Exploited in the church, yet Leah no more
“I’m Leah!” I cried. I had given myself to a church culture that had used me and used me, while profoundly rejecting my personhood, my adulthood, my worth, me.
“I’m Leah!” I cried. I had given myself to a church culture that had used me and used me, while profoundly rejecting my personhood, my adulthood, my worth, me.
We expect to see illusionists in magic shows, entertaining us. We don’t expect to find illusionists in our everyday lives, betraying us. Yet anywhere it pays for abuse to hide behind an abuse-free image, abusers and abusive systems can hide in plain sight.
Maybe the church has become bewildering to you. Leaders you trusted and people you respected are acting in ways that do not reflect who Jesus is, nor what they profess to believe. They have turned on anyone among them who appears to threaten the status quo. What is going on?
Any number of motives can prompt leaders in our church systems to create an illusion that refuge for the abused exists, where it does not. “They say, ‘All is well, all is well,’ when it is not.” So how can we know?
In the church, those obsessed with manipulating, intimidating and dominating can pose as those serving God. And we can be very fooled for a very long time.
Any group that shuns is withholding your deepest needs in order to control you. That’s the opposite of loving you. It’s people you trusted, trying to erase you.
I saw it for the first time in a meeting I called and led. No. Actually: I realized then what I had been seeing for years. It broke my heart. I’ve tried to tell the story twice before. Both times, I described what happened in that meeting, but did not include any backstory. Now it’s time to write the whole story. Bring honor to your name, holy Lord.
In the middle of that dark-valley time, I often found myself alone with God, crying aloud and writing passionately in my journal. During that time too, I came to identify with David, the shepherd-poet-warrior-king, in ways I had not before. For David was also ostracized by people he trusted. And he cried out in distress - and in faith.
No longer wounded, outcast, lonely, afraid - your new name shall be Confidence, Joyfulness, Overcoming one, Faithfulness, Friend of God, One who seeks My face.
Why, in midlife, did I suddenly find my boundaries battered and my adulthood denied?
Frustrated, exhausted, I realized: I would never count as an adult in my church system. Free at last, I’m embracing the adulthood God works in his own
Many see the SBC #churchtoo issue as, primarily, a matter of wrongdoing on the part of some individuals and churches. But that approach gets us exactly the same place as when we try to figure out a narcissistic abuser by assuming he has the same qualities, feelings and motivations that truly caring people do.