Leaving church

I left a church community last December, one I had felt deeply committed to and established in. I hadn’t anticipated or seen myself leaving, and doing so has been deeply sad. Many months on, the experience continues to be formative. I write to process what this journey has felt like for my own record, and for those who find themselves in similar situations trying to understand it.

When church falls apart

The church I had been at was, for a long time, a place of safety and belonging. I was known and cared for there, and knew and cared for others. When things started to go wrong, I wasn’t that concerned. I’d believed that everything would be addressed in the usual course of communities making readjustments.

Rather than this happening, it felt like the dynamics that were creating issues became more entrenched and began to escalate. It felt increasingly more adversarial and divisive. I was removed from a context I was serving in and was actively ignored and avoided on a Sunday. I also felt the wider situation this was part of was weaponised and couched in inappropriately spiritual language.

People sometimes imagine that harm in a community must look dramatic — a single terrible event, a confrontation, a scandal. My experience was of a steady deterioration of the health of the church community, significantly informed by one person in a position of power. In the places this was challenged, control intensified but not in ways visible beyond those immediately involved.

I started experiencing increasing dissonance between the surface level of normality and the undercurrents of power dynamics that were playing out. My experience of church became split into groups: people I trusted and who shared concerns, those who had heard concerns but were unwilling or unable to address them, those who were unaware, and those who were actively assisting the person in control.

This divergence was something that was able to be exploited. In churches, as in other communities, people are wary of being seen to gossip. This can inhibit the sharing of information when something is going wrong, and enable someone who is deliberately attempting to control information.

I reached a place of deadlock, in which there was no recourse to any resolution or accountability for what was going wrong. I could either stay, and tacitly consent to how church was being run, or leave.

I was very reluctant to go. Leaving felt like an admission of my powerlessness and lack of commitment to a community I loved. It also felt unjust. I didn’t feel at fault, and yet I was forsaking somewhere deeply important to me. At the same time, I also couldn’t stay. Continuing to be there would be a betrayal of my own experiences. The dissonance within the space felt destabilising. The joy of worship is in part the freedom of surrendering yourself, and this is simply not possible in a place where you feel uneasy.

The dynamics of spiritual abuse

Lisa Oakley and Justin Humphreys’s research (in Escaping the Maze of Spiritual Abuse) describes spiritual abuse as a pattern of coercion and control that happens in a religious context. It has recognisable dynamics: pressure to conform, the misuse of scripture or spiritual language to legitimise behaviour, a culture in which questioning is treated as disloyalty, requirements of secrecy and silence, the suggestion that to challenge a leader is in some way a threat to ‘Truth’/God. Especially pernicious is the use of the words that carry your faith being used to carry control.

The situation I was in bears characteristics of spiritual abuse. I had protective factors others don’t, and forms of spiritual abuse are often far more severe than what I experienced — but understanding its dynamics and impacts has been useful in processing everything.

For my part, this is what I’ve experienced and learned:

