Guest Post: Facing Your Spiritual Abuser

Cindy, at the Under Much Grace blog has so kindly allowed us to re-post this article, entitled:

Facing Your Spiritual Abuser: Index of Posts About the Star Chamber and the Hot Seat

As we have seen in many of the stories here ( Kip's , for example), this is very much a reality.  Please stop over at Cindy's blog...but I must warn you...there is so much good information that you will need to have time on your hands!  Very educational.

For those that have answered A Call for Reconciliation, please take notes!

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Sometimes, members of a high demand group or a spiritually abusive church are called in to sessions of confrontation with their group leadership, pastors, and elders in order to intimidate them and to secure their compliance with group demands. And quite often, when people discover problems with manipulation, doctrine, or exploitation within their spiritually abusive church, they feel responsible to inform their leadership. Many people seek out their leaders to inform their leaders that they are leaving their group, just as a courtesy, to find personal closure, and sometimes, to hopefully make their spiritual abuser aware of the hurtful if not harmful nature of their actions – a personal courtesy to them.

Because of the authoritarian nature of spiritually abusive groups and the dynamics by which the leaders perpetuate control and coercion of the followers, group leaders generally react to this type of confrontation in very predictable ways. Such a system demands compliance with a certain set of dynamics, one of which demands complete perfection of the group, the way it does things, and the decisions made by the leaders. The group defines ultimate truth, so the group leadership speaks on God's behalf. The system demands complete devotion and compliance, requiring unquestioned obedience and complete submission to authority to any of their superiors on their chain of command. Because these dynamics demand that the follower assume fault at all costs, for the purposes of discussion, we have named the sessions of confrontation the “Star Chamber.”

Manipulative groups also make use of shame sessions that demand that the follower confess their faults to the group and the leadership. Deeply personal information elucidated in the “star chamber” can generally be extracted from group members because of the threatening nature of the confrontation sessions, what some high demand groups have formally called “the Hot Seat.”

If you're planning to confront a church leader that you suspect might be spiritually abusive, you will find this series of blog posts quite helpful. If you have advanced knowledge of the nature of a meeting to which you've been summoned, or if you are planning to confront manipulative church leaders, please take advantage of this information in advance. If you are recovering from this aspect of spiritual abuse which often proves to be quite difficult because of the moral questions that arise, you will likely find this information helpful to you as you work through the anger, grief, recovery, moving through your experience into triumph.

The many posts on the subject have been categorized to make them easier to navigate.

Thought Conversion During Confrontations

With a Manipulative Leader

(What is the Church Star Chamber and the Hot Seat?)

• When Persecution Comes and Thought Conversion Results (How the confrontation process can get you to change your thoughts, emotions, and behaviors)
•  When You're Summoned to the Church Star Chamber (Intimidating meetings with many church leaders, usually conducted under the guise of “the Matthew 18 process” as a discipline session)
• Thought Conversion on the Hot Seat (A process of interrogation that generally takes place during “star chamber” confrontation meetings with manipulative leadership – a formal practice in many high demand groups and religions)
• The Violence of Thought Conversion: Wrapped in Gentleness and in Cruelty (Sometimes the process of conversion through confrontation appears to be gentle and benign, though the group demands relinquishing of personal will, history, and ethics in order to meet the demands of the group)

Considerations and Protective Measures to Take

When You Encounter a Hot Seat / Star Chamber Meeting

• What Do You Risk When You Go to a Meeting? (Biderman's Chart of Coercion used as a model to identify and anticipate tactics used to manipulate and intimidate – limited discussion of Sovereign Grace Ministries/Mahaney and Mars Hill Church/Driscoll)
• If You Choose to Go to Star Chamber Confrontations with Ministers, At Least Be Knowledgeable About Abuse (The bare minimum of information to review about thedynamics of thought conversion and abusers when you've willingly chosen confrontation instead of walking away: links to summaries and blog entries)
• Practical Considerations for the Confrontation of a Pastor with Spiritually Abusive Tendencies (Ideas about how you can protect yourself and limit the damage)
  
  
  
  

  Questions About the

  
  

  Hot Seat / Star Chamber Experience

  
  

  • Do I Really See Spiritual Abuse All Around Me?
  • Does My Pastor Deliberately Use Thought Reform?
  • Does Someone Teach Thought Reform To Pastors Under the Guise of Good Christian Practice?
  • Don't Church Leaders Realize Just How Abusive They Really Are?
  • Working for a Religious Group or a Secular Employer Who Uses Manipulative Tactics.

