The reader who has arrived to this page without having first read its requisite introduction is encouraged to return and do so here.
Notes:
1. I privilege quoting myself versus quoting others. In cases where I feel a direct quote of someone else is best, I limit myself to those instances for which I have a written record. If there is doubt about verbatim, I leave out the quote marks.
2. For a number of sisters, I eliminate gendering, not to privilege patriarchy but to aid anonymity. Indeed, all pertinent proper nouns, for now, remain fictitious. Those in my former organization will infer many of them, anyway.
DAY 0
My wife is by my side while I read aloud a letter over Zoom. The letter details grave concerns about statements made by our boss. The person on the other end is a Mission Branch National Level superior.
An earlier appeal for an audience with my other Denomination superior, the Regional Overseer (“It’s important,” I’d written) was turned down, and I was told to pursue Mission Branch channels for assistance instead. I wrote back to clarify that my appeal was to him as Regional Shepherd, but added, “I won’t insist.” He didn’t respond.
When I finish reading my letter on the Zoom call, I say to the Mission Branch leader, “Please, I would rather you ignore and discard these concerns instead of treating them as a matter for In-house Mediation. This isn’t team conflict.”
I email the leader a copy of the letter. I share the password for opening it, but not the separate one preventing printing and copying. Both my wife and I feel extremely unsafe, and say so.
Day 9 [9 days later]
One more Mission Branch leader joins to make this second Zoom a group of four. I’m reading a briefer, clearer version of the same letter. It’s the first time I use the word abuse in writing (though no laws are being broken that I am aware of) and the word accusation about our boss. I beg to be corrected if that is what I need. I assert again that In-house Mediation would be an inappropriate response. I email this new copy to both of them with the password “Dread.”
Day 13 [3 days later]
Our long-awaited response from Mission Branch National Level is disappointing:
In-house Mediation.
Mediators from within the organization will be coming.
Day 16 [3 days later]
My wife and I respond with an impassioned protest about the impropriety of this direction, our concern about the first response being a move to silence us with a signed agreement, and our alarm about the lies being spread around the site daily. Not to mention the oddness of an attempt to make peace when no one has complained about or indicated team conflict.
I will not learn until later––much later—that the original plan was for some kind of direct intervention. But the accused requested In-house Mediation, specifically.
Day 23 [7 days later]
I email Mission Branch National, “It’s getting difficult for those of us in the know here at the Site to carry on working as if everything’s normal. Is there a start date for this?”
Later that day, select members of our Site receive initial Forms for In-house Mediation. More than one person is confused, because no specification about what precipitated this process is included. Some will not know for months. We turn in our forms quickly, anxious for anything to get started. There aren’t any other options.
Day 44 [21 day later]
Everyone’s Forms have finally been turned in. Dates can now be set for a Site Visit by the Mediation team. We are concerned about unqualified upbeat praise of our Site’s work and leader.
Day 70 [26 days later]
The Site Visit marks the end of a difficult 81-day wait for an institutional response to my weighty letter. The decision at hand: “Will our team’s situation prove appropriate for the full, formal Mediation process or won’t it?” In-house Mediation meets with couples together. My wife and I work through the standard list of questions when it’s our turn. I am also obviously hoping for interest in and questions about my initial accusation (in vain, it would turn out), for I, too, have been certified by In-house Mediation, and it is not designed for abuse situations. I appeal to this.
There is nothing to do but wait for a decision.
Day 77 [7 days later]
I am disappointed when our team learns that we will all be entering the full, formal Mediation process.
I am still waiting for my accusation to be addressed.
Day 92–93 [15–16 days later]
My wife and I feel lower than we have since the deeply disturbing and emotionally tumultuous days leading up to Day 0. We’ve grown to call the process since then crazy-making. Today, I experience a suicidal thought, to be repeated once more the next day. This is a first-time experience for me, and alerts me to the deadly seriousness the situation.
