Every time I look at this photo, it takes me aback. The day the picture was snapped, I was spent.
For more than a decade, I had been falsely accused and gaslighted, bullied, betrayed and shunned by my faith community – including trusted leaders, friends and family members. The most wrenching months still lay ahead, as I faced divorce from my husband of 39 years.
So there in that photo, what do I see? The stress isn’t absent, but what’s more pronounced – and what takes my breath away – is the peace of God.
I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world. – Jesus, in John 16:33
No room in the church
After my eight years inside the Southern Baptist structure, and soon after LifeWay unceremoniously dumped me, I left the SBC. I knew that to stay would only invite more abuse.
I did not know abuse would follow me.
False accusations continued to spread – fueled by a well-placed word, a telling silence, a look. Acquaintances across the SBC distanced themselves from me. So did lifelong friends. Ministry opportunities vanished overnight.
For a time, I ventured into the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR) and, at first, saw what appeared to be a greater honoring of women and people of color. But the more involved I became, the more I saw, heard and experienced distressing things there too.1
Wanting to belong somewhere, I tried several other Christian “streams.” I found I couldn’t be true to the Lord and fit neatly anywhere. I was too liberal for the conservatives, too conservative for the progressives; too charismatic, yet not enough.
In my experience, church leaders do not want to be associated with someone who speaks up about God and the church, but does not fit into their box. Especially a woman challenging the church to examine itself.
More than once, I was pressured to echo every tenet of a group’s teachings, and to be silent on any topic they didn’t like, if I hoped to be counted “one of us.” Or, I was inspected and rejected outright.
The more that I’ve pressed in to the Lord, the more I’ve experienced real belonging to him, in him – and the less I’ve belonged any one place in our fragmented US church culture.
Though none go with me
For years, I researched the history of the Deep South and the church. People shut me down when I tried to tell the hard truths I was learning.
When the Spirit of Christ began nudging me to write a book, I didn’t want to do it. But I wanted to follow him.
I began to write.
Struggling to say what was forbidden, I prayed for grace. I searched for words to urge:
Eager to tell what I had experienced, I wrote:
Repentance is continuing to turn to the Lord and turn to the Lord and turn to the Lord, until every veil is taken away. It’s gazing into the eyes that blaze with fire and finding that the fire doesn’t destroy you, but rather burns up whatever is not of God in you.2
Chaos at the crossroads
As I wrote, new trauma broke out in my personal life.
For one thing, the leader of a NAR prayer network, who learned what I was doing, at first championed the message. Under his leadership, the network committed to pray for widespread repentance in the US church.
But as soon as they encountered backlash from the system, the group and its leader turned on me, and they hijacked the prayer effort we had agreed to undertake. Together, they banned repentance prayers and invoked witchcraft prayers.
At the same time, chaotic family situations arose. Though I didn’t recognize it yet, most of the chaos issued from abuse. Trying to sit, to focus, to write and edit was a battle. Every single day.
And every day, I felt the weight of the assignment. I prayed not to misrepresent God. Yet I knew: he is unfathomable, and I am still learning to see. I was very aware then, and am now, that I know in part.
But I was also aware of the timing. As I wrote, the calendar rolled over to 2011, the first year of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War. I believed those four years to be both a window and a crossroads, when we would choose whether to face what previous generations had not.
It seemed a crucial time to say, however imperfectly:
Dear conservative US church, there are things we haven’t wanted to see that we must see and deal with, if we want to go with God.
Saying the forbidden
In December 2011, I completed and self-published, We Confess! The Civil War, the South, and the Church. Looking back, it seems nothing short of a miracle that it got done.
Initially, We Confess made a few ripples, got a few positive reviews, got noticed by several Christian leaders, who picked it up, looked at it – and then dropped it like a hot potato. Afterward, they acted as if the book didn’t exist, and I didn’t either.
Ultimately, my plea for turning garnered me a lot more shunning.
That wasn’t entirely unexpected. But one thing I didn’t see coming: From the moment We Confess was released, the trauma in my family life increased exponentially. It took years for me to realize: More than one family member was determined to control, sabotage and silence me.
