Last September, I woke up early several mornings to sit on my front porch and watch the sunrise.  This might not sound like an unusual thing to do, but I am *not* a morning person.  I like to start the very slow process of waking up after the sun is well in the sky, so forcing myself to get out of bed before 6:30am while the sun was still down with nowhere urgent to be was and is highly unusual activity for me.  But I have always been drawn to sunsets and sunrises when I need perspective, and I was feeling pretty desperate.  So I woke up, threw on a sweatshirt, and sat on the front porch as the sun came up.

The months leading up to this abnormal morning routine were tumultuous.  I had spent the past year and a half sharing concerns with my church’s leaders about the well-being of our senior pastor.  I had been on his staff for four years, becoming increasingly aware of harmful interactions he had with his staff and other ministry partners.  The incidents grew in frequency, and I watched several co-workers cope with the emotional toll this was taking on them. 

After being on the receiving end of his explosions several times and attempting several conversations with the pastor, I started going to church committee leaders to report the incidents.  My concerns for the well-being of the pastor, his staff and colleagues, and the church as a whole continued to steadily grow. I believed something was really wrong with the patterns that were emerging, but I didn’t fully understand the depth of the unhealth I saw¹.  The people who believed me didn’t know what to do, and I didn’t know what to ask them for. 

After a year and a half, there was still no visible movement toward investigating allegations of the toxic culture that had now been brought to leaders by several staff members.  I had a phone call scheduled with the newly appointed chair of personnel to make sure he was aware of my previous reports, and I decided that would be the last conversation I could initiate.  I was exhausted from the numerous attempts to convince others that what I was seeing was real and required action.  I knew that what I shared was never making it to the larger body of leaders, and it felt like I was repeating the same pleas for help over and over again.²  I just couldn’t keep the cycle going anymore.

The call started with 10-15 minutes of him sharing how much he loved the church. He spoke of how he had never seen a church so actively engaged in the community and gave credit for that ministry’s success to the pastor I was calling to share concerns about.  He then talked about how much harm to the pastor and church’s reputation was risked by a recently departed employee’s letter to church leaders and staff.  

My hopes of being heard were being crushed before I even had the chance to speak.

The rest of the call felt rushed, as he dismissed my concerns by suggesting that I was being too sensitive and that my desire for receiving spiritual care and mentorship as a staff member and congregant wasn’t in alignment with the church’s goals.³  When I told him I had been cut out of all staff meetings and that my communication with my pastor/supervisor was strained, he neglected to provide any solutions or acknowledge a need for resolution or reconciliation.⁴  Towards the end, he suggested that I consider finding a church that could “better meet my expectations,” putting all the blame for the harm I had experienced back onto me and my “preferences” instead of the pastor’s actions.  He made it clear that he believed all issues brought forward had been resolved and that I shouldn’t come to any church leadership again unless a new incident occurred.

I was angry and devastated.  I didn’t know it then, but everything about the call was a textbook response for institutional leaders covering up abuses of power.⁵  I was a woman in my twenties calling out the behavior of a successful and beloved senior pastor with 30+ years of ministry experience.  The power imbalance was huge, and it was clear that the personnel chair never intended to hear and respond to my concerns.  He only wanted to bury them and me in darkness and deception. 

I’d been discouraged when other leaders hadn’t fully understood or acted on my reports, but being invalidated and having all responsibility shifted back onto me was absolutely rage-inducing.  I knew I needed to pump the breaks before I acted on impulse, so I started seeking God in quiet moments.

Which is why I drug myself out of bed to sit in the crisp morning air and watch the sunrise.  I played worship music, prayed, and cried on my front porch for anyone walking down East Street at 6:30am to see.  They weren’t the most aesthetically pleasing sunrises, but I could sense the Lord’s presence and Word as I watched the sun illuminate my neighborhood each morning.

As I think back to what the Lord impressed on my heart on those mornings, I am drawn to 1 John 1:5-10:

“This is the message we have heard from him and declare to you: God is light, and there is absolutely no darkness in him. If we say, ‘We have fellowship with him,’ and yet we walk in darkness, we are lying and are not practicing the truth. If we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin. If we say, ‘We have no sin,’ we are deceiving ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and righteous to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. If we say, ‘We have not sinned,’ we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.”

