Chapter 7: Moving Forward

 

In this brief volume I have described what is without doubt the most traumatic experience of my life.  What I am attempting is to reflect on this experience, and what I have learned.  Other people have been through similar anguishing experiences, both in the group I was part of, and other groups as well.  There is, maybe as never before, a plethora of these spiritually abusive religious groups and I believe more will be on the horizon. There are several insights which have helped me come to terms with what I went through that I want to share.

 

It is not God’s fault.

 

As I was thrashing in the waters of this painful experience, trying to keep my head above water, and at the same time developing a love and knowledge of philosophy, the Problem of Evil occupied a great deal of my thinking.  Put succinctly, the problem is,

 

                        If God is all-loving,

                        And if God is all-powerful

                        Why does evil exist?

 

When I was a student at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, I took a January-term course on the Problem of Evil.  For three weeks, we read and discussed what every major thinker in the history of Christianity had to say about this problem. Several solutions were proposed, but none of them intellectually satisfied me.  Some of the solutions indicated things like a Calvinistic view in which God’s love was limited to the elect, that there were just some people God did not love and did not intend to save.  This approach fails right away in my mind.  Even if it is true, it does not answer the question of why evil happens to God’s people.  If this view is correct, one would expect to find that the elect are blessed and protected and shown God’s favor, while all the suffering is poured out on the non-elect.  This approach fails to answer the question asked by Rabbi Harold Kushner in his book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People.  I do not think the Calvinistic approach has a suitable answer for that problem.

Of course, my statement could be countered by a theodicy.  William Rowe, in his book Philosophy of Religion, defines a theodicy as “an attempt to explain what God’s purposes might be for permitting the profusion of evil in our world.” He suggests theodicies are a response to what he calls Skeptical Theism.   A skeptical theist is not skeptical about the existence of God.  Rather, they are skeptical about the idea that there is pointless evil in the world.  In this view, God may face the possibility of many evils, and some are unavoidable because preventing one evil may cause another.  The skepticism is not about God, but about our ability to make sense out of evil in this life at all.  Rowe says,

 

The skeptical theists, however, make a good point in arguing that if God does exist, then since [God’s] knowledge would far exceed ours, it would not be unlikely that there would be goods beyond our ken that [God] would know, goods which, for all we know, may justify God both in being hidden from us and in permitting all the human and animal suffering not do to a misuse of human free will.[1]

 

The way I understand the position of Rowe here is that we cannot know if there are in fact pointless evils.  Now, on one level, I want to agree with him, because it just seems to me to fit well with the limits of what humans do and can know.  This is the position arrived at the end of the book of Job.  I also think the biblical account of the Old Testament Joseph, with his statement, “you meant it for evil, but God meant it for good” (Genesis 50:20) fits here.  The idea is that there is a purpose, but the purpose remains hidden from human view.

The problem with this view, however, is that it is an argument from silence.  Since we cannot see the purpose, we cannot know if there is a purpose or not, so we will assume there is not, and we will proceed on that basis.  Skeptical theism is skeptical about whether there are pointless evils, so it does not attempt to answer the question at all.  To me, that is akin to a scientist who is not sure if drug X will cure disease Y, so she decides not to do any studies to find out.

In the end one of the reasons this position is unsatisfactory is because it is what Karl Popper, in speaking of psychological egoism, called unfalsifiable.  In the scientific community anything which cannot be proven false is considered not to be a valid contender for truth claims.  In the philosophical community a similar standard applies to those ideas which cannot be subjected to two tests.  Those tests are correspondence and coherence.  Correspondence means what we are arguing for fits with the facts we do already know.  Coherence means the idea itself is not internally contradictory. In other words, the idea does not undermine itself.  Passing these two tests does not mean an idea is true but failing either of them gives reason to think it false.  I happen to think skeptical theism fails the coherence test. 

Many thinkers realize this problem, and so, as Rowe suggests, they turn to theodicies.  Again, a theodicy is “an attempt to explain what God’s purposes might be for permitting the profusion of evil in our world.”  Therefore, theodicies are speculative at best.  This approach, to me, reveals a problem found in a great deal of evangelical Christian thinking, because it trades in plausibility, passing it (plausibility) off as an explanation.  When we take plausibility as certainty, I think there is a danger of self-deception.  People eager to defend biblical inerrancy do this when they try to harmonize seemingly conflicting biblical passages with non-biblical explanations to get around the conflict.  In the end such ventures prove nothing and add nothing to the body of knowledge on the issue at hand.  I see the same thing happening in 2021 with vaccine and mask hesitancy and resistance.  Answers which seem plausible, but which serve a person’s confirmation bias are accepted as fact.  These answers never seem satisfactory to me.

Some people realize this problem and are satisfied with neither skeptical theism nor theodicy.  I admire their honesty but again this is not a place I am comfortable landing.  When I took the course on the Problem of Evil, the last day of the class, a young black brother who is now a nationally known African American Baptist pastor, with tears in his eyes, raised his hand and said, “Professor, for three weeks we have been asking why God permits evil.  I don’t know why.  I don’t care why.  All I want to know is…is God going to make it all right in the end?”

Now, for sure, I share his hope.  I look forward to what the Scriptures describe as God wiping every tear from our eyes.  But even so, I do think on a deeper level, this approach has the same problem as skeptical theism.  It is trafficking in plausibility and avoiding the answer to a serious question.  Imagine telling a sexually abused child not to worry because even though they are sad and hurting now, some day God will make them happy.  Please do not misunderstand me here, God often blesses the woundedness with happiness.  I am one of them.  But to offer this answer amid the pain is dismissive.

