INTRO

If you were to tally 2022’s posts to this blog, you’d find…none. The main post of 2021, too, even though that was an extremely eventful year for us, was missing nearly all detail. Such time gaps don’t concern me; I’m not really that kind of blogger. But there was a reason beyond just “not getting around to it” that I didn’t post in 2022. We were regrouping. It was a take-time-to-be- grateful year. A new job year. 

2021 was the Year of Trauma.

And before now, it was not the right time to talk about it.

My reasons for speaking now, in order of importance, are: 

1. My own healing. 

I’ve learned more about trauma in the last few years than I imagine I thought I ever would have. Which of course means I now understand much more about (and have so much, much more compassion for) those who’ve known worse, and far worse, trauma than me. But it also means that I’ve learned not to dismiss my own. Big T or little t, trauma doesn’t simply just go away. We do the work of moving through it. Understanding it. Rebuilding. Replacing. 

We all move on, and my whole family is in the process of moving on. But we don’t move on from trauma; we move on with trauma. We take it out and work on it when we can. Or, it comes out whenever it freaking feels like it. We deal with it either way. We tell our stories. 

The timeline I am going to link to in this post forms the scaffolding of my story. It’s missing upwards of 99% of my inner story, but there is rarely a forum in which we can (or want to) tell our whole stories. I suppose in a “tell-all” book. But normally, bits and pieces get brought into the light as the time is right and the audiences are right. Before now, I kept this timeline largely to myself.

But I have come to recognize that my own healing journey requires sharing more. Because of good counsel, I value sensitivity against over-sharing, but because of good therapy, I know the value of speaking. It’s a rhythm and a path that I am choosing to engage, and I am merely a learner on that path. I’ve miles to go before I sleep. Miles to go before I sleep. (Great one, Mr. Frost.) 

2. Family and friends.

While therapy is for the minutiae, many people we are in relationship with can love us well enough for what we need with far less complete versions of our stories.

Though I’ve hit a majority of the major ones, I’ve still cut the episodes/events in this story by at least three-fourths. But even then, you may prefer not to read my timeline of this account. I invite you: go with your gut. It is absolutely your freedom and your choice, and I have done the favor of making it easy by putting the timeline on a separate page. You will not get there unless you click the link. If you are one of the two handfuls of people who subscribe to this blog, I believe you will not even get a notification of its posting, nor will it later show up in the list of past entries. Everyone remains free at all times to “take a pass.” If you’re uncomfortable with accounts like these, honor yourself and don’t read. There’s enough detail in the Outro for you to catch on. If you dislike the thought of a negative report about your own denomination (should you happen to know me; you won’t find named names), or are simply from a generation, in a family, part of a tradition, or at a time of life where the supposed need for the public airing of dirty laundry mystifies you to begin with… please, be my guest and don’t read. Proceed directly to the Outro without clicking the link.

For the record, please allow me to confirm how many, many members of my former denomination still get counted in this friends and family category. There may be strain or silence characterizing some current or future relations, but there is not bitterness and ill-will. For all of them, maybe especially those who might recognize their juxtaposition to parts of the story because they were there, there’s no better way to begin to appreciate some of the impact of the full story than to hear it told from the vantage point of the one who lived every chapter.

3. Encouragement to others with a yet-untold story of their own.

Be assured, our stories have value even before we have the courage to tell them. And yours has value even while others may drown out your hope by shaming you that you can’t make a trauma case out of every boo-hoo experience. Telling our stories has always been part of the human experience, and it always will be. 

As I am always blessed by the honest telling of stories––stories that help me know I’m not crazy… or defective… or alone… but beloved––so may you be. 

I think that the Church is the only thing that is going to make the terrible world we are coming to endurable; the only thing that makes the Church endurable is that it is somehow the body of Christ and that on this we are fed. It seems to be a fact that you have to suffer as much from the Church as for it but if you believe in the divinity of Christ, you have to cherish the world at the same time that you struggle to endure it. This may explain the lack of bitterness in the stories.

–Flannery O’Conner

4. Righteousness. Justice.

Yes, I care about righteousness and justice. But I also don’t forget that I have contributed towards unrighteousness and injustice, sometimes consciously, more often unintentionally. Hardly anyone, and I would include many a Christian man who abuses his power, is purposefully working on behalf of the antitheses of the things he says values. But good intentions and good motives are nothing in the face of the power of wickedness and injustice working their will upon humanity. And, throughout history, in the name of God as often as opposed to it.

My question for you, reader, is: How will you pursue justice and righteousness in those places where you can determine that others are failing to flourish? What shall you do when the missing piece is your voice? Don’t think that the day will come when institutions simply “do the right thing” somehow disconnected from self-preservation. For our institutions do not bear the imago Dei, we do. Only you, image bearer––whether you decide to simply lay down your self-protection or whether you gather allies and speak together––can choose to speak. Everyone has a voice. It’s a priesthood of all believers. 

THE POST-WHISTLEBLOW TIMELINE

I whistleblew.

