Chapter 12: Fight Like a Baptist
Psalm 60:15
O God, you have cast us off and broken us; you have been angry; oh take us back to you again.
You have shaken the earth and split it open; repair the cracks in it, for it totters.
You have made your people known hardship; you have given us wine that makes us stagger.
You have set up a banner for those who fear you; to be a refuge from the power of the bow.
Save us by your right hand and answer us; that those who are dear to you may be delivered.
Our church purchased land in the early 1980s and the new location was literally a grove of trees when we broke ground.
My dad was on the planning committee, head of the “Capital Campaign” so my younger sister and I spent many a weekend there…hammering, carrying wood, cleaning up garbage, hauling roof tiles. For many years after it was built, I could literally feel my handprints etched into those plastered walls. I painted classrooms and carried in pews (hello 80s!) and later on stacking padded chairs (welcome to the 2000s!). I learned how to mop tiled floors and I vacuumed those mottled brown carpets hundreds of times.
And I raced around those hallways as a teenager and young adult, in and out of classrooms and offices. I met my husband there and we were married amongst the orange pews and dark wooden beams. We were the first mixed-race couple in our youth and young adults group. I think only the second mixed-race couple in our entire church at that time.
Rebels.
My husband was baptized here in his late 20s, our three kids were all dedicated on that expansive, carpeted platform, surrounded by family and friends. My parents messy divorce and its painful aftermath reverberated through the sanctuary. I was sitting with my mom and husband in the middle section during that Sunday Service when the declaration to disfellowship from my dad was read from the pulpit, hot tears streaming down all our faces and yet no one coming to comfort us, all too unsure what to say I suppose.
While it was awful for me, it was exponentially worse for my mother who was slowly herself being abandoned by all her church friends. It seems shame, pity and holy gossip don’t make for authentic relationship building tools. My mom was angry throughout my growing up years and the truth is she was prickly and not an easy woman to love. While many years of trauma and humiliation do not excuse her behaviour, they can help understand her tough exterior.
I actually thought that’s what the people of the Jesus were here for…to bind up the broken hearted, watch for the swirling waters at the edge of the pool and faithfully help the leper in so they too can be restored.
While I went along with their rationale and sat obediently while my family was being made an example of, I can’t help but wonder that if those same men and women would have practiced radical grace and stubbornly loved my mom and dad, particularly my dad, back into relationship, our story would have had a different ending.
Perhaps.
Here’s the thing…I know that our pastors at the time and some of the people who cared for my dad tried to reach out to him. And I choose to believe that it was genuine. But I was kept out of the loop even though I was a grown-ass woman and a member of the church. And his decision to have an affair and leave my mom, that’s on him. I just wonder if we gave up too soon and were too quick to be judge, jury and executioner.
I wonder.
In my 30’s I began to volunteer and become heavily involved in almost every area of church life — hospitality, music, teaching adults, deacon, special events planner, policy making, and children’s ministries coordinator…which is where I then spent over a decade as a creative program director, then eventually becoming our second female children’s pastor.
My senior pastor was there for 25 years while our beloved youth pastor turned associate served for 15 years - unheard of commitment for an urban/ suburban Baptist church. And they both left within 6 months of each other. When their replacement was hired in 1997, I was one of the event coordinators tasked with welcoming our new pastor and his family.
While I was there over the next 13 years, there were a lot a great things that took place — growth and laughter, learning, meals, breakthroughs, connection, community, new programs, My community. My people. My God. So much of my life, my husband and kids lives were rooted in our church community.
But at the same time, outside of the church, our family was committed to building strong, vibrant intentional relationships with our neighbours, the parents of the kids our eldest sons’s hockey teams for well over a decade. I loved serving on our elementary school PACs and helping support the high school band fundraising (okay, I liked that less). And we still have life long friends outside of our faith and we have loved and been deeply committed to being fully present to both.
Working at the church, volunteering, and raising a family in my 30’s, I also began to study the scriptures more closely. I read everything I could, and attended conferences and workshops, and facilitated training events and classes.
And then my faith began to shift.
The childish lens with which I read scripture and lived out my faith, was becoming more mature, nuanced, complex. And so did the questions I had. Yet the answers I was being given did not seem to match up. And I don’t mean I just didn’t agree with them, they were inconsistent with what I was reading in the text and through my personal study. They were simplistic answers being handed to me…not discovered by me through dialogue or discussion. And there seemed to be no room to engage different perspectives at the staff table, theology table or leadership table.
As my prophetic imagination was being unleashed, the leaders around me were tightening their reigns. As I was asking questions about structures, processes, policies and context of texts, I was being shut down, asked to “stay in my lane.” Through spiritual manipulation, through misapplied biblical texts about spiritual authority and women’s complementary roles, through sexisms couched in Baptist tradition rooted in conservative, narrow applications of biblical texts, agency over my thinking, my spiritual growth and theological development and trusting myself that I was called and qualified to push back when something did not feel right was being eroded.
Not only was my inner life being twisted, but in the last few years there, my body would once again be controlled by men’s perceptions, this time rooted in misogynistic and patriarchal theology.
I was told by the lead pastor and elders that I was too fat to serve with integrity and that I was a disappointment to God. I was told that I would never be effective in the kingdom looking how I did. I was told to trust the spiritual authority of men over me and that my own female intuition was corrupted.