Days 98, 99, 100 [5–7 days later]
Disbelieved, desperate, and out of options, I email a password-protected appeal letter to the Denominational Corporate Secretary. My honest understanding is that I am following the instructions, even encouragement, of our Denominational President, for I got the Corporate Secretary address from an abuse-report invitation at the end of a recent video response to a denominationally licensed individual who turned out to be a predator.
My short letter references the original accusations, but I decline to repeat them. I will wait this time until I am convinced someone wants to hear them, first. I end with five requests:
1. First and foremost, help, hopefully leading to healing, for the accused.
2. Someone to consider that we might be telling the truth.
3. Inquiry or investigation instead of mediation.
4. Or, at least, an outside party to hear some of our current concerns about conflicts of interest.
5. Or best, for a third party assessment by someone like GRACE to be considered.
At this high level, my felt un-safety is so great that I send from a non-denominational email address. My subject line is “Confidential Report,” and the text body specifies that the attachment is password protected. The password is “Help.”
24 hours in, and I am still waiting for a response.
I follow up. 42 hours in, finally, a response. My email was received but not opened due to me being an unknown person? It is a very punishing beginning to a nerve-wracking step that required courage to take, but a number of emails later and we have worked out the misunderstandings with no hard feelings. But the original email has disappeared, so I both forward it again as well as send a new one from my denominational email address to be sure.
For five days I will have no idea if anyone received or is reading my letter.
Day 105 [5 days later]
A response. Not an email but a phone call. I am horrified when I hear a voice that I know. Humiliated, embarrassed. Because my “confidential” report, with its separate, unshared password blocking printing, has been typed out so as to be given to him! “Painstakingly typed” he says, as if to elicit what? Appreciation?
He’s not, it turns out, calling me wearing any mediation hats. Oh.
My report was forwarded to him because he is on some other committee. He is calling with that hat on. Unfortunately for me, he says, that committee hears three specific types of situations, exclusively. Mine doesn’t qualify. I feel more hopeless than ever.
Day 107 [2 days later]
My wife and I, along with another colleague couple who are also a part of the Mediation process because they submitted a letter similar to mine, share a meal with the same two Mission Branch National leaders from Day 9. It is a heart-felt, cathartic, truth-telling, feet-in-reality, “we feel heard” hour. Changes will be coming. All six of us seem to feel heartened.
Day 111 [4 days later]
I share a second, and overall nice phone conversation with that same two-hat gentleman and learn an even more key point about my abuse appeal. That invitation on the video, he says, though it failed to specify so, is meant for (wait for it)…people experiencing legal abuse (meaning sexual, physical, and other abuses meeting the legal definitions of abuse). Nothing else.
Of course! A full-blown epiphany. I genuinely thank him for making sense of it for me. My letter was a dead-end before I even wrote it. There had never been a prayer.
I feel embarrassed. And chagrined not to have seen that coming, especially with that legal-office email as the contact point. Yes, of course: the invitation was built to anticipate and ultimately to protect. But not me.
Day 120 [9 days later]
My wife, who holds more physically visible roles at our Mission Branch Site than I, comes home from work hurt over being shamed and blamed, this time over things she didn’t even do, and she blurts out that she feels like quitting. In actuality, neither one of us seriously entertains the idea of leaving or quitting, for various reasons, but it’s clearer than ever that the quagmire that my report precipitated is dragging down her well-being in increasingly major ways.
Day 128 [8 days later]
An extremely significant email from the Mission Branch National Office arrives full of information about both their and Regional’s disciplinary policies as well as potentially hopeful shifts in our process.
The two most salient points, summarized:
1. In-house Mediation shall not continue for the present.
2. The Regional Overseer (RO) is taking over. He has told all concerned National Levels that there will be “a comprehensive investigation.” The RO has also communicated disappointment that licensed workers in his Region would not feel safe submitting a significant concern such as this to him, directly.
