually, I’m pretty sure that Myanmar is doing just fine without us, I thought, but I nodded and smiled instead, feeling that I had to start faking a lot of things if I was to get along with these people.

“And besides,” Linda added, “we need to get the gospel out to everyone so that we can all get to heaven sooner!”

I was becoming certain of this: these people sure seemed to like being in charge more than they liked Jesus or the country of Myanmar.

Beyond that, I only had questions. Why had Gather put such people in charge of anything or anyone? Why would they insist on forcing Jim to relocate to a new city with no regard to the fact that he was quite capable of functioning in Western Myanmar? Was appeasing these people the price we would have to pay in order to return to Myanmar? Was it worth it?

+ + +

A few days later, Jim and I flew to Gather for my first orientation. This orientation was, coincidentally, right after our horrible weekend with Doug and Linda, and we were naively optimistic. We’d planned to meet up with some folks there to ask more questions and to get some help regarding Doug and Linda. We felt certain that this was all a misunderstanding, that if people at the head office knew what Doug had been saying to us, they would help mediate the situation somehow.

Because Doug had refused to listen to us when we confronted him in person during our weekend together, we determined that the next sensible step was to get help from the people above him. I had never been to Gather before, but Jim was confident based on his experience that Gather was equipped to help sort things out with Doug so we could move forward. And at first, it looked that way.

We were told that Gather’s Member Care and counseling department was undergoing a rebranding; they were going to transition to being called “Member Development.” (This was a signal as to how our conflict was about to be handled.) We sat down with a female counselor who had been assigned to us, and she listened intently. We had a phone call with the regional leader, Alvin Hull, who was warm and supportive and promised to help us navigate the conflict and our concerns about Doug’s apparent desire for control.

But when Doug got word that we had asked others for advice, he was furious. He was outraged, insisting that this was the first he had heard of this problem, and that we had not adequately confronted him in person. “You are spreading the leaven of rebellion,” he wrote to us privately, adding that if we continued to push back in this way, there would be no room for us within the organization — words that proved to be prophetic.

He told us in no uncertain terms that we were disobeying the Biblical conflict resolution principles in Matthew 18. He insisted that we had gone over his head, and he was adamant that this was the first time he had heard that we had a difference of opinion. He told us and everyone else that we were gossiping about him, that we had failed to “be Matthew 18 about this.” His superiors, who had previously agreed to help mediate, changed their tune when they saw Doug’s anger. They assumed Doug to be right — that we had gone above his head by not first confronting him — and they backed away from communicating with us, insisting that if we sent any more emails asking them for help, they would not even read them. They cited the organization’s bottom-up values of letting individual team leaders make their own decisions.

The counselor we’d been previously assigned was no longer allowed to communicate with us and cut off contact. It also turns out that our counselor was required to report the content of our sessions to Alvin and to Doug, and she was expected to answer any questions he had regarding our counseling with her. There was no confidentiality at all. Which is why her position was in jeopardy when Doug discovered she’d been talking to us. I didn’t know at the time that this violates all sorts of counseling ethics principles: because the counselor was also under the employment of the mission agency, and not an independent contractor, the conflict of interest forced her to report unethically to her superiors or risk losing her job. (I’ve learned, the more I talk to other people who have had conflicts within their organization, that this dynamic is the norm, rather than the exception in a lot of parachurch organizations.)

Doug insisted that we only talk to him. He made it clear that we were forbidden to discuss our concerns with anyone else in the organization, and that if we did so, it would only prolong the time until our return to Myanmar, as the final permission for us to return rested in his hands. This went on for months, via email discussion. We repeatedly asked him and his superiors if we could have some mediation; we even offered to fly to meet up with him somewhere so that we could have the mediation in person. Doug refused.

“If I don’t think we need mediation, then we don’t need it,” he insisted. “I will be our mediator,” he added sincerely, failing to recognize the irony of such an assertion.

Back and forth the conversation went for many months. There were pages, and pages of email, most of it written by Doug. He repeatedly accused us of being divisive, but he took no personal responsibility for our conflict, instead citing “the demons of miscommunication” for foiling our efforts to reconcile. The initial conflict we had with Doug had been more of a “he said, she said” scenario, but I began to feel sure the paper trail of ugly insults from Doug would guarantee us help from superiors eventually; once enough evidence had accumulated, I figured someone would be willing to help us.