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  Cynthia Mullen Kunsman is a nurse (RN, BSN), naturopath (ND) and seminary graduate (MMin) with a wide variety of training and over 20 years of clinical experience. She has used her training in Complementary and Alternative Medicine as a lecturer and liaison to professional scientific and medical groups, in both academic and traditional clinical healthcare settings. She also completed additional studies in the field of thought reform, including the study of hypnotherapy for both chronic pain management as well as its efficacy in the treatment of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) that is often associated with cultic group involvement. Her nursing experience ranges from intensive care, the training of critical care nurses, hospice care, case management and quality management, though she currently limits her practice to forensic medical record review and evaluation. Most of her professional efforts concern the study of manipulative and coercive evangelical Christian groups, the recovery process from thought reform, and PTSD associated with such involvement.

Former MHC Leader on the "Call to Reconciliation"

I was in leadership at MHC but am no longer a member as a result of some other-worldly interactions and meetings with elders & pastors.  

I have many more thoughts, but here are a few. My response to the latest “Call for Reconciliation” was similar to yours in that it felt misleading.  It seems the church’s responses are consistently evasive or misleading, or both.  In one of the first responses, they made it seem that the pastors involved in Andrew’s Church Discipline situation were fired as a result.  This was untrue (which I confirmed by way of the exact timing with Andrew) and I’m glad that the church has clarified this.  Similarly, it feels deceitful when they give numbers about a small percentage of cases that are actually in Church Discipline.  As you mention in your post, there are many of these conversations that occur on an ongoing basis.  Many people who are wiser or more mature choose to remove themselves before they officially get to the status of church discipline.

When I read the statements about MHC’s Theology of Church Discipline I am struck with four thoughts:

1.      Theology and Praxis are two entirely different things.  While their doctrine may be mostly on track, the application of their doctrine is questionable, if not blatantly abusive in some cases.

2.      The level of detail given to determining “true repentance” in their literature is disturbing.  I’ve researched other mainstream church discipline policies and nowhere else do I find this level of a pastoral discretion in determining true repentance on areas that are grey in Scripture.  Clearly, there are ways to determine true repentance in sin areas that are black and white in Scripture.

3.      If we were to apply MHC’s standard of true conviction, confession and repentance to MHC itself, would the church would be under Church Discipline?  And who would administer this discipline?

4.      Any thoughts on why many of these statements that come from the church never come from a particular person?  It seems like one of them initially was authored by a lower level staff but they currently are all authored by “Mars Hill”.  I don’t mean to be cynical, but it seems convenient that the church leadership can call out individuals when they disagree but hide behind the organization of the church when it comes to responsibility and giving a response.  Does the idea of conviction, confession, repentance, restitution & reconciliation get extinguished because we are dealing with the church as an organization and not each instance with each leader/elder/pastor?

My experience from conversations with multiple MHC pastors is that their theology on submitting to your church leaders is the following.  If a leader in this church tells you to do something that is not specifically prohibited by scripture, then you have a responsibility to do it.  In most churches, if a leader tells you (or asks you) to do something, you have a responsibility to obey if it is a black and white issue in Scripture.  At Mars Hill Church, you are considered in rebellion to authority if you don’t obey a church leader’s request, even if that request is a matter of conscience and something you may have resolved alternatively through prayer and counsel.

