My story of spiritual abuse and recovery
Not to bore you or go on about my life story but it might be helpful to share some background on me. I have led and interesting life for sure. One thing I have found is that if you dig into someones story you will find that we have all had different and interesting paths to where we find ourselves today.
Early years
I am the oldest of seven children, born into a stable Christian home. As far as my childhood I moved around a bit living in Maine for 3 years when I was seven and finally settling in a pretty valley in a southern Indiana county. Home schooled for most of my school years spending every afternoon playing tackle football with my brother and our friends or building camps in the woods usually with a "borrowed" tool my grandpa didn't know I had.
We were somewhat poor I'd say. My dad built our house which was never really finished and started a copier repair company that was never very profitable. I was content with my life and my first real job apart from carrying papers in our small town was to work for my dad in the office products store. I did a little bit of everything from waiting on customers, answering the phone, ordering supplies to working my way into the role of copier technician.
About the time I was a senior in High school my parents along with several friends decided to start a church. My dad was to be the pastor and several of the men formed a leadership team of overseers as they were called. It was a non denominational church or fellowship. We had contemporary worship before that was cool and my dad's sermons were very Biblically based. He always infused humor and life stories into them. For awhile things were good. I will share later how I met and married my wife, lost a close brother unexpectedly and grew in the Lord but for now know that the Church became more and more important in my life.
Warning signs
I eventually became an overseer myself and with my growing young family invested heavily in the prayer and worship ministries of the church. We traveled all over attending conferences and special events of national ministries in the search for any new thing God was doing. Looking back now I see the signs of trouble but back then I was very intense in following the Lord and wanting all that He had for me. We had all night prayer and worship meetings, trips to national outpourings and constant fasting's. More and more my mom was becoming the driving force behind everything. She manipulated dad to speak about subjects she deemed important, led women's groups that just happened to be in on everyone else's business. Had "special" prayer groups that would be privy to everyone's dirty laundry and she set herself up on the worship team as a leader who would direct how the singing time would go. Eventually the overseers changed leaders as one by one they would be uncomfortable with my mom and the inevitable conflicts their wives would have with her. She was leading from the shadows only it wasn't so hidden anymore. Then my dad fell into sin and was forced to step back from ministry. I had four kids by this time and what should have been a church wide and family wide wake up call was simply seen by my mother as the opportunity she was looking for. She stepped into the role of full time head pastor with the full support of the then sycophant supporters still called overseers. I'm ashamed to say I supported this move. Looking back it's hard to grapple with how deceived you can become when you are the frog in the proverbial pot. The temperature slowly rising all the while you never feel yourself cooking.
Our Church by this time had had several leaders leave and we did what we could to persecute them even to the extent of my mom spiritually seducing their kids to stay with loyalty pledges and reject their own parents. She was fond of saying she heard God say to her that "she was a queen and there is no other". I found the actual scriptural reference to this years later and it is chilling.(Zeph 2:15) In the scripture. God is judging a nation for saying essentially this and He was bringing utter destruction for it. Not exactly something I would be claiming!
I would love to say we had had enough and left but unfortunately we stayed on. We moved across the street from my boyhood home and started a sheep farm. By this time our family had grown to six kids and we would have our seventh, Grace in that home before everything changed.
A Change was needed
In late 2012 I began a very frustrated wrestle with God over my destiny direction of my life. I felt so overwhelmingly suffocated and hemmed in. I believed that I was meant or called to do greater things than what I was currently doing but saw no way forward in any direction. I had begun to be pushed out of having any influence or role in the Church by my mom. There were others in the leadership team that were jealous and envious of me and my wife(I was unaware at the time) and were doing what they could against us behind our backs. My mom who I realized later, much too late, was and is a classic narcissist and could not tolerate or work with anyone who was emotionally whole and had strong leadership qualities. She would see that person as a threat, even if it was her own children.
My wife Andrea and I spent time praying and really felt God leading me to run for a political office and in correlation to the frustration decided on running for Congress. I have always been politically active and very informed even before I could vote. I absolutely love how our government was founded and put together and dreamed of being a leader in the political realm someday. In the previous two decades of church service however that was drowned out by the hyper spirituality we were all accustomed to. Ministry and preaching seemed likely the only outlet I could have to express what was inside me.