First I wonder if he remembers that I did, feeling safe or not, attempt to submit my concern to him first, and he not only sent me to Mission Branch National, he ignored my follow-up. Second, I support anyone who feels unsafe sharing these concerns to anyone, without even needing to mention his particular unsafeness, specifically. Feeling unsafe is not a deficiency in the feeler. My wife and I would affirm that our listener on Day 0 contributed zero personal reasons for making us feel unsafe, yet we felt significantly unsafe. We’ve been around the block. I understand what I’m doing. We know what’s at stake. This is an organization. A Christian organization. Every human feels unsafe for the exact same reason. When we think we are. An assertion of someone else’s perception of safety is irrelevant. At best.
The process so far has done nothing but cement our feelings of unsafety.
I once called him my Regional Shepherd. Would he be so, now?
Day 129 [1 day later]
A) Signed Mediation Agreements are requested within three days. (These agreements, required to begin the process announced on Day 77, fifty-two days ago, had been in a sort of holding pattern due to my appeal.) So, yesterday we heard that Mediation is on a permanent hold, and today we get word it’s coming to life again. Perplexing.
I will not be able to bring myself to add my signature to the Agreement for more than a month.
B) The RO emails me, “I will need to meet with you in person or via Zoom to begin the investigation process.”
Day 141 [12 days later]
A) The In-house Mediation mystery gets explained, again by my two-hat guy. The RO wants to proceed in a dual track: the Mediation process and the disciplinary process together.
Huh. All other advocates overruled, or what?
B) The Regional Overseer and I have a face-to-face meeting in a hotel lobby. To the best of my knowledge, this is the only one-on-one, face-to-face conversation I ever have with the RO. [I shall be glad to be reminded if there are witnesses of another. There was one short 1:1 Zoom a week prior to Day 0 and my wife’s and my initial Zoom job interview with him.] I lay out an abbreviated version of the same concerns about my boss that the RO could have heard on Day Negative-1.
Then I affirm, “I know abuse is a serious word.”
“And it’s overused,” he quips.
The conversation is not exactly natural, but it is not by any means awful, and I experience him as making best efforts.
But I am concerned by a number of the things the RO says. I understand, in a way, his logic in a power struggle paradigm, which he appears to be operating in, but it is not good news in the power abuse paradigm I am living in. A sampling:
>Life is short. Maybe move on? (Classic. This is such a common m.o. Moving on will always help your career more than telling the truth in these situations. I’m not faultless, in my own past, in choosing, even advising, moving on.)
Not this time. That’s not what love looks like, here.
>If you stay, will you be able to work under and respect his authority?
This question is nonsense if I believe my own accusations. But I answer respectfully.
Finally, >What’s your part in all this?
I can hardly believe Matthew 18 is once again going to be brought out to bludgeon me. I don’t engage.
At some point in the conversation, I use the word investigation. The RO himself has been using this word (and will continue to after this day) with others and with me, in speech and in writing.
His response, swift and unmistakable, halts me. “This is not an investigation; it’s an inquiry. I make the decision about an investigation.”
Whoa.
I’m familiar with their distinction. Even in-house. Used both words myself in my letter to the CorpSec. But how I just now hear them contrasted chills me, because I am well-familiar with that exact same differentiating usage from a national publication article earlier this same year in which the Denomination seems principally interested in sidestepping responsibility for failing to protect a truth-telling victim.
A proper investigation can protect me. An inquiry might protect everyone but me.
Day 148 [7 days later]
A Regional insider happens to comment to me, with a good heart and the purest of intentions, “The RO says In-house Mediation has gotten bogged down, and he wants to get this taken care of as quickly as possible.”
Does he, now!
My mind goes back to when, on Day 58, my boss claimed: “The RO says Mission Branch National is overreacting.” But whereas I never knew when I could believe my boss (and therefore never knew whether the RO said this or not), I have no doubts about this insider. In other words, I will now operate under the knowledge that the RO wants to take care of this quickly.