Kevin Potts' Story

 I left in 2008 from Mars Hill Church. Their culture of abuse is frightening in its implications. Everything said on your blog [the Wartburg Watch], on Matthew Paul Turner's site, and on the Stranger is alarmingly accurate: the members are not encouraged to stand up to the leadership when it's acting with wrong motivations or wrong actions, they are told to remain quiet and to trust the leadership. There is no body to hold the leadership accountable to, and the church's authority structure is such that the only people to go to if you have an issue with one or more of its pastors is, unsurprisingly, another pastor. I can't imagine this being an environment, for anyone who takes a few moments to consider its implications, where anyone would feel safe expressing concerns about the leadership, let alone about Mark Driscoll.


For myself, my story is perhaps one of their earlier examples. At the time, I had been a member for nearly 8 years, having started at Mars Hill in 2000 and becoming a member just two months later with a much less rigorous membership process (which amounted to a quick 2-hour lesson from Driscoll on church leadership's structure, an indication of what being a member meant, handing out membership covenants to those attending, and letting us decide on our own if we wanted to become members). I had been having misgivings about the growth of the church and the increasing separation between the leadership and the congregation, but had largely kept this to myself.

Driscoll, in 2008, was preparing a sermon series entitled "Ask Anything", the intent being to set up a website where questions could be posted and voted on, with the top 5 questions (those that received the most votes) being the ones that Mark would build his preaching series on. Anonymous comments were allowed due to the software that was being used, and people used this to start bringing up questions about the firing of Paul Petry and probation of Bent Meyer that they felt they couldn't ask in the church itself, since they had been directly instructed by (then) pastor X, in an open letter to the members via the password-protected members' website (The City hadn't yet come into being, though it was close at the time), to remain quiet on the issue while the leadership worked to produce a unified document explaining their actions.

I made one comment on this site under the pseudonym of Kel, and had no further comments published. At the time, one person was using the title of "Concerned" in the comments, and was raising a bit more of a stink, though with some thoughtful and probing questions.

Around this time, I decided to transition away from the main Ballard campus over to the then-titled Wedgwood Campus, as it was geographically closer to where I lived (the campus became the Lake City Campus, which is now closed; its staff were largely absorbed into the Shoreline campus). I was serving as a stage manager in the morning for the Ballard campus, and had an exit interview with the head of the production department, XX. In this exit interview, a discussion of my discomfort with how the Petry/Meyer issue had been handled arose. I made a statement of "I have no interest in causing division. It would be easy to do so with how well connected I am in the church, but I have no interest in doing so."

This was communicated to senior leadership as "Kevin Potts indicated he's going to cause division in the church."

Shortly after that, I received an e-mail from the Pastor of Technology (and creator of The City). He asked me point-blank if I was "Concerned", the poster raising issues on the Ask Anything site. I indicated to him directly that I wasn't. A couple of days later he responded and indicated he thought I was, in fact, "Concerned", as that individual was making statements that echoed my exit interview with XX, as well as a statement I had made on the members' site in response to one member indicating it would be a shame if the leadership had to start tracking IP addresses between member posts and the anonymous comments on Ask Anything in order to figure out who were random posters and who were disgruntled members hiding behind pseudonyms. I indicated this wasn't a course that was wise to take, as there were people upset with the leadership, and such an action wouldn't engender the trust the leadership needed to get Mars Hill through the trying situation at the time.

This, according to Pastor of Tech, was me displaying an "unhealthy distrust for the leadership" at Mars Hill (eerily echoing the accusations levied against Paul Petry and Bent Meyer), and it was indicated that my membership was being put on suspension pending a meeting, as three elders had apparently concluded I was "in sin" (without ever having spoken to me first to hear my side of the story).

After much prayer and consideration, I chose to conclude my membership at Mars Hill Church. I sent an e-mail to XXX, as well as the then-head pastor of the campus I was transferring to. No "discipline contracts" were offered to me, as I don't think they'd have thought of something like that at the time. Some momentary communiques occurred between me and Pastor Q (who is now a Mars Hill pastor at their Albuquerque campus in New Mexico) shortly after both the Stranger and the Seattle Times had gotten ahold of me, as my name was on a list someone had circulated to those papers as people of interest to speak with regarding the truth, as we understood it, behind Paul and Bent's dismissals.

