It was a Tuesday when all hell broke loose against me at my workplace. Tension had been building for several weeks, but that day brutal behavior erupted. By evening, I arrived home feeling like I’d been dragged behind a Mack truck.

The truck kept going – and dragging me behind it – for nearly 15 months. The abuse stopped only when I left the abusive situation.

I worked for a church organization.

Four years later, I learned names for what I had experienced. It’s called adult bullying, and sometimes, mobbing. I learned that this type of abuse happens a lot – and devastates victims.¹

Five more years had passed when I came across a post titled, “Grown-up Bullying.” The author, Lynne Shallcross, featured and quoted Jessi Eden Brown, a licensed counselor and professional coach with the Workplace Bullying Institute.²

Brown and Shallcross described what I experienced – and the damage such bullying can cause.

Subtle, insidious, persistent

First, Brown mentioned this definition of workplace bullying:³

Repeated, health-harming mistreatment of one or more persons (the targets) by one or more perpetrators. It is abusive conduct that is:

• Threatening, humiliating, or intimidating, or
• Work interference – sabotage – which prevents work from getting done, or
• Verbal abuse

I can attest: Bullying may include all three of these types of abusive conduct – and more. Further, bullying does cause harm.

In 2013, when I researched and wrote the original version of this post, I found little to nothing online about bullying in the church. Yet the more I read, the more I realized: Adult bullying looks strikingly similar, whatever the institution involved. The insights below nail it.⁴

And this one is key:

Although popular media frequently portray the [adult] bully as a volatile, verbally abusive [leader], in actuality, the behaviors tend to be more subtle, insidious and persistent.

Types of tactics

The Anti-Bullying Alliance defines bullying this way:

The repetitive, intentional hurting of one person or group by another person or group, where the relationship involves an imbalance of power. Bullying can be physical, verbal or psychological. It can happen face-to-face or online.

Bullies seek power over others any way they can get it. They abuse the power they have. Their preferred ways to control? Sabotage. Coerce. Shame.

We may think of bullying as blatant, aggressive, physical. And indeed, many who bully will use overt cruelty any time they can get away with it.

Yet often, in settings like the workplace and the church, an adult who acts like the typical school bully will not hold power for long. Thus, adults who bully adults may use more insidious tactics. They may, for example:

• steal credit for good things the targeted person has done;
• assign false blame;
• use highly public and humiliating criticism;
• threaten shunning or other punishment;
• set unrealistic expectations;
• engage in rumors and gossip;
• work to turn others against the targeted person;
• plot to sabotage that person’s reputation. [Brown]

It is the fact that these bullying behaviors are repeated again and again that make them especially damaging.

Types of harm

There is a significant body of research linking workplace bullying to physical, mental, social and economic health harm for the bullied target.

Studies have linked repeated exposure to stressful events such as bullying to severe physical ailments, including cardiovascular disease, gastrointestinal problems and increased levels of cortisol, among other things.

The psychological harm from bullying can be just as devastating. Panic disorder, general anxiety disorder, major depression, substance abuse and dependence, acute stress disorder and posttraumatic stress disorder are but a few of the diagnoses encountered when working with targets of [adult] bullying.

Dynamics of bullying

The stress and exhaustion that targets endure is often isolating and paralyzing. After all, it is generally the bully’s goal to disempower the target. Even when they do speak up, targets of [adult] bullying tell us their employers [or church leaders], family and friends do not often believe them nor understand how it could be so distressing.

In most cases, the target has done nothing to deserve the treatment [he or she is] receiving. The bully chooses the target, timing and tactics. Also, the target may have very little control or influence over these factors. The responsibility to stop the abusive behavior rests with the employer.

At church, this responsibility rests with church leaders. Yet the vast majority of the time, the person with the power and the responsibility to stop the bullying does not do so. For that person may in fact be the bully, or be in cahoots with the bully, or not want to cross the bully.

Teaching [the targeted person] to be more assertive or to stand up to the bully is not the answer. Most of the time, this only makes the situation worse. [For] 72 percent of bullies are bosses, and standing up to the boss can easily be misinterpreted as insubordination.

Clever bullies

This Workplace Bullying PDF gives more info, and suggestions, that can also apply to bullying in the church.

It affirms, for example, that the most successful bullies within institutions are not “obvious bullies” who use “nasty over-the-top” practices.

It urges: “Beware of the clever bully,” who “rarely resembles the stereotype.” (And, I would add, who may be a “she”).