• Spiritual abuse is a disfiguring of faith, and can impair it. A church is a place where relationships, identity and faith are woven together. This can make distortions particularly disorientating. Because a church mediates something ultimate, its failures can reach further in than other failures do. When care breaks down, it can feel as if God is somehow also implicated – allowing or enacting the pain you experience.
• People react to the same things completely differently. People have wildly different thresholds for recognising harm, and unanimity is not the test of whether your experience was real. Some people simply will not see what seems obvious to you; some are genuinely oblivious, and some find that denial is a far more comfortable place to live. It can be difficult for people to feel like they are able to intervene, or that it’s appropriate for them to, if they were not directly on the receiving end of the behaviour being described. It feels more straightforward and palatable to believe something is a personal disagreement than to contemplate it being more serious.
• The instinct of institutions is to protect themselves. This means that the people who name a problem can easily become the problem to be managed. Dealing with the potential consequences of acknowledging a situation of this nature is greatly inconvenient, and can have costly implications, which incentivises denial. This compounds the pain and experience of powerlessness of those within the situation. For me, the non-response and failure of wider structures has in some ways been as – or more – painful than the initial situation.
• You should be wary of trying to find healing at the site of the accident. I was really sad to leave, but it was absolutely the right choice. There was total disinterest in acknowledging or addressing issues where I was, and getting distance was really important in starting to confront what had gone wrong and disentangle my own feelings about it.
• You can’t reason yourself out of being impacted. I have been surprised by the extent of the impact, and how involuntary some of my reactions have felt. This is particularly true of bodily reactions – e.g. instantly tense shoulders, feeling close to tears. The involuntariness of reactions can add to a sense of loss of control. It’s been important to tell myself that my reactions are not evidence of my fragility or inability to cope. They are the ordinary responses of a person to whom this happens.
• You have to actively tend to painful feelings, and prevent them from becoming painful beliefs. For me, one of the most painful parts of what happened was the feeling of being expendable to somewhere I was deeply committed. I didn’t want to leave, but there was no one ‘running after me’ when I did. Strong feelings are powerful, and their strength is so compelling that they can feel like and become truth. Feeling expendable turns into feeling that you are expendable. Feeling like you do not matter can turn into a belief that says ‘I do not matter‘. I have had to actively tend to the painful feelings involved so that I don’t carry these feelings over into beliefs about who I am.
• Believing you are unworthy can feel safer than accepting care was withheld. Part of the way in which painful feelings can turn into beliefs, is that they can offer a protective explanatory frame for what happened, where the alternative is losing an ability to trust others. It can be easier to believe you are undeserving of kindness and care than to accept the alternative option: that you are deserving of it, but it was withheld from you when it was needed. I’ve found it helpful to identify this dynamic and try and actively reject the conclusions it offers (loss of worth, or loss of trust). Even still, I have found it consistently hard to accept kindness and care in a way that is entirely new for me.

Finding a way forward

After leaving church, I took time out, and have recently found another church context that has felt — incredibly — like a soft landing. This has happened far sooner than I anticipated, which has been wonderful. At the same time, the process of settling has been continually confronting. There was a service I left in tears about ten minutes in, because it was about Acts 4, and how those in a church should show care to one another. There are songs this new church sings that belong, in my body, to the place I left. And there are new people to meet whom I find myself guarded about getting to know, because I am still grieving the people I let myself grow to care about before.

Church is a context where the language of love and family is used. The church had been family for me, people from my previous church had, in the time I was there, dropped off soup and flowers when I was unwell, given me furniture and done tip runs when I moved house, and put me up when housing fell through. That depth of relationship and community has been something that has been really important and beneficial in my life. It also informs the extent of the loss on the other side of it.

What makes a difference

It’s easy to think that spiritual (or other) abuse is one of those things that “wouldn’t happen here”. I used to think that about the church I left. Abuse is not a binary, and it can develop over time. If you are in a church context it’s worth understanding the dynamics of spiritual abuse before you ever need to. If someone leaves a space and you don’t know why, reach out to them. The person leaving in this sort of situation almost never feels able to initiate, so showing genuine curiosity and a desire to listen is really useful. Respect their wishes for what they say would help them. Ideally there are functional structures operating which allow third party scrutiny of what is happening in a way which supports all involved – these should be used, but they are not always available or functional.

In the week of an especially difficult part of what happened, the two people who knew about it made sure they were at the door of church for my arrival and greeted me with “We’re so glad you came this morning”, and sat by me. Feeling seen and cared for by them went a long way, and gave me courage to own my sense of belonging at a time when I was feeling unwelcome. Being a good friend to someone is always a good starting response.

There’s so much more that could be said, and there is plenty of nuance to be found in the different ways that unhelpful dynamics can emerge and develop in church and religious contexts. But what I mostly want to say to others who have found or do find themselves in similar situations, is that strength is not being unaffected. Strength is working out a survival that doesn’t harden your heart. And it’s ok for that to take time.