Behind Closed Doors: Exposing Spiritual Abuse in Churches
The dark underbelly of church dynamics
After ten long years, we finally made the difficult decision to leave the church that we had called our spiritual home for over a decade. We had formed some decent friendships at the church. Our children had all been born into the church. Our lives had come to revolve around it.
But as we became more involved, some of the patterns and behaviors that we began to observe, particularly among the leadership, began to make us feel uneasy. We noticed people around us who we respected and cared for being mistreated and hurt. There was a recurring pattern where lovely, high-capacity people would start attending the church and become actively involved, only to leave a few years later in a disillusioned or broken state. It troubled us — but little did we know that our turn would come.
After we walked away, the associate pastor took my wife’s best friend from the church out for a coffee and proceeded to tell her that she should cut all ties with my wife — she said that my wife was a bad influence. Meanwhile, the senior Pastor made it his personal mission to assassinate my character by telling anyone who would listen what a faithless and depraved individual I was. He was determined to deflect any blame for our departure squarely onto our…