In the end, neither theodicy nor skeptical theism seem to me to work.  So, when I took this class in January of 1986, I struggled still to find an answer that satisfied me until 2020.

In 2020, I took an online course on Process Thinking.  We read Process and Reality by Alfred North Whitehead and sat under the tutelage of Dr. John Cobb, one of the premier process thinkers in the world, still sharp at age 96.  I had read a little about Dr. Cobb in seminary at both Earlham School of Religion and The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.  Many of those in the class, like me, were already professors in philosophy and/or religion.  A few of those have become personal friends.  One person who has become a good friend is my colleague, Thomas Jay Oord.

Dr. Oord has written two pivotal books I heartily encourage everyone to read, The Uncontrolling Love of God, and God Can’t.  Oord’s premise is that in the struggle over the problem of evil, we get hung up on the wrong horn of the dilemma.   The Calvinistic approach so much of evangelicalism has bought into resolves the problem by limiting God’s love in favor of God’s power.  This is done in subtle but harmful ways.  In the end, though, there are those who believe everything which happens in the world is what God wills.  I had a student say in class one time, there is not a disobedient molecule in the universe.

The problem with that seems obvious to me.  If that is true, then it makes God the efficient cause of evil, not just an approximate cause.  Oord puts it this way, “God can’t prevent evil singlehandedly…Notice I’m not saying God won’t prevent evil.  I’m saying God can’t. The difference between “won’t” and can’t is huge.” [2]      

He goes on, “Many people feel comfortable saying God won’t stop all evil but does stop some.  Those who say God doesn’t always stop evil usually say God “allows” it.   They think God freely permits the pointless pain [God] could singlehandedly prevent.  God chooses not to intervene or chooses not to interrupt evil in progress.” [3]

I remember vividly asking my version of this same question.  What is going on here?  Why do I have cerebral palsy?  Why do these church leaders think I cannot be a minister and cannot be married?  In essence, I was putting the blame for this on God’s shoulders.  I was so angry at God I sometimes looked up and said, “Hey God…” and gave God the middle finger!

Of course, my years in ministry and the love of my wife and children healed a lot of that hurt—but not all.  It is not all healed to this day.  I will discuss that later in this chapter.  But for forty years I did not have, even with my studies in theology and philosophy, satisfactory answers to those questions, because I was looking in the wrong places.  I believe my life experience anticipated and prepared me for my friend Tom Oord’s work.

Oord argues that if God could prevent evil, and chooses not to, then God is complicit in that evil.  That is obviously not a satisfactory answer, and I believe that is why Oord devoted so much of his thinking and scholarship to this issue.  He concluded that it is not that God doesn’t prevent evil, it is not that God won’t prevent evil, it is literally the case that God can’t prevent evil.  In the book, God Can’t, Oord powerfully argues that the reason God cannot do this, if I may concisely state his position, is that God is love, and love is uncontrolling.  If God forced people to do the right thing, that would not be love.

My own philosophical work had prepared me to receive this message.  I have told my students for years that even God cannot do the logically impossible.  God cannot make a square circle because the definitions of square and circle are mutually exclusive.  Anything which is square cannot at the same time be a circle and vice versa.  By extension, and in a way I found liberating, as I read Oord, I realized God cannot be loving and force people to do things they do not want to do at the same time because love and force are mutually exclusive the way square and circle are.

Oord appeals to the idea of essential kenosis, the idea that God is by nature self-emptying love on behalf of others, an idea found in the New Testament in Philippians 2, where Jesus is said to have “emptied himself.”  If God’s nature is kenosis, then God by nature will not override people’s free will.  He puts it this way:

 

The word “essential” indicates that self-giving and others-empowering come from God’s essence.  Loving others is who God is and what God does.  Essential kenosis says God cannot withdraw, override, or fail to provide freedom, agency, and existence to creation.  God’s love always empowers, never overpowers, and is inherently uncontrolling. So, God can’t control others.[4]

 

What this means, as people deal with their own stories of pain and rejection, is that it is not God who caused the problem.  God cannot be who God is and override free will.  The accident at my birth which caused cerebral palsy was not God’s doing, but the result of a choice made by an obstetrician.  The pain I went through sorting through my religious abuse, did not come from God either.  Two men, Loran Helm, and Oliver Hogue, made choices, for whatever reason served their purposes, to tell me things which deeply wounded me.

Now, I cannot tell you what a burden realizing this took off my shoulders.  Even though I still do not know why these things happened to me—I have some ideas about that, but I cannot say I know—I am confident in the love of God, a God who saw me in a wounded state and used others to help point my life in a new trajectory.  God was my ally in all of this, not my foe, even if I did not know it at the time.

I would say to anyone out there who has suffered some sort of abuse from religious leaders, that it is important to realize it was not God’s doing.  It was not God’s fault.  God is with is in those times.  I find comfort in thinking about that in praying the Psalms, because of how they constantly reassure us of God’s presence when things are going on which wound us deeply.  The wounds are not part of God’s program for us.  But God is with us, hurting and sharing our pain.  And as the Baptist theologian Frank Tupper used to say, “God does what God can.”  When people’s will is not in alignment with the kenotic love of God, people get hurt.  Even still, God is there offering comfort and strength.