How could I not have known? The issues in the church at large were deeply embedded in my family too.
The world behind me
I’ve learned a lot since the day I agreed to follow God into the SBC structure. As never before, I’ve seen myself. I’ve seen people. I’ve seen the Lord. Some of what I’ve seen, I’ve written about in the books and blog posts you can find on keytruths.com. Some, I have yet to write.
One insight seems important to mention here:
When following God requires you to recognize and reject your role in a toxic system – be it church, family, whatever – the system doesn’t just shrug that off. And it doesn’t just write you off. Instead, it casts you as scapegoat. The more you try to reject that role, the more you set yourself up to play it.
Cast in the role of scapegoat
If you suddenly find yourself the scapegoat in your family, community or church (or you realize that’s the role you’ve been playing all along), it’s bewildering and devastating. When it happens in multiple systems at once, it’s hellish. Everyone’s determined to fix you, but not in the ways you’re actually broken. Everyone’s dumping their crap on you, and no one will believe it isn’t yours.
As I’ve faced abuse for choosing to follow the Lord, Good Christians, and especially Prayer Warriors, have denied that it was happening, or said it was my fault. They’ve told me to repent for attitudes I did not have. They’ve told me to fix relationships I could not fix.
When I told them, “What you’ve believed about me is not true” – or I declined to obey them, in favor of obeying God – they denounced me, or quit associating with me, or both.
The Lord knows: I have plenty of my own crap. Since I yielded my life to him at age 8, and especially the last 25 years, he has been at work, helping me identify and get rid of what does not honor him. Many times, he has spoken through people.
To go with him, to grow in him, it’s vital to remain open to whatever he says, by whatever means, even when I may not want to hear it.
And also, it is vital to recognize false responsibility and false guilt, even when they come from someone claiming to speak for Christ. It is godly and right to refuse to confess and repent for sin that is not mine.
Getting the system out of you
Perhaps most vital of all, I’ve learned:
The only way to walk free from the roles and expectations that abusive systems force upon you is to follow Jesus as he gets the system out of you.
The Spirit of Christ will help you recognize and reject beliefs that you’ve been taught are godly, but are not.
Do not be conformed to this world [including the world in church clothing], but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect. (Rom. 12:2 NAS)
The Spirit of Christ will help you break free from the lie that a system can give (and take) your worth.
These things [that gave me status in a system] were my assets, but I wrote them off as a loss for the sake of Christ. But even beyond that, I consider everything a loss in comparison with the superior value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. I have lost everything for him, but what I lost I think of as sewer trash, so that I might gain Christ, and be found in him. (Phil. 3:7-9 CEB)
The Spirit of Christ will teach you when wiping the dust off your feet and fleeing are wise and right – when, in fact, they are part of the cost of following him.3
I have decided to follow Jesus
When I left the SBC, I thought I had survived the worst and could focus on healing, and on finding new ways to serve God. I had no clue how much seeing, how much grieving, how much pain lay ahead. And how very much love and life.
Now I can testify:
The cost of following Jesus has not changed. And we are not exempt.4
Yet we in the US church have believed ourselves exempt. We’ve desperately tried to make ourselves exempt.
For generations, we’ve latched on to whoever or whatever promises us power and privilege. We’ve baptized it and Christianized it until we cannot separate out loyalty to other masters from worship of Christ alone. We’ve experienced just enough random reinforcement to keep us ever re-enacting, expecting a different end.
But in seeking a cost-less Christianity, we have paid a terrible price. Often unknowingly, we’ve identified ourselves with abusive systems that destroy, destroy, destroy. We’ve worshiped hidden idols in our hearts.
The cost of following Jesus has not changed. Yet the Lord has not left us to try to follow on our own.5
The Father and the Son sent the Spirit to accomplish in and through us what we, by ourselves, cannot.
The Lord also created a community, the church, so that, together, we could face whatever opposes our going with him.
It is a betrayal, of us and more, of God, when those who punish us for following Christ are the people we thought were following him too.
And yet, it’s been happening for most of Christian history. The testimonies of Christ-followers through the centuries is this:
As we say yes to the Lord Jesus
in the face of a church culture that forbids it,
the Triune God himself becomes our community.