In October of 2013 I announced my candidacy to seek the Republican nomination for the 8th congressional district pitting myself against the current Republican who held the office. Even though I was politically active I had no support structure within the party and the campaign was doomed from the start. In the midst of the campaign however I didn't understand that and ignorance is bliss. My family and I enjoyed every second of the countless Lincoln day dinners and political events we traveled to. Nineteen counties were in the district at that time and we had a presence in every one of them. I had a blast taking my daughter Hope along for many of the trips and spending time with my sons Josiah, Daniel and Drew. Grace as just a baby really stole the show wherever we went. The feelings of being alive and full of joy during that time I can still remember. This was the first time being outside the little puddle I had been living in. Sometimes I think God calls us to do things that we think we are sure of the purpose but He has other better plans.
My 16 year career in the coffee business was drastically changing at the very same time. The 100+ family owned business had been purchased by an investment company. Lots of things were getting chopped and systems upended. I saw them moving away from the close customer relationships I had built a nice life on to a very corporate, lets make money at all costs attitude. I could see the writing on the wall and knew I needed to make a change there as well. With two months to go until primary election day I walked away from my job to devote full time effort to the campaign. I was all in.
When the first numbers began to come in I knew we had lost. While as a first time candidate I had raised $30,000 and received 10,000 votes it was going to be way short of what we needed to win.
I should have been prepared to lose but I wasn't. It's in my nature to play to win and just didn't have a plan b. The day after the election I was defeated, jobless and had only enough income to last a few months. What followed was some of the most intense personal fire I have ever had. I questioned what I thought I had heard from God, questioned myself big time and despaired of having any kind of successful future. What kind of dad and husband would put his family at risk like this? I had chased a dream and it was costing me and worse than that was costing my family.
Fallout continues
It was this very campaign and the subsequent pain of losing and having nothing to fall back on that started Andrea and I on the road to freedom(ironically the town we lived in then). My mom began a slow but continual process of controlling and persecuting us. It had been going on for decades but now she told us to come submit to them(like we weren't?) and to lose our own opinions and they would help us out financially. Money was used to manipulate and guilt us into owing them and after some time of being told we had to come to every meeting the church had I resigned from leadership in the hopes the persecution would end. It only intensified and so much so that my mom was telling everyone that we were trying to steal her church. That Andrea and I were so rebellious and proud that we were wanting to take over the church. This accusation was laughable then and even more so looking back these many years later. I finally had enough and took my wife over with me to confront her. She said she kept hearing (meaning from God) that I was after her church. I told her she was abusive and needed prayer. I said I wanted nothing to do with leading the church.
This eventually escalated into my dad calling all my friends and fellow leaders(using the term leaders here loosely) and telling them I was in the rebellion of Korah (someone the earth swallowed up in the Bible for defying Moses)and that the severe judgment of God was on my life. He said no one was to speak with us. We were on the receiving end of a shunning! I had called dad and said that we were leaving the church quietly(still trying to be a good christian) and wanted a way for their grand kids to not be hurt. He was silent. I was stunned, I really thought they would have cared about their own kids and grand kids over some stupid church but I was wrong. My mom coveted that power more than anything in the whole world. She always wanted to be a somebody and she was going to have this and be this Moses figure at all costs.
The pain of the rejection was actually the first ray of sunshine in my world since the election loss. I finally had clarity although more was to come later. I had been in an abusive relationship and what was worse was I had raised my kids in and subjected my wife to this abusive environment for years. We came to the obvious conclusion we were going to have to move. My brother Joseph had to do the same as he and his precious wife Laci stood with me and Andrea during this time. We were both having our eyes opened and it was painful.
It's hard to explain the feelings of the next few years from that time. I felt as though I had wasted so many years. I questioned every single belief although not my core faith in Christ. I threw out some beliefs while moderating others and began studying leadership and growing as a person. I still to this day feel such a debt to my wife for all I put her through. We struggled financially for years afterwards and I always felt like that added undo stress on her while we were trying to become whole.
