Hey guys, I'm Drew and I love Jesus, long walks on the beach, comedy movies, Seinfeld, comic books, live music, classic cars, the NY Yankees, Jets, Rangers (that's hockey – not those counterfeits who try to play baseball in Texas), Knicks, and gun to my head, I guess Duke basketball. I have an aversion to belly buttons, Boston accents, eggs, and the How I Met Your Mother finale. Seriously – thank you for taking the time to read my story. I hope it blesses you and I pray that if you've experienced something similar, you don't feel like you're alone:
How I walked away
from an abusive pastor....
As a teen, I swore I would never live in this North Carolina
town again! And so I moved, several
times, in fact. Very long and
complicated story short, my wife and I felt a calling and even a longing to
come back to this area of western NC!
And during a visit here to scout houses/apartments, we attended a church
service and we heard from God very clearly and directly that day. He told both of us that He was going to be
calling us to something big. He wasn't
going to say what it was, but only that we had better be ready when He
called.
So in May 2008, we make our move back. THAT was a Danger Day in and of itself as
took a gigantic leap of faith moving forward with our plans, not knowing for
sure if the house we owned in Illinois would sell – but God came through and it
did! We felt a pull to a certain church
and quickly became regular lay attenders and subsequently, members. In late-2009, the youth pastor at the time
resigned very abruptly. We were called
into the pastor's office one Sunday after morning worship during all of this
and the pastor asked us to spend the week praying about a need that has come up
in the church (we were unaware of what was going on) and that God had given him
our names to fill this need. My wife and
I instantly recalled hearing from God that one Sunday afternoon just a year
earlier.
The next Sunday, we were offered the position of part-time
youth leaders. I was upfront with my
pastor that I did not grow up in a Christian home, had not even gone to youth
group as a teen, let alone led one, nor had I ever studied youth ministry in
college. I certainly felt behind the
eight-ball, so to speak. I was reassured
and began the position. I soon felt
God's call to full-time ministry, enrolled at Indiana Wesleyan University in
2011, and after the first year holding this position, my pastor and I began to
have discussions about a full-time position.
“After the first of the year” (2011) was what I was initially told. It got to be July and nothing had changed. I was working two other jobs, had a
2-year-old child, and was taking classes at IWU in addition to my role in the
church. It began to take a toll on my
marriage. My wife and I prayed about
this and knew that there had to be changes.
We expressed the desire to the pastor and board members to go full-time
and how our current circumstances were taking a toll on our marriage. Long story short, we were offered the
position full-time after an interview process, but our pastor never counseled
us or offered any kind of support about the state of our marriage. The only thing he said was, “You think you're
overwhelmed now, well you're really about to be.”
He was very clear that the bar of expectations would be
raised upon going full-time, but he never taught me anything about how to meet
these expectations. I had no clue how to
go about spending my days. My tenure
felt like four years of throwing stuff against the wall and seeing what
stuck. There was no teaching, no
discipleship, no emotional support. I didn't even receive a mission statement
or goal to work towards. If there were
any suggestions made, they were always very vague and never an attempt to
actually teach me. A vast majority of
the feedback I received was strictly negative.
Other times, I would not receive any at all. A great example of this was this past fall, I
collaborated with another local youth group to do a series of 5th
Quarter events after local high school football games. I never heard a peep of feedback as to
whether it was a good idea or not, or any kinds of suggestions. This silence from a man who supposedly had a
vision for our church to minister to our immediate community...
In January 2013, my mother was diagnosed with kidney, bladder
and ureter cancer. We had been making
plans for me to head up a new Sunday School class directed at college aged and
young adults. This news changed a lot in
our lives and obviously made taking on something new very difficult. I expressed my concerns to my pastor in a
staff meeting and his response was, “Well, if we push the start date of this
back a month, is that going to give you time to work out your 'personal
issues?' Because this needs to be done
right.”