If we as believers want to walk in the light of Christ, we must let light shine on the truth, even when it might reveal our shortcomings.  This is true for individuals, and it’s true for our institutions.  When we leave our broken parts and failures in the dark, they cannot be purified by the exposing light of Christ. When we deceive ourselves by covering up wrongdoing and silencing the wounded, we protect the reputations of our institutions at the expense of Christ’s reputation. We make Him out to be a liar.

Where sin and abuse lead us into silence, deception, and darkness, through Christ we are given the paths of confession, truth, and light so that we might walk into reconciliation, healing, and justice. 

My early-morning sunrises led me to continue choosing light and truth while others chose darkness and deception.  That choice cost me a community that I love. It is immensely painful when individuals refuse to acknowledge the harm they have done to you, but it’s even worse when a whole community insists that they “have no sin” at your expense.  I can’t begin to describe the hurt and grief of being silenced and rejected by your own faith community.  Viewed at best as overdramatic or too sensitive, and at worst as a slanderous wolf to guard the flock from.  The pain of the last eight months has been unbearably heavy, but God has continued to show up for me in the sky.

As the days are getting longer and nature is coming back to life, I’ve felt drawn to sunsets instead of sunrises.  And as I’ve spent many of my evenings chasing sunsets over the last couple of months, I’m reminded that God doesn’t just bring an end to the darkness of night – He chooses to paint beauty around the darkness, bookending it with brilliant splashes of pinks, oranges, and purples.  God creates beauty in the meeting of darkness and light, both in the skies and our hearts.  We see this both when those who have caused harm and those who have been wounded choose vulnerability and honesty.

The beauty of the Gospel is on full display when all parties trust that the grace we have received through Christ’s death and resurrection is enough for us to walk into truth and light, regardless of the earthly consequences.

Historically, those consequences are greater for people who have been harmed than for those who have done the harming. The accused often hold more power in about every sense of the word than the people they have harmed.

And it costs us something to recognize when someone who has treated us with kindness and respect has habitually shown the opposite to others. It shatters our perception of reality when we acknowledge that someone who is our spiritual leader is unwilling to live by the gospel they (sometimes literally) preach. And the cost of that realization often keeps us from seeking and speaking the truth. Why would we shine light onto something that would cause us and many others pain?

Sometimes, seeing the light can hurt.  It can jar us awake when we aren’t prepared for it and sting our eyes when they have grown accustomed to the dark.  But if we choose to live in the dark or refuse to see the light dawning, we miss the beauty Christ is painting on this earth.  Because of the Gospel, we can choose to hear and speak the truth, knowing that Christ’s reputation is more important than that of our institutions or leaders. 

Because Jesus’s reputation and Kingdom are always purified by the truth, not stained by it.

I believe that it’s never too late to shine light where darkness abounds.  We can always acknowledge how we have failed as leaders, institutions, or individuals and call for action in the present.  We can listen to the wounded and weep with them.  We can tell their stories truthfully and, in doing so, honor their pain and humanity.  We can pray for others to have the courage to acknowledge hard truths and speak out when the Lord prompts them to. 

And when we’ve followed the Lord’s call to exhort our communities to walk in the light, we must discern when to walk away from places that refuse to value righteousness over reputation. We must acknowledge that after the dust has settled, our continued presence communicates to leaders that we stand by the choices they have made. It inadvertently invalidates the devastatingly painful experiences of brothers and sisters who have been wounded within our church walls. And it says to the world that this is a sanctuary of refuge and healing in which they can trust, when we know that this is not true for all people who enter its doors. We enable unrepentant shepherds who feed off of vulnerable sheep when we silently sit among their flocks.

Walking in light doesn’t mean leaving at the first sign of unhealth, failing to listen to other perspectives, or neglecting the need to seek truth and use discernment.  But it does mean pursuing truth in an unbiased way that is sensitive towards those who have experienced trauma. When looking at toxic and potentially abusive cultures in churches or other faith institutions, pursuing the truth necessitates knowing the signs of an unhealthy leader and initiating a third-party investigation when accusations are made – this is the only path to truly pursue justice for both the accusers and the accused.  There will always be wolves who cause harm within church walls, and we must know how to spot them if we are going to protect the vulnerable in our flocks and make spaces for the wounded to experience healing.