I just don’t know what that means.
Day 155 [7 days later]
11:08 AM: My boss calls me on the phone! It’s the first time since before Day 0, I think. He says, “Just calling as an FYI due to your previous groundwork over here.” He’s at such and such apartment complex signing a lease, but I have to tell him I’ve not done any of the leases in that apartment complex? And hang up, flummoxed. Why would he call me, now? And for something so menial, almost stupid, in the midst of all this? How odd.
12:28 PM: Email from the RO. Oh. This is going to explain it. “Please note the attached memo which concludes the RO inquiry in response to your complaint. Your concerns were taken seriously, investigated fully, and deliberated prayerfully. I trust you will cooperate fully with the In-house Mediation process which is underway.”
Inquiry has been declared sufficient, all charges effectively annulled. Conveniently, inquiry included an “investigation,” apparently, at least the word. But I myself have a whole list of people of consequence who were never included in said “investigation,” all female. Excuse me, “inquiry.”
Day 156 [1 day later]
1. I write the RO. Due to the wording in his memo, I want to be clear on whether electing to not sign on for continuing Mediation poses any kind of jeopardy to my employment. He reassures me: that decision is totally mine to make.
I will only grow to see how naive I am at this point of the process much, much later.
2. I share an emotional call with Denominational HR in which I re-express (this wasn’t our first interaction) my deep need for care. I mention my two suicidal thoughts and an episode two days prior in which my wife also shouted end-of-life statements during an emotional breakdown. Unfortunately, they cannot intervene, but feel sympathetic. I implore them, “I need action!” I try a number of different tacks, including, “The org cannot over and over bemoan the loss of good people and then refuse to raise a finger when good people need real care.” But I’m surprised myself when a few minutes later I barely have time for an abrupt “I think that’s about it, thank you,” while closing my laptop to have a breakdown of my own.
Day 164 [8 days later]
I finally sign the Mediation agreement. For the sake of the other members of the group who want to work through all of the steps, who want that final promised sit-down for telling the truth, together, I assent. Apparently the group cannot continue without everyone.
Day 178 [14 days later]
I watch the video previously described in this blog entry. (The final day’s events of that story insert chronologically below on Day 193.)
Day 182, 185 [4, 7 days later]
A bunch of us have a series of individual meetings designed to help us move towards owning our part and identifying the log(s) in our own eyes as per Matthew 18. After my wife’s session, she experiences feeling re-abused. I watch her pay the emotional price for having pushed back on that all the rest of that day. At the end of two sessions myself, I write down a commitment: “I cannot speak fully openly/honestly in that setting again.”
I never do.
Day 188 [3 days later]
My 15-year-old son enters our kitchen on a Monday and hands me a FedEx envelope. Within, I find a single page of Regional letterhead signed by the RO. Three of the sentences jump out from the rest:
“It is with regret, but board unanimity that I inform you that your position with [Mission Branch Site] is terminated, effective immediately.” I go find a chair.
“It is the conclusion of the [Site] board that your attitude and actions have been not only disruptive, but harmful to team cohesion and ministry effectiveness.” I recoil at the notion of being told anything about my attitude by a group of men whom I have never met. But the sentence itself is true if “attitude” is left out.
“It is not in your interest to voice further dissent to anyone connected with [Mission Branch] or area [Denomination] churches.” Yikes.
Where am I?? Did this just happen?
It will feel disturbing to eventually learn the decision was made a week prior to me getting the FedEx. And feel emasculating that double-digit numbers of people––both above me and below me in organizational hierarchy––knew about it for that long (or longer) before me.
I inform a handful of friends. At least three will say, “Get a lawyer.”
Over a year later, a friend of one of the board members will pass me the alarming tidbit that long before the firing decision, the RO had drafted NDA’s for the board members to all sign which precluded them from interacting with me.
