Influential and now scandalized mega-church pastor, Bill Hybels, is known for saying, “There’s nothing like the local church when it’s working right.” The reverse is also true: There’s nothing that can do as much damage as the church when it’s not working right.
I spent 1973–1981 in a toxic environment called Beracah Bible Baptist—an independent church that morphed into something not far from a Kool-Aid-drinking cult. The new pastor and his former Hollywood actress wife wanted to build “Beracah Christian City” on a ninety-acre piece of wooded land with running streams. It would be Christian community protected from an increasingly scary, godless world, with its own camp, school, place for seniors, and a large church at the center of it all.
My dad, a surveyor, donated his time and did a topographical survey of the property to inform the vision and associated capital campaign. An artist’s rendition of what the “city” might look like was painted on a huge signboard, divided into ninety sections, and placed at the front of the sanctuary. Congregants could then buy an acre, two, or more and get their name on the board. Besides the donated survey work, my dad worked many extra hours, sacrificing much, to pay for as many acres as possible. In the end, the land was never used for its intended purpose. Rather, the property was sold by a later generation to pay its bills. Not long after that, the church ceased to exist.
My parents gave cars to the needy, spent time with broken families, gave thousands of hours in counseling, visitation, Spanish ministry, running a bookstore, teaching, etc. My dad became, outwardly at least, the good “yes-man” deacon and my mom, his “submissive” wife.
The church grew to 900 people on a Sunday morning with three services. They had sixteen buses to pick up people from surrounding areas. They got an award for having the fastest growing Sunday School in New Jersey. The pastor even got on the Philadelphia news, made a big stink about the deteriorating morality in public schools, and subsequently started his own Christian school, which my sister and I were enrolled in.
He and his wife, outward paragons of Christian virtue, took in sixteen foster children. The mayor gave them a key to the city. It seemed to be the perfect church but inside things were rotten.
It finally came out that this pastor, our primary spiritual mentor, was a pedophile (abusing several boys for years), and his wife a cruel, emotional and physical abuser. Both, although in different ways, were deceitful manipulators behind the scenes. Most of the criminal acts played out in their personal mini-mansion and home by the shore, but there were plenty of instances of shame and abuse that occurred at the church-school as well.
Looking back, I view our decade-long church experience as extremely destructive. Moreover, I hold this legalistic, shame-based spiritual environment partially responsible for my parents’ divorce after twenty-six years of marriage. As a related aside, my wife, Pam, grew up during her high school years in a church that was—at the time—caught up in the health and wealth gospel. Although we’ve both had to “detox” from a lot of bad theology, God has used our backgrounds to give us greater empathy and discernment. What’s more, for me it’s influenced my vocational calling. As a minister of the gospel, I want to protect people from religious abuse, and rescue the Bible from hacks who devalue mainstream science[1], theological education, and denominational credentials and accountability. Moreover, I want people to come to know God as the holy, gracious, good, just, and loving Father that he is.
As one who’s suffered from religious abuse, I’ve come to take great hope in God’s promises to not waste pain in the lives of those who love Him. He works even through the ugliest things, redeeming them and shaping them into something that conforms to his good purposes:
- And we know that God causes all things to work together for good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose. (Rom. 8:28, NASB)
- Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God. (2 Cor. 1:3-4, NIV)
Viewed through the lens of these promises, I’m thankful that despite the deceit and ugliness of my early adolescent and teenage church experience, I heard the gospel and was encouraged to respond. Related to this, especially as a teenager and young adult, I’ve struggled with my ability to discern, or the importance of even having a specific point in time that I personally responded to or “accepted” the gospel. My difficulty in this area came from trying to combine my normal, unexciting, and gradual growth in belief—in a seriously dysfunctional church environment—with the dramatic change reflected in many conversion stories.
Next week, I’ll share early influences and events that led me to embrace the gospel. Regrettably, as you’ll see, these were also mixed with a lot of bad theology, scare tactics, and manipulation.
[1] See The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind by Mark Noll—especially the chapter “Thinking about Science,” The Lost World of Genesis 1 by John Walton, and biologos.org for excellent examples of how NOT to devalue mainstream science or Scripture.