This podcast is made possible because of our incredible donors. At the end of last year, we announced that we are trying to raise an additional 3, 000 a month to bring on two new roles for the Bodies Behind the Bus team. If you are able to contribute to that fund and you're a listener of Bodies Behind the Bus and want to support the work financially, there is a link in the bio to donate to the show. We would really appreciate you partnering with us in this. Thank you for daring to listen. Today, we're going to continue our conversation with Chrissy as she walks us through her firing and the aftermath. Then, we will welcome in Walker. Walker served the church and the community faithfully for so many years through a variety of roles, including being an elder. Walker will share about his personal experiences with church leaders, how the church culture shifted and changed, and the impact on himself, his family, and And the church community. I am all about blessed subtraction there. There is a pile of dead bodies behind the Mars Hill bus , and by God's grace, it'll be a mountain. By the time we're done, you either get on the bus or you get run over by the bus. Those are the options. But the bus ain't going to stop. You either get on the bus, or you get run over by the bus. Those are the options. But the bus ain't going to stop. All right, welcome back everyone to the Bodies Behind the Bus podcast. We are back with Chrissy. Chrissy, you know, when we left off our conversation last time, we just started to talk about what happened leading up to your firing, and we haven't gone through what actually happened when you were fired. So I do want to talk about that, but I was wondering, could you spend some more time kind of talking through your relationship with Pastor E and some, providing some more context to, uh, to that relationship and to how he operated within the church. Yeah. Thanks, Jay. So I feel like last time I didn't speak a lot on pastor E because I knew what I was dealing with. I knew it was the hit man, the sophisticated bulldog. So my personal interactions weren't a lot there, but I did a lot of observing and. I just kind of wanted to touch on that because I know I talked on Pastor J a lot, but Pastor E was, was intricate, obviously, because he got ousted, um, pretty quickly there with that investigation. Um, with that investigation, um, I wanted to go back and say that. The investigator, when he interviewed us, he asked us to go out and if there was anybody that might want to interview with him and have information that he would find helpful, he encouraged us to do that. I was following what the suggestion was, and then as far as with Pastor E's, this, this kind of was pivotal why I reached out to you guys, because one day he draws a bus up on the, the bulletin board in our staff meeting, and he says, sometimes you have to throw somebody off the bus if they don't get off themselves, and that's about why I returned it. There was about 15 people probably in that meeting sitting around a conference table and my body just froze and I looked over to one of my staff members that I knew she knew the deal and we were just like I cannot believe he just said that and it was following the leaving of one of the children's ministers and so we knew That she had gotten pushed off that bus, but he sat there and said that in front of everybody. So we were just kind of dumbfounded. Another thing that I wanted to bring this up because it brought me to tears and it was just so hurtful. I was part of the worship planning team as the administrative person. And Pastor J and Pastor E would sit there and make fun of the oldest pastor who had been in this church before they came along. He was nearing retirement. He wasn't hip. He wasn't up on Facebook or whatever was popular at that time. Now it would be TikTok, right? And he was, he was just a great. big hearted, very personal guy. And they would sit there and make fun of him in this meeting. And I'm one female, four men, five men, and they're all laughing at these jokes to the point that this pastor came out of those meetings at least once, maybe more than once. in tears, not showing anybody, but I saw him in tears. The secretary at the, well, the front desk person saw him in tears. Those were the ways that they were treating people. And Pastor E was spearheading a lot of that just as much as Pastor J. And I was really heartbroken over that. I think often, thanks for sharing that context. That's super helpful for people to just understand that. And environment that you all were working and really living your life within. I think super often people just attribute that bus quote that's in the beginning of our podcast to Driscoll, but what they don't realize is that A lot of our stories actually include a version of that quote. So that's why we have it there. Because it is, I don't know if it was Driscoll who, I mean, he's clearly the most famous person that has said it, or he's most famously known for saying it, but it is something that these dudes Like, they actually think that this is the way that you lead in ministry and this is the way that you view staff. So I don't doubt that for one second. And I'm also just so sad about it. And that's why Bodies Behind the Bus exists, because Jay wrote a really beautiful intro to this podcast way back in episode one. Just saying like being a body behind the bus is not the gospel and you're more than that. And you deserve to be seen and heard and loved. And it's just really heartbroken, heartbreaking that you guys experienced that type of leadership from someone who claimed to be a shepherd. And I mean, I saw a lot of that type of thing happening, even though I wasn't personally. affected directly, but I saw making fun of people, congregants, staff, and getting rid of ministries. That does personally affect people. So maybe it's not targeted at you, but that's like when you're witnessing that type of behavior from people who are supposed to be your pastors, that Or your bosses. Let's take this even outside of a church context into a company context. If you see your bosses acting that way, that affects the culture, that affects you, that affects your confidence, that affects your feelings of safety, security. All of that stuff is ruptured and rocky when you start seeing these things. And it takes quite a bit of audacity to do that in front of other people. And it also sends a message that like, you're not going to do anything about this. So I can say whatever I want in front of you. It's literally, it's dehumanizing of every single person. In the situation, even when it's not targeted at you, right? It sets the, the grooming, right? Yeah. Or that you're not going to be believed also. Yeah, right. And then the last thing about Eric was there were congregants who came forward and had heard how he spoke. And that was very concerning. It was in my estimation, in my experience, very abusive. And so There were like things that were brought forward early on before the investigation on Pastor E happened. My point is, he was very involved in this as well. And even though it Wasn't something I had direct interactions with super helpful It's always telling too because the you know from from our conversations with you and from walker It was pretty much said hey that guy needs to go immediately after the investigation was completed And granted that's not funny at all But that talks about the serious nature of what the allegations were and what was uncovered That that was the immediate recommendation is that he needs to leave so Super, super helpful for that context, Chrissy. We appreciate it. Now, I want to dive into, if you can, talking to us about the day you were let go. So, can you set the stage for us and then walk us through that day? Can we really quick? Remind everybody in your last episode, in your, the first episode with you, we heard about this like unraveling that's happening, even with the people that you trusted, like your, you called him your brother, who was your direct report, right? Like you reported directly to him and starting to have these conversations. Yeah. Conversations that were very weird, like basically felt watch your back or like, I don't know. Can you explain that? Just like a very quick, like 60 second recap of that leading into this next part of your story. Yeah. So my family, my brother, the missions pastor, when we met, I'd say the phrase that he repeated mostly was we need to take care of this before it becomes an HR issue, you know? That to me was just what are you talking about? I don't understand. And then a very awkward meeting with the elder chair at that time just left me on the defense of, Oh my gosh, they're coming after me about something, but I don't know what. And that is when I took it into my own hands to kind of interview 13 staff, top volunteers, just to apologize for what I did. Guess I'd done wrong, but didn't even know. And then that lead led into July where I was celebrated as like the most encouraging, smiley, happy employee. Yay! To be followed by my, one of my bosses direct reports leaving his job and nobody told me. And then finally right before the day I get fired, three days before a sexual predator There was found out in the church. And so that was everything leading up to August, 2021, August 4th, 2021. What a beautiful day. So that is that kind of capture it? Yeah, that was helpful. Super helpful. So. You just got celebrated. Right. You're walking into work, just like a normal work day. Walk us through what happens next. So you're at, you go to work. Yep. I go to work. Start there. Yeah. Okay. So it's a day where I meet with my. Supervisor who has changed since that one that we talked about in the last episode. She was 25 years old. She was the one I had been brought in to clean up the mess of, but yet she had been assigned to be my new supervisor, which was just. Kind of odd, like her, all that. We were friends, but it was just kind of weird now that I was reporting her. But nevertheless, I walk into our meeting and I'm meeting with her and I just, she looked at me and she said, as I'm like sitting down, she said, Administrator G is gonna join our meeting today, and I'm just gonna call him G from now on. Skip the administrator part. So he had been employed, like I told you, about seven months by that point. I just thought it was really odd because I'd never had that happen. I wasn't told about it and I'm not expecting for him to be walking in the meeting. Right. So he sits down beside me and the first thing he says is not like hello or greeting. He says, we are recording this meeting. And I thought, wow, okay, what is going on? I'm totally clueless. Totally. I look at my supervisor and she's got her laptop open and she's recording it through her computer. She says nothing else the entire meeting. That one phrase to greet me was it, and, uh, G pulls out a piece of paper and he proceeds to read from it, and the words that I hear are things like terminated, effective, immediately, we have well documented integrity violations, and my head didn't. Just start spinning. I'm very clueless. I am just dumbfounded. I feel like I'm in a total dream. And I just say to him, I don't know what else he said at that point. And I just said, what are you talking about? I have no idea what you're talking about. So he goes back to the top of this paper that he's holding and he begins to read exactly the same statement again, robotically. I look at my supervisor behind her computer and she is in full panic attack mode. She is trembling. Her hands are shaking. She cannot look at me. So then I ask G to explain what he's talking about again. And he goes back. Yep. To the top of that paper and he reads the top sentence and reads it verbatim again, just totally like a robot in that statement. He mentioned that North Carolina is an at will state. I think I know what at will is, but I'm like. Maybe I'm clueless. Maybe I have no idea. So I take the opportunity and just say, can you explain to me what an at will state is? And he does. And he just says, we can terminate you at any time for any reason. Okay. So I knew he continues reading this paper and there's some numbers that are being floated out there. I hear the word severance, but my head is just totally swirling. I cannot. Kind of really get it around the words. I've not had that experience before. So it was kind of surreal. I just can't focus. I hear him say, CHBC property needs to be turned in immediately, like my laptop, my keys, and anything else I have, I have to mail it in. He then says that I will not be allowed to go back to my cubicle, and if there's anything I need, like a purse, then my supervisor will go get it. Otherwise, they're going to pack up my desk, and someone will deliver it to me. He then verbally says that after I sign this paperwork that they're putting in front of me, they are going to escort me out of the building to my car. Now, I'm in, I'm in a total this is not happening state. This is surreal. You're gonna walk me to my car? So I'm still looking at my supervisor. She's still having the panic attack behind the computer. I just don't even know what to do. So I asked him again. I do not know what you're talking about. What are these well documented violations of integrity? Guess what? He goes back to the top of the paragraph and reads it robotically for whatever the third, fourth, fifth time. I don't even know what we're at. Totally losing track. So I say to him. Well, I guess I'm not going to get the answer. Clearly, you're just going to keep repeating the same thing to me over and over. So can you please tell me when somebody and who and when they might get in touch with me so they can give me more information about these details? Instead of answering that, he goes back to the paragraph and again, reads about North Carolina being an at will state. I've asked what five times for information I've gotten nothing. So I'm totally freaking out this point. I've worked here for 16 years. I didn't see this coming. I mean, hindsight says maybe I should have, but I didn't. I'm just a very super trusting kind of person. So it never occurred to me, never. So I've got this paperwork in front of me. And I'm supposed to read through it and sign it. My first thought is that I can't, I don't know, it's surreal. I couldn't put the words together. Like I'm seeing words, but I'm reading and they're not coming together. So I just start praying, okay, God, can you please help me calm down so I can read this and know what it says? It's because. I'm afraid at this point, and this was my thought, that they're setting me up for something that I'm about to sign and that is going to get me into trouble. So I start going very slowly and reading and piecing it together. We have had, by the point this has come out, probably close to 80 or 90 stories. And we have never had a storyteller escorted out of the building. We have heard horrendous firings. And I think yours takes the cake, Chrissy. Well, I'd say thank you. But yeah, unbelievable. I mean, John, I've never even