Institutional Betrayal: Stephanie’s Story
Content Warning: This post contains themes that may be distressing to some readers. Read full disclaimer
In the aftermath of my disclosure of Adult Clergy Sexual Abuse, I observed my church leadership, many of whom were close friends, quickly adopt an unwillingness to engage with complexity, opting for a simple analysis that served the institution and its processes best. I saw a desire to control the “investigation” in order to control the outcome, to ensure that the leadership survived with its legitimacy, position, and reputation untarnished. I was an easy scapegoat for the blame.
An unbiased investigation that included outside experts would have included an assessment of the culture of leadership, its processes of accountability for shepherds, and protections for congregants. Because our church had experienced other scandals in the past, I suspect church leadership knew it wouldn’t survive another public exposure of its failure to protect congregants, so the in-house “investigation” was structured and its findings framed in a way that ensured safety for leadership.
Despite their lofty claims, the church leadership's choice to conduct the investigation the way it did and the decision to initiate ‘discipline’ for me had very little to do with loving me or caring for a “wayward” congregant. Was it more about convincing the congregation that leadership is in control and still worthy of it? A distraction from any discovery of negligence, ineptitude or failure to protect the flock?
I believe it was matter of optics: an act to exonerate themselves while legitimizing my spiritual lynching. It certainly played well on the pervasive bias born out of faulty theological views of women, and promoted the public narrative that church leadership was fully “dealing with the problem” (me) and caring for my soul.
Regarding soul care, I observed public statements that fostered confidence that the leadership was caring for and ministering to us. It wasn’t happening. This, too, felt like Public Relations for the church’s image. The effect was to isolate us even further, since those who were concerned were under the impression we were being cared-for.
Simultaneously, my husband was characterized by elders as being “mentally unstable“ and “in complete denial”, which demonstrated a failure to recognize my husband’s traumatized soul and contributed to even further isolation for him. My heart breaks for the impact ACSA and the church's response has had on his faith.
We experienced egregious violations of the confidentiality expected in Session meetings and in sensitive conversations with individual elders. Most of this gossip was suggestive, only enough to maintain plausible deniability while giving people enough to feed their imaginations in a way that controlled the narrative. ie. “If you knew what we know….”
I became aware that an elder’s wife was widely sharing such “information” as a means to convince our closest circle that showing us kindness was “dangerous.” Every day, I think of someone I wish I could still talk to or some relationship that I’ve lost. Then I consider what they must think of me and worry they resent me. I’m told over and over by the people who still talk to me that I could never go back. It is not safe for me… the whispering is too much, too vile… I’ve heard and read some of it, and so have my children. There is so much profound pain in that, it takes my breath away.
I’ve heard that my experience is a harm to the well-being and reputation of “the church”. The church is not an institution. I am the church. We all are the church. . I’ve experienced “othering”by those in power as a means to protect the institution. This isn’t about protecting Jesus. It’s about protecting a brand that’s already so damaged from this exact kind of behavior.
I’m finally free of an emotionally-twisted “shepherd”, a wolf who kept me bound to him in in order to feed himself. Nobody but God knows how good that feels to me. Now, I need to be free of an institution that seems to care little for me except for the purpose of fulfilling process, shifting culpability and preserving institutional image. I hope to find belonging in a new place where I can begin to see how God will redeem the damage to my life.
It hurts deeply that my church is currently not a safe place for me to do that. I hope and pray it will be that for others someday. That will take so much more than promises and platitudes. It will take resignations. It will take shepherds who humbly seek understanding, who can recognize when they need help from others with expertise to free sheep from the bonds that abusive shepherds place on them. It will take another reformation.
While I know the church has those who vigorously campaign for a necessary understanding of trauma and abuse, the church also has many who hear those terms and hear “woke-ism”, and stridently lecture about the dangerous slippery slope towards therapeutic antinomianism. What if, as my beloved Martin Luther used to say, the church are drunkards who fall o the horse and into the ditch on either side? What if the church falls o far far too often on the side of re-harming the harmed? Of failing to fully acknowledge evil in the church's midst? What would Jesus say about that? “Change does not happen just because we get new info.
“Change happens as we begin to take a posture of curiosity (vs. certainty) and truthfully engage with the experiences of ourselves and those of others.” Martin Luther