 

Give yourself space and permission to grieve.

 

In chapter 2, I mention how I nearly married R., and how she broke it off three weeks before our wedding date.  I cannot tell you how painful that was.  Even though I now see it would not have been a healthy marriage, I did have genuine feelings for her. I wanted to be married.  I wanted that desperately, so I cannot sort out how much the loss was because I was losing her, and how much was just because I would still be alone.  Thirty-eight years later, I can see that these emotions were all mixed together.  I was in love with the idea of being in love. I do not know if I was in love with her—keeping in mind one of the ministers in the fellowship told us this was “God’s perfect will”, or if I was just in love with the idea of being in love.   I do know, even if I was not really “in love”, I loved her, and when I went back to West Virginia, I missed her.

The pain of this is the reason I withdrew from Earlham School of Religion, and eventually moved back to West Virginia.  I was not in classes, but I was around the seminary for a couple of months before I moved, and I saw my fellow students and the faculty with some regularity.  My advisor, Jim Yerkes, encouraged me to spend some time with Peet Pearson. Pete was a kind and gentle lady, an ordained Methodist minister who taught Pastoral Care.   Over that couple of months, I saw Peet three or four times.

Finally, in one session, Peet said to me, “What is happening to you, is that you are grieving.”  That would have never crossed my mind because I thought grief was what you went through when someone died.  Peet helped me understand that grief is part of any loss.  I had lost a relationship, and the feelings I was having were a normal part of that.  People who go through divorces grieve, she said, just like people who lose a spouse in death, and there was no reason to think otherwise than that I was grieving the loss of the anticipated life I would have with R.

Then she gave me a mental picture which was enormously helpful.  She said grief is like being at the beach.  The waves ebb and flow, high tide, and then low tide.  Feelings of grief are like waves which crash in on us, just like waves crash upon the shore.  Something will trigger a memory—a song, a picture, a food, a smell, anything—that reminds us of that which we have lost.  And when this happens, we feel waves of grief.  These waves are the high tide, and when they subside it is low tide.  But even at low tide the grief is there.  We are grieving when the feelings of grief are in the background, like an application on an electronic device, which is operating even when we are not aware. We may not be focused on the grief at the moment, but it is there.

The thing Peet said which made the biggest impact on me was this:  Grief never fully ends.  Gradually the waves become farther and farther apart, so the amount of low tide is increasing, and we are not focused on our grief—but there will never be a time when we can say, “Well, that was the last wave.  My grief is over.”  We never get to a state where there is not the possibility of those grief feelings being triggered again.  It is a process which remains with us from the point of loss to the end of our lives.

About ten years later, another counselor, and Quaker minister, Dr. Judy Brutz, told me something important which builds on this understanding of grief.  I was telling Judy about the frustrations which come as I live with cerebral palsy.  Judy told me I was grieving there too.  She suggested I had some grief work to do surrounding my disability.  I questioned that, because it is not really a loss, I have never known anything but living with CP.  However, she said, one can and must sometimes grieve the loss of something they wanted but never had.  I had honestly never thought of it that way, but I intuitively knew she was right.

The reason this is so important, the reason I want to emphasize that if someone has suffered religious abuse, they need to grieve it, is that those waves will come for the remainder of your life.  That is just the reality. I do not believe when Elizabeth Kubler-Ross talks about the final stage as acceptance, that this means you are now suddenly whole and good as new.  No, acceptance means you have learned the process of how grief works, and you know what to do when the next wave crashes in.  You have gained some mastery of recognizing when the high tides and low tides are, and you are learning how to give yourself the space for proper self-care in those times.

I struggled with this issue for years.  The abuses I have written about in this little volume happened between 40 and 45 years ago. All the things these leaders told me would not happen for me did happen.  I have had a 36-year marriage with a love so deep and firm and a commitment so unshakable that I know few people who have the kind of intimacy God has given me with my wife Gay.  I have two awesome, caring, well-educated, professional, adult children.  I own my own home.  My credit score is in the top 3% of the country.  I have an earned doctorate and have been a pastor, an executive in Christian publishing, a college professor and dean.  I have thought before, God was going above and beyond to show that they were wrong.

I still feel profound sadness at times over this.   I have nightmares sometimes where one of the leaders of the group is still telling me I cannot have any of these blessings.  This is four decades down the road!  I have, many times, awakened at night and turned and touched my wife next to me in bed, to reassure myself that they were liars, and all of this is real.

For a period of about 10-15 years, I was not much in communication with people I loved dearly, both friends and family, because of what this experience did to me.  I told my aunt in Ohio a couple of years ago I felt a loss of time because I did not let myself go to reunions, I did not have contact with cousins, etc.  I was in such an emotionally decimated state that I did not want to be seen.  I have had to grieve that time.

I have close friends, ministerial colleagues, and other friends, with whom I was not in contact for a period of years.  Some of them have also left this group, but some of them are still connected to it.  It was just too painful to be around them, because so many of even the good memories would also trigger the high tides of memories which were quite painful. 