[A clever bully’s] methods are very subtle, disguised with all the right behaviors. In that lies his [or her] treachery. People respect and trust him, and he quietly betrays their trust whenever necessary to fulfill his ambitions.

If the bully is particularly good at this, no one except his [or her] victims sees the betrayals. In some cases, not even the victims realize what has happened.⁵

To sum up:

Those who only consider bullying to be blatantly aggressive behavior are missing the point.

Any habitual pattern of intentional, socially cruel behavior is bullying, including the subtle tactics of deceit, distortion, misrepresentation and misdirection.

It’s agonizing to be bullied. The agony multiplies exponentially when you have believed the abusers and their colluders to be godly Christians. The pain of such a betrayal cannot be overstated.

If

If you’ve experienced bullying in a church or ministry setting, know this: You did not deserve such treatment. It did not come from God. He hates that such abuse has been done in his name. He is not fragile or narcissistic.

You can go to him with your grief, your anger, your questions, your complaints. He will hear you, and he loves you. He may not answer in the time or the way you would like. But he is faithful and just.

If you have not been bullied in a church or ministry setting, know this: It is so common as to be epidemic. What’s more, it’s often well-hidden by the godly appearance of the perpetrators and the whisper campaigns used to discredit and isolate the target.

Before I was bullied, two people came to me and told me how badly they had been mistreated by the person who later instigated the mobbing done to me. I wanted to believe them, but I could not see it. I still thought the abusive leader godly.

Bullying in a “Christian” setting may well have devastated someone you know. If anyone tries to tell you they are being bullied in the church, Jessi Brown urges, “First, and most importantly … believe them.”

If you’ve participated in bullying in a church or ministry setting, know this: Bullying exposes control issues and cowardice. It exposes misplaced loyalties and divided hearts. What you did, or failed to do, reveals a hidden idol in your heart – something you’re so eager to protect that you colluded in hurting someone deeply and in dragging God’s name through the mud.

I urge you: Ask God to show you what has hooked you into participating in such a thing. Choose to see, and to turn.

Culture of bullying

The bullying I experienced years ago stopped when I chose to leave the abusive situation. But then it reoccurred, more than once, in different settings.

As I struggled to understand, “Why does this keep happening?” I finally realized:

Bullying of adults by other adults doesn’t take place in a vacuum.

Bullying thrives in abusive systems
where manipulation, coercion and control
are practiced and accepted as the norm.

The abusive system may be a family, a workplace, a school, a community, a culture, a church culture.

Here’s the tell: When someone speaks up about bullying in such a system, the people with power to stop the abuse do not. Instead, the bullying by the one escalates and expands into mobbing by the many. Vicious but insidious pummeling by a growing crowd continues, seeking to force the “troublemaker ” – who dared to ask that a wrong be made right – to knuckle under, or get out.

I grew up in a toxic system and did not know it. As an adult, I accepted coercive control as the norm – until the trauma of repeated bullying propelled me to do what I otherwise would never have done:

Run to God, asking to see. Press in to the awful truth he had begun to reveal. Cling to him and go with him, as he worked to free me, from the inside out. Begin by refusing to agree with a culture of bullying. Especially a culture of bullying in the church.

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I published the original version of this post on March 29, 2013, under the title, “Bullying in the church.” Now, 12 years later, people are looking for help with this issue more than ever. So I’ve renovated a bit, strengthened the title and reposted.

See also

• Illusionists! The abusers we have not seen
• Masters of misdirection
• The world in church clothing
  
  
• Witchcraft in the church
• Shunning in the church
• Cliques in the church
  
  
• Behind the façade in the SBC
• When church leaders bully people and reject God
• Can we talk about shame?

Footnotes

1. For an in-depth look at adult bullying in the workplace, see the book, Mobbed! by Janice Harper. ↩︎
2. Lynne Shallcross, “Grown-up Bullying,” Counseling Today, published March 1, 2013, and currently available only in the Counseling Today archives. To see the part of this piece that corresponds with adult bullying in the church, click the link, scroll down and start reading at the heading, “Bullying in the workplace.” ↩︎
3. What I’ve quoted here is the definition of workplace bullying as it appeared on the Workplace Bullying Institute website when this post was first published. ↩︎
4. Unless otherwise noted, the insights and quotes in this post are from the “Grown-up Bullying” post by Shallcross and Brown. Where you see brackets, I’ve tweaked a quote about workplace bullying – to show how it applies in the church. ↩︎
5. Some of the treacherous in the church bully their own spouses. The post, Treachery and divorce: When God sees betrayal, deals with treachery in general, as well as treachery in marriage. ↩︎