When I had spoken with Jonah Spangenthal-Lee from the Stranger, and Janet Tu from the Seattle Times, I had indicated in both instances that I didn't want my name used in their articles. I was still, at the time, living in a house owned by Mark Driscoll in Montlake, and didn't want my living situation jeopardized, as I didn't trust Mark or his assistant to do the right thing in light of this. In both discussions with the reporters, I only confirmed what they already knew, referring them to Mars Hill Church and Bent Meyer and Paul Petry for further discussion. Q eventually called me to find out if I was, in fact, the person who had spoken with the Stranger and the Seattle Times (and I doubt I was the only one who had), and I confirmed it for him, at which point he proceeded to lay a guilt trip on me, indicating I needed to go to the church and ask the forgiveness of the people I had harmed in talking with The Stranger (who he was sure to note to me "was no friend of Mars Hill, and no friend of Christ") and the Seattle Times.

Keep in mind I was already no longer a member at Mars Hill at this time, and yet he thought that he could still control me to the point of having me apologize to people I was no longer involved with in an attempt to repent of sin that it seemed he was the only one accusing me of, he and those he represented.

At a later point, Molly Worthen from the New York Times Sunday Magazine spoke with me. At that point all ties with Mars Hill were severed for me, and I would have suffered no ill consequences for speaking with her. I gave her my full permission to use my name in her article, which can be found at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/11/magazine/11punk-t.html?_r=1&pagewanted=4 Curiously, she chose not to use my name, though on the 4th page of the article in the link I gave you, I'm the member she referenced in the third paragraph, the member who "complained on an online message board and instantly found his membership privileges suspended".

I was able to get out before they implemented the kind of behavior that Andrew is now experiencing. I'm horrified to hear he's experiencing it. Feel free to use my name and my story here (though you may want to remove the pastors' names, as I have no ability to authorize their use) in a blog post if it would be remotely helpful to anyone else who's going through the horrors of attempting to separate from Mars Hill Church.

Our Story

Here is are easy links to our story:

Sophia's Story

UnReformed's Story

The Stranger Writes: Church or Cult?

Brendan Kiley, writer for The Stranger (and indie newspaper in the Seattle area), addresses the question we have all been asking ourselves.

The Stranger Article: Church or Cult?

Dear Church: Shut Up and Listen!

Dianna Anderson wrote this over at MPT:

http://matthewpaulturner.net/jesus-needs-new-pr/why-the-church-needs-to-shut-up-and-listen-a-guest-post

Makes me think of this:

Beauty from Ashes – Good News for the Oppressed

Isaiah 61:1-9

I have been thinking about this scripture a lot lately.  The first part is actually talking about Jesus, and is a prophecy about him that he then quotes in Luke 4:18. I have read this scripture many, many times, but in light of the last week or so, I see it differently.  The beginning is talking about Jesus, but isn’t our life purpose to be sanctified to be more like Him?

¹ The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is upon me, 
      for the LORD has anointed me 
      to bring good news to the poor. 
   He has sent me to comfort the brokenhearted 
      and to proclaim that captives will be released 
      and prisoners will be freed.^[a] 
 2 He has sent me to tell those who mourn 
      that the time of the LORD’s favor has come,^[b] 
      and with it, the day of God’s anger against their enemies. 

Is it not MY responsibility to bring Good News to the poor, to comfort the brokenhearted, to proclaim FREEDOM to those held captive?  How can I best do that in the context of my life?

 ³ To all who mourn in Israel,^[c] 
      he will give a crown of beauty for ashes, 
   a joyous blessing instead of mourning, 
      festive praise instead of despair. 
   In their righteousness, they will be like great oaks 
      that the LORD has planted for his own glory.