I continue to pray that current and former leaders from my church will choose to walk in the light of Christ and pursue truth, even when it might be initially painful.  Choosing light and truth means acknowledging and taking responsibility for the times we allowed darkness to prevail, whether through our actions or inaction.  Integrity is sacrificed when we shine light on others’ failures without first searching our own hearts. Self-reflection allows us to genuinely pursue restoration and restitution for the people harmed in our communities.  They experience healing when we acknowledge the ways they were failed in the past and commit to being compassionate witnesses of their pain in the present.

Many people who have experienced harm in the church are walking around wounded while they and their stories remain hidden in the dark.  Like the Israelites, we flee from places of subjugation and abuse, wandering in a spiritual wilderness and trying to make sense of a faith that led us to places of deep hurt and confusion.  It’s a pain I don’t yet have words to fully articulate.  But on the other end of the grief and darkness we stumble through, there is beauty and Goodness.  Whether our justice and restitution is seen in an earthly kingdom or a heavenly one is yet to be determined.  But I do know this: We can find hope that after the night, light will always win.

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1. I wish that I had known then what I know now about abuses of power in the church. I wish I had had the language for it, because then I would have known where to look to find help for myself and others. I would have known how to advocate more effectively and I would have known what resistence to expect when I wasn’t believed. If you want to better understand what abuse of power looks like, I encourage you to listen to Dr. Diane Langberg talk about this in her address at the Restore Conference 2022, Understanding Abuse of Power in the Church. ↩︎
2. I can’t begin to express how draining and discouraging it is to continually go to leaders (many of whom are friends you worship alongside) and never see action.  I went each time, knowing that retaliation could cost me my job, reputation, and spiritual community if the pastor found out.  My entire social network was made up of people connected to the church building, so the fear of losing it all and being forced to start over loomed large.  Still, I repeatedly made myself vulnerable, asking for help in a situation that had rendered me powerless, walking out of every conversation feeling misunderstood or unsupported. 
   All the while, I had to keep working and worshiping in a toxic environment with a pastor who would go stretches of time avoiding making eye contact with me when I saw him throughout the week, and then acting normal when other church members were around.  The flip was crazy-making, but my pastor’s anger and abuse of power felt like a secret I had to keep from most of my spiritual community, keeping me further isolated.  I desperately needed someone in a position of authority to say, “I see your pain, I believe you, and you don’t have to carry the burden of this alone anymore,” but that was never something I received. ↩︎
3. Much of his strategy for dismissing me relied on the idea that successful churches operate like businesses and that churches that focus on spiritual formation and care are less effective in God’s kingdom.  This was common rhetoric from the pastor I served under.  I was told over the phone that the church operates “more like a business than a church” and that some people can’t handle “direct communicators” like our pastor.  I’ve since learned that this is a common tactic for churches that excuse employing shepherds who wound – their supporters focus on the gifts and strategies brought to the church, ignoring the biblical qualifications for eldership that emphasize character and humility (see 1 Timothy 3:1-7 and Titus 1:6-9). ↩︎
4. Rather than acknowledge the conflict and the difficult place it put me in, I was unhelpfully told to “let go” of incidents that had happened in the past.  I then asked, “How many concerns need to be brought up before this is recognized as a pattern of behavior that requires intervention?”  He responded that he couldn’t share anything about actions the committee may or may not take in response to future allegations and that I shouldn’t raise my concerns over past experiences again. ↩︎
5. Dr. Wade Mullen speaks extensively about the importance of letting victims speak the truth about their experiences of abuse and the strategies that institutions (including churches) use to cover up abuse in his book Something’s Not Right: Decoding the Hidden Tactics of Abuse and Freeing Yourself from Its Power. If you aren’t up for reading a whole book, you check out the talk he gave at the Restore Conference 2022, The Power of Truth and Sincerity. ↩︎