Anger is another issue with which I have had to come to terms.  I am not nearly as angry as I was, say ten years ago, but there is still anger. I am angry that some people still consider these two men to be “men of God” when their behavior has led me to consider neither of them to be such.  It was painful to be with people who sang the praises of men who had been, if I may say so, cruel to me.  So, for the purpose of self-preservation, and to avoid lashing out at them for supporting people who so deeply wounded me, it was much easier to just stay away.  There have been times when someone called Loran Helm and Oliver Hogue “men of God”, and I have wanted to cry out, “NO!! No, they weren’t.  They were just the opposite.”  I know that is true, but I have decided it was not always the time and place to say so.  If people are not ready, they will not hear that, so I did myself a favor and did not let myself be put in those situations.

Some of those friendships have been reconnected, and I imagine some never will.  That is OK.  Probably some of them are such that reconnecting would be toxic, and I have no desire to reconnect those relationships.  Sometimes we are simply better off with certain people not being in our lives.

The wonderful thing about grief is that it is a testimony to what was lost. The weight of the grief is proportionate to the weight of the loss.  When we lose people, relationships, hopes and dreams, the way we grieve is an ongoing reminder of the value of what we lost.  In my case, I wanted a sense of belonging.  I wanted to be part of a ministry where everyone was loved as Jesus loves us.   I wanted so desperately for the message they preached to be true.  It took a few years to totally process the fact that it was not true—that the love these two men professed to have for their flock was fraudulent.  People have asked me before, if I saw all of this going on, why did I stay so long?  I believe the answer is that I was hoping I was wrong, and they were right.  I was hoping I was just misinterpreting what I was seeing.  In the end, I was not. 

Another thing I grieve over to this day is the people who, as I see it, were taken in and never did see how fraudulent this entire thing was.  These two men, I believe, were both charlatans.  But they continue to have faithful devotees who have given their financial means and surrendered their own personal hopes and dreams for what seems to me to be snake oil.  Wonderful people who love Jesus and love people but remain stuck in something I am thankful to have been freed from.  I would love to see them freed as well.

As a philosopher, I tell my students about Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Plato tells this story in his Republic.  It is the story of three men in a cave, chained hand, and foot, and they have been there since birth.  Behind them is a fire and the fire casts shadows on the wall of the cave.  Someone stands between the men and the fire with two-dimensional puppets on sticks, so the men see the shadows on the wall, of a dog, a sheep, a lion, a bear, a man, or a tree.  For all these men know, the shadows are the reality of what the dog, sheep, lion, etc., are like because that is all they have ever seen. 

One day one of the men is freed from the cave and makes his way to the world outside.  At first it is painful as his eyes must adjust to the light.  But eventually he sees the real dog, sheep, lion, etc. Reality is not at all like what he thought, and he learns to exult in the joy of this newfound world. Then he goes back to the cave to tell his fellows what he has found, but they laugh derisively at him, telling him he has been fooled, and the true reality is what they see on the wall of the cave.

Over the years, many times I have reached out to the leaders of this fellowship which wounded me so deeply, wanting to be reconciled.  I was kind of hoping that as that as they saw how God had blessed me in ministry and in life, there would be acknowledgement that they had done wrong by me, and they were sorry.  The three people who hurt me the most deeply in my life have all died without taking responsibility for their role in my wounding.  I not only sought reconciliation with them, but with those who took leadership after they died.  And every single time I reached out I was rebuffed.

For many years, this was just another wave of grieving.  I wanted to be reconciled, I think, for a couple of reasons.  I wanted what I did not receive years ago.  There is no doubt about that.  The few times over the years when I did encounter people, they seemed often to be genuinely shocked that I was a pastor!    I felt keenly the loss of the nurture and encouragement that other young men received but I did not.   Yes, I wanted redress for that.

But I also wanted people to realize they had sold everything and bought what was not a pearl of great price, but a trinket like from a five-and-dime store.  I wanted people to see that the whole thing was a fraud.

The last time I attempted to reconcile was in 2020, and I felt a complete rejection again.  There was no way, I was told, that the current leaders would even entertain the idea that what Loran Helm did to me was wrong and unjust.  This last time it hit me—I have been freed from the cave, and they would rather stay in the cave.

I imagine I will mourn over this for the rest of my life.  If you have been abused by this or some other group, you will too.  What I want to say to you is, become comfortable with that.  The grief is your friend.  It is a gentle nudge that you are doing OK, even if you have endured loss.  You, with God’s grace, will come to a place of meaning and purpose in your life, even if others never see it.

 

Realize you had a role in your abuse, and others had a role in their own. Forgive yourself.   You are not responsible if you leave, and they stay.

 

This is a difficult topic to discuss.  I want to approach this with gentleness and tenderness.  My comments here are in no way intended to be victim-blaming.  Yet, there is a kernel of truth here which I believe must be examined.

Please understand, what I am saying here is not for everyone.  There are some situations where abusers abuse, and victims have absolutely no role in the abuse.  Sometimes, innocent parties simply get abused.  Children, older people, anyone who is not in complete possession of their faculties—all of these come to mind.  I am by no means suggesting that just because someone was hurt—even badly hurt—they did something wrong themselves.  No thinking or caring person would even approximately suggest that.

I am speaking here to people who came to a point where they chose to stay in a religiously harmful group longer than was necessary.  I am speaking to people like me, who lingered too long, for whatever reason, in the company of some religious charlatan.  The issue of clergy sexually abusing children, or taking financial advantage of older people, that is not at all what I am trying to speak to here.  Those are heinous situations, where the rest of us need to look out for and protect the vulnerable and hold the abusers accountable, both spiritually and when necessary, legally.