There are many lessons that have come out of the MH experience.  The Lord, in Isaiah, offers us beauty for ashes.  So here is my list of beautiful things that have come from the ashes of our MH experience:

• I have become a Berean alongside my husband (he’s always been one) Acts 17:11
• I have fallen in love with and learned to trust and run to the Word of God and want to live the Spirit-led life. I am grateful for and eager for the Holy Spirit’s direction, comfort, ministry and presence in my life. It is something I now know I believe in with such conviction that nobody will ever be able to convince me of anything else.
• I trust the gift of discernment God has given me.
• The realization and true conviction that I want to train my kids in godliness through my example and I want them to see me live out my faith in the context of everyday life, with everyday people. I do not want them to be in a church where they are taught elitism, but rather want them in a church where they are taught about the mercy, grace and love of God and how those gifts of God spurn us into holy obedience not out of fear, but out of love and gratefulness for the gifts He has given us.
• I feel convicted to seek justice for the oppressed and spiritually abused.  I cannot stand by silently any more.  I have read many other stories, and joined the “Fellowship of the Wounded”.
• I am less judgmental and able to have compassion for those who are suffering.  I have learned that the ground is TRULY level at the foot of the cross.
• My husband and I are united in a way we never have been before.
• I have (finally!) put my priorities in the right order.  My relationship with God (not the church), my husband, my kids, my extended family and friends, and then church.
• I no longer hold pastors who are in the spotlight in high esteem only because they are in the spotlight.
• I will never, out of desperation, accept instant friendships as being real.  True friendship develops over time.

What about you?  What beauty have you found in the ashes of your experience?

Questions

Yesterday I shared my story on The Wartburg Watch.  I am grateful to Deb and Dee for helping me find the courage to speak out and tell my story.  Today, I am very discouraged.  I guess I had the expectation that the telling of our story would be met with outrage. Battle cries.  Compassion.  A massive outpouring of support. The people at TWW have been amazing and supportive.  Beyond that, the silence has been deafening.

I spent the last several months asking God what I was supposed to do with this experience. What was the purpose? Why did it happen?  How can believers do this to other believers?

Is anyone listening? I am wondering where I go from here?  Do I keep shouting it from the rooftops? Do place it on the altar?

 Do I ask the hard questions of the people who have harmed me? Do I even bother when I know that doing so is risking further abuse?  Am I willing to risk them diverging private information about my husband and myself?  Did they do so already? Is it really possible to maintain the one friendship I still have, when I cannot be myself and express my pain?

Will others share their stories?  Is the pain so deep and the fear so great that they can’t?

How can I best glorify God in this situation?

Mars Hill Discipline Contract Makes It's Way Into the Light

A young man named Andrew who was a member at Mars Hill Ballard campus for approximately two years has come forward with a discipline contract he was given by elders at the Ballard campus.

The discipline contract is available in it's entirety and private follow up letter to members of MH posted on the City instructing them on how to properly deal with Andrew in public are available on Matthew Paul Turner's Blog.

Matthew 18:15 - "If another believer sins against you, go privately and point out the offense. If the other person listens and confesses it, you have won that person back."

Matthew Paul Turner - Mark Driscoll Part 1
Matthew Paul Turner - Mark Driscoll Part 2

Why We Are Here

Welcome to Mars Hill Refuge. We exist to allow a place for people who have left Mars Hill to tell their stories. This is meant to be a safe haven for those who have been wounded by their experience with Mars Hill Church. We have our own story (see Our Story). We have found many stories in various places on the internet, but we believe that those who are starting their "exodus" from Mars Hill need a place to find stories like theirs. When we started seeing red flags, we were very confused and felt "crazy" because you become so immersed in Mars Hill "culture" that you are not sure... 


We have no desire to be a watchdog blog.  While we do feel that there are many things wrong at Mars Hill and with Mark Driscoll's twisted "gospel", we do not want to focus on him but on becoming more Christ-like and helping others discern the truth that sets them free. There are many wonderful blogs that intelligently address these issues.  If you would like to participate in those discussions, you can find links to them on our "Things We Like" page.


Would you like to tell your story?  Please click on the "More Stories" link for more information.