had a disciplinary in anything. If I'd had issues, maybe. I mean, I just don't know what they thought I was gonna do. Start throwing chairs out the windows, running through the halls, pulling out a gun. I mean, what is it they they think I'm going to do here? I mean, it is wild. Well, I'm sorry that you get the Bodies Behind the Bus trophy for worst firing. Not only is she known for being the most happy, smiley employee, also she gets the Bodies Behind the Bus worst firing ever trophy. We'll mail you the reward, so. Awesome, awesome. Oh my gosh, that's so traumatizing. Being fired in general is just really hard, but it's not. There is so much when it's your church. I can't explain. It is different. And it's so much more a statement on your identity when it's happening in church. Like you have extreme character integrity issues, and it's your pastors, like your church leaders are telling you this. After 16 years, Jay, you've had to let a lot of people go. Is that how you do it? Not a lot. Not a lot. But I have had to let people go. Jay. Now you're firing everybody. But, you know, I, I would actually say, Chrissy, I was really admired that you asked the question, can you clarify. Why what the integrity issues were that you had to wear, you know, that you were reeling, but you at least ask the question. And then you even made the statement. Well, you're clearly not going to answer me. So you did actually asked great questions that they were unable to respond to, which I think you should really. applaud yourself for that because that was a traumatic experience and, you know, being disassociating or just great checking out could have easily happened. And, you know, you had the ability to ask some questions. So you're, you're getting escorted out of the building. So walk us through. What do you do with that paperwork? Do they give you time to sign it? Can you take it home with you? Walk us through the next steps. Yeah. So that paperwork that I'm looking through, I had the wherewithal to think there's only a signature page at the end. What if they switch pages one and two? So I go initial and date each page. But basically that paperwork, all that it said was, you are acknowledging you're getting fired, you have to turn in, you know, our equipment, whatever, and there is a severance package on the table. G stops me in the middle of that to push me to hurry up. And I just looked at him and said, I'm not done reading. Cause I asked him questions like, how am I going to get any personal stuff off my computer? They said I could do that with the it. There were a lot of like questions that I was having. So he reminds me through that, that we're going to walk you out of the building as soon as you're done here. So I get done. I do make a couple comments very calmly, just that they should be ashamed and this church should be ashamed of treating somebody like this. That was my only comment said very calmly, like I said, I get up to leave and he walks me to the door and he has a manila envelope that he hands to me and says, this has more information about your severance package in it. Okay, whatever. So I walk out the door, walk down the stairs, they follow me down the stairs, I walk through the exit door, they follow me out the door, I walk towards my car, they come in the parking lot and just stand there and watch me until I've driven off. So yeah, at that point I'm freaking out and I just I mean, here's a tip I just go and start changing all the passwords to anything that might have been open on that computer my Facebook I mean, there's nothing to incriminate me, but I also don't want them having My personal stuff, they've locked me out of everything at that point. Yeah. So I'm just spiraling. I pull over to a park and just kind of breathe and start doing some of that. And I start getting phone calls. I get a text from two staff members because one thing I'd asked was, what are you going to tell the staff? And he said he would tell the same thing that he read about my well documented issues of integrity. So they're texting me going, what is going on? I do get a call from that missions pastor who, you know, feels like family and is my brother and he just says, I'm so sorry, I just, I can't believe this. And I said, did you know, he said they came to me yesterday afternoon and told me what was going to happen, but I told them that they need to explain to you what these reasons are at some point in time. Um, and. Then it flipped. Well, I hope this is a good start for whatever is your next season. And, you know, turning on the positiveness of it all. Boo! Missions caster. Bad, bad form. Agreed. Well, I mean, I will say this too. I mean, they are, they're, they're basically taking your mud and your name through the mud. To all of the staff without even providing context of what these integrity issues are, which again, I mean, let's Matthew 18 this thing, guys, you know, that wasn't done properly, boys, boys in the boys, priestly boys, let's, let's Matthew 18 it, and instead they're just being like, no, we're not doing that, we're going straight and saying, hey, this is, this is what she, she's had integrity issues and how dare you ask us anything else, which is just, let's Matthew 18 it. Absurd. Again, I'm, I'm mocking that for on purpose because that's what we're told as congregants, Matthew 18, Matthew 18. But yet when they do something, it's no, just trust me. It's an integrity issue. And how many stories, Jay, do we have of pastors? I mean, Pastor H did it to me, and I'm not the only one. It's so many storytellers where we have these tenured, loved staff members where this pastor just says something that That seems so counter their character or what they're known as and then everybody just goes with it Integrity issues, but but I've never seen Chrissy have integrity issues. Well, we don't want to gossip about Chrissy So that makes everybody think you have some secret weird integrity issues, right? Like even like joy I think of joy like what? They said something that made it sound like she was having like an affair or something, like a moral failing. They say these things that are vague, but serious. Right. And it causes everyone that is in your community to one, not want to ask you because they don't want to shame you. And they're freaked out. And two, it makes them all think poorly of you. Right. And they were well documented. He kept repeating that. And it wasn't just a violation of integrity, it was violations. So he made sure it was very clear it was multiple. But this, this brought, you know, this missions pastor, he did say, It's definitely not your work. There's nothing with your job performance. So I know it's not that. And then he said, it's so great that you got a severance package. I've never heard of an administrative assistant getting a severance package before. I'm just like, yeah, yeah, whatever. I'm still, you know, reeling in my, is this real moment. So that, that was what happened immediately after the meeting. So now all the staff knows, has been told that there were multiple well documented violations of integrity, but we are caring for Chrissy. And that is said in a mafia voice, if I've ever heard it before. We're caring for Chrissy by tying cement blocks to her feet and throwing her in the river. That's what it kind of felt like John. Yeah. Yeah. Oh So that was August 4th August 5th, I start getting texts from congregants saying oh, I'm so sorry You're leaving and I'm thinking What has happened? So they've put out an announcement to the kids ministry volunteers, but they took the angle of, Oh, we just want to thank Chrissy for all her years of service, blah, blah, blah. So it makes it sound like I've quit my job. I am not wanting to tell my fifth kid because she's in college. I wanted to wait till the weekend, but the next day comes and I'm getting more texts. So now they've sent out a church wide announcement, which has never happened for anybody who is not a minister and above. So what in the world? And my daughter calls me and says, mom, what is going on? My friend just told me you quit your job. So I was just really not prepared for. For all of this and I've not opened this envelope either because I cannot stomach Whatever it might have to say so I'm I'm clueless about what's in the manila envelope Another weird thing in this time is I get one elder who reaches out and says hey if you need a reference I'd be happy to give you a great glowing job reference. I've loved working with you. Then I have another elder Reach out and offer me a job at his company, never acknowledging anything. about me getting fired. Nothing, but just why would you want someone with well documented integrity issues working for you? Exactly. Or why would you be a reference for someone like that? Yep. So it was elders. Obviously, they knew nothing but I've, you know, learned that they were also told that there were well documented violations of integrity, and that is why I was fired. So, I don't know. It was very, very confusing with all of that. So, I spend the next few days talking to a couple friends, trying to see if I should get a lawyer, what should I do? I'm just, I don't have a spouse to go to and ask these questions and kind of sift through it. So, You know, I, I just don't even know what to do. Finally, I think it was August 7th, August 8th, four days later, I was just like, okay, I gotta open this stupid envelope no matter what it says. So I opened the envelope, there were five pages. I read through it, they're going to give me 15 weeks of pay, some few months of insurance, and then money for like a headhunter, which is about 14, 000. I finished reading all five pages and I just can't even believe what I've just read. My very first thought was, this is hush money. They are offering me hush money. They want me to sell my soul. What is going on? So I read it again, read it again, and absolutely they wanted me to be quiet and they're trying to pay me off. Why? I don't know. That's like the weirdest part is it seems like, and like we're never going to get this answer, which is so frustrating, but it seems like they thought you were a threat for something, but the wildest part is you have no idea what that thing is. You're like, what do I have locked away in here somewhere that could solve the case? Right. Something is fishy, but it's like they like paranoid fired you. Right. Right. But then nobody actually knows why, unless, I mean, unless Walker knows why. We shall see. We shall see. Yep. So you have this paperwork, then you eventually start kind of reaching out to others and get Walker engaged. Walk us through, what do you do with the paperwork? Do you sign it? Right. And then how, how does Walker get engaged in this story? So first thought on the paperwork was Not, hey, I'm going to sign this and get money. My thought was, I have black and white proof of something. And I know enough people by this point who have been abused and hurt by this church that I can help support them and bring healing. So honestly, the thought of signing it was It's just a minuscule thing. I don't know why a church would have a non disclosure. I don't get that unless you have copyright issues or something, but there was no reason that they should have given me a non disclosure, in my opinion, for what I knew I knew. So I talked to a couple people and at this point, you know, I'm I've already been talking about it too, because I didn't even know not to, and the non disclosure is absolutely ridiculous if you want to post it and read through the details of it, but it's crazy. I couldn't, you know, talk to certain people and all of that, so I knew I'm past the point of return. Plus I'd had heard that the executive pastor who had been found guilty in that investigation, he probably left with 100 grand and they're offering me 14, 000. So, I don't know. You're all, if you want to up that times four, maybe I'll sign this because I don't actually know anything and don't care. Just what the heck? Right, right. So, someone I know. Said hey, we've had some congregants in our life group who have heard wind of you know You being fired and they would love to hear your story, and I think you can trust them So my thought is all right. I've got black and white proof I know a group of former staff and congregants that have been hurt deacons and this could help And how can I use this God? What do you want to do with this? This is, um, not going to help me at this point. So can it help others? And I decide that I will go on a sharing life group tour. Because I, here's very important for anybody listening that is in this situation. I knew that I could not do it alone. I could not face the powers that be alone. I had watched two, three other people. They could not come forward because they would have been alone. This would have been a waste of everything. So God just, Holy Spirit gave me this and said, Hey, you need to like gather supporters if you want to use this. So that is why I started talking to safe people. It was set up with this one life group and this is where Walker comes into play because it's Walker's life group and he at that time was an elder. So that kind of felt. Good, but also a little scary because he's an elder part of knowing what's going on or did he so this is set up and I walk Walk into their back porch and a group of about 10 people are there Walker being one of them And so I share pretty much what I've shared on this podcast, but actually even more even more details So that is where Walker comes into play This is why they wanted you to sign an NDA, by the way. You haven't seen anybody else in your church's story that I have heard from either of you that went and started to talk to people, and start, like, putting together the strings on the criminal board, you know? Like, you did that, and they, I mean, you probably were just known for being a a connector. Absolutely. I mean, my phrase is a bridge builder. I still had relationships with all these people that they had burnt the bridges with. Maybe not, maybe not intimately, but I knew them. They don't want you building bridges in this situation. Right. And I mean, they just thought a single mom, five kids was going to sign this 14, 000 agreement. I guess that's what I think they, the way they. And I thought I was going to sign that in 24 hours. How long did you, you'd been there? How many years had you worked when you were fired? What was your, how many years? I worked there for 16. 16 years. 