I was asked to look like the other women on our staff — don’t get a tattoo, don’t look too pretty, don’t look to shabby, make less than men in the same roles. Better yet, we will never disclose what every other male makes because we trust the Lord to guide us about those decisions, regardless of ethics or labour standards.
Messages both overt and subtle kept reinforcing the narrative that a women’s worth was in her purity and humility, and to remain so, women must be protected from themselves through male headship.
I was told gays were going to hell (so were feminists and liberals) and the dreaded Jezebels, whom I would later be called, were real and in our midst. A culture of fear was meticulously constructed with paranoid messages repeated so often that they start to feel true… “the world is out to get us”; “there are demons waiting to take us down”; “the church is being persecuted by a gay agenda/ liberal agenda/ feminist agenda.”
You know the analogy of the frog in a pot of water not realizing the temperature was being slowly turned up until it was too late and it boiled to death. Looking back, I got out of there in the nick of time.
But something did die.
Everything inside of me.
The church broke me.
The men in spiritual leadership broke me. They cultivated a culture of mistrust and unquestioning loyalty in the pews to uphold the positional power of one man. They twisted the good news of a peacemaking, reconciliatory Saviour into a Christ-like archetype of their own making…white, male, militaristic, complementarian, religious, fear-based.
Where were my church friends in all this? What about my work colleagues? The women and men, the very community whom I poured out 40 years of life for?
I took spiritual and emotional care of their children, I visited their sick parents, I delivered hampers to their neighbours and spent year after year serving this body of Christ with joy, devotion and creativity. It felt like they all abandoned me. All but 1. One unlikely elder believed me and stood up for me. And then he was then immediately stripped of his eldership and pushed out of the church as well.
The thing is, when you are in a toxic culture that has a stronghold of keeping people in line through tactics of fear, mistrust and gaslighting people into thinking its them that’s the problem and not the culture itself, looking back I can understand why people did not stand up against the unethical and ungodly things that were taking place. We did not have the language of gaslighting but that’s exactly what it was.
On my last Sunday, they insisted on a public “farewell”, largely because my closest friends who felt powerless, angry and hurt also insisted that something be done to mark the leaving of one of its longest attending members. I will never forget the spectacle of my little family of 5 on the stage surrounded by a bewidlered lot of friends and accusers, my 13 year old with tears streaming down his cheeks as he and his brother and sister were being torn away from the spritual home their mom had helped build, the only church they had ever known.
The similarity between this scene and the one I endured 20 years previous when my own family was torn apart in a public and humiliating way was not lost on me.
I was so broken. My husband, my precious kids, all of us broken.
I didn’t get out of bed for months. It took me a long time to heal from the spiritual and emotional abuse I endured as a woman, a pastor, a Jesus lover, a life-long member of that beloved community. I went through 12 months of intense therapy (and several other touch-ups throughout the years).
Loving. Leaving. Letting Go.
It would be too easy to say something like, I am healed, all is forgiven and I moved on. While these things are in fact true, healing and forgiveness happened in spite of what happened to me, not because of it. Resiliency was hard fought. The process of forgiveness required the truthful acknowledgement that the ungodly things done to me were not okay, were not part of God’s plan and were certainly not my fault. Leaving the church was the healthiest thing I could do.
As I reflected back on my 40 years in the church, a disturbing pattern began to emerge. Like a window flung wide open, I began to see more clearly the language of submission, the practices of misapplied scripture and the long-term consequences of both on my social, spiritual and emotional development.
I was taught from the time I was a little girl that good girls are obedient girls.
The narrative that women should not speak up/ ask questions/ form opinions different that the prevailing theological positions is an institutionalized foundation of western evangelical culture. Consequently, that’s how my neighbour and the sons of elders at our church were able to sexually abuse me and I told no one but buried my shame deep inside me for 25 years.
And obedient girls can become Godly girls and Godly girls are a man’s prize.
That’s how systemic misrepresentation and misapplication of scripture creates church structures and church cultures that in turn create compliant, complimentarian women. And any woman who questions those structures, who seeks answers outside of “approved” resources, steps out of line and therefore out of favour with God. And who would want to put a ring on that?
Since Godly girls make God happy, the Holy Spirit obviously dwells within such women. And when the Holy Spirit indwells such women and she continues to behave obediently, she safely holds onto her “righteousness” card.
Therefore, women are at the mercy of the ever shifting goal line of what makes for a godly, righteous woman. Proverbs 31, be like Ruth, be like Esther, be like Mary, don’t worship Mary or put too much thought into Mary. Be like Beth Moore…now don’t be like Beth Moore because she started speaking truth to power and forgot her “place.”. Is her skirt too high? Does she have tattoos? Is she a virgin or not? Too Fat? Appropriately Skinny? White? Humble? Submissive? Career minded? Mother? Married? Straight? And so the measure of a woman’s godliness is determined by the men in leadership around her. As women, our trust in our God-given spiritual intuition is eroded from the time we are young and we are groomed to believe that only men can biblically instruct and approve us as godly women. We spend so much of our lives conforming and performing to that end.
And sadly, this toxic pattern of grooming, gaslighting and structural gatekeeping is repeated over and over in churches all across the world. And while this (working theory) helps me make sense of my history, I believe that other women may have similar stories to tell.
And in fact they have. I have talked to dozens if not hundreds of women…smart, gifted, hilarious, serious, introverted, extroverted, skinny, plump, brown, white, asian, queer women who love Jesus and long for flourishing faith-filled community.
Yes, this is my story. But it is also their story.