+ + +

I’d been accepted as a member of the organization after attending the initial orientation session back in December. It was now September 2014, close to a year after our original visit with Doug and Linda. We were at home in Washington state, working part-time and gradually raising more funds for our eventual return to Myanmar. But it was hard to get excited about going back. Whenever I gave thought to the particulars of the life I was about to start in SE Asia, I felt sick to my stomach. Hardly anyone knew what was going on under the surface, largely because it felt too petty and complicated, and also because we’d been ordered to stay silent. Despite all this, and despite the fact that we were both working and weren’t outright asking new people to support our work, within a few months, we had sufficient funds raised. We contacted Doug and the administrative offices at Gather to let them know.

“Hooray! You should start looking at plane tickets!” was the finance chair’s cheerful reply.

Doug hit “reply all” shortly thereafter, writing “Do not buy tickets at this time. You have not met all of my requirements for you yet. You have to go through counseling first.” We were disheartened by this, but not wholly surprised. We planned to visit the Gather office to attend a final training session before we could officially leave anyway. We figured that while we were there, we would sort things out with counselors and determine out what we needed to do in order to please Doug. We’d be on our way before long, we reasoned.

I tried to play it calm, but I was an anxious mess, and my physical responses to the prolonged conflict had been building and building. I couldn’t bear to open my email inbox anymore because I was so stressed by the frequency of angry and insulting emails from Doug. I started having Jim check my email for me. I lost my appetite for weeks on end, and each morning when I woke, my body felt crushed by stress, my heart rate soaring. Each morning when I woke, I envied my unconscious, sleeping self of moments before; I longed for night to fall so I could sleep again and be free from the anxiety. I worried about what life in Myanmar would be like if I had to work under such an egomaniac. It was unbearable to have our future resting in the hands of someone who gave so much credit to the “demons of miscommunication.”

We reached the head office for my final pre-field training, and then spent all of our spare hours in the counseling sessions that Doug had mandated. Jim printed out the past year of email exchanges with Doug for the benefit of our counselors, highlighting the crucial parts. It amounted to over fifty pages, single-spaced, most of which was written by Doug.

“This,” said the lead counselor, dangling the sheaf of papers as we sat in her office, “this is pretty bad.” Her name was Deb. She was flanked by two other counselors from the organization who had also come to add their wisdom to this unresolvable conflict. They nodded in unison.

I sighed in relief — they understood — they’d read all the emails and realized that we needed help, that we needed some sort of mediated discussion. They are going to help us sort this out, I thought. In truth, I was just beginning my initiation into the ways spiritual language, a demeanor of gentleness, and false promises of help are employed as a means of protecting leaders within the parachurch hierarchy.

In between our hours of mandatory “counseling” sessions, we attended seminars on different organizational practices. One of these addresses protecting children from sexual abuse. As I listened to the speaker praise Gather’s internal reporting hierarchy and its effectiveness, I could not bring myself to take any notes. What was the point? Preventing abuse seemed like such a meaningless discussion, given the way I’d seen the organizational leadership behave in the midst of a conflict. If these people would not listen to the concerns of an adult with field experience, why would they hear a child? I started to wonder if staying with this organization would simply be a huge mistake. The more hours we spent in our mandatory counseling meetings trying to discuss our conflict with Doug, the more my faith in the organization plummeted. Everyone acted warm and sympathetic, but there was no deeper action taking place, unless it was to correct my tone, or my attitude in regard to Doug. I was starting to believe that, despite all their stated values, Gather had no integrity whatsoever.

The thought of leaving and starting over, potentially incurring the same issues elsewhere — it was too exhausting to think about. But the thought of starting a life and raising children within such a twisted system of authority troubled me. If I were to have children and work for this sort of organization, what might happen to them? If they won’t listen to me, why would they ever listen to a child in need? If I don’t even have kids yet and I’m thinking about how to protect them from the people in charge, should I even be here? I wondered. I couldn’t help but believe that the stress I was currently storing inside of my body would be enough to overflow and hurt a nuclear family over time, that to live pushed around like this for years would destroy me and those around me in a dozen different ways.