This man also accompanied us to an international youth
convention in Louisville, Kentucky over Christmas break in 2012. Our first night there, he publicly lambasted
me in front of five of my students about being “unorganized.” The only decision that had not been made or
planned out was what time to have breakfast the next morning. I never received an apology for this. In fact, I swallowed my own pride and
apologized to him for being disorganized.
I apologized for this and several other things during my tenure which I
had no business apologizing for, just to attempt to preserve unity in the
body. Recently when I announced my
resignation to my students, one of them asked us after service if the pastor
had done something to me to cause me to be leaving because she “remembered how
he did me in Kentucky.” I had another
young man in my youth group we made a special connection with. He is an angry kid, going as far as to
attempt suicide last year, but God allowed us to really make some inroads with
him. He still reaches out to me from
time to time, and called me at Christmas time asking me out of the blue if I
“got in trouble with the pastor in Kentucky.”
I didn't give him a straight answer and he said, “I was just curious
because I was at the hotel Starbucks one morning and he was in line with the
other ladies from the trip complaining to them and just going off about how
unorganized you were.” That was his
takeaway from such an awesome and life-changing event.
The last straw for me was when I was physically threatened in
front of my wife the day before Thanksgiving.
Earlier that afternoon in a staff meeting, I was giving the pastor some
details on a mission trip to Brooklyn, NY, which I was planning to take some of
the youth and some people from church.
One of the people I chose to chaperone was a good friend of mine who
attended this church with us for six years.
My thought there was to give this man a chance to serve. He's great with the kids and really doesn't
get to serve in church as much as he'd like due to his job in a retail
establishment at irregular hours. Also
didn't hurt that he's about 6'4 and 280 pounds – very beneficial going into a
rough neighborhood! Our pastor – who
ironically always preached on and drummed up giving opportunity to others –
assumed I just wanted to take my buddy just to take him, and even told me so,
going so far as to suggest I was lying.
I went home from that meeting in tears.
I told my wife that we needed to really pray because I really felt like
this was it. He never trusted me, he
never respected me, and I just no longer had the energy or the zeal to continue
the struggle. This had been a matter of
prayer for a couple years, but God told us through prayer on this day to
express our feelings to him before service that night and I'd have my answer as
to what to do.
That night, I expressed my feelings to him that I honestly
felt like resigning and wanted to talk about things. He jumped to the defensive immediately. My wife was crying and pleading to him that
we didn't want things to get to that point, that church has meant so much to
us, and we just want to get on the same page.
He said to her very sharply, “Well if you don't want things to get to
this point, then why are you in here in my office talking about
resigning?” I interjected, “Because
you're my PASTOR!” I admittedly said
that in an animated fashion, but was very careful not yell at him. He swung his office chair around, leaned
forward, glared at me and said, “You wanna raise your voice to me?” like he
wanted to fight. God told me that I
would have my answer by his response. I
meditated on it a couple days, but the day after Thanksgiving, I emailed him my
notice and never even got a reply. We
haven't spoken to one another since.
God never promised me that it was going to be easy – just
that it was going to be big.
God gave me a new job just 3 days later and called us to an
amazing new church home that next Sunday.
Here I sit five months later on 1/3 less income than I was earning, but
with three times the peace of mind I've had in years. I'm also working a job where I work from home
and can keep my 6-week-old daughter.
We're also at a very awesome church where I'm playing the drums, and
under a very awesome teaching pastor.
(One thing I've learned from this whole experience is that there is a
HUGE difference between a preacher and a pastor.) I'm currently on the sidelines of
professional ministry and sort of at a crossroads about what may come
next. I once felt like Christian
counseling was what I wanted to pursue, but now I don't feel that way at
all. I don't know where I'm headed or
what's next. I voiced these feelings to
our current pastor a couple Sundays ago and you know what he told me? “You know, I think that would have been a big
waste. Not for everyone, but for you
specifically, it would have been a waste.
God has BIG things for you!”
Yikes....