Day 189 [1 day later]
I direct-message the Mission Branch Site group chat, which is around thirty-something, maybe forty, people at the time:
“Dear All,
“My employment with Mission Branch has been terminated by the Site Board. I remain gladly the same person I have always been, so take heart—there is no need for any awkwardness in personal conversation. It’s been an honor to serve with you. Our God will never fail. Much love.”
I learn how angry this makes the RO some days later from a suddenly-former colleague, who says breaking the news of my firing to the Site was the RO’s prerogative, and his alone. I mix my laughing in with my own anger, and tell my friend I couldn’t disagree more.
Day 190 [1 day later]
I call our Mission Branch National superior from Day 0. I am operating completely on words last spoken (see Day 107) and words last written (see Day 128) and assuming, without thinking much about it, that the abrupt firing will register as unforeseen.
I am immediately disabused of that naïveté.
I do, however, hear anger over the news being delivered to me via FedEx.
And I hear deeper anger that the RO has not yet given me the “real reasons.” Real reasons? Who knew there were reasons?!
“Well, can I have those, then?”
No. I’m told I have to reach out to the RO.
“Um, I don’t think that is my responsibility?”
“I didn’t say it was your responsibility!”
Bewildering from hello, this conversation is deteriorating fast, but it goes on a little longer. Suddenly, I have to arrest it completely:
“Wait! Wait a second, stop. Are you saying: not only did you know all about this, but: you believe justice, and not injustice, is being meted out on me?”
A one-word, never-to-be-forgotten answer:
“Yes.”
I claw for a mental vantage point from which to assimilate this information. I fail.
I do not blame (and will not later come to blame) the speaker of the “yes.” I accept it as factual. What I’m choking on is the fact that this person is credible. I realize in that moment: everyone believes this. Whatever “this” turns out to be. This still-secret, fabricated narrative about me which, evidently, has replaced…me.
It is over.
I cannot speak.
But have to. “I’m sorry, I need to think. I need to process what you just said. I need to hang up now. Maybe again later?”
There will be no calls later.
Day 191 [1 day later]
My Denomination login credentials fail. What? I begin to panic. I’ve stored gads of important files, ministry and personal, on Denomination servers for as long as I can remember. No advance warning of this 3-day cut-off?! I write and ask. Surely I may at least be given a temporary reinstatement? No. Temporary credentials? Sorry, no.
Over Zoom with an administrator a couple days later, I will endure a humiliating file-by-file request for what I need.
Am I a criminal?
Day 192 [1 day later]
The RO calls on that 9-hour car ride.
“Any questions?” he begins.
I admit to him that I don’t really understand what the reasons for firing were.
I hear rustling paper as he goes for his copy of the letter. He reads me back the one explanatory sentence, verbatim.
“Uh, yes, I read that. Anything else?”
“Is there a specific list of things? Of course. But what those things are isn’t important.
“That’s to your advantage to have it general like that because this letter goes in your personnel file.
“In any case, the decision is final. The decision is necessary. The decision was unanimous.
“This can’t have come as a surprise to you.”
I can’t help but react to that one. “It comes as a complete surprise to me!”
So was the one lone month of severance.
Day 195 [4 days later]
The Regional Overseer is in town for a Site-wide meeting about me, to answer Site members’ questions, and to assert himself as the man in charge. I am obviously not there, today or ever.
At least two reports that come back to me are deeply disturbing.
1) The RO never speaks my name, even our family name, calling me/us “the family.” This is dehumanizing. Tammy courageously sits there through everything (only breaking into sobs just that one time someone pointed out she’s, obviously, present).
2) Afterwards, privately, one individual familiar with everything else to this point ventures a personal opinion: “Well, we know the RO lied at least twice.”
Day 205 [10 days later]
We send out a personal family newsletter titled, “Very LAST Mission Branch Update.”
[If you received that and always wondered what was between those lines… well, here you are.]