The next day, we continued with our mandatory counseling sessions. I turned to the group of counselers and expressed the fact that I felt a great deal of anxiety about working under Doug and Linda, how frustrating it was that these people had gone out of their way to tell me that they didn’t trust me, how I was seen as incompetent until proven otherwise. At the end, I surprised myself and burst into tears, all the bottled up frustration of the past year spilling out.

“I think,” said the lead counselor, looking at me, “I think that you are very sensitive to spiritual warfare. I think this is part of the issue at hand.” I looked at her through my tears. “I think you should read this book,” she continued, naming a title, and telling me that it would be very helpful for me in nurturing my sensitive spirit as I navigated the spiritual minefield of life overseas. I nodded and wrote down the title. I wanted her insight to feel comforting, but it didn’t.

Up until that point, I’d thought that Doug’s tendency to attribute the conflict to the demonic would have been a subject worth more serious discussion with the Gather leadership and counselors. But the counselors didn’t seem to see it as a red flag at all — they supported the same idea by trying to put me and Doug on the same team, as if our true battle in all of this was against the invisible forces of evil, rather than against the volatility of a fragile man’s ego.

In the years since, I’ve noticed this rush to blame the devil/demons is a common trend in Christian cross-cultural ministry. Folks will write ministry newsletters about the obstacles they’re facing, how no one showed up to their Bible study, because of illness or work, etc, concluding on behalf of their readers that these troubles are due to the work of Satan, rather than engaging in further introspection as to why those obstacles might have arisen.

Doug and Linda would continually say similar things in their correspondence, things like: “God wants you in Myanmar! But Satan doesn’t, and Satan is trying to stop it. This is what this is all about. This trouble we’re having is because the devil doesn’t want the gospel to go out to the world!”

The trouble is, I don’t think that Doug and Linda were lying when they said this — I think they genuinely believed this to be true, that the only way Good folks like them could struggle to resolve a conflict with Good folks like me and Jim was due to the hand of Satan. The net result was that whenever we tried to bring up specific concerns about their behavior, they were utterly deaf to such critique, because their identity as Christian service workers depended on the notion that they were Good people. They weren’t the type of people to behave as bullies, or to have conflicts: Satan was simply poisoning things for all of us. (In the greatest irony of all, many missionaries such as Doug and Linda be-little the beliefs of animistic people groups who fear and give credit to the spirits for relational problems. And yet here they were, except that they were doing it to solidify power, not as an act of reverence or religious devotion.)

I agreed to look up the book on spiritual oppression. But I had more concerns. “I’m truly concerned that if I allow myself to work under this man, I will end up becoming like him myself,” I confessed to the counselors, starting to cry again. Their responses were of visceral shock.

“Oh no!” one of them insisted. “You would never become like this,” she said, gesturing to the stack of Doug’s emails as if it was a dirty diaper. I was gratified at this subtle admission that Doug’s behavior was, indeed, repellant. But it was a small comfort. I had watched the behavior of Doug’s team members from afar, and I could see that his poor leadership trickled down into their lives, that it did not bring out the best in others. It was not hard to see that the poison of his prideful leadership spilled out into the ways his underlings treated Myanmar people. Thinking of a future under such leadership, of living in the midst of group dynamics influenced by such leadership, made me ill, and the counselors’ assurances that I was impervious to it were meaningless to me. The leaders you allow into your life will change you, for better or for worse.

The lead counselor, Deb, continued to talk, trying to be indirect in her criticism (probably so as to keep her job), but affirming the fact that Doug was, in her words, “a bit of a bully.” She went on to admit that there wasn’t much to be done about that. The important thing was to calm him down and help him feel better, she said. We ought to be really careful of his feelings, she said. At this the other two counselors nodded emphatically. If we could find ways to build Doug up as a leader, this would help things along.

Deb told us that she would be in touch with Doug and would urge him to give us permission to move to Myanmar. In the meantime, she said, I ought to write him an apology email for hurting his feelings. We had started this whole thing badly, she said, by telling Doug that we didn’t like his paternalistic behavior. And since I was the newest player on the scene, since these problems hadn’t cropped up while Jim was single, I was the one who needed to make the apology. Doug’s hurt had been caused by me. The proper thing would be for me to apologize. From there, the counselor said, we could see how things unfolded, and wait for Doug to soften enough to give us permission to leave.

By this point, I’d talked through the issue so many times with so many people who had promised they would help me that I was too numb and weary to put up a fight. If an apology from me was what it would take to quell the storm and get the green light to go to Myanmar, I could suck it up and do it. We hadn’t slogged through all of this mess for me to end things by being too stubborn to apologize, I figured.