As we wait and watch with him,
he will make a way for us to find others
who are going with him.
The cost of following Jesus has not changed. Neither have the rewards.6
The blessings do not minimize the cost. Ah, but they will far outweigh it. And the blessings do not all lie somewhere out there, “in the sweet by-and-by.” Instead, they begin here and now. Often, they unfold in the most unexpected moments in our journey with the God who loves us and lives in us.
This God calls us to know him, to continually choose him, to be willing to let go of everything and everyone else, for him.
He waits while we struggle. He knows we will answer, with or without words. His question is simply,
“Will you follow me?”
See also
- A spirit like Caleb’s – fully following God
- The purpose of the wilderness
- Fighting fear with fear
- You have circled this mountain long enough
- The blessing of the Lord
- Other posts on Healing from Toxic Church
Series: Will You Follow Me?
My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me. – Jesus, in John 10:27
Part 1: Behind the façade in the SBC – On the one hand, Christian leaders pummeled and guilted me to choose a denominational organization above all else. On the other hand, the quiet voice I had spent 40 years learning to know spoke by the Spirit and the Word.
Part 2: The Civil War, the South and the church – After abuse began to open my eyes to evils in my church culture, God took me on a pilgrimage into the past, to show me what is happening now.
Part 3: Going with God – Choosing to go with God where my church culture had forbidden, I had no clue how much seeing, how much grieving, how much pain lay ahead. And how very much love and life.
Footnotes
- Please be warned. The NAR system is every bit as toxic, abusive, devious and controlling as is the SBC. See, “What Christians Need to Know about the New Apostolic Reformation.” ↩︎
- We Confess! The Civil War, the South, and the Church, p. 246. ↩︎
- In Matthew 10, Jesus teaches his disciples when to wipe the dust (v. 14) and when to flee (v. 23). Read all Matthew 10 to see these commands in context. ↩︎
- Jesus described the cost of following him: when sending out the 12 (Matt. 10:34-39); when foretelling his suffering and death (Matt. 16:21-27; Mark 8:31-38; Luke 9:22-26; John 15:18-25; 16:1-4); to the rich young ruler (Matt. 19:16-26; Mark 10:17-27; Luke 18:18-27); to others who showed interest in following him (Luke 9:57-62; 14:25-33). ↩︎
- The night before his death, Jesus said much on the topic, “I will not leave you as orphans” (John 14:12-27; 15:5, 12-17, 26; 16:5-15). Then, he prayed for us (John 17). ↩︎
- Jesus also had much to say about the rewards of following him. See, for example, Matt. 19:27-30; Mark 10:28-31; Luke 18:28-29; John 8:12; 12;26; 15:9-11; 16:20-24, 33. ↩︎
Thanks so much for sharing. Yes, when no one listens, take notes and write it down.
https://wildmustangmall.com/blog/f/how-i-wrote-this
You’re welcome, Ava. Thank you for your writing too.
I am so thankful that you chose to let Jesus teach you these things. They are key truths, yes, but also hard learned truths that came at great cost to you. i pray that God will bless you exceedingly in Christ Jesus.
when i read this its like a light-bulb went off inside because i had always thought if i went to church it would be full of people following the Lord and i found there were few that really were:
“And yet, it’s been happening for most of Christian history. The testimonies of Christ-followers through the centuries is this:
If we will say yes to the Lord Jesus in the face of a church culture that forbids it, the Triune God himself becomes our community, and he himself makes a way.”
but then i remembered that even “the disciple that Jesus loved experienced it”:
3Jo:1:9: I wrote unto the church: but Diotrephes, who loveth to have the preeminence among them, receiveth us not.
and Paul also:
2Tm:4:16: At my first answer no man stood with me, but all men forsook me: I pray God that it may not be laid to their charge.
I had always read those two scriptures as them being forsaken by the world…not their churches…but i see now that it was their churches.
I appreciate your comments, Sandy. Thank you. And, yes, as you pointed out, John and Paul experienced it too.
