Yesterday was a long hard day. The weather turned and so did my mood. My mother’s cousin died after a short harsh battle with cancer. I couldn’t find my mother to tell her. She was in Maine. I spent time reflecting on my faith journey and it did me in. There was no one to tell to about my mother’s cousin, to ask for prayer for her family. For her children and grandchildren. I was and am alone.

Back in 1989 or 1990 when we first did the whatever-you-want-to-call-it … joined the church? became believers? became born again? Whatever you are comfortable calling it … that. I was glad to be part of the community. Community is important to me. As I’ve studied over the years since then, I’ve come to believe that it’s important to God that we live and reveal Him in community.

We thrived for a long while in our first church and it was good to us for a long time. There were many different strands of why it went bad. But when we left that church in late 2003, we left with a small group which had been meeting together for a number of years. It was hard and heartwrenching for us (LightHusband and I) in particular because at one time we had been very close to the pastor and his wife. But we had our small community which we kept meeting with.

In early 2004, we found a new small innovative church that was doing all the right things. It was focusing on helping the poor. If those impoverished folks wanted to worship with us, so much the better. They and then we, were doing some new and innovative things with worship. We focused on experiential worship. We focused on including the congregation in discussions rather than having people listen to lectures.

LightHusband joined the team that lead the church later that year. I joined the team that helped create the worship services. I was able (finally) to use my teaching gifts and talents across the spectrum. We did so many wonderful, unique things there is scarcely room to list them all. One of the guys on the team put together a worship element on the tower of Babel that still gives me chills when I listen to it 2 years later. It is one of my favorite meditative pieces ever. I wrote a one woman play based on the book of Ruth and acted it out one Sunday, later I did one based on Esther. We did collective services in which everyone in the church participated to bring something to the service. Or we had worship stations where people learned, experienced and worshipped together in small (4-6 people) groups together. We spent the year 2006 – 2007 observing the Jewish holidays in order to more thoroughly understand the roots of our Christian faith.

In 2005 a whole group of us went to Soularize out in Venice Beach. We had a blast and learned so much. We walked the streets of Venice and found things to use to put together a Eucharist station for communion.

We told each other it was okay to ask questions, to grieve our old churches, to be angry … yet it wasn’t okay to stay there. We set out to redeem the bad and ugly things we’d found in the old way of life; or at least attempt it.

So, why am I telling you all of this?

Because, when we left our first church behind. We left it. We were done and it was gone. But this time is ever so much more difficult. This most recent church was made of the emerging cloth. Most of you know some of the people who participated my spiritual abuse. They comment on your blogs. They are your FaceBook friends. They go to Emergent gatherings. This spiritual abuse isn’t limited to the old institutional church. It can happen anywhere. Anywhere at all.

When I first found Emerging Grace some two years ago, I read her Spiritual Abuse series. I thought it was interesting, but it didn’t resonate with what had happened to me at our first church. I found it sad. I knew it could happen. I knew it had happened to some friends of mine in other places. But it wasn’t my story at the time. It is now. When I read it again yesterday, it was as if Grace had been in my livingroom during a particular meeting that happened this past January. The fact that she wasn’t and didn’t even know that meeting took place. In fact, that she wrote this post 2 years prior to the meeting speaks sadly to the commonality of these events and how devastating they have become to the Church. Here are the salient points from part 2 but click through and read the whole thing. It all happened to me … really … it did.

When spiritual abuse occurs, it is because circumstances require that the leader take you down in order to secure or advance his position. These circumstances could be jealousy, differences of opinion, political or budget considerations threatening his position, or needing a scapegoat for problems within the ministry.

“When a lust for power in the heart of a leader is combined with pride, an insecurity that needs to control, and a constituency that is willing to follow blindly, the conditions are present for spiritual abuse.”

……

Manipulators and controllers will not accept differences of opinion. One of the ways they exercise control is to question the loyalty of those who disagree with them and discipline those who contradict them, branding them as rebellious (or as -in my case- attempting to split the church because I was asking questions).

Then, I thought, well … maybe I need to look beyond this and think about de-toxing. So I went to RobbyMac’s site to read his series on De-toxing from the Church. He’s written an excellent series. I don’t want to detract from that at all. But I’ve already lived it once. What do I do now that I’ve been there done that? Where do I go if I’ve been this harmed within the emerging church? This, from Detoxing Discoveries, in particular struck me …

• Which, being interpreted, means (A) we shouldn’t act so self-righteous or adopt a detoxing-martyr complex if other Christians aren’t rushing to hear us vent (yet again) about church, and (B) we need to find others who understand where we can safely vent, puke, cry, and hash through the issues (for me, that meant starting up the Dead Pastors’ Society at the King’s Head Pub every Monday night)

1. Dead Pastors Society Rule #1: It’s safe place to vent, and to recount the gory details of what led to the disillusionment and detox.
2. Dead Pastors Society Rule #2: But it isn’t okay to stay bitter or feed bitterness. A safe place to vent was for the purpose of healing.
3. Dead Pastors Society Rule #3: It’s a process. Not a quick fix. Sometimes, we met and all we “accomplished” was the quaffing of Guinness and the watching of hockey. And that was (and is) okay.

So … to whom do I turn? Where do I go, when it’s not the institutional church, but an emerging church which has created the monster? Where is the support group for that? Then what?