16 years of service and no issues. And straight A's on my job performances. And even when you think about a severance for a 16 or 15, let's say 15 year employee, like the severance is kind of a slap in the face to be like, we're going to give you, it's basically like a thousand, less than a thousand dollars for every year you've worked there. And that yet you have a senior pastor who had been there, what, a couple years, who's getting six figures to basically be fired. Be told that he had to be fired by a third party. You've got to let this guy go. And the church is like, well, let's give him 100, 000 on the way out. So it just shows you, it just shows you like when, when we talk about these things with churches, like it just shows you that. You know, the churches are not in it for what's right at times. Not all churches, but the churches like this, they're not in it for what's right for the community and for the people. It's about who's in control and what's right for them and what maintains their control and how can they do that. And it's just sad. Thank you again to Kirsi for sharing that incredibly painful story with us. We're now going to be transitioning to hearing from Walker as he shares his perspective as an elder at CHBC. So, without further ado, this is Walker. Today, we have Walker on the podcast. We're honored to have him. He is a former member, a former elder of the church, longtime member of this church. His family attended for many years. So Walker, welcome to the Bodies Behind the Bus podcast. Thank you. So glad to be here. Well, I, you know, we don't, we don't often get elders or, or pastors that come on the podcast. When we do, we, we just, we, we want to thank you for your courage to, to stand up and talk through your experiences and what happened in the church. We think that all voices are valuable, but when leaders stand up and, and, and really speak, speak the truth, it's, it's very impactful for, for those that are still in the church or thinking about going back to church in this space. So thank you. Really appreciate it. Can you talk to us a little bit about. Your role at, and we're going to call it CHBC for short. So if you're in the know and we say CHBC, you know what we're talking about. So can you talk about your role at CHBC? How long were you there? What were your responsibilities? Yeah, absolutely. So I. I started going to the CHBC decades ago. I mean, it was a, it's kind of a cool story, actually. I was a non believer when I went to college, and it's a college campus church. And so I went, I came to university as a freshman, not a believer, a bunch of great stuff happened that year. I met Jesus. But the summer of my freshman year passed, came back to campus, I was all excited, I, you know, committed my life to Jesus and was just ready to get plugged in somewhere, and some friends pointed me to the CHPC. They said, hey, you should try this church, it's right, it's walkable from campus. And so I did. And just got plugged in there, started to learn up and down, left and right about Christianity, about Jesus, about my faith. It was a super sharp church. It's, it was kind of known for being, I mean, it was well suited for a university setting. It was, you couldn't swing a cat without hitting a PhD in there. There was just awesome intellectual Rigor, and it was just an exciting environment to be a part of as a college student and as a new believer. And so I got discipled there, I was shepherded well, my wife, my wife to be started to go there as well. I think she'd actually started going before I got there, but we got married through the church in the late 90s. You know, did our counseling through a pastor there who we're still great friends with. He's still in the area and it was just, it was beautiful. And so then we started serving in the youth ministry and then we're part of the young adults program. You know, just doing all the stuff that you're supposed to do in a church to have a rich, full, kind of tightly knit fabric of a community. And then in the late 2000s, I was like in my mid 30s at that point, and the pastor who married us approached us and said that, you know, you've been put forward to be an elder. And so 2009, I think it was, maybe the first part of 2010, I came on as an elder. And so, I mean, just from thinking about church at large, it felt like a really It felt like kind of how it's supposed to happen, you know, you had this church that welcomed in a brand new believer and taught him well, and then got him to serve. And, you know, and we started raising our kids there. So we had this really incredible fabric and there was just, there were these long term relationships that were forming beautifully and, and it was just kind of exactly what I kind of think that church ought to be for a community. And then we started giving back more and more. So the ratio of us. Serving and contributing shifted, and I was leading in adult retreats as the elder in charge of young adults, and that had been the organization that had first discipled me. So it was, it was really great. So, yeah, I was an elder there starting in 2010. I served that in that capacity until 2023, 2022. So over a decade. Three long terms of being an elder. Our first job as an elder board was to hire the new pastor because we had been without a lead pastor for like over a year when I came on. And so I was on that committee that did the hiring of that. And he came on. He's been actually, Pastor Jay has been part of the church since then. So he's still there. So yeah, before we get into Pastor J and how he came on board, I also was part of the search team that brought on Pastor H, so I failed miserably in that, in that regards. But I, I would love for you to talk about the, if you could describe, Johnna likes to, I love the way she did, does it, if you could describe, you know, the pillars or three words or how, you know, three words or three, how would you give, how would you describe the church culture? You know, what would be The go to words for describing the church culture, what it was when you started and then how it shifted. over the years. Boy, to boil it down to three words. That's a great exercise. I'm a high school teacher, so I like stuff like that. So let me see. I'm going to say intellectual would be the first word. It wasn't a entirely intellectual church in the sense that it wasn't emotionless, but it was a very intellectually vigorous community. And it was the kind of place where Before Pastor Jay came, there was a, just a robust welcoming of different viewpoints. It's a conservative church. So maybe that's the second pillar, which is an unusual thing in a university community. And I think it prided itself on being an intellectually robust church that could kind of go toe to toe with any of the, anyone in the intellectual world and also be attractive to people in the, in the university community. I was, I was really proud of that for a long time. And maybe we can. reflect on the pride element of being a part of a place like this at some point because I think that was a problem eventually as I, as I think about it. But I was very much, I was very proud to bring people to say, Hey, look, this is like intelligent Christianity. This is smart Christianity. This is something that I can be proud of. And different viewpoints, say on something like gender were welcomed. It was a complimentary in church before I knew what that word meant. So before Pastor Jay came, I didn't know it. I didn't have never heard that word. They'd only had men in leadership. But there were these rounds and rounds of dialogues about that, that, you know, in the late 90s when I was there in the 2000s, it was not considered something that you couldn't have a different kind of view on. It was very welcoming to other views. The church prided itself on being a diverse church, maybe in comparison to other evangelical churches, suburban evangelical churches. As I've thought more about that, I think the diversity was overstated, but it saw itself as being like, Hey, we're the church that's not just white people. And so, and for a long time, that was a calling card for the church. That's how it's one of the ways it would talk about itself. Yeah. Even though, again, first of all, a genuinely diverse church is really rare. And secondly, I think that the actual diversity of the church was, was overstated, overemphasized. And it also that eventually, maybe we'll come back to this, but the quality of the diversity, uh, it was put to the test. Like the commitment to the, to diversity was put to the test in coming years and it did not pass the test. Well, it didn't do well with that test. So let me see if that's, is that, I think that's three. Yeah, no, that was great. That was more, yeah, that was perfect. So you mentioned that. You, was it 2000, was it 2009 that Pastor Jay was hired? It ended up, so I was looking at my, at my outline, my timeline, and I think it, so we, we were in the process in 2010, I don't think he actually came on until 2011. So he's been there for maybe 13 years. So 2011, you guys hire Pastor Jay. How would you describe him? What was your relationship as an elder like with him? What was he like? I was so excited. By this hire, because we have been without a lead pastor for a couple of years, and again, so much insight and hindsight. In hindsight, I think that was probably the most. spiritually healthy time of our church. We had developed these structures to lead and conduct the affairs of the church without a lead pastor. And as I think back on them, we had something called a lead team, where different ministries would send representatives to meet, um, and make decisions together and inform each other about what's going on. And it wasn't the perfect System by any means, but it was it very much involved and empowered people. And I think that's a really important part of a healthy church to to engage and honor the the people who are serving by giving them real decision making power and and ownership. But there was a sense, I don't know if it was a, just a sense of embarrassment, like, gosh, we don't have a lead pastor, what's wrong with us? But there was a sense that we were floundering. And I think we were floundering numbers wise, our numbers were down. We had probably had about a thousand, it was about a thousand person church in the mid 2000s. And then it had, you know, maybe cut to two thirds of that or something. So there's a bit of a financial sense of panic or whatever. And so, when Pastor Jay came, on paper he's just the perfect candidate for our church because he came from the Wheaton area. He was part of this prominent church in the Wheaton area, and he's extremely intellectual feeling. He sounds, he talks intellectually, and he loves intellectual things. And I'm a humanities teacher. in high school. And so I loved thinking about ideas and philosophy and literature and reading and this kind of stuff. And so, and he was making like Lord of the Rings references in his sermons. I was like, this is my guy. I can't believe this. And we're the exact same age and our kids are the same age. And at the time I taught at a private Christian school nearby and. He came into town and put all of his kids in the private Christian school, and eventually he got on the board at the school. And so I'm like, man, this is just the best thing ever. I can't believe how richly we're going to be involved with each other's lives. And, and also we had, we shared kind of a, a sarcastic sense of humor that I think eventually caused a lot of trouble, but I was like, man, I can joke with this guy and he's fine. Oh, he's well. I thought he was fun. It's interesting. As I think back on it, I realized that, you know, I reached out to spend time with them. We would go on runs and stuff and the families would get together and he gave off the appearance of being fun and interested. But then as I reflect on, I realized that one of the features of our relationship was that he never showed any curiosity in anybody else. So we go on these runs and I'd be asking about his family and how he's doing with his, you know, moving here and stuff. And after a few runs. And I would always, I wanted this to work so badly that I would kind of suppress this, but now I realize I was never asked a single time about how my family's doing, or if I was, it was very cursory and very, it was obvious that there was very little interest. He was always very interested in the politics of the organizations nearby. So, he's always asking about other teachers at the school and where people stood at the church on whatever issues, like about this lead team. And I learned very early on that he, so he would, and he would use that sarcastic sense of humor to crack quietly on the side with me on different aspects of the church, which made me feel great because the lead pastor was was including me in on his true feelings and we were sharing in a sort of a conspiratorial denigration of this or that person at the church. It was, but it was all in joking, so it's not a big deal. Like we're just kind of letting our hair down a little bit, not having to be so, so guarded in our words. I thought we were, I thought a close friendship was brewing, but as I think about the way And I've had so many experiences with him over the years, and I've talked to so many other people who have had experiences with him. It's almost like he, he has a, this is where, the way I imagine it, and maybe you can get him on here, he can tell me otherwise, but he has like a, some sort of goggles on or something, and everything is, is, is color coded, either black and white or red. It's either with me or against me. And, and he, I feel like he's going around engaging the world and seeing who's, who's on board with my theology, who's on board with my, my sense of like power and this or that organization. And if you get flagged, if you're, if you get the red color of danger or a threat, then you're just permanent. Every time you come into his view, there's that threat there, like an alarm goes off, warning. And, and so I was in early on, I was, I was part of the inner circle and I love that feeling. So I, I thought we were very close. And I enjoyed that a lot. He would do things like, and so he has, he had a couple issues and still does that were paramount for him. And there were things like he introduced the idea of complementarianism to me. And early on, like when the, within the first year he gave me this book and I can't remember the name of the book. It's, it's the biblical manhood and womanhood. Book. What is that book? That's not the entire title, but he gave this to me. This is the essential text that I want you to be thinking about. This captures our church's position. And of course, our church didn't really have a quote unquote position. It was a recovering biblical manhood and womanhood by Piper and Grudem. That's right. Piper and Grudem, right? And I had actually not really thought about these, those names that I know of really well now before I was like, Oh, who are these guys? And so I read it and I quickly adopted it. I, I became a defender of it. And I think partly because one of the, one of his features was, you know, he was not warm relationally. He didn't show interest or caring or concern or compassion. If you told him something bad was happening, he might be able to pray for you, but there was never the sense of caring, but he had confidence. He, he exuded this sense of, I know exactly what's up, what's right, what's orthodox, what's not, what's liberal, what's conservative. And if, and I'm not sure how you How you acquire that confidence, but once you have it, you almost don't have to work for