Again thank you for listening to God, for trying to walk His path for you, despite the things that came to stop or throw you off the path. Makes you think about words from God from the scriptures like walking thru the shadow of the Valley of death, moving mountains, flood waters, strong winds, thirsting for Him in a dry and weary land, promises to be with you, being our rock and our tower and our refuge, not to make life easy but to hide, protect, comfort, restore for the next battle. Make the path smooth? Perhaps first we have to be willing to climb over the rocks? I am again sorry for the pain and heartache that you have endured. That two headed serpent you have written about was poking you from the front about the church, while his fangs struck out of the shadows in the back where you thought you were safe.
You’re right, Tammy. The two-headed snake! The unexpected hardships in following God. And the God who loves us working in us to overcome. Thank you for speaking up. You encourage me. We encourage one another! So good.
I am glad you follow God with all, and write down the stories. Thank you.
Thank you, Bryan.
You might find things of interest in the Organic church movement. Frank Viola has many books and a top rated blog and podcasts. Very Christ centered. Also To the Saints podcast be a group of 3 couples.
Thank you very much for this article. The attitude of the SBC towards women has always kept me away from it. We both grew up in Maryland and then spent 34 yrs in western NY. Ten years ago we moved to the suburbs of Atlanta. Since it seems that 3 out of 4 churches near us are SBC, I have many old friends from the north question why we cannot find a church that we like. The alternatives have compromised too much with the world in our thoughts. We do not lean to the pentacostal churches.
Like you, we are too conservative for the progressives and too progressive for the conservatives. I often think that I would be OK in the SBC if it weren’t for the mis-treatment of women. Now I have more reasons to not try to belong there.
The sad thing to me is that like many, we have simply given up on finding a good fit with a church. I don’t need the aggravation that we have found in most places. I keep telling myself that it’s the fault of the people, the other sinners just like me. I try to convince myself that the people who believed these horrible things about other races are long gone to their “reward,” but I see how 200 yrs later, their legacy lives on.
I am not shallow enough to say that I do not have prejudices. We all do. Some are good, but when we depend on those to make decisions about other people that we have not bothered to even try to know, we surely are not acting like Jesus. I do not ever want my prejudices to cause trouble for someone else. Atlanta used to joke that we were all too busy to hate. In some ways, it is true, but there is still an undercurrent.
Oh, I could babble about this more, but I will spare you. As someone who grew up in a very questionable church with the remains of a slave gallery, I have often thought about these things. I appreciate the new information to make me think more.
God bless you in your hunt for a place to serve.
Thank you so much for telling some of your story, Ann. It is sad – it’s a loss we need to grieve – when we can’t find a fit in the church as we have known it.
At the same time, it gives us a wonderful opportunity (and a bit of a push) to find and be the true church, in places and ways we have not known. Your connecting with me through this blog post is a part of that.
Thank you for your prayer for me. As I read it, I realized God has answered it! In spite of myself, I have found the place he is now calling me to serve. ♥️
Several years ago, he spoke to me through Ezekiel 3:10-11. Just this week, he took me back there.
“Human one, listen closely, and take to heart every word I say to you. Then go to the exiles, to your people’s children. Whether they listen or not, speak to them and say: The LORD God proclaims!”
When God first pointed me to that verse, I didn’t understand what, exactly, he was telling me to do, or how to do it. For a time, I kept trying to find a way back to what was familiar.
Yet through these years, the Lord has faithfully made the way for me to find community and joy myself in exile, and to encourage others who are on a similar path.
Dear Deborah, thank you so much for telling your stories. Of your disconnection from abusive systems and your full surrender to serving people regardless of their denominational affiliation. It’s a great journey and I’m sure God is leading you. He has been preparing everything and accompanying you every step of the way, painful though it has been. Your journey from abusive systems to God resonates very much with the situation of some Baptist women and men in the Czech Republic in Europe. We are gradually translating and posting your testimony on our Baptist Faith Network website https://sitviry.cz . May God bless you and strengthen you in your service to Him and to us. Stepan.
Dear Stepan. Oh my! I don’t have words – just a very grateful heart. It is a great honor to serve my sisters and brothers in the Czech Republic.