I crafted the sincerest apology I could muster. I didn’t apologize for my convictions about Doug’s pride and paternalistic habits, but I expressed regret for the effect I had had in presenting them. I emailed them my apology. Jim and I called them the next day to follow up on the email.

“We were so THRILLED to get your apology!” Linda trilled over the phone. I cringed. “Thrilled” and “apology” were not words that belonged in the same sentence. Suddenly, I felt dirty.

“This is real progress!” Doug said approvingly, “I think things are really moving forward,” he added. We exchanged a few pleasantries, and then hung up.

+ + +

We waited, and heard nothing more from Doug regarding our status on the team. It had been several months since we had sufficient funds raised to go, and it had been weeks since we’d issued the required apologies. We waited, but we were frustrated. We were living in limbo, staying in a friend’s bonus room with no housing of our own. We had been ready to go for so long by now, and there was nothing more we could do to prepare for Myanmar; the only thing we awaited was Doug’s favor. Though how we were supposed to earn it beyond getting all the counseling he demanded, and making the requisite apologies, was anyone’s guess. We certainly were guessing, every day, wondering how many more months we could sit around like this.

We heard from another team member not long after the apology phone call. “He seems happier now that he heard your apology,” they said. “But he told us that he really isn’t confident yet that Breanna is truly submissive. He said if he receives more personal communication from her over time, he’ll be reassured about her willingness to respect his authority.” This information was passed along matter-of-factly, as if it was the most normal thing in the world for a man in a leadership position to request a personal communiqués for an indefinite period, from a woman married to one of his team members.

It was becoming clear that Doug was ready to step confidently into unethical territory, and when we brought this up with Deb, the lead counselor, she didn’t seem to feel that this was a significant problem; it was just part of helping Doug feel that we respected his leadership. Over the months of our conflict, Doug habitually described his leadership style depending on his behavior. At one time, he would declare he was a “fatherlike, pastoral leader.” At other times, he would insist that he was an intrepid, “Lion-like leader.” It all depended upon the behaviors he wanted to sanctify in the given moment. Those on his team seemed to think of it as normal and “godly” behavior and would advocate for him. Even at his worst, he deserved the benefit of the doubt, and it was the duty of team members to put their efforts toward helping to stabilize his ego. Paternalism was just his leadership style, some people tried to tell me. But all I could see was that this man wanted the sort of loyalty no healthy person should demand.

I was finished. I was not only fed up by being pushed around, but I was physically drained from the strain of the anxiety the conflict was causing me. I was done with being blamed for this conflict. There was no way for us to thrive in our work if we had to spend so much of our spare time placating a twisted and fragile ego. His indirect request for personal correspondence was like being shown an open door into a better world, a world where men would not demand these things from women like me, simply because they could, simply because they had the backing of a Christian ministry organization that operated like an old boy’s club.

We decided to formally resign from the organization. At the time of our resignation, I wrote a friend,

“I’ve come to realize that if I were to continue [with this group], the personal cost would be so high, it probably wouldn’t be worth going at all. There will be enough challenges in our path without having to deal with a leader who loves his plans more than he loves people. …it fills me with sorrow to think of what kind of person I would become if I stayed under that kind of leadership.”

When we sent our resignation to Doug and Linda, we didn’t hear any kind of reply to the letter until several months later. They did, however, upon reading our resignation, immediately delete us as their Facebook friends.

+ + +

Back in December 2013, when Jim and I first visited the organization’s head office together, we’d had the chance to meet Gather’s president, Steve. He happened to be the son of a famous missionary: his father’s story was hailed far and wide for effective contextualization of the gospel story. At the time, I had chatted with him about business models and organizational structure; Steve had told me how he was an “architect” style of leader, he spoke of his love for facilitating healthy organizational structure.

