March 2024 – Wild Woman. Wild Minister. Wild Writer.

You can read part 1 of this three-part series here.

After Peter and I were married, our church was no longer “geographically desirable.” More like, the church was fine, but our apartment wasn’t; we’d had to move, though, for his job. The drive became untenable after a while and we looked for a new church. We happened upon a small country church. I’d grown up in one of those so this was good to me. I also wanted a smaller church so I could get to know people better. The primary dysfunction in this church was the pastor and his wife. The pastor did no spiritual self-care, and it’s customary for pastors to participate in small support groups with other local pastors. He didn’t even do that. He proclaimed, “My wife is my pastoral support person.” She’s a hospital chaplain to this day, and I’m quite sure after working forty hours a week doing spiritual care, the last thing she wanted to do was come home and do more.

There was so much funky about this situation. The preacher’s wife was pretty controlling. She took her role in the church way too seriously. (In Baptist churches, unless the husband and wife are called to co-pastor, the preacher’s wife just does whatever aligns with her gifts.) She was straight-up bossy and demanding. She tried to tell me what to do on numerous occasions, and I noped her.

At least a couple of times a month, there would be an announcement from the pulpit that someone in the community needed some work done on their home and asking for a crew to gather and go do the work that Sunday afternoon. I was working an unpaid internship forty hours a week (not including when I was on-call) plus a part-time job. Sunday was the one day I was guaranteed off, more likely than not. And here’s my newlywed husband happy to meet a need. That’s his thing, and I love him for it, but our marriage was starting to suffer for it. I told him, “The family was the first institution created by God, not the church.” He stopped volunteering as much.

The preacher felt like our church needed a family life center. It was supposed to attract students from the nearby university and families from the brand-new apartment complex across the street. My question of whether this facility would include showers so we could host unhoused people as part of that area’s Interfaith Hospitality Network was met with an emphatic “no.” After all, what could they contribute (financially) to the church? was the vibe I got. There was a suggestion of building a picnic shelter so we could host fundraising dinners to go towards building that family life center. To this day, that’s as far as they’ve gotten.

There were other indicators that we needed to move on. It just so happened that the conflict resolution person for our local Baptist association went to that church. Since she had knowledge of the local Baptist churches, she was able to recommend one to us. It was a good fit.

But there was toxicity here, too. I’m a cradle Baptist, and I grew up going to Sunday school. I was that one who read their lesson, took their Bible to church so she could follow along, and was thoughtful about my study. By the time we got to this church, I was in seminary. If I haven’t enjoyed Sunday school, it’s not because I didn’t want to, and I’m comfortable with participating in discussions. We weren’t there too long when the preacher told me that “some people” in our class complained to him that I talked too much. I guess the two men who alternated leading the class didn’t like an intelligent woman making them look inept, though that certainly wasn’t my intention at all. It speaks more to their insecurity than my knowledge.

anti-plagiarism picture — A male steals a female’s idea to claim as his own. Sadly, way too common.

Another time, the preacher and I were talking about our seminary experiences. He’d gone to a Southern Baptist seminary (pretty much the only pure Baptist seminary in our state at that time), and it just so happened that his preaching professor would later show up at my divinity school and become my preaching professor. Preaching isn’t my ministerial gift, nor is it at the heart of my ministry, but I enjoy doing it and can do it well. I just wouldn’t want to on a weekly basis. I was feeling a little proud of myself because I’d managed to squeak an A- out of my second preaching course. Our pastor told me he’d never gotten an A from that professor. I asked him if I could share the manuscript of my sermon with him. He said, “Yes.” Now, imagine my surprise a few Sundays later when I heard my sermon from the pulpit, almost word-for-word save a few illustrations, and with no credit given to the writer. Yep, our preacher plagiarized my sermon. I guess he liked it, huh?