That is not the kind of abuse I suffered.  My abuse was emotional but nothing which constituted anything illegal.  Immoral, yes, illegal, no.  What Loran Helm and Oliver Hogue said to me was beyond the pale of ministerial ethics.  They did not “stay in their lane”, so to speak, and let me and others learn how to follow God’s leading in our own lives.  Both men were false shepherds like the Old Testament prophets used to rail against.  Lives were wounded and crushed because of how they led and taught—and yet little, if any, of it was criminal.

I am speaking about situations where people knew they should walk away and could walk away and did not.  Realize you failed yourself, and then forgive yourself.

Those who abused me are responsible for what they did.  The same goes for anyone who may have abused you.  I believe it is impossible to be in a healthy place without acknowledging that.  Denial of the abuse, minimizing it, blaming ourselves for what others do to us is never productive.

I did have to come to the point where I saw that I unnecessarily gave power in my life to those who did not deserve that power.  Their unworthiness was demonstrated by what they did with that power.  Maintaining the truth of that is paramount.  It is essential to keep that in front of us.  Yet, I also see that part of the problem was that I believed them.  They were selling snake oil, but I chose to buy it.  Mercifully, God led me away from the danger I was in, which leaves me in awe.

I gave Loran Helm and Oliver Hogue a degree of control over my life, or a degree of influence, which neither of them was loving enough to deserve. All I longed for at the time was to feel the same level of acceptance the other young preachers-to-be were receiving. I kept wondering what was wrong with me. Why was I not being affirmed like these other guys were?

It was nobody but me who opened the door for these people to be abusive to me. I will be accountable for what I did, and they will be accountable for what they did. I have written about how this experience led me to know some of the finest people I have ever known, and my wife, the absolute love of my life. Had I left the group earlier, Gay and I would never have met. This is where the awe comes in.

The real irony of this is that had they given me the affirmation I sought, had they found a place of ministry for me within the group, I would have ended up handing them more control over what was going on inside me than I even did. I would have lost much more than I gained. As I have said many times, every rejection was a protection.

As I made a beginning on processing my anger, I realized that I set myself up for abuse.  Now, it is also true that the power-flow in these relationships was never one of equality. I was a young college and seminary student, and these men were the spiritual leaders of a few thousand people.  There is no denying that they should have known better, and they should have done better.

I have put off writing about this for 10-15 years, despite the encouragement of my wife, my daughter, and a very close colleague at the college to write a memoir.  I did not want to do it because I knew it would come across as bitter and vindictive, and that would do neither myself nor my readers any good.  My fervent hope and prayer is that now, as I write, that is not what is coming through. 

Almost three decades ago, I was counseling a woman who had been sexually used and abused by a pastor.  What this guy did was heinous—and no, it was not anyone connected to the group I was in.  I listened to her pain.  I told her he was way out of line, and out-and-out sinful.  But I also told her she had opened herself up to it, that she knew enough scripture to know better than to get involved in extra-marital sexual behavior.  I tried to say this with gentleness, not to scold, but to encourage her to see her role, because I had a sense that accepting God’s forgiveness and moving on would require her to also forgive herself.

About three or four years ago, I began to come to that point in my abuse.  I want people to know about it, and I want people to know who it was, because if I can keep anyone from venerating these two men, I believe I have a moral duty to do so.  As I said, the message of this book is a “Danger Will Robinson” moment.  If I can play a small role in helping someone else not go through what I went through, then I want to do that.

Nonetheless, this does not obscure the fact that I put myself there.  I remember a pastor giving High School kids a talk at summer camp on “an intelligent basis for resisting temptation.”  He told us a big part of staying out of trouble was doing our part to stay out of the situations where trouble can come in.  It is probably not possible to be 100% successful at this.  But we can do what we can do.

Obviously, a 17-year-old high schooler could not recognize the signs of spiritual abuse the way a 61-year-old philosopher and theologian can.  I get that.  But I did make choices which put me in the place of being susceptible to their abuse.  I did not get to a point where I could begin to move beyond my anger at them (and this is not complete—it is still in process) until I looked at myself and my own choices and realized I put myself there.

I am not meaning to victim-blame here.  I hope and pray this does not come across that way. I am not, in any way, absolving them of their sins.  What was done to me was not OK.  What was done to you is not acceptable.  What I am saying is, before I can forgive myself, I need to accept responsibility for my role in this tragic story.  Until I could do that, until I could admit I put myself there, all the prayers in the world were not cracking the anger in my heart, because as angry as I was at them, I was also angry at myself.  I could not forgive anyone until I could forgive myself.

Your experience may not be exactly like mine in this regard, and that is OK. In my Quaker years, I discovered the Quaker practice of queries.  Queries are a series of questions for self-examination which are used to gain insight into one’s spiritual condition.  I think of queries as part of the broader Christian practice of examen.  Now, as a Catholic, whenever I go to confession, I am to do an examination of my conscience to see what I need to confess.  What the Quaker queries are, as I conceive it, an ongoing examination of conscience so we can live each day as fully as possible walking in the light of Christ.

So, in this section, I am trying to suggest, as one who has been spiritually abused, examine your conscience.  Are there things you could have done which may have made things less difficult?  Are there times where your responses are counterproductive to your healing?  Are there falsehoods you believed which furthered the pain?  Let them go, seek God’s forgiveness, and forgive yourself.

 

Expect spiritual leaders to stay in their lane.