He makes all things new
God did some really amazing things. If I wondered where God was after the election loss and the subsequent rejection from my family I didn't wonder any more. I looked everywhere for a job and found nothing. It was because I was searching in the wrong location. We didn't know where we were to move to until one night I had a dream where I hung my work belt up inside of the church we were attending at the time. It happened to be in Terre Haute Indiana. We lived almost an hour away and had been driving to Church every Sunday. I took this dream to mean we were to move to Terre Haute.The first place I stopped in on my job search there was where I eventually came to work. I had always liked the building but knew nothing about what they did(printing and promotional products). It took some time for them to work out a place for me but months after stopping in I had a job. We sold our farm just one month before we would have run out of money to pay our mortgage. We found a rental, and this is a funny story. At the last minute my wife found a house for rent on Craig's list in Pimento Indiana. It had a phone number listed so she called. She called and called and called all without any response. I happened to mention to someone at my new job what we were looking at and she said she knew the pastor of the church that owned the house. She was able to put me in touch with him and come to find out the old folks at the church had listed the house on Craig's list and then were too afraid to answer any inquires since "everyone knows you can't trust Craig's list". We were one small child over what they wanted but agreed to let us rent it. I signed the rental paper two days before moving day and since the Church was out of copy paper had used old bulletin paper to print the agreement on. When I flipped it over it read " Behold I make all things new". I couldn't believe it! It was if God was with me right there and assuring me He had us in the palm of His hand. I had never rented a day in my life up to that point and it was small. We went from a farm to a two story house but we both loved that place. It was peaceful and quiet in that little town and a good place to rest. We never attended the church next door but they welcomed us in anyway. They loved on us and doted on us and showed us the love of Christ. I will never forget them or the way they helped total strangers feel hope that life could be good again. We were terribly hurt by "the church" but it was the church used by God that loved us back to life.
Healing was gradual but steady and different for all of us. I began a long and slow process of reaching out and trying to make things right with individuals and families I had hurt in the past. Our church had a reputation of separating families and I unfortunately took part in this. I was zealous for God but was in effect doing the devils work. Every single person I have reached out to has been so gracious and forgiving. It was humbling to think you were doing good only to realize you were deceived. We had been mostly concerned about the younger children in our family but it was actually much harder for our older kids. I wish looking back that I had taken a more active role in helping them to heal. I have a daughter I love very much that was unable to get the healing she needed and eventually she walked away from the life she saw as an abusive lie. I am believing God that someday she will return fully to Him.
My dad began having serious health issues the minute we left the church and eventually passed away a year ago from the cancer that had come back. He was apparently willing to die without speaking to me but after much prayer I reached out and texted him. It was the first time I had said anything to him in seven years. He called me fairly quickly after the text to find out who had texted him since he no longer had my number(same number forever so....). It was more emotional than I thought it would be and I just told him I loved him and thanked him for raising me in a safe home and teaching me to love the Lord. He still tried to bring my mom into the conversation but I'm glad I had that short talk with him. I did not attend the funeral and am perfectly at peace with that decision. Not one person in that group would have been glad to see me and my dad was already gone. My story may be extreme but probably not all that uncommon. I have forgiven them. I forgave and then have had to forgive again but truly as much as I am able I forgive them. They meant it for evil but God meant it for good. I do not have contact or relationship with my mom, any of the members of that church or some of my family still connected to them. It is a spiritually seductive and dangerous group similar in many ways to a cult. I pray for their sake's that God will open their eyes to see the harm they have done and are doing. I think it is important to share this story. I know Andrea and I are not alone. Spiritual abuse is very insidious and so harmful because it doesn't prey so much on the vulnerable but those who are genuine and earnest. It takes advantage of our desire to give everything to God and before you know it you have allowed someone else to take His place. It has given me a perspective I never would have had before and a compassion to listen to and walk with others experiencing similar spiritual abuse. One of the biggest helps for me was to read some of John Maxwell's leadership books. To list and learn the differences between good and bad leaders. I learned that I wasn't crazy and that the abused usually are not believed by the acquaintances of the abuser(her friends mostly defend her to this day). I learned not to care what they thought. God has brought such wealth and life out of that season in my life. I hope and pray that this is an encouragement to those who may have or are going through similar circumstances.