If you’re a woman in business or ministry, when was a particularly painful time that a man stole your ideas or words and claimed them as his own? Post your response in the comments. (Note I’m not saying “if it happened,” because we know it does.)

Church Trauma Through the Generations, pt. 1

Among Christian, deconstruction, reconstruction, and progressive faith circles lately is this idea of church trauma. We often think of church trauma as being something big. Many people, for example, have experienced physical or sexual abuse at the hands of religious leaders, either ordained or lay leaders. A lot of women report being told not to talk about the abuse to “save the reputation of the man” who abused them. There are also numerous instances of people being emotionally and spiritually abused by the church and her representatives.

All this talk of church trauma has made me reflect back on my life and the mess I thought, believed, and experienced.

I was never physically or sexually abused at church at any time in my faith journey. But there was some trauma.

Broken churches, broken hearts, broken lives

My first church wasn’t horrible. The people were incredibly loving. It was a small, country Southern Baptist church. Let’s face it, though. In the 80s, pretty much all White Baptist churches in the South were Southern Baptist or Freewill Baptist and those that weren’t, we didn’t talk about.

Know what else we had in the 80s? Premillennial pretribulation dispensationalism cozied up with the RAPTURE. We had Jack Van Impe and his Barbie-doll wife (only Barbie looks more real, bless her heart) talking about the headlines and how they are fulfilling prophecy right in front of us! We had David Jeremiah warning us about all the earthly things being satanic and leading people away from Jesus. We had songs like “I Wish We’d All Been Ready” that talked about how horrible things were since the antichrist ushered in the tribulation and how we needed to get ourselves ready and make sure everyone else was ready, too. Edgar Whisenant calculated that Jesus would return between September 11th and 13th in 1988–the fortieth anniversary of Israel becoming an independent nation–and when we were still here on the 14th, we got anxious (until it was publicized that Whisenant may have made a mistake in his calculations). Yet, we still read the passages where Jesus says no one knows the time and date, not even him, but only God. No one else (besides me, of course) questioned how this guy could be so sure of the date range for the Rapture when not even the Son of God himself had those deets. But we were taught not to question our leaders. Asking questions was an indication of not having enough faith. (Whisenant would go on to predict the return of Christ to happen in 1989, 1993, and 1994. Smart-ass me surmised one of those times that even if Jesus were planning on coming back one of those predicted dates, he’d intentionally stall just to prove this guy wrong.)

We were good, though. We’d said the magic words and been baptized and God was cool with us. I even participated in a play that one of our youth leaders wrote that, um, impressed upon people the importance of getting right with God. More like, it scared them into believing with the threat of hell. That play was popular; we went around to several area churches and performed it. (I was one of the girls who got sent to “everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels.”)

Yet, over against all this “You’re a child of God” and “You have eternal life” were the very real messages of “You’re a sinner” and “If you stray off the path then maybe you don’t really have God in your heart (and hence, won’t get into Heaven).”

It’d only be a few years later that a new preacher would come in to the church and almost split it. This preacher made things uncomfortable for our family, especially my dad. (Guess he figured that Mom and I, being women, were not significant enough to mess with.) I was in college, anyway, so it was as good a time as any to separate myself from that church. After all, this new preacher was backed by the old diaconate who had known and presumably loved my dad and us for years.

I visited churches, some once, some for months, and everywhere in between. When I was in graduate school and was living full-time in my own apartment in the university town where I was studying, I became active about looking for and finding a new church home. It was a good one. My husband would later be baptized there, and we got married there. We’ve visited it a few times through the years.

After graduation and marriage, my husband’s job necessitated that we move away from that area. We made the drive for a couple of months or so. I’d been in the choir and had really enjoyed that, but with the commute, showing up for choir practice wasn’t practical. Eventually we realized we were too far away from church truly to be a part of the parish so we started looking for a new church.

Let’s converse! Do you remember or have you dealt with end times-related church trauma? What are you doing or have you done to heal from that trauma? Respond in the comments.

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