it. You just, he would just put his, he, he exuded the fact that I get the final say on whether something's orthodox or not. So, you know, complementarianism, this recovering biblical manhood and womanhood, all that, that was considered orthodox and good. And anybody who had any kind of nuanced views about anything was immediately labeled with that red color, that, that red color. And so I remember there was this dear friend, another teacher in the upper school at my school. And he was, he was one of the most profound influencers for Christ in the school. I mean, he was just this magnetic teacher, so good with the kids, and just exuded Christ like compassion for everyone around him, especially people kind of on the margins. And I, I can't think of anybody at the school who did more to promote the Christian mission of the school than he did, you know, and he loved Jesus. He loved the Bible. He loved scriptures. He loved talking about it. He also was LGBTQ affirming, right? And so at that time at our school, that was, that was not a deal. You could, you could do that and be at our school. I'm not sure what the current situation is. I don't teach there anymore, but Pastor Jay got wind of this and I, I sense there's like this hypersensitive radar scanning all the time. To try to, hey, that guy, I wonder if he's, I wonder what his position is on LGBTQ stuff. And he found out that, that this guy was affirming and he behind the scenes just hounded me in the same sort of sarcastic, joking way about getting rid of this guy. Like, when are we going to get rid of this guy? When's he going to be gone? And so the only thing, the only way he'd view the world. Was was in terms of with me or against me and the the loss to various communities is just profound because this guy again He was doing the best work to them for the mission of anybody at the school, but none of that mattered I think so. I'm very interested in in patterns One of the reasons why I want to think a lot about my experiences at this church is because as I've gotten, as I've started looking at other communities and situations, uh, of people who have kind of experienced similar stuff, you start to see the same patterns over and over again. I think if we can like label and name those patterns and start to better recognize them, they're very handy. And I think this is one of those elements of the patterns is that Once, if you have a mindset like Pastor Jay, you start seeing everybody as an enemy or an ally, and it's you're either one or the other. And if you have that mindset, there's no room for nuance. There's, as soon as you show any nuance, you're immediately kicked into the enemy. How would you say that affected a you? Being in the inner circle, did you start adopting those traits as well as a leader in the church? So I don't naturally bend that way. I think I got into teaching because I love discussion and nuance and dialogue and I am curious about other people. Oh, but it certainly, but I was, but shame on me. I am very susceptible to people telling me I'm important and I'm impressive and I'm in. And I think he sensed that I think he saw that very quickly with me and so it absolutely shut down all of these elements of my personality and my approach that were That we're naturally curious and I mean, in my view now, that's one of the critical elements of a, of a robust, healthy, humble faith is curiosity and, and really humbly thinking that the people around you can teach you something and that you can get to, you can learn something from almost anybody and something crucial, like they have something that's really important for you to understand. And so for years, when I was. On board with Pastor J, I found myself being like an apologist for Pastor J's views. And so like complementarianism, for example, I remember my, my marriage does not work in a complementarian way. We were very mutual in our approach. We do everything we do is like we come to consensus. There's definitely no like hierarchy of importance. or authority. I spent years trying to fit the complementarian view into my understanding of, of the, of my own relationship and of the Bible. And so I would just, you know, do gymnastics to try to convince, especially younger, younger people who I was, who was working, like they would have all these questions about it. This doesn't seem right. So, and so that, how's that supposed to actually work? And I wouldn't honor their curiosity and let them like encourage them to pursue that. I would instead go into apologist mode. And, oh, well, and I'd give off the party lines, and I could do it pretty articulately, I was, I was decent at it, and I did that with, you know, gender stuff, LGBTQ stuff, you know, and it actually doesn't mean that I necessarily have changed my, my theology at this point about this or that given topic, but I had no curiosity then, and I realized that I was suppressing my, you know, Interest in pursuing other people's views on this and realizing how important those are. So I remember this one student I had where I teach a CS Lewis literature class and She was doing a paper on gender and CS Lewis and this is a really good topic It's really valuable and important and most of my energies in that paper Or spent refuting or, or defending the complimentarian view, which she was calling out as troublesome in the books, and that was really helpful for her to do that. And it could have been so good. I think it still was. She had a strong enough personality that she pushed past my. My obstacles and actually we've we've since gotten together. She's graduated and she's gone. We've since gotten together and with the first thing I said, I was like, I am so sorry that I stifled your excellent curiosity about this. And basically spent my time pushing that agenda on you. That was completely inappropriate. It was unhealthy as a teacher. And so so yes, and in short that until the until I was labeled as an enemy. I, I enjoyed that favor and I promoted it and I think just talking about patterns, that's definitely one of the elements of the pattern is that if you can weaponize people who would normally be healthy to, to carry out your agenda for you, then you spend, expend a lot less energy and you also kind of develop this protective circle around you that does most of your defense for you without you having to actually ever defend yourself or to defend yourself. Justify your actions. That's super helpful. Thank you for that perspective. It wasn't just Pastor J on staff, correct? So at a certain point, a new pastor joins, Pastor E. What was he like? What was that duo like, combined together? Right. Yeah, both of them. were socially awkward and uninterested in engaging sort of relationally with people. Pastor J was, was more of a intellectually minded in the sense of like it was you, you leave a party having spent time and just kind of like that, that felt uncomfortable and not super relaxed. Pastor E had sort of like a, a more of a authoritarian air to him, more of a bluntly authoritarian air. Pastor E came from the same church or the same area. That Pastor Jay came from. Pastor Jay brought him in. He was a general hire, meaning that Pastor Jay always wanted us to, quote, trust him. And let him kind of do things the way he wanted to do. And so we didn't have a job description, a specific formal permanent job description. It was more, it was very flexible. I think it was considered maybe going to be the pastor of community, but then he eventually became executive pastor. But the, but the point was just to get this guy in there as a right hand man for Pastor J. We, we interviewed two E's for the position. One came from, came locally and he was engaging, you know, this is going to be a person who's supposed to be a community pastor or something. And so he was like relational and social and he actually, we actually offered the job to this guy and he turned it down very wisely in hindsight. And then Pastor Jay brought in his guy and there was a noted lack of excitement. about him and sort of like, I mean, and talking to lots of people since then, one person after the other would say about actually both of them, but especially Pastor E. This guy rubbed me wrong. He didn't feel right. He was odd and sort of alarming. There's, there's, there's an air of aggression about him that was very off putting. And so, I'm sure looking back that this guy was brought in here to do Pastor J's dirty work, to take care of the, and in some places that's been actually articulated, but for all, like all the, all the firings, all the rough treatment of staff that Pastor J didn't want to do, Pastor E was ready to take care of that in a rough, aggressive, uncompromising way. He was even more committed to conservative orthodoxy. than Pastor J was. Oh, I don't know about that. They both equally were, but he was forceful. He was equally incurious. I remember we were riding together to a elders retreat one year, and I also teach an economics class. And so I, you know, I love talking about these things. So I was, I was bringing up some interesting thing, topic that came up in economics, and I was expecting to have like this kind of back and forth where we're both interested in each other's ideas and, oh, that's, that's neat. And then we kind of have this, this dialogue. I brought it up and, and Pastor E. Proceeds to just like issue the gospel truth about this economic principle and then end the conversation there. There's no oh, what do you think? What's your take on that? And I was I remember just going like wow He is completely uninterested in anybody else's views and that happened again and again and again I was the guy on staff who would very gently Because I knew the lay of the land at that point. Very, very gently, like, you know, I don't know that the way we have things set up right now is serving the women in our congregation well, and empowering them, enabling them to have input. And from time to time, every few months, we'd bungle something, and I would want to bring that up in a meeting. And you could always feel the hackles go up on Pastor E, like in the, and he gets sort of icy. And we, we never had any direct run in. I've heard story after story of him actually like yelling at people and just also just being blunt and brutal and aggressive and hurtful. He was, it was never really that way with me, but I could feel that as soon as you said something that was not in his set of orthodox beliefs, he was just like probably the same kind of lenses that Pastor Jay would put on. Oh, doot, doot, doot, doot, doot. There's an enemy right there. Let's, let's watch him, but let's tag him and keep an eye on him. Do you feel like your position as an elder protected you from experiencing that side of Pastor E? Very much so. And there were some meetings where people came, where people asked me to come in and sit with them. as they met with Pastor E. And I think Pastor E would put on his best face when, during those meetings and appear like gracious and winsome. And I would leave going like, Oh, that was pretty good. Like I think he did okay there. How do you feel as an, as a former elder now realizing that like the people who were the most vulnerable in these settings were the least protected from that behavior? Oh, I feel terrible. How do you work through that? I mean, I've been apologizing to people. Left and right. One of the, one of the earliest people who was targeted by ENJ for seven years. She, she left the church and for seven years we didn't talk. We didn't have any. And she actually heard, heard that I was advocating for Chrissy and that spurred her to reach out to me and say, I've heard you're advocating for Chrissy. I'd love to get together and talk. And I knew enough then and had experience enough to know that I just went. We got together, actually beforehand, I sent her an email and just said, I am so sorry. I completely let you down. I was in a position to protect you, or to fight for you, and I didn't. I believed Pastor J instead, and Pastor E. And I had no reason to, because I had known you since the 90s, and I had every reason to believe you, and I didn't. And so Um, and she was so gracious about it and she very quickly forgave me, but I, I've had a lot, I've had a lot of conversations like that in the last three years where I've just been like on a tour saying I, and I wish others would do the same thing cause, cause I've been told it makes a big difference to just not say I didn't understand or blah, blah, you know, just own it and say, I'm sorry, I was wrong. I should have protected you and I didn't. And there's no taking that hurt back now. That was, that's on me. Yeah, that's so good. I think that's so important to hear and, and you are right. Like it is, it is, I mean, the, when we get in these spaces, anytime we're in these kinds of spaces and we are put in positions of power and, and we have a position of importance that does, you know, we do take pride in that. And I think that's a normal reaction, but when that pride is built on something that's unhealthy, it'll naturally turn to hurt. for other people and just being able to say, I'm wrong. Like, that's really what the whole faith thing is about, right? Like we've wronged each other. We're not going to be perfect in being able to go to each other humbly and saying like, I wronged you a thousand percent. Yeah. I am at fault. Yeah. And, you know, I, I would encourage all theaters and all spaces to, to really listen to those words and, and, and, you know, put them into practice. So. Yeah. That's like baseline what Bodies Behind the Bus wants. We want these people to listen. to what they, what, what they have done or the parts that they were complicit in and apologize, make it right. Yeah. Like we, we say often, like today is always the right day to start moving rightly. And then some people, and some people that apology needs to be, I wronged you congregation and I'm going to have to step down as a pastor and no longer pursue ministry. I need to find a job and I need to get help, but this is not the place for me to be. And you know, in this story, You know, we'll talk further that may have not have been a bad option. Yeah. So, well, and I've, I've learned so much in this process about what a real apology is consists of and how, and how many, I think it was Wade Mullen who calls it, or somebody calls it faux apologies. I think that, it might be Wade, it might be Chuck. Wade definitely has like a really beautiful outline. I'll link that in the show notes for like what. Yes, an apology should look like where he like critiques it. Yeah, it's really good. You've probably read it. I'm guessing I have and there there's so many like False apologies that you can throw out there that are no apologies at all or that actually hurt and then the person who's apologizing It's oh what? I apologize. Well, I don't understand what your problem is. Oh, you must not be full of grace. Another, another thing I've noticed too, you asked, you know, did I turn into a protector? And what's interesting as I think about what was going on in my head