The Timeline linked below is not an attempt to prove I was correct; indeed it does not even lay out my case. It assumes the accusations were credible and routinely verifiable by qualified persons. Only one of the original accusations is referenced, and that is not in the Timeline but in the Outro below. The Timeline is a sketch only of the process that, together to date, forms the full organizational response to a request for help in a case of perceived abuse. The net result of that process was my family having been removed from our life-long organization.

Click here to read the Timeline.

Alternately, proceed directly below to the Outro, instead.

OUTRO

Welcome back, if you chose to read the Timeline. 

Should anyone be feeling some inward insistence that, had you been around, you would have stepped in and done something!… God bless you. Thank you for the sentiment, truly. But not likely. It’s not like there was a shortage of very good people all around and all throughout all of this. No one intervened. I think it is simply our congregational and community default, for whatever reasons, to believe the narratives our leaders are speaking. So I would say, “Please, turn your eye to your present. Is there someone(s) in need of you now? Someone who could use your defense on their behalf against those wielding power, even in church, not in service of them, but over them to their harm?” We need more people with these kinds of eyes.

More is broken in our beloved institutions than just a few scattered leaders. In the story I have just told, almost everybody involved were fine, good folks committed to good leading. To a (wo)man, they probably followed policy right down the middle. At every turn. In spite of that, and in the midst of that, somehow an image bearer’s human needs were invisible. There is no way on God’s green earth that any image bearer’s human (including spiritual, emotional, social, financial, or other) needs should be that invisible to us, ever. How many are in this world, I personally find myself deeply convicted about, and never more so since undergoing this experience. It should not be possible in the Body for anyone (whether you’re speaking about me, or my boss, or an outsider) to be that mischaracterized and misjudged. And don’t get me wrong: I am as capable of blindness as any. I am as capable of power abuse (had I any to abuse) as anyone. 

In other words, whatever problems we have won’t be solved by simply plugging new people into unchanged paradigms. 

…the normal world, where the tyrants win in the end, and where it’s better to dissociate yourself from people who get on the wrong side of them.

N.T. Wright

What if there had been someone who had decided they wanted to seriously advocate for me in my situation? What options did they have? Another letter? To be ignored? (Happened.) To be publicly denigrated? (Also happened.) What else? Was there anything for such a person short of risking their career and reputation as we were? Is “I’m going to put career and reputation on the line” truly the only downstream option to “I guess I’d better just trust the leadership and stay out of this”? Where is care? Justice? Protection? The place for appeal? The non-in-house input? Without safeguards, who would choose a dangerous road just to help another? There are far too many dominos with extremely long-term ramifications directly in the shadow of career and reputation for anyone to risk toppling them all. 

No, I do not blame anyone for not joining us in the furnace. 

We did have Someone walking around in there with us, don’t forget. Yes, we were alone, but we are none of us ever completely alone.

On the other hand, if in a case like this you wanted to fire and hold everyone accountable for every error, who should be included? Everyone who did not fully join the proven-correct-in-the-end side? We’d all have been fired years ago. What about the dozens or scores of people up and down the organizational ladder with some measure of direct or indirect power to do something to defend me but who didn’t? Do a clean wipe once the truth comes out? Fire everyone? No lunatic would suggest it. These are good, ministering people. (We, too, I guess, once enjoyed that reputation.) 

No. Not for one minute would I support this kind of thinking. The firing of hardly anyone.

Even if one did it gently. Like, in person instead of via FedEx. Or letting them know what the reasons were. Preferably ahead of time. And informing them on which day their network access would end, and did they need any of their files? And, if they were offered a severance package fairer than one month, if one were even to take––heaven forbid––their age? number of children at home? length of service? other human factors? into account. Still no. For most, not deserved.

Yet firing any one of these people sharing any of the guilt for what was done––the age-old story: buying the fabricated narrative of the powerful, closeting the truth, then punishing the one who’d dared to speak it (in short, all those who called good evil and evil good)… firing any of them would be more justifiable than firing me was. 

For at least they did something, right? Maybe no legally fireable offenses, but neither did I. And they did something.

I did nothing. I reported abuse; I asked for help. Help for myself, help for the lambs beneath (to borrow a term used by my successor who immediately came to see the same problems I’d reported), and help, especially, for the accused. 

That is all.  

I was charged with the raison d’être for whistleblowing laws: “disruptive.”

Secondly, “harmful to team cohesion and ministry effectiveness.” Of course, whistleblowing does those things. So yes, guilty on both counts. But these are knee-jerk, stereotyped responses to whistleblowing, not actual charges. Now, to be clear, the simple fact that these charges, specifically, were levied does not automatically somehow exonerate me. But they don’t incriminate me.

However.

Let’s not move past “disruption” and “harm” just yet. I submit that there is harm and disruption that deserve to be called out. If the board and the denomination would open themselves to an impartial look, I submit that their actions would be shown to have been more disruptive (to people’s lives) and more harmful (to people) than the disruption and harm I caused to the organizational status quo. And I would make that statement without the need to add in our family’s trauma to the equation. (Including that would break the scales, I’m afraid.)