Day 209 [4 days later]
1. I spend a very frustrating day with resumes, cover letters, and a search through nearby Federal Government job postings. My kids have moved enough. We will be remaining in our home. I will not be interrupting their school years. We have two in middle school, two in high school, and another at home starting online college. All this has done unspeakable things to all of them. I have yet to learn that the oldest away at college may be suffering the worst damage of all. My day results in a single, solitary application to some quickly-forgotten downtown non-profit.
I know from my job search back when coming home from China (due to the special needs of two kids) that my accumulated life experience hasn’t made me a particularly marketable person. Now I’m just five years older.
My one month of severance is half gone. We remind ourselves daily, “The Lord has taken us through unemployment and underemployment before.”
We are not afraid.
2. Tammy texts me a slide from a spiritual formation class she is taking. The infographic is a contrast of the Enemy’s Voice with God’s Voice:
Vague vs. Specific
Condemning vs. Restorative
Leads to feeling shame and despair vs. Leads to repentance
Produces fear vs. Produces love and peace
Accuses, harasses, torments vs. Produces solutions, freedom, hope
We feel something almost like relief. “Okay, we’re not the crazy ones.” Comfort.
And many other feelings as well.
Day 210 [1 day later]
The RO sends out his monthly newsletter to the Region. I have obviously been removed from that list, but the email still gets to me when a friend forwards it to me and asks, “Is this about you?!?” Who am I to say? I don’t even know when my equilibrium is going to return. The reader may engage their own theories, should they so desire.
Day 213 [3 days later]
I go to coffee with my former colleague from Day 189, and he mentions that the RO is still steamed over me having broken the news of my own firing. The nerve.
This time I’ve no anger to mix with my laughter.
Day 232 [19 days later]
Dates for Final Meetings are set.
My last meeting was about the same time I got fired. Seven weeks have gone by. I have, totally incomprehensibly to some, if not myself, recommitted to the process post-firing. Hadn’t I been told the others couldn’t complete without me? Haven’t people gone out of their way to affirm my inestimable value to the process, even now as a non-team member?
For months I attended meetings I refuse to speak about, ceaselessly appealing (until I ceased appealing) to be believed, because of one interminably dangled carrot: at the end we could all gather in one room and tell the truth together. Now that the end was in sight, could I not stay the course? Final Meetings will be the first time our core team will be gathered into a room together since before Day 0.
We put the 5th Thursday and Friday from now into our calendars.
Day 252 [20 days later]
I attend a friend’s 50th Birthday Party. He is another former colleague, so much of our former community is there, most of whom I have not seen since the firing. It hits me hard as I watch everyone: Tammy’s and my 50th parties were supposed to have been combined into one big one a few months from now. How pitiable that even that lifetime event has been taken from us. It’s a little more difficult to hang around than I’d anticipated. I leave early.
Day 259 [7 days later]
It is 8 days until The Thursday.
And a bombshell gets dropped.
The Thursday will now ONLY include the originally accused (and exonerated) boss and the lately accused (and convicted and sentenced) me. Okay, only our actual names are in the announcement. The whole-group time will have to wait for Friday.
This type of isolation was always part of the problem, and never part of any promised solution. I protest. Limply.
Day 264 [5 days later]
It is 3 days until The Thursday.
There is now further considering about eliminating Tammy and me from The Friday entirely. I am asked to email my thoughts on the matter by the next morning. I don’t need one minute to know my thoughts, let alone one day, but I ask if the decision is mine to make, or if I am just offering opinions.
It was only ever optics. My answer isn’t needed.
When some of the other participants find out we might not be there, anger erupts. We’ve all been told from the very first meeting how the Final Meeting is the reason for all the rest of the meetings.
Day 267 [3 days later]
On Thursday my wife and I are together with my former boss and his wife. Things start über-awkward but evolve to livable awkward. All day, we never become in the least un-cordial with one another.