 

I need to make clear what I mean here, and what I do not.  When Pope Francis has spoken out about the economy and climate change, businesspeople, and politicians both told him to “stay in his lane.”  Now, I believe both of those are in his lane because they both are moral issues.  That is not to mention that he is a scientist as well as a priest.  I believe that spiritual leaders need to speak out for social justice, and I do that frequently myself.

When I talk about staying in their lane, I am trying to address what is a well-documented practice of many of these cult-like leaders to tell people what to do in their personal lives.  The ministry of Loran Helm, which I was part of, featured leaders giving people “revelations” about who they should marry, where they should go to college, directions to move to another city, to take a new job or not take it, how to vote, what products to buy, and so on.  It was spiritually abusive.

Now, at age 61, I am in my eleventh year as a Roman Catholic.  When I became Catholic in 2010, I had friends who said things like, “Wait.  You left a group which told you what to do and now you have a Pope who tells you what to do?”  I would respectfully suggest it is not the same thing.

When I came into the church Pope Benedict XVI was Pope.  (My daughter and I used to joke that if he was a televangelist his tagline could be “Call 1-800-BENNY16.”)  Then Pope Francis became Pope.  Their job is to interpret the Catholic faith for the faithful.  To my knowledge, however, the pope never intrudes into anyone’s personal business.  I do not believe that the Holy Father even asks people if they use or do not use birth control.  I am sure that the Pope does not call people and tell them where to go to college.  The church gives faithful Catholics information on how to be informed in the voting booth but does not tell us to vote for a specific candidate.

The leaders of the group I was part of have done all the above—except maybe for the birth control issue.  I remember Loran Helm said it was God’s will for Ronald Reagan to be President of the United States.  Was that true or not?  I don’t know—but I do know that in office Reagan did great harm.  I also know a church which promotes specific candidates endangers their tax-exempt status.

I remember one time Loran Helm said God told him not to wear a wedding band.  I was not married at the time.  But I noticed all the guys in the church who started taking the rings off their fingers.  I thought that was imbecilic.  When I got married, I got a wide band because I wanted it to be obvious.  I have thankfully worn it for 36 years now.

These guys would make announcements right in church services which were “revelations of God’s will.”  Sometimes they were for marriages between people who were not even dating one another.  I know of one situation where a young woman broke up with a young man before church and went in and sat with the man God had supposedly revealed was her husband to be.

One of the biggies was when Loran Helm said God had revealed that a famine was coming to America and people should start storing food.  I know for a fact his own brother made money off this by selling dehydrated food kits with a year’s supply of food to people.  The famine never came.

To me, all this seemed to contradict the message they preached, which was that we were to wait on the Lord’s guidance in our lives as we make major decisions.  I attempted to do that, and as God led me, they did not approve of the direction I was led.  They were preaching that we should listen for God’s leading and then practicing that a divine leading did not count unless it came through the leadership.

Now, this practice I am describing is not the same as legitimate spiritual direction, because a spiritual director walks alongside you, as you discern what God is telling you.  A spiritual director has many questions but few answers, and the answers they do offer are in general terms.  No spiritual director worth her salt is going to tell you to quit your job, or move, or marry somebody you are not in a relationship with, just out of the blue.  These leadings are processes, and the art of discernment is to recognize what God is doing in your own life, not to have someone put in all the work for you.  This work cannot be sub-contracted.

When a spiritual leader is telling you what to do in a personal decision, that is a real danger-sign.  As a pastor, I tried to explain biblical principles to people, so they could make Christ-centered decisions.  It was not my job, and not their job, to tell people what those decisions should be.  Even if a leader knows what God wants you to do, their job is to pray with and for you, but not to give you a “revelation.”  That is overstepping.  As I said, when a spiritual leader is telling you what to do in a personal decision, that is a real danger-sign. 

 

Be wary of ministries which resist accountability.

 

“Sunlight is the best disinfectant,” the adage goes. When I first got involved with Quakerism I was not prepared for how out-in-the-open the church was about finances and about the business of the church.  The fellowship churches were shrouded in such secrecy that the congregants did not know what the pastors’ salaries were, or how money was spent.  In Quakerism, the final business decisions were made by the whole congregation, and detailed monthly financial reports with line-item accounting for every check written were made available to everyone who wanted to see—member or not.  These reports were handed out at the monthly meeting for business and were left on a table for anyone to pick up—even visitors.  The annual budget was distributed the same way, and again, even a visitor could see.

Pastors in the Friends Church also make monthly reports of their pastoral activities, to the elders, and to the entire meeting.  Now, obviously, a pastor cannot divulge details of who he or she saw, or what they discussed.  But a general accounting for how the pastor spends his or her time is a monthly event.  The theology involved is that the pastor is “released” from a secular occupation to do pastoral ministry on behalf of the meeting.  The pastor is not in charge!

The fact that the pastor is not in charge is not without its difficulties.  Generally, the pastor does preside over the meeting for worship, but even then, Friends practice what is called “Open Worship”, a silent time of waiting and centering in on God’s presence.  During this time, anyone can speak.  And there are times when things are spoken which are inappropriate.  Not everyone is sufficiently centered on listening to the voice of Christ to really have a word from the Lord.  This makes for some uncomfortable times.  I have had people stand and publicly challenge my own pastoral leadership.  My policy has been to not respond and allow the meeting to work it out.  I can imagine situations where I might counter what was said, but in actual practice I never have.