I remembered this as we resigned. Part of me just wanted to get the heck out and not have to send another email regarding abusive Christian leadership. But another part of me felt obligated to practice some due diligence, thinking perhaps Steve would want to be aware of the dysfunction. In our resignation letter, I tried to describe the issues we’d experienced in terms of organizational structure, rather than making a list of grievances regarding the specifics of the conflict. We urged him to consider implementing a review process that would allow people at the bottom of the organization’s hierarchy to request help from outside:

“In our experience, and in the experience of those still on the team, Regional and Member Development have dealt with our requests for help by telling us to “go back to him on your own and try one more time,” until we look back and see that we’ve been sent back alone to try many times.… We’d like to suggest that Regional and Member Development’s repeated insistence on sending those seeking help back to their abuser without an intermediary nullifies the accountability structure for which an organization like Gather is meant to exist.

Most organizations of this size have a whistleblower policy which allows people who are being hurt to seek help. We know that people have been hurt, and that some of them have been silenced. …in an organization with 2,000+ members, it’s not wise to do away with accountability based on the assumption that the leadership is good. It’s also not at all helpful to continually force team members to address issues with team leaders who will not listen to them. This only perpetuates the cycle of abuse, and we saw this taking place in our own experience.”

We continued, saying that we felt a great disparity between the expressed core values of the organization, and the way the leader in question was acting. “From what little we know of you, we thought you would want to know about the disparity, so that if it is a systemic problem, it can be remedied and people can be protected,” we wrote.

A few weeks later, we received a brief reply from Steve, thanking us for our email, and responding to our concerns by saying only this: “in situations such as these, there is a multiplicity of perspectives at work.”

+ + +

When we resigned, someone told us, “Oh, but Doug was literally just about to give you permission to come to Myanmar!”

If this is true, then we had a close call. We might have stuck with the organization and gone ahead under Doug’s leadership anyway, because it would have felt like too much work to change gears and leave. That is the power of an abusive leader in an abusive system — the emotional, physical, and spiritual fatigue are so great that it’s hard to imagine being able to muster the energy to walk out the door, even if the door is already open, even if there are brighter and better options available.

About ten months after our departure from the organization, we received a letter from Alvin, one of Doug’s superiors who had initially promised to help and had coached us through our early confrontation with Doug. When Doug got wind of this and was angry, Alvin had backed away and told us that we could no longer be in touch (it was all part of the organization’s bottom-up strategy: let team leaders have autonomy rather than being dictated to by people above).

“You need to deal with this on your own now,” Alvin had insisted at the time, insinuating that we had wronged everyone by asking for help and mediation. When we resigned in 2014, we’d sent Alvin Hull, and his co-leader John Fain, a copy of our resignation letter. Now, nearly a year later, he wrote back for the first time, telling us that he thought it would be best for us to reach out to Doug. We ought to seek reconciliation with him after all that Doug had gone through because of the conflict, and all the pain he had suffered because of it. “He is still grieving,” Alvin wrote to us.

+ + +

After the dust of our resignation and departure settled, we sent an email to everyone who financially supported us; we told them that we would not be continuing with Gather, and that we would be changing agencies. For weeks after this, we were shocked at how many people had read between the lines and weren’t surprised. So many people simply nodded and said, “yeah, this sort of thing happened to me, too.” The more I heard, the more I realized that our story was not an anomaly. It seemed that abusive leadership was Christendom’s best-kept secret, a secret that popped out into the open on occasion, only when someone got bold enough to say something aloud. The solidarity was comforting, but the greater reality was incredibly disconcerting.

After leaving Gather, Jim and I started reading a book called “The Subtle Power of Spiritual Abuse”. At first, I could hardly read it without being overwhelmed by symptoms of anxiety, the scenarios in the book were so similar to the things we’d been experiencing over the past year. Not long into reading it, we began to feel more confident that what we had been experiencing was not a mere difference of opinion or “multiplicity of perspectives” — it was abuse. It was abuse from Doug because of his unrestrained desire for power and praise, and his unaddressed personality issues. It was abuse from the organization for having no system in place to manage a person like Doug. It was organizational abuse (not to mention flagrant dishonesty) to employ people as “counselors” who were actually forced to be snitches. It was further abuse to wrap the abuse up in spiritual language, as if spiritualizing things would make the problems go away.