was that I think there's, you know, there's like your current desktop running and then you have all these programs happening underneath the surface. They're really operating your, your internal processor. And I think I was sensing what was really up with these guys. And some part of me realized that if I started to acknowledge what was wrong with them, or the extent of their unhealth, that the whole thing would fall apart. You know, and that was one of the things that made me, I think, refuse to acknowledge the early cries for help. Like, it was like 2014. So this is very early on. And as I think back, I'm like, I think I knew that if, if she was right, then this guy was a bad dude. If this guy was a bad dude, then All the hiring we did, all this like exciting new energy with the church, and this guy's confidence, it's all false. If that's all false, what are we going to do? Are we going to just like, how, how would we address that? We have no real proof. It just sounded exhausting. And also I would then be, I'm loving this inner circle I'm in. The inner circle would be gone. And probably nobody would believe me. I think we can realize those things in the background without ever having to bring them to our Because if they were actual conscious thoughts, we'd, we'd start I mean, those are bad thoughts. And so I think we're able to keep those operating in the back and resolve those, decide to ignore it. And then in your conscious mind, you can just move forward and make excuses or be like, Well, you know This person's a work in progress, or we need to show, you know, there's a billion excuses we can make to perpetuate this system while at the same time satisfying this deeper needs we have underneath. But I think that's happening with a lot of people, you know, cause I'll have, I'll bring these things. I've had dozens of conversations since then about the grave wrongs I've discovered that have. They have all sorts of evidence to support them. I have these conversations and I'll have guys nod their head. Oh, they won't contest it. They'll seem to agree. And, and the implications, of course, are that, okay, if this is true, you're going to have to act and you're going to have to take some bold steps. And they, they go away from the meeting. A couple of days pass. You're like, huh, I didn't hear from so and so. Maybe they're still processing. No, they've just. Done that. Well, they were still processing. They've just done that thing in the back of their head where they realize, no, the cost is too great. We're gonna have to make an excuse for this person's behavior and move on. So I want to go to 2021 because that seems to be a. A big inflection point for a lot of people in the Church, and it changed a lot of different things. So I specifically want to talk about the insurrection that happened on January 6th at the Capitol Building. Um, you know, Pastor Jay had a response to that insurrection on January 6th. He wrote a letter to the congregation. Can you talk to us about what was in that letter, and then how that letter was received by those within the Church? Just a little context, first of all. So again, the church has long considered itself a diverse church. And then in 2017, so I was back on the elder board. I had been back on for a couple of years after a year sabbatical, a year and a half. I was on a six year term. 2017, Trump had just got elected. A lot of people of color were experiencing substantial alarm in our community. And our family, we grew our family through transracial adoption. So we started that in 2005. So our kids were starting to get old enough to have real experiences, real cultural and social experiences. And so we were growing in our awareness of the danger of the climate with the advent of Trump getting elected. And so the small group of congregants came and requested a meeting with the leaders, with church leaders and us like the pastors. And then I came. And maybe a couple others. And they said, they essentially said, we think that our church is just handling this new situation very anemically. And we are, we want to challenge you guys to, to go in a new direction and greatly increase the vigor and strength of your response and your shepherding of the congregation and the congregation that are congregants of color and, and communicating to them their value and their. their, their belonging here. And so that actually, this is 2017, it launched this really exciting period in our church that I, at the time, thought was just magnificent and amazing and extraordinary. The staff seemed to respond very well. So we have sort of Pastor Jay, his dad's from India, his mom's a white American, so he's half Indian. We have another pastor who's half Brazilian. And they got on board. There was meetings and committees made and sermon series preached and prayer, like a monthly prayer meeting about racial unity. Triggered. And, and by 2018, I think our elder board had adopted racial unity, which is very carefully worded phrase. They had adopted racial unity as one of our top three strategic priorities for the following three years. So we're like, Oh man, this is so exciting. And they put me in charge of kind of heading up the racial unity efforts. And so, um, just for this brief shining moment, a number of us thought that maybe the church was really going to just break new ground and transform into this really dynamic force for racial harmony and reconciliation. But as soon as we did, of course, there was all these myst, at the time, mystifying obstacles and things that got in the way from our progress that we're just like, wait, hold on. Once you realize that. the leadership wasn't actually interested in growth in this area, it all makes sense. But at the time we, we really believed them. We thought that this was a genuine movement in the church. And so, you know, we, after doing some research, we decided that we didn't have the in house expertise to assess our church's racial climate. And so I went out and got this organization that my conservative Christian private school had used to do some training and said, Hey, these guys do assessments. They can assess our climate and give us, you know, outside. And so just for a moment, I was like, okay, great, let's go hire them, bring them in. And so there was some, I put it in the ball in the court of the paid staff and nothing happened. I was like, Hey, what's going on? Are we going to do that? And then there's further delay, ask again. And then the Pastor Jay says, well, you see, here's the thing. And he was on the board at our school. He had gone to the training himself and he had expressed commitment to this organization. He says, well, Pastor E's wife is. As a teacher at the school as well, and she felt uncomfortable at the, the training they had. And so I don't think we want to use that. It's like white women comfort is the top priority when it comes to racial harmony in these spaces. Exactly. Wait, what? So, okay. Well, can you go and find another organization? Sure. Sure. We'll do that. Time passes. Nothing happens. And so, and then we wanted to have a, an advisory group of people of color at our church to help to be a resource. To ask about, okay, something happens like Charlottesville, what are people of color going to experience from the, from the pews to, that we need to know before we respond to this. So excitement, wow, we're going to do this. And then I start to form the group. I create a list of names. They demand to see the names, Pastor E and Pastor J and this other elder who has ended up. It's pretty clear he's a complete white supremacist. They, they see the list and they start ticking off names who are not allowed to be on the list. So they like, line out and veto the names and say we're not comfortable with this list. And so, essentially the committee's killed. We had a race and faith class, like a Sunday school class, that they had to do no work for. It was all exciting. A bunch of people of color and white people were coming together to have these difficult conversations about race. Wow! You know, progress is being made. Suddenly the pastor of community comes to us and says, Yeah, we don't want our Sunday morning classes to be too insular. So we're gonna actually cancel all Sunday morning classes and then have just a rotating set of different classes. And we were like smelling a rat because our reading that's that fall was going to be this book called Reparations by this. These are like PCA pastors. These are conservative dudes. But the name Reparations just terrified a bunch of people. So. We, we like, okay, so every other class is going to be canceled. We're all being canceled. Really? Is this, is this really happening? Yeah, yeah, sure. So we, we fight it, but eventually the class gets canceled. Six months later, we find out that every other class is still meeting. I mean, and so in hindsight, there never was any commitment to racial unity. There was only the appearance, the commitment to the appearance of racial unity. And that actually leads me to another pattern that I've recognized, and I'm going to introduce you guys to the state motto for North Carolina. So do you know the state motto for North Carolina? It's Latin. It's very useful. It's esse quam videri, which means to be rather than to seem. And I think the motto for the Bible church is videri quam esse, which is to seem rather than to be. And so at every turn, they want to seem gospel centered. They want to seem diverse. They want to seem welcoming. They want to seem all these things. without actually being it. And that appearance is the most important thing. As soon as you push past the appearance and anything of substance, that's when you get the pushback. Okay. So the original question was about January 6th. So I'm fascinated with the fact that this kind of started for you guys in 2017. I think that actually is telling that, that there was even at a point, culturally as a church, there was enough seeming Safety for people of color to come to you guys and be like, we want to be in community with you. We're seeing red flags. They felt safe enough or they put themselves on the line enough to do that. What a grace to you guys as a church that they did that. Everybody's like, kind of all in, you think? And that just peters off. And now all of the sudden we are way, we're four years into Trump. I think if you, if we're going to talk about patterns, which we do like to talk about, so I'm loving all of your patterns talk. If you listen to stories on this podcast, you will notice a pattern that almost every story there is a stark 2020 influence in the story. So we get to January six, which is what that. Is that 2021? We have the 2020 election, 2021, January 6th, chaos for us Americans. If you're listening overseas, you probably saw the chaos. It was that crazy over here. What happens with your church? A letter goes out. Are the elders all involved in the creating of that letter? Or is this just like Pastor Jay goes rogue and sends out a letter? What's going on? I, all of us feel it, like everyone listening right now, if you close your eyes and remember January 6th, you remember what was happening in your body during that. I mean, it was not good. So wild. So wild. So that was Wednesday. The elders. Communicate via our messaging system, Basecamp. We need to have a response to this. Pastor J says, I'll head up the letter. You know, I, I'm a humanities teacher at the school where he's a board member at. So I'm a writing teacher. I like this stuff. I'm also in charge of the racial unity initiative at our church. So I'm like, okay, I, I'm, I'm happy to sit in with you on this and give you all kinds of feedback. So that Friday he sends me, he doesn't seem too excited about me being a part of it, but he accepts it. Sends me a Google Doc on Friday. Since then, my school had put out a letter to the community that was great. It was unequivocally condemned the Christian symbolism and the Christian involvement with the attack. It called it out and said, this is not okay. It asserted the importance of the safety of people of color in our community. It was, and it wasn't compromising. It was, it's, it's actually not that hard to do a straightforward message of care, concern, and forceful rebuke. And also he's on the board, so he has access to this letter. So he writes this letter that is, it's very, I mean, it is, I don't, I think I've shared it with you, but it's, it's one of these, they're good people on both sides. Everybody is trying to find Jesus in their own way. through this. And so we have to, you know, a whole bunch of words too. It was just like three times as long as it needed to be. Just talking around the basic issue, qualifying everything. We, you know, we had some people who had been at the rally. There's nobody at our church who had been at the Capitol, but there are these Facebook pictures of people with their gear on, smiling at the rally. And I sensed that he was just terrified of offending them. He was so scared of them getting mad at him if he came with a straightforward. Honest rebuke. And so I spent, I put aside all my grading, lesson planning, and just spent that afternoon giving him feedback. And I even said, just use the statement from our school. That one's fine. Just say, hey, our school came up with this great statement. Here it is. We feel the same way. Well, he ignores it all. Um, he puts it forward to the elder board and I say, I will not have my name on this. So do not sign it by the elder board. And so finally only he and the white supremacist elder, elder chair. put their name on it. And it goes up to the congregation. And we were connected to a bunch of the congregants of color at the church. And so immediately heard back, what is this? This is awful. What is going on? And, and we were also, I mean, we're like, I can't believe I'm at a church that is saying this. And, you know, my children are not safe in this environment. This is not a safe place for them. And so I went to a cafe that Saturday or Sunday and wrote a four page letter to the elders. And I gave Pastor Jay warning that I was going to send it, and he's like, good, we want dialogue. And I sent it to the elders, and it was a forceful letter. It was, I did not hold any punches. I said, we should, this is utterly unacceptable. What are we doing? We are abandoning the gospel in our basic lack of courage. to stand for Jesus in this moment and for our congregants. This unleashed a firestorm of responses. So two months of just so much back and forth, so many strong feelings. We only had a handful of elders of color and they, they expressed this excitement about finally having this on the table and then being able to talk about their experiences at the church and how unsafe they felt and how important it was to consider these things. We had three times that number of Assertive voices on the elder board responding back, like dismissing them and, and, well, no, sorry, I won't say it three times. We had plenty of active voices pushing back against them. We had other voices saying like, Oh, thank you. Like these