One of the things I have struggled with since I became Roman Catholic is that there does not seem to me to be sufficient accountability—the clergy sex abuse scandal is fruit of that deficiency. I will say the pastors I have had as a Catholic have all been servants with impeccable integrity.  But I do think the Catholic church has a structural deficiency in how leaders are held accountable.  Some means of local church accountability is necessary for any pastor to succeed and thrive.

On the other extreme, I do think some Quaker meetings over-do the accountability in such a way that they quench the work of the Holy Spirit.  My congregation in North Carolina tried to keep me on a very short leash, even though when they interviewed me, they told me they wanted someone who would tell them what they needed to hear, even when they did not want to hear it.  I did that, and they terminated me—they did not mean what they said.  I believe there is a hidden resentment of pastors in the Friends Church.

The fellowship group of which I was a part was, if possible, even more top-down than the Catholic Church.  I have already discussed how they told people how to vote, who to marry, and where to go to college.  There were also issues surrounding financial improprieties and pastors directing how the money was spent.  That is something as a pastor I steered clear of.  I did not want my fingerprints on how money was spent.  I did have to do some biblical preaching on giving and help one church change how it did its budgeting.  But I had no desire to be the one directing where funds went.

In general, I think the more people involved in a decision, the sounder the decision will be. I do realize that this can also raise a problem.  In Quakerism decisions are made by a discernment process, yet many people who are involved have no spiritual discernment.  Most of the time things work out fine.  But there are times when I do believe God’s will is impeded by the desires of people who do not recognize the leading of the Holy Spirit.  I would still rather have that than have the pastor making all the decisions.  I always felt like, even if the best decision was not made, it gave me a certain amount of protection because I was not the decision-maker, the congregation was.

 

 

Make sure the focus is Christ, not the human leader.

 

One thing which religious groups like the fellowship which surrounded Loran Helm in common is that the focus is on the human leader.  Now, in Helm’s case, he feigned a humility which made it difficult sometimes for even discerning persons to see, but it was really all about him.  He called himself, “the Servant”, and “the least in the kingdom.”  This latter phrase is for me a subject of great irony.

Jesus refers to “the least in the kingdom” on two different occasions.  In Matthew’s Gospel, chapter 5, Jesus tells us that those who encourage people to ignore or break God’s commandments will be known as “the least in the kingdom.”  (This is also in Luke, chapter 7.)  But then in chapter 11 of Matthew Jesus says, “Truly I tell you, among those born of women no one has arisen greater than John the Baptist; yet the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.” (Matthew 11:11 NRSV) 

It is not unusual to find contrasts like this in the Bible.  For one thing, these are things which are handed down orally for some time before they get written down.  And it is not uncommon for a phrase to have more than one implied meaning.  Also, the Bible, the insistence of evangelicals notwithstanding, is not inerrant.  The wonder is how God speaks through human authors, frail and liable to error as they were, and that the message of the Gospel shines through even amid other points which they clearly get wrong.

It became common in the group for the Matthew 11:11 idea to get identified with Rev. Helm.  When he said he was the least in the kingdom, there were people who would say that means Jesus is talking about him, predicting his future ministry, in Matthew 11:11.  It was rather commonplace for testimonies about answers to prayer and what people were experiencing to get tied directly to Helm.  To be sure, I am not suggesting such answers to prayer, healings, etc., were not real or did not happen at all.  I am simply saying that there was a subtlety to this which would, under the guise of praising God, really make Loran Helm the focus of the story.

I believe this is a problem for most of evangelicalism.  Pastors have their own “style” (and some groups of churches do as well.) Oftentimes, this or that style becomes subconsciously synonymous with how God works.  One of the reasons there is peril when leadership changes in Protestant churches is that people get comfortable with a style, and when the next pastor comes along and does some things differently, people may leave.  When I was a Quaker pastor in Iowa, I knew a guy who had a history of coming to pastor a Quaker meeting with 30-40 in attendance, and within a couple of years it would be three or four times that.  When this pastor would then move on to another place of ministry, in a year or so, it would be back to 30-40.  This is not healthy.

One of the things which helped me in my conversion to Catholicism is the fact that the Catholic church has a liturgy.  I love liturgy.  I believe the Episcopal church has a beautiful liturgy as well.  The Catholic liturgy is based on what we know, from the writings of the Ante-Nicene Fathers, and others, of the liturgy of the early church.  When I go to mass, I know I am worshipping in essentially the same manner that the church has since its infancy.  To me there is a powerful testimony of continuity in that, and a comfort that I am part of “the Communion of Saints.”

There is also a safeguard.  If pastoral leaders are expected to remain within the parameters of this liturgy, with some allowances for local and national specifics, the church does not careen from one thing to another.  In the fellowship associated with Loran Helm, he would tell long stories of “how God had led him” in ministry over the years.  On the surface, this practice, called reviewing, was to praise the Lord for what God had done for people.  But the way the stories were told, the obvious implication was that it was all about Loran Helm, and “how God had led him,” to the point that this was not to be questioned.  I have already discussed how the thinking of Tillich helped me to see that there is an implicit danger in leaders being beyond being questioned.  I think to a lesser degree, the Catholic church also has this problem.

As I am writing this, I am praying that the lessons I have learned through my experience will be helpful to others who have been similarly wounded by religious groups.  Sometimes those wounds are physical, and that happened in this group.  Sometimes they are more emotional or verbal.   Whatever the nature of the abuse, it can set in motion ripples which influence people for decades.