Diane Langberg, a Christian therapist, writes extensively about abuse within Christian organizations. In one of her books, she discusses narcissism within church leadership, and the effects it can have on a group. One of the hallmarks of clinical narcissism is a preoccupation with ideas of grandeur, an overweening urge to focus on one’s own greatness and accomplishments and seeking the praise of others. Even though not everyone fits the definition of a clinical narcissist, we all exist on a spectrum of narcissism; many of us have deep seeded longings for greatness and unchecked admiration. Langberg, in her discussion of narcissism, levels the playing field, saying, “We must recognize that the seed of such things is in all of us. Not recognizing that is part of what makes us vulnerable to narcissistic leaders. We have longings for our greatness that are ultimately not longings for our own greatness — though we are easily seduced to that end.”[1]

Here, according to Langberg, is a scenario that is ripe for fostering the growth of narcissistic leaders:

“… when a group considers itself superior — more knowledgeable, more spiritual, and as holders of a special or unique mission. Church plants, new organizations, spin-off churches…. When you are part of the “we know how to do it better” group, then a leader must by definition be grander and greater than the ordinary. A special group demands a special leader, and vice versa. …Your superiority is proof of mine. We picked an extraordinary leader, and we will do exceptional things for God.”[2]

Now, if you have read any missionary biographies, if you have ever been to a missions recruitment event or listened to a sermon about missions, you have likely been told missions work is a special calling, for those who are especially dedicated, especially convicted of the urgency of the good work at hand. To work as a missionary is to be noble and of superior spiritual mettle. Such things are not always said aloud, but they are the heartbeat of the missions culture: they are, to some degree, what a lot of missionaries believe about themselves. Missions groups, by virtue of the fact that they frequently spout this sort of language, fit the description of narcissistic vulnerability that Langberg describes above; the organizational culture is fraught with a systemic tendency toward narcissism.

To raise questions of the group’s greatness or good intent is to risk censure. After all, missions is, according to folks like John Piper, “the second greatest human activity in the world.” If that’s not a great set-up for collective narcissism, I don’t know what is.

+ + +

One interesting hallmark of an abusive leader is that they will repeatedly bring the conflict back around to their own feelings. An interesting example of this in news headlines is the story of mega church pastor Matt Chandler’s handling of child abuse allegations in front of his congregation.[3] From the whole saga, what interested me most was that Chandler chose to conclude his brief address to the congregation by saying that he had no wish to get into details, and that the “’whole thing’ had made him feel ‘thin and exhausted and worn out and heartbroken.’”[4]

Of all the things that might have implicated Chandler as complicit in the sexual abuse of one of his congregants, this statement stood out to me the loudest. In what was surely a devastating, terrifying, even life-changing occurrence for the victim of the abuse, Chandler ensured that his final words to his congregants were about his own feelings. His use of the word “heartbroken” is virtue infused with deception. An individual who was truly heartbroken for the sake of another would not go out of their way to highlight their own feelings, as Chandler did. In truth, Chandler’s statement was not one of love for another hurting person; it was more of a declaration of self-love, of love for power. He made sure that the story of conflict ended with the spotlight on his own suffering.

In our situation with Gather, Doug’s hurt was one of the counselor’s primary concerns. Doug’s hurt was emphasized by everyone around him as if it were a virtue. Repeatedly throughout the conflict, we were corrected not for our behavior, but for the hurt feelings that our behavior had caused, for the wounds we had given to Doug by our desire to confront the issues we’d seen. Those working within Doug’s team gave us advice for dealing with Doug, saying that finding ways to compliment his leadership went a long way. Other team members praised him or called him “Captain” in group email correspondence.

When we gave our notice, our former team members kept telling us that Doug was grieving our departure, and on more than one occasion, they would go out of their way to mention whatever stage of grief he was currently in. Many months after our resignation, more than one person from the organization contacted us, urging us to meet up and have some sort of reconciliation with Doug; they insisted that he was quite hurt by all that had transpired. No one, at any point, seemed to be stopping to question whether or not the hurt Doug was claiming was actually self-inflicted. We were only a symptom, but everyone from the organization wanted to treat us like the disease.

+ + +

One of the simplest explanations for our prolonged conflict was that no one wanted to eject us, despite our obnoxious desire to address an issue. The trouble we were causing was annoying, but not annoying enough for them to ask us to go elsewhere. After all, asking us to go elsewhere would also mean losing the money we raised and brought into the organization. We were financially beneficial to Gather; they were in the business of recruiting new members and keeping them on the field, even if they weren’t well enough to be there in the first place. After all, 13% of the funds we raised went to Gather’s administration.