Is anyone even surprised that abuse was protected with more abuse?

In hindsight, sure. But this pattern across the Christian world landscape is too commonplace, too predictable, and too rampant for real surprise to be justified.

When I told the RO (on his phone call 4 days after the FedEx that terminated my employment) that I was surprised by being fired, my notes record that he replied,

“I don’t see how, as this has been going on for over a year, and you’ve been going around to all your colleagues telling them you’re going to be fired.”

…I shut up. 

It was time to get off the call. The full weight of my fate crystalized in that moment. 

When I’d filed accusations six months earlier, the first was about my boss’s repeated threat to me that “The board and the RO want to fire you.” Used on me as a means of attempted control for almost a year, I’d finally grown tired of that dark cloud and gone to the RO (also the Chairman of the Site board) directly to point-blank ask him to clarify. To which he replied that he had no idea what I was talking about. (Later, neither did the one board member I knew.) That’s when lights––very bright lights, for I had always assumed the statements to be true––first came on for me. 

Now a grueling, traumatizing six months later, the victim discrediting process had run its full course, and that fantasy had become reality. I was having difficulty wrapping my head around how.

My sinking heart saw that I had appealed for safety to the one entity in which my lack of safety would become ultimate. Pick your podcast, documentary, or article, and we’ve all learned by now that this is all I should have expected from the outset. But somehow I had sincerely––and, I feel embarrassment and shame to admit––naively expected the people that I knew to do better. But no. Everyone went along with the final solution that one man with awesome power dictated to our entire ministry site. 

More than one person has told me of being informed of the existence of “real reasons” for my dismissal that go beyond “disruption” and status quo “harm.” And rumor has it they are alarmingly dire. But they remain, as they have from the beginning, in the dark. Purportedly, it is claimed, to protect my future! No. They were kept in the dark because they are fabrication and spin. Sure, charitably, maybe they were birthed in exaggeration of actual faults and weaknesses I do have. I wouldn’t have any way of knowing.

Shrouded in mystery, at least from me, they yet managed to leverage an offer for salvation: a clean personnel file. Here was my opportunity to present myself acceptable to a subsequent ministry. Perhaps my reputation was not yet a total loss. I was welcome to move on and minister somewhere else within the organization or denomination; not only would no one be forcing me out, they would keep my record scrubbed of any overly damning verbiage.

In 2021, I had not the wherewithal to respond to this false grace from the left hand whilst the right yet rested on the knife within me.

I shall respond now.

Any such offer––intimating that I might desire preserving career and reputation above Gospel duty and love––irrevocably demonstrates an utter failure to understand, not only me, but the entire situation. It is, in fact, evidence of the absence of even a good-faith attempt to understand the situation. Regardless of what some so-called clean personnel file might purport to offer me, I reject it, for it stands on lies. It cannot and does not offer any vestige or iota of kindness to me.

Some months ago, I heard through the grapevine that the boss I reported on was dismissed for the same basic issues I reported on.

I was possibly never going to write publicly about this story before that day, as 1) I watched many of the lambs who most needed to leave do so, and 2) I wasn’t that interested in playing an interfering role after I was gone. From what I understand, his firing came about because, unlike how my position was structured, the person who succeeded me had direct access to the site board. Eventually, those men’s eyes were forced open, I guess, and they made decisions based on actual knowledge. If the denomination had simply engaged a more correct response when I first came forward (and it’s not some buried mystery what correct responses look like in these situations), it would not have even mattered that the board never met me. The truth would have come to light, and the bleeding would have been stopped. Instead, it got protected, then blessed. Everyone bears some measure of responsibility for those additional years of bleeding. 

When I heard the news of my former boss’s dismissal, part of me grieved. I hadn’t stuck it out for 287 days in order to get proven right. And no, I don’t “feel vindicated.” (Everyone asks.) I engaged an “If not me, who?” situation fully aware of its seriousness, and the result I’d hoped for never materialized. And it has not materialized with this development. I only ever hoped for redeeming correction and real help leading to healing. “Vindication” wasn’t even a line-item that made any sense before the denomination mishandled everything. Besides, just because I could see more, and much sooner, than many other site people, that doesn’t mean I was the one experiencing the most mistreatment back in pre-Day-0 days. Not at all––others were. My mistreatment was probably, in therapeutic hindsight, worse than I realized at the time, but trauma for me did not begin in earnest until after I came forward. 

“Woe to him whom this world charms from Gospel duty. Woe to him who seeks to pour oil upon the waters when God has brewed them into a gale. Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appall. Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness. Woe to him who, in this world, courts not dishonor! Woe to him who would not be true, even though to be false were salvation.”

-Herman Melville

Do I wish today that I’d taken an easier way out (there were a number of routes we might have chosen)?

I do not. I have even gotten to, a few fleeting times and for the very first times, personally experience actual, real, paradoxical joy in suffering. Who would have thought? May I prove worthy of more, if need be.

Thank you for listening. By letting me speak, even to you few, you contribute to my healing. I will keep at this process––we must all keep at our processes––for as long as I need.