The accumulation of trauma in my body over the last 38 weeks (I guess I’m nearly full-term) sends me outdoors by myself during lunch to get away. I lie spread-eagle and face down in the hotel parking lot. I soak up the heat from the asphalt. I imagine it’s planet Earth giving me a hug. It’s funny how, now that I thought it, it kind of feels like it.
This memory will come to me in the future every time that I cannot avoid driving past that lot.
By the afternoon, our meeting becomes almost friendly, in a pointless sort of way. We compile some soon-forgotten agreement that no one, anywhere, could possibly disagree with. My boss and I share jokes and laughs, and talk in the restroom during our final break together. We’d experienced little interpersonal conflict in the first place, and now, wrapping up a six-month process to “make peace” when I wasn’t even on the team anymore, felt like a joke.
Day 268 [1 day later]
We are, of course, disinvited to The Friday. Even Tammy, Current Employee, was disinvited, not that she would have wanted to be there without me.
The remaining team feel hopeful for the future, but I don’t. Not without the truth.
Day 287 [19 days later]
My severance ends. It was extended, hair-raisingly near to the end of the first month and after numerous pleas and appeals, to 3 months.
It coincides with Tammy’s last day at Mission Branch. A brave, heroic woman to stick it out these long, long weeks.
287 days are now passed since I blew a whistle on a man I felt compelled to love in a way I knew no one else was loving him. Days 0 and 9 feel like ancient history. I try to remember my heart at that time, going back to read from the closing of my Day 9 letter:
“I’m under no delusions that speaking up was some kind of bright idea. Other than him, no one is at greater risk from this than I. Our own denomination’s history with those who make startling allegations (even those that prove true in the end) should have been more than enough to dissuade me. But the most difficult part about taking this plunge was simply inside my own head–– wishing I could just…say nothing instead.
“It seems to me that I/we/others have been subjected (even if without forethought) to psychological, emotional, and spiritual abuse. I know that’s a serious word, and I want nothing more than to be convinced I’m wrong if indeed I am. It seems like it would be necessary to get that straight in order to understand my own role in reconciliation.
“We’re called here. We’re not looking for an escape hatch.”
I am unashamed. My heart started, persevered, and ended in right places.
I am glad, too, of the reminder that I walked into this with my eyes open.
I chose to stay, even when the cost rose higher––much higher––than expected. I never stopped asking for correction at all stages of the process. But all “correction” came at the end. Heavily.
I’m sure I did not always do, write, or speak in the best ways. In fact, a good friend of mine read my Day 9 Letter long after the fact and almost panicked me that it was the worst thing ever. Maybe it is closer to that than I see. He said it read like a list of gripes and that I put the Denomination in an impossible position. Maybe it did. Maybe I had. At least his comments directly helped me state better, clearer desires (even if ultimately equally impotent) in my letter to the Corporate Secretary.
But love was always my motivation.
There is no question that more Mission Branch people would have stayed at our Site longer and been the worse for it had nothing been done.
I blew a whistle, and I sincerely thought all of us could be, and would be, helped.
I was wrong.
“What I have consistently heard from survivors from faith communities has been the following. “[What] was perpetrated against me by the perpetrator was traumatic, and it’s going to take a lifetime for me to process it…. But what was worse than that was the response from the community that I thought was going to be my greatest advocate, who turned their back on me. That I don’t know if I’ll ever heal from.”
-Boz Tchividjian, founder of GRACE (Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment)
Day 319 [32 days later]
I start my new job as an Associate Pastor in a local area church in another denomination. I think back to my last other-Denomination church before I entered my first this-Denomination church in 1982, and calculate that I’d just finished the third grade. Who would have thought an over forty-year run could end like this?
My family is remaining in our home.
(Return to Original post to read the OUTRO).
My heart is saddened by what you and Tammy experienced. Father feels your heart and he urged me to pray for you one morning (I don’t remember which year.). I could feel the heaviness when praying.
We love you, Susan.