Years before, when Jim started working in para church ministry, Ted, a more experienced friend, took him aside and said, “Jim, whatever happens, don’t become a company man.” When we finally resigned, Ted’s wisdom once again rang in our ears.

This story is a blip of one terrible year in a lifetime of other positive experiences elsewhere. No felonies were committed, no death threats were made, no great sum of money was stolen. And yet, the experience of being bullied by an organization that held our future in its hands was incredibly stressful. And that experience was compounded significantly when the abuse happened at the hands of an organization that spouted Christian spiritual language throughout the course of the conflict. The impact of spiritual abuse is real, and there are intangible costs that such abuse extracts from its victims.

Before this little saga, my husband and I had each gone through separate experiences with abusive leaders in parachurch organizations. And despite our previous experiences, it took us about a year to tear ourselves out of the situation with Gather. We stuck around as long as we did because people had made eye contact with us in face-to-face meetings and assured us their help. We believed them, and we felt a sense of loyalty to them and to the organization as a whole.

We also stuck around because Doug’s bullying behavior was so blatant, so obvious, that it seemed that our situation would be easily rectified. There was a paper trail, after all. Doug went so far as to write emails saying, “don’t tell anyone else about this…” and going on to say awful things to us, calling us names and telling us not to speak to anyone else without his permission.

When we decided to share the 50+ pages of emails he’d written us with people at the Gather office, they saw just as clearly as we did that he was an abusive leader. And in the end, their actions made it clear that they intended to do nothing about it. So while our story may feel unremarkable in that no criminal activities took place, I believe it worth telling for this reason: even when the abusive behavior is obvious, when the abuser has, in essence written his crimes on paper and signed them, organizations like Gather still prefer to do nothing.

And if parachurch groups are in the habit of doing nothing when things are that obvious, when the evidence is that tangible, how much more when abuse is concealed and never brought to light because there is simply no “proof” or when it is one person’s word against another? It is easier to “let things go” and move on, and to shroud the subsequent skeletons in the spiritual language of forgiveness.

+ + +

Organizational abuse isn’t exclusive to a belief system. It’s a matter of power. And Christians are no different than the rest of the people on the face of the earth in this regard: power is easy to accept when it is handed to you. Very few people reject an offer of power. Even fewer people are rigorous about checking themselves and remaining accountable for their actions while they exercise their power. It’s our default to assume that we are wielding our personal power appropriately. It’s a rare person who will step down because they’ve concluded that their pride is inhibiting them from doing their job effectively.

Christian organizations, for all their statements of faith and all of their policies are no exception to the rest of the world: they are full of relational and organizational hierarchy that provides benefits and security to those at the top of the system.

In Christian service work, lots of ink is spilled on things like outreach strategies and cross cultural communication. Those matters are worthy of discussion. But what is rarely acknowledged in Christian service work is that we will inevitably demonstrate our deepest values and our most important commitments to others without needing any language or cultural proficiency. If we love hierarchy and status, if we love the system that has handed us the microphone more than the message we claim to love, the people around us will be able to tell. We will end up demonstrating that power is more important to us than human beings: that power matters more than love. And in so doing we will inevitably end up ruling over and extracting power from those we claim to love. And they will certainly know it.

Abuse in Christian settings — and the habit of silencing those who speak up — is a symptom of a bigger problem: it is a symptom of an addiction to power and status. To ignore an addiction to power is to approve of it. To ignore such abuse is to nourish it.

You cannot be committed to power and also be committed to human flourishing. In the end you will have to choose. And whatever you chose, you will end up exporting to the world around you, in a multitude of ways.

____________

[1] Langberg, Diane. Suffering and the Heart of God. (298)

[2] Langberg, Diane. Suffering and the Heart of God. New Growth Press. 2015 (295)

[3] It also bears noting that, like Gather, Matt Chandler’s church is also involved in a conflict of interest:

“The Village also uses an abuse prevention company called MinistrySafe, which many evangelical churches cite as an accountability safeguard. Ms. Bragg assumed that MinistrySafe would advocate for her daughter, but then she learned that the group’s leaders were the church’s legal advisers.” As quoted by Elizabeth Dia for the New York Times.

[4] Dias, Elizabeth. “Her Evangelical Mega Church Was Her World. Then Her Daughter Said She Was Molested by a Minister.” New York Times. 11 June 2019 https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/10/us/southern-baptist-convention-sex-abuse.html