Forty years after some of these events, I still have nightmares about them.  There has been some healing, but it is not complete.  I do not know that it will ever be.  There is not a day which goes by in which, at some point, this period of my life and these experiences still cross my mind.  I wanted desperately for the reality of what Rev. Helm and his ministry were to be something other than what it was.  I wanted desperately for what he said about his own life and the lives of others who wanted to be followers of Jesus Christ to be true.  For forty years I have mourned the death of a dream which, while unrealistic, gave me an initial sense of hope and blessing.

A friend who was in youth group with me recently informed me that nightmares were part of their own experience also.  The nightmares subsided after therapy for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.  A Quaker minister friend who knows us both suggested to me that he thinks I may have PTSD also. I looked into this, and found there is a form of PTSD known as “Religious Trauma Syndrome.”

I have cerebral palsy, and diabetes as well.  In addition, in March 2021, after fourteen months of tremors in my right arm and right leg, I was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.  I am taking medication now, which has reduced the tremors by 80-90%, but the medication does make me sleepy.  As I read about Parkinson’s, I am finding some of what I am experiencing fits the diagnosis.  I have all the major symptoms, but then again, some of these symptoms overlap with cerebral palsy. 

One time my then-family physician was scolding me about my blood sugar with my diabetes.  I was averaging in the 150-160 range.  She was trying to impress upon me the urgency of getting this down to around 120.  I did some reading and came across something called the ACCCORD study.  One thousand adult-onset diabetics were divided into two groups.  One group was told it was imperative to get their A1C (the measure of how your diabetes is doing) down to 6, which is considered a normal A1C.  The other group was told that as diabetics they would never be a 6. If they could stay between 7 and 9, that would be good.  The study found no difference in diabetes complications, but the group which was told they needed to be under 6 experienced twice as many heart attacks.  The stress did not help.

For me, having diabetes is not just having diabetes, it is having diabetes as a person with over six decades of cerebral palsy also.  Having Parkinson’s, for me, is not just Parkinson’s.  It is Parkinson’s as a man who also deals with CP.  I do not know if there would be statistical differences between me and others due to this, but I do know there is an experiential difference.

I can imagine the same with PTSD.  I have no doubt that my decade in this group has led to four more decades with PTSD.  But I could say I also think almost 62 years with cerebral palsy has caused six decades of PTSD.  I do not know if treatment could untangle that or not—how much PTSD stems from what traumatic experience--but I believe I should probably try.

The other day I told my wife that my early life experience of rejection conditioned me in such a way that now, when people want to affirm me, I do not know how to receive it.  It does not always compute.  There are three people who, in my life, have dealt me significant verbal abuse and contributed to my feeling dehumanized.  All three have now died.  None of the three ever acknowledged the injury, even though I made several attempts to day to each of them, “This is what happened.  Here is what you said or did.  This is the difficulty which your actions caused for me.”  Not one of them ever took any responsibility.  At this juncture, I am not sure what to do with that.

In one sense, I have been blessed with everything I wanted in life.  I aspired for three professions—editor, pastor, and professor.  All three of those came to be.  I wanted a wife and family, and God blessed me with the best!  I wanted to be respected, and the Quaker and Catholic communities I have been part of have provided that, not to mention my academic colleagues.  I have imagined at times my life as a mirror.  People of quality have treated me as a person of quality.  People of incompetence have treated me as incompetent.  I have no idea why this is the case.

Yet, I would some days turn time backwards and trade all of that for the affirmation of those who withheld affirmation from me.  This is not healthy.  I do not need anyone to tell me that.  I feel it deeply.  It would be ludicrous to do this.  Yet, emotionally, this is where I find myself sometimes.

I also know this cannot and should not happen.  Maybe I am what Fr. Henri Nouwen calls a “Wounded Healer.”  I hope so.  This narrative is not, as far as I can tell, written to rake people over the coals.  It is written to forthrightly face and own what happened to me, owning my own part in it, and forthrightly declaring the part others also played.  I carry a sense of history with me.  It grieves me, it makes me shudder, to think that time could go by and the dark side of the story of this ministry fails to be told. 

Loran Helm used to say we should never speak about our problems or difficulties.  I believe that was a subtle means of control and insulation from criticism.  Experience has taught me what 12-step groups already know. Admitting you have a problem is the first step toward healing.  I have told my story—what happened to me—to the best of my ability.  Getting such painful stories out decreases the hold they have on us, even though Helm repeatedly told us the opposite.  This was a harmful ministry lead by a harmful man.  My sense of harm was intense and influences me to this day.  My prayer is that others, in this group or some other group somewhere, can be as richly blessed as I have been, in spite of the pain we carry.

 

 

 

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[1] Rowe, William.  Philosophy of Religion: An Introduction. Thomson Wadsworth, 2007, 124.

 

[2] Oord, Thomas Jay. God Can’t: How to Believe in God and Love after Tragedy, Abuse, or Other Evils. SacraSage Press, 2019, 17-18.

[3] Oord, Thomas Jay. God Can’t: How to Believe in God and Love after Tragedy, Abuse, or Other Evils, 17-18.

 

[4] Oord, Thomas Jay. God Can’t: How to Believe in God and Love after Tragedy, Abuse, or Other Evils. SacraSage Press, 2019, 27.