sort of vanilla voices in the middle saying, Oh, I'm sorry you feel this pain. Thank you. Gosh, I hope we can do something about this. But it got so contentious that finally this is right in the middle of COVID too. That this other elder who eventually became. The elder chair, Elder S, said, commissioned a meeting for all the elders in his backyard. So this is like in February. So it was a cold backyard meeting where we could all be outside in person together. And, and so the way our church was structured at the time, we had a, an inner circle of eight elders called the oversight team. That did all the decision making. So that was and I was part of that as was this guy elder s and we had like an outer circle of maybe 30 elders who are considered like shepherding elders and they would be responsible for like caring for members and this kind of thing. But they wouldn't be actually at the decision making meetings. Everybody was called in here. And, in the meantime, so, and this was commissioned like in mid January, so I was like, okay, in order to help inform us, I'm going to go and find every congregant of color I can find and ask them to just offer their insights for the elder board about what it's like to be at our church. And so I got over 20 responses, and they were, they were awesome. They were so helpful. There were these long, thoughtful responses about what the experience was like, and they were, they could be so useful if we had just used them right. And so I compiled them. I did them anonymously. I had an anonymous version where I could share with everybody. I did an executive summary as well. So if you didn't want to read the 25 pages, you can read the two pages. And sent that out beforehand for people to consider. I'm pretty sure me calling out our response to January 6th was the beginning of the end for me. After that. After that, I don't, I can't recall a warm, meaningful, substantial, substantive conversation between me and Pastor Jay. You became red in the goggles. Yep, that was Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. Flagged. Yeah, that's exactly what happened. Well, and also, even worse, my wife, she sent him directly an email expressing her dismay. And it was not a, it wasn't the kind of email that complementarian pastors require of their congregant women. It wasn't fawning. It didn't tell them how great he was. It cut right to the chase and said, this is terrible. I'm so sad that this is happening in our church and I'm angry. And so, if there was a red on there, I mean, I'm not sure what more vibrant color there is than red, but it was like a deep purple, like super danger, like a woman is speaking out forcefully against the church leadership. And that began this parallel process with her that, you know, she would be fun to talk to as well, because her perspective is just as extraordinary. But that double, that was a double whammy against the, against our family. I think it's really fascinating, and just like a side note for all of us, so all of us on this call are parents of transracial adoption, like we've all become parents through that, and I think that really, it's not right, but it's a reality that us having children of color It completely gave us a new perspective on situations like this with our churches, or at least I'll speak for myself, with our, with my church, with my state, with my government, all of a sudden, all of that privilege that I carried, the more you learn, the more you realize how much that does not translate To your children. So it really opens your eyes to danger and it, it takes for some of us, it takes that realizing like, Oh wait, my personal family can be touched by this. And it's not like this, like, I didn't go through the world. I don't know if, if this resonates with you guys, but like, I didn't go through the world thinking like, Oh, I have all this privilege and I don't care that that's happening over there. I just didn't straight up even look for it. happening over there. I just, I lived my own life in my own bubble. And the more you learn, if you love your kids, you learn about your kids. And the more you learn about what it's like to be a person of color in America, the more your eyes are open to this stuff. And the more you want to advocate and the more you want to see our churches in America reflect Jesus in the way that we interact with image bearers, all image bearers. It's like frustrating in a sense, right? But you, like you have two white people. So you have all these congregants of color that are willing to speak out. Then you have a white male executive level elder, right? Like you're on the inner circle elder and you're speaking out. And like the reason that you had. Something invested in this is largely because your family has that makeup. That's right. And so I guess I want to just challenge us all like people listening right now. You might be uncomfortable with this conversation whenever race comes up. That might make you uncomfortable because you might be in your bubble right now where your family isn't paying the cost of this. Your family doesn't pay the cost of having someone that incites white supremacists in public office. But the reality is, is like this is an opportunity for you to now See what it looks like to love image bearers that do not look white, middle class American. And it looks like having to sit down and have the conversations and pay the cost. We need to start paying the cost. And that's what Walker you got confronted with. And I, I think it's shocking to us as people that do enter these spaces with privilege to all of the sudden realize wait a second, you, you thought I was like, you, you don't even have a chance to reckon with your privilege until you realize how much you do not matter once you become a threat to these systems and the reality is, is people of color in these spaces are viewed as threats if they will not become assimilated Into the culture, right? Then they are a threat. And that will happen to you as a white person if you refuse to force assimilation onto people of color in these spaces. So, that's a little side note, but I think it's important for us to say that, like, all of us lived our life with blinders to a certain point and with all our privilege. And we thought we had that privilege when we spoke up. And the reality is, is You're going to learn real quickly what the values are in these spaces. And you often don't learn until you're required to, you know, if you have somebody you care for so deeply in your life. I mean, this is one of the great tragedies of this last season with our church is that a lot of people had a chance to have their eyes opened to some realities that they weren't familiar with, and they had the luxury to, to turn away from it. And that's just a bummer, right? That's. So unfortunate. And this is so, you know, like I brought, I had sent out this collection of experiences of people of color in our church, and The elders of color were like, this changes everything. This is so amazing. This is the most valuable document that we've seen here. This is so important. If people see this, it's just gonna change the whole way our church operates. Get to the meeting. Pastor Jay has never said anything about it to me. He never said, thank you. He never said, well, I recognize the hours and hours you put in collating this and soliciting this and never said this is valuable. He just, he just said nothing. The only thing he said was at the very end of the meeting after The elders of color had a chance to talk. They were given the floor. Uh, and then there's pretty much crickets afterwards, to which one elder of color said, guys, the silence is deafening. And then Pastor Jay gets up and says, well, there's some really good stuff happening in our church too. That was his only response. My wife sent him that letter, and then another common tactic I'm sure you guys would know from all your stories, hearing all your stories, is that when people in power don't want to engage something, they just delay. And so, it took five months for them to get a meeting on the books where she wrote her full articulation of her concerns with the church, especially regarding race. and sat down with Pastor S and Pastor J and Elder S and read the letter to him, thinking that once he hears this, this is really going to be a golden opportunity for him to finally, fully have his eyes open to making some real changes. What she didn't know is that she was finalizing her identity as a major threat to the church. And he was at that point, he then, uh, the following fall, uh, used, well, he, she, Came to a meeting to ask about the upcoming assessment with grace. We had and he used that as a way to, uh, condemn me and her. The fact that she asked that question use that to condemn her and dismiss her and then say a bunch of actual direct falsehoods about her. So the, the point is, is that. During the course of this, a great opportunity was at hand to have a transformative moment in the church with regards to racial relations, a rare, beautiful moment. And it was instead interpreted as a threat and a danger. Why do you think that would be a threat? Because the goal was never racial unity or reconciliation or justice or harmony. The goal was the appearance of those things so that more power could be consolidated and maintained. So the people in power, Pastor Jay, I think his main goal in life is to have 30 hours a week to prepare sermons and to get up on stage and to be celebrated for his impressive sermons and not have to deal with shepherding Or pastoring, or the primary dangers to the gospel in the community. And this was a major threat to that. Because this required, this may require you setting aside some of your priorities. And even some of your monies. Some of the things you want for the church and instead engaging what the church really needs. And also just like the dynamic of somebody else being able to call the shots and being able to direct the church it's a total threat because the whole system is built on the confidence and authority of the senior pastors of the people in charge. Okay So basically you put all this work in all these people of color in your church like graciously offered up their perspective And it's just a dud Right, because it was, yeah, and something else was happening at the same time that contributed to it going nowhere, besides the fact that the powers that be desperately did not want it to go anywhere, was that another crisis was brewing at the same time. Actually two crises, only one of which we became aware of. And then the other one involving Chrissy was actually, was, was in process, but we didn't know it. But that late February, Pastor E, the executive pastor. Enough complaint had come up from the congregation about his behaviors to various people. His supervisory team, and we have a three person elder team, or we had a three person elder team that was in charge of supervising the lead pastor and the executive pastor. They said, there's too much stuff, too many complaints here for us to handle. We have to Do something else. And so we want to start an independent investigation. And so that happened almost at the exact same time. It was crazy how much is happening at once. And so that took all the energy out of the racial conversation and directed it towards dealing with what the actually, and there are, there are a couple of other crises happening at the exact same time, but I'm not going to bring up. But so there was this like whirlwind of. Of discord and controversy that eventually took the energy out of the race conversation and it's never really returned. I mean, there've been a number of promises made we're like this earnest sounding. We will pick back up the race conversation as soon as we can and we promise it. It's been made two or three times and it's well documented that has never happened. So once that went away, it was done. So what was, what was uncovered about Pastor E specifically, you know, during that investigation and what was the result of it? So we had an, an independent investigator come and he was, he's not qualified to be an independent investigator. I've since learned that you have, there are qualifications that one should have, there's training that one should have. Um, I've learned so much in the last three years, but we, the executive pastor supervisory team found a local Lawyer who's was also an elder at a PCA church to come in and he conducted interviews of Everybody on staff as well as anybody else who wanted to comment on Pastor E's Performance, so he conducted like 40 some interviews So he was actually very thorough. We think in the end of the day, as far as an amateur investigator goes in this kind of stuff, he did a pretty good job. He compiled it over the course of February and March and presented his findings in April. And he gave the report to the Executive Pastors Supervisory Team, the EPST. And they came to the smaller oversight team and said, Guys. This report is so bad. We need to take him off the job right now and he had actually stayed on the job in February and March while this investigation was processing, which in hindsight, I'm like, so I had stirred the pot so big with the race stuff that I was like, I, I knew that this is not if he's being investigated for his conduct, he should not be. He should be suspended for a month and a half. Let's resolve this before he's and in the process of him staying on the job He actually ended the preschool we have that we had been part of the Bible of the Bible Church for years and years So he made a major decision and pushed it through while he should have been suspended and so it had real consequences But none of us had the courage to say hey this guy should really be off duty for the next month and a half So April comes the the report is so So terrible that the EPST says he has to be off the job right now and Before and this is actually also after in February when it was announced that there was going to be this investigation Pastor J had said and he was recorded saying this at a meeting because people were starting to record things at that point Pastor J Said to the staff at a staff meeting. Hey, there's this investigation we have to do. Pastor E has my full support. He has not done anything to disqualify himself. We have to do this because people are complaining. So just go through the motions. Essentially, he was saying, just don't say anything bad about him because there's nothing wrong with him and you better not. But he said it in polite and indirect ways, but he was trying to tilt the scales before and even this, despite that the report came out, it was so extreme that Pastor E was taken off the job right away. He was, he was then, so, and another series of things I'm ashamed of. He was then. Asked to resign instead of being fired because we realized that there was going to need to be an 80 percent Elder vote of all the elders So the larger body of elders in order to successfully do that and we didn't think we'd have 80 percent and so we're like do we push through and go for the 80 percent in the midst of already a bunch of turmoil in the church with COVID and these other people being fired or do we just just leverage his resignation and so We finally decided to just ask him to resign. He didn't wanna resign. He said, I didn't do anything wrong. Uh, I wanna pull Matthew 18 on you guys to say that I'd like to confront my accusers and if they won't confront me, then I shouldn't be removed from office. And I strongly protest this from front to back. He, he was, was finally brought to a point of resignation later that week, and so he of officially resigned and. Shame on us. We paid him for the rest of the year. It was April. And so his reward for abusing people terribly for years was, you know, 70 some, 80 some thousand dollars. And I am glad to say that I went through my notes to check to confirm, but I did protest that. I didn't protest it nearly enough. I should have put my foot down and said, this is appalling, but I was still new in the church abuse business at that point. No excuse though. I mean, I should have, it was, it was just unbelievable that we paid this guy. To not work not only was he was he paid for his abuse because it paid for not working He got the rest of the year off and got full. Yeah, what was found out about him? You know, was he abusing employees? Like what what were the what were the charges against him? I guess well pastor Jay almost submarine the entire report because he said that the people who brought the complaints were Women and congregants and so should not be and they probably had access to grind and they shouldn't really be Considered but so the the EPST said okay Look, even if we take out all the women and all the non staff people and just look at the responses to the interviews given by staff people and pastors Everyone except for one, so it's like 18 or 19 or something, was, identified him as being harmful, emotionally manipulative, emotionally just mean, underhanded, the word abuse was, I think, carefully avoided because of the connotations that go with that, but he was just a harsh, just oftentimes cruel, domineering, demeaning boss and leader, and, and he made the atmosphere toxic, I think. Unpleasant and unworkable and this is all that this is just the male staff who said this to a person except for except for the the elder chair at the time who was a huge Pastor E fan. He's also the guy who was so adamant that the race stuff was baloney. There's two things going on at the same time or close connection with one the Leighton Ford non investigation but assessment and then the grace assessment. So this church so you have Pastor E gets terminated, you have an independent investigator, then there's two additional assessments that are launched on the health of the church. Just gonna say this, that's not the best sign. So one of them is the Leighton Ford assessment. What were they brought in to do and then when did grace get involved as well? The same night that pastor E was fired or forced to resign we had an executive session So one of the elders on the oversight team said guys, I want to have an executive session Can you please dismiss pastor J and let's talk Pastor J goes to his office, and within five to ten minutes, we all agreed that the problems of the church were not limited to Pastor E. Pastor J was, was talking up big, like, whoo, thank goodness we found this terrible guy. He was, of course, the one who brought him, but I had no idea he was, he was behaving so terribly. Thank goodness we found him. Let's get rid of this. Cut him out of here, and then we're good to go. We all agreed that actually, that Pastor Jay had neither the capacity nor the interest to do the job of lead pastor. What he wanted to do was to be given 30 hours a week to prepare a sermon and deliver the sermon and then meet with people who wanted to be expository preachers as well, young men, and have them tell him how amazing he was and go to conferences and preach on. How to be an expository preacher. He did not want a pastor or a shepherd or lead a team. He didn't want to facilitate a church. We all agreed on that immediately. And we were, I remember the, I still remember the feeling of our faces. They were like, our eyes were all wide. Like what, what do we do? We, we can't get rid of another pastor right now. Like, that would be, and, and he hadn't been on the hot seat either, really. And so it would be a rather, rather sudden act. And we, but we all agree we're all in complete unity. He was utterly unfit for the job. So we launched a month of super intense meetings where we, Processed and figured out that we wanted to put a chart and also the elder term. A lot of us were on was ending that may so that the six year term was done and there are these new elders coming in and Pastor Jay had explicitly said in his review that he was excited about getting some new elders in that were more sympathetic with him. So we knew that his solution to this was just to get rid of the contentious elders and bring in yes men. So we were like, we have to act now. And so we created this charge to the next elder board saying this is the, this needs to be the church's number one priority is to hold Pastor Jay accountable for changing in these particular ways. And we had that documented and passed on. It was put in charge of the new elder chair, Elder S. To deliver to the new elder board and have them carried out. And so elder S also said, he was also recognizing just the fragile place that this church was in. And so we have to show the congregation that we're serious about fixing things. And so he, and again, he was putting like 30 hours a weekend as a volunteer, he goes and finds these two organizations. Someone suggested the grace one to him. I'm not sure how he found Leighton Ford, but I know I'm confident he really regrets the grace one. Leighton Ford is primarily an organizational assessment group. Like they'll kind of say, what is your leadership structure look like? And how can you be more efficient? They're very uncontroversial. They came and did their work in a few months and presented. their findings and were gone. Within a month of acquiring Grace's services, now I was on sabbatical at this point, so I was finally off the board, but I was hearing rumblings that the remaining people, especially Elder S. and Pastor J., were like getting very alarmed at the nature of Grace's emphases. You know, they were looking on abuse and Relational harm, and I don't think Elder S or Pastor J were remotely interested in uncovering those kind of things. And so they immediately gave pushback to Grace, and it took six months to even finalize the contract and get the investigation of the assessment going. And at every turn, there would be roadblocks put up. I remember at one point, they were going to launch this question set for anybody who wanted to answer it, and it was in late November. Pastor R said, Oh, we're going to delay this until January because we want to be focusing during Advent on Jesus. And so we don't want to have these unpleasant things to consider in December. So every, every roadblock in the world you can think of was put up to delay the implementation, hoping, I'm guessing that like the sort of fervor would go away and people would just kind of forget about it. But people were so fired up. They had, I think it was like 250 responses to. Their inquiries. And so that launched and then they finally released their report in November of 2022. And there's no way we're going to get to that because that was a whole big thing as well. But that took a whole nother year. So yeah, it's June and I'm finally off the board for like a year. You get a year off potentially. And then maybe you roll back on to some like the oversight team or whatever, or maybe you become part of the shepherding group. And this is common, right? Right, right. This is standard. And actually I was, I was the first. A class of folks to serve six full years. So that was, that was unusually long. So there's like built in breaks for people that are serving on the elder board in your bylaws. Yep. And so, so I go on vacation, June, July, I'm a teacher, so I'd. Check out, I actually went to California, it was awesome, for a few weeks, and come back into town. A little bit of time passes. There have been big promises made to present that charge about Pastor Jay to the next Elder Board. I hadn't heard, we were supposed to be invited to those meetings, and I never heard a thing, so I. Even though I was on sabbatical, I was like, hey guys, just check it in. Did that ever happen? In a very ominous moment, Elder S says, who's now the chair, What is it that we said we were gonna do? What? And I was like, what do you mean? What is it you said you were gonna do? The very first thing you were gonna do with this new Elderboard is to present this charge and get Pastor J on an accountability track. I can't remember exactly what we said. And I was like, oh boy. But I was on sabbatical, so I really didn't want to engage, but that was an early warning sign. Then, you know, I'm just checking messages, and I see on August 4th, a message comes through that Chrissy, one of our longtime admins, who I didn't know well at all at that point, she had been there for 16 years, I'd only heard good things about her, had been fired for multiple well documented breaches of integrity. And so I didn't know anything about this, and I was just, oh boy, that's, uh, that's bad. I may have heard something in May, sort of rumblings about this, that she was being looked at or something, but there's so much going on, I had ignored it. And so I saw that, but again, I was committed to doing nothing. I think, really quickly, it's helpful for people to understand, you guys were, Functioned in such a like large capacity as an organization that for like so many listeners are coming out of smaller churches where like elders are on staff or like you're constantly working with each other in this setting. You did not really interact with staff very often unless it was like for a very specific reason. So you're not, you don't have like this like deep relationship with the staff side of things, correct? Right. Yeah, I'm exact. Well, yeah. And also I'm just like, okay, after all that turmoil of the first half of 2021, I cannot emotionally afford any more of this. So August, August 26th. So she was fired August 4th. So I didn't know this at the time, but she had been given three weeks to consider signing an NDA and getting a large severance package to go with that. And so she thought about it for three weeks, and when the deadline came, she decided to not sign it. So the next day, or that day, she contacted my life group. And the way our life group worked was that women would meet one week and men would meet the other week. And the women were meeting on the 26th. And she said, I'd like to come to your life group and tell my story. And so I remember this. I was up in my bedroom. My wife comes in and says, so Chrissy wants to come and tell her story to the life group. I think you should come. And I remember going, no, no, no. Oh boy. I, and I asked her, I was like, can you just, cause I knew, I knew at that point, if she's, if she's there to tell her story, it's an awful story. So I asked my wife, would you, how about, can I not go? Would you just tell me what she says? And my wife said, no, no, I think you should go. Dang it. She was right. I knew it. And so I stuffed my cowardice down and agreed to go. And we sat on our back seats. So they came over to our house and we sat on our back porch. The most of the life group came, guys and women. And she told her story. It took about three hours and, you know, jaws were dropping, heads were shaking. You just couldn't believe what she was saying about how she'd been treated. And it became obvious right away. Like, if I have one drop of integrity, I have to, I got to do something about this. I'm on sabbatical. It's not going to be welcome, but there's, this is just the most. Ridiculous, preposterous treatment, imaginable. So I, it was like August 27th, new school year, supposed to be on sabbatical. I start that week going around meeting with everybody I can sort of like in stealth mode, cause I don't want people to get the sense that I'm trying to unearth stuff. And so I just kind of, I talked to the pastors, the elder chair, had breakfast with the elder chair, every elder I could get ahold of, other staff, the business manager. Trying to figure out if I could, if I could discover information that would discredit her story, that would prove it to be false without actually saying that I'm trying to do that. So I'd be like, Hey, Pastor R, just calling, you know, I'd I've heard I have some congregants who are really troubled by Chrissy getting fired. Can you just kind of help me figure out what's going on here? And, you know, I, I. I investigated this well documented breaches of integrity and mysteriously nobody would name or could name the well documented breaches of integrity. And there was like all these sort of pseudo phrases, important sounding phrases like employee confidentiality, liability, blah, blah, blah, like sort of fancy sounding terms that they said were why they couldn't talk about this. And I was like, I'm an official of the church. You can, you can tell me. Whatever these are, there's, there's no violation here. No, no, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then, and then there's, there's a little two step made, too. Nobody would tell me what the breaches of integrity were, even though Chrissy had, so I knew what was the accusation, or at least the speculation, because Chrissy actually has never been told what those were specifically, but I, I knew what the speculation was, but then a couple of the pastors Or sorry, the elder chair and one of the pastors did this move where they said, well, yes, we have well documented multiple breaches of integrity, but also, you know, she was actually known on, it's best that she's gone because she was known as being kind of a gossip and very negative. And now that she's gone, like, I hate to say it, but the staff is a lot happier. So that's not why she was fired. But I mean, it's probably best and so that was it was interesting overlapping strategy there So don't tell you what the what the violations were or and therefore you don't have to provide any evidence for it But then also even if we don't have any evidence for it, or I'm not going to show you those things It's probably best she's gone. Anyway, I asked okay if she was having these If she was gossipy and having these problems at work that apparently had been evident for years, she's never had a negative job performance review. They've all been 100 percent positive, glowing reviews. 16 years. The reviews have been wonderful anecdotally. She's been, everything I've ever heard about her was that she does awesome work. She's cheerful. She's, she's an excellent worker. Why wasn't she told about these things? So that she can correct them and the pastors had the gall to say, well, you know, she's a single mom and We we didn't want to jeopardize her Position I was like wait, but she's fired now had you told her about this these problems that by the way You say aren't what caused her to be fired. Then she could have made a plan It could have been a documented plan that she could have worked on to improve her performance so that she wouldn't have to be fired. Even though you say that's not really the reason that she was fired, but maybe it kind of was. So don't you see how that's how you, you seem to be putting on this appearance of caring about her, but you're doing the exact opposite? Well, it wasn't really about the, about the gossip and the negativity. It was, it was actually the well documented breaches of integrity. And so I had, I would go back to Chrissy and say, okay, Chrissy, here's what I've heard. Walk me through these documents they're talking about. And the documents were not breaches of integrity, not even close to breaches of integrity. I'll let her tell that story. But after three weeks and change, I talked to everybody I could. And I was like, there is there's absolutely no reason to believe that any of this is true. And so I went to the vice elder chair and we had a long conversation. Our walk, and I laid this stuff out to him. I was like, what are we supposed to do about this? Can you, this is so dreadful. And this guy, Elder B, is just the nicest fella in the world. Just the gentlest guy you could ever meet. And I remember at the very end of this long walk, where all the evidence had been laid out, he kind of looks at me, and he, and he's, all he says basically is that, You know, office manager G, he's a really solid guy. I did this mentoring thing with him. Oh gosh, that was it. So he's a solid guy. So none of that's going to happen. And so I, at that point, I said, I have to write here. This is 2021 is the year of the letter. So, so I got to write a letter. So I wrote another five page letter and just, I mean, I was, I was like an amateur lawyer for this one because I knew I had to get the language right. And I also knew I couldn't warn anybody because they would suppress it if I told anybody I was delivering the letter. So in mid September, I said, brothers, I'm coming off sabbatical for just a second to give you this important letter. And I. Attach the letter to our messaging system and Elder S, who's running the church still, Elder S says, Brothers, do not look at this letter. This is a violation of all sorts of employee confidentiality. We could be in serious legal trouble if you do so. Just came strong, came hard about that. And it had an effect. It has this chilling effect when you, when you see that stern of a message. And of course, it's completely false. We're all officers. Of the organization, we are completely within our rights. And also I hadn't shared any confidential information. The information I shared was from Chrissy with her permission. And so, but that strategically creates an atmosphere of peril and personal danger to the institution that takes the edge off of anybody who might. want to agree with the concern I'm sharing, that sparked yet another meeting. 2021 was not a good year for harmony in our church because it sparked yet another all elder meeting where the purpose of it was to come together and talk about these concerns that I brought before the elders. And this is all 38 of us. And it was, it was a circus. Uh, what I was hoping for was that this would spark, uh, a few courageous elders to stand up and say, what are the answers to these questions that this letter poses? This letter seems to indicate that there was no good reason, no justification for her firing and that we need evidence to, to, to justify it. And that needs to be produced now. They should have stood up and demanded that, but it was a zoom meeting. I remember seeing all the little squares, all the silent squares as the elder S ran the show. He came forward and the, the meeting structure was that Elder S gravely convened it and said, I want to just turn it over to a few of the staff who can comment on Chrissy's firing. A few of the staff did comment. None of them addressed any of the specific concerns that I had laid out in my letter. All of them. Also, how is that not, that seems much more risky. Legally, to bring in staff members to comment on, right? Yeah, well they, none of them, all of them hid behind employee confidentiality and liability by saying we can't say anything, but just you need to trust us. We've, we've, we've worked with Chrissy and we, we think this firing needed to happen. Now, of course, that didn't address the question at all. It wasn't that they didn't think the staff members had nothing really to do with the well documented breaches of integrity that were supposedly the source. They were actually commenting on Chrissy's supposed negativity and gossipiness. But of course, that was the reason why she was fired. But they were commenting only on that. And any elder there should have said, wait a minute. You. We want to know about his concerns with the well documented breaches of integrity. None of them addressed that. In hindsight, I should have spoken up, but I figured that I'd already said my piece, so I just kept my screen off and just stomped around the room. Yeah, because that sounds more like gossip than, uh. Right. Yeah, it has nothing to do with the actual cause for firing. And they were so silent, it was so painful to watch their silence. And eventually Pastor Jay came on and he painted this picture, this grave picture of him realizing back in January, he said it was January, which is also the same month of the racial discord and all of this stuff. And also the same month that the concerns about Pastor E came forward. He said it was that month that business manager came to me and said, I have to let you know about these breaches of integrity. And, and he had this spectacularly sober, serious face on, just the gravest concerns. And he said that when I heard this, I knew that it was going to be, I was going to get a ton of blowback about this, but I just, we were going to have to let her go. I had to. Just honor the integrity of the moment and pursue this. Of course, this is in January. She wasn't fired till August. Later on I pointed out to to Elder S. I said, okay Chrissy was escorted out of the building on August 4th without even being allowed to go by her desk Because you were apparently so scared of her the threat she posed to the church. Yet Pastor J And business manager, and a few others, knew about her breaches of integrity in January and allowed her access to all the church's most vital information, most sensitive information for seven months. You were so gravely concerned that you let her continue to have access to these things? That just completely refutes your position there. And yet nobody else said a peep. Everybody else bought it and just sat there and all voted in favor of confirming this decision. There's just complete embarrassing silence. So finally, like I was, I was utterly destroyed by this. And two days later, I woke up like at four in the morning, tossing and turning. I was like, wait, okay, okay. We can do, we can at least do this one thing. I'd heard a couple of elders speak up in the meeting. They said, you know, the manner she was fired kind of makes, makes me feel funny. Like she was 16 years. He's a sister in Christ. She never had another bad performance review ever. And we just. Practically put her in handcuffs, you know, let her out by, by the shoulder without even letting her turn and go to her to say goodbye to anybody. That wasn't so great. And so I said, brothers, I was so encouraged by our shared understanding of the poor manner in which we shepherded our dear sister in Christ. Even though we can't agree on her firing, we can at least begin to do our job as shepherds by writing her a letter of apology that owns the cold manner in which we fired her and apologizes for that and says that we shouldn't have done it that way. And so I wrote the apology letter. I said, how about this one? Would this work for you? I wrote the apology letter and I presented it over our messaging system. And a couple of elders, this is again, part of the pattern. There was a joyous response at first. Oh, this is how this feels so great. I'm just, I think we should do this. Wow, this, this makes me feel so much better about this towards her because a lot of people cared about her. She was known in the community. Elder S steps in and says, guys, I, it's wonderful how deeply heartfelt you feel towards her plight. But, you know, actually, we'd be throwing our other Employees under the bus, if we apologize for this. And so why don't we have a meeting where we bring our lawyers and we orchestrate a more appropriate, personal, private, individual apology, nothing in writing, that would be safer and not hurt our other employees. And so I was like, you, you have got to be freaking kidding me. And sure, so sure enough, after being pressed further, Elder S. admitted that he actually didn't think we had Treated her inappropriately. He was only putting on the appearance of saying that in the in the beginning So as to try to put off the pressure to do something about it And so he finally admitted that and I said this is good to know that you actually didn't mind that way that we fired Her it's very unfortunate, but I'm glad to actually have your opinion And then at that point pastor J who had been silent Pastor J is one of his methods is to let other people do his dirty work for him. He had been Silent the whole time and he had one line where he said, actually, yes, because of the grave threat she posed to the church, it necessitated the most extreme version of our firing policy. That was it. So, two days later, another elder on sabbatical said, brothers, I'm confused as to what our role should be as elders on sabbatical. And Elder S said, thank you so much for bringing this up, Elder D. We need to look at a policy that actually allows our Sabbatical Elders to be more thoroughly on rest. And then a couple months later, they put into practice or put it, made a policy that Elders like me on Sabbatical completely off of the Base Camp messaging system. And, and they said, we, we, we want to bless you with rest and I and some other elders said, that's okay. We're good. We still want to stay on, you know, we're not. And then the, of course, the next level was, but the bylaws say that we need to do so. Well, no, the bylaws don't. Well, actually, no, you're, you're off. We're just going to do this. You're off. I was officially silenced. At that point, the writing was on the wall. I had done everything I possibly could to advocate for anything that was healthy and good at the church. And that was in December. And then three other elders and I, who, And it's interesting, back to your point earlier, Janna, about those who have some kind of contact with other, who are people of color or have loved ones or connections to communities or people of color, the four elders who resigned together jointly were all either elders of color or two white elders who had transracially adopted. So there, you know, an outsider observer has got to look at that and go, huh, there's something, there's something up there. So we resigned in February of 2022 and urged, in our resignation, our joint resignation letter, urged the congregation and the leaders to publish the grace report in its full, in its entirety, and when it, when it came out, which ultimately did not happen. Which we'll get to the grace report more in a joint conversation with Chrissy and Walker and I'm excited for our listeners to also hear Chrissy's experience because I think once you hear that and start grappling with like who is Chrissy, something that struck me about her as a person was like she was very dedicated to staying in her lane it felt. So I was like wait you were the threat because when you're talking to her she seems like she's like the like dutiful soldier a little bit. As far as a staff member. So I think that will be really interesting for people to hear. Usually when we have these stories come to bodies behind the bus, it's the person who like asked too many questions. She was like too good of a student. It felt like almost like that's what ended up getting her in trouble in the end. It's a little like, like we've said, there have been articles surrounding this. There has been a little bit of heat surrounding this. Chrissy initially reached out and then we got in contact with you. What would be your why for wanting to share now? Like, what, what's the why behind this for you guys? For you. I'll have you in particular share for that. Yeah, yeah. And I'll try to keep it brief. There's a lot of whys, so let's just reduce it as best as we can. I mean, for one, it's for, as I think about my participation and the harm done to people like Chrissy, and the protection to an institution that conducted those things. As a person who realizes that harm, I feel, I, I want to do something to help to fix that. I want to help in the healing. And I think exposing these stories And honoring the Chrissy's and there are many others besides Chrissy who were courageous and victimized and who stood up to all the wrongdoing and were thrown under the bus. I want to, I want to honor them by coming alongside and sharing the truth from the inside that. Can confirm their experience, can solidify it, and can shed further light on it. I'm also, as I said earlier, I'm really interested in the patterns of the whole thing. I think that whatever strand of evangelicalism the CHBC is part of, it's really sick right now. It's diseased. And there's some famous quote about sunlight being the best disinfectant. I think all this has got, I think the more we shed light on the inner workings of this evil, and this wrongdoing, and this disease. This sickness, it's gonna offer a chance for things to get healthy again, and I'm, I really want that. I love this church. I was, it was such an integral part of my life for almost 30 years, 29 years. My whole adult life, I've been deeply committed and connected to part of this church family, and so it's just such a grief to have the church fall so far. I want this church to get healthy. And I don't know if telling the story helps it get healthy, but it can't hurt. I mean, I've been motivated by 1 John 1 so much where he talks about how if we confess, if we admit that we're sinners, then God will forgive us and the healing will begin. If we deny it, then we live in a world of illusion and the truth is a stranger to us. And I think that the Bible church is, is living in a world of illusion. that just perpetuates itself. And so if there's some way for different elements to break out, to break it out of that pattern, I would, I would rejoice. And I want to see that place get healthy again. Let's see, Zuni, there's, there's a third reason. I've said everything I need to say to Pastor Jay and Elder S and others publicly and privately. I, I would love for them So, to have some opportunities to encounter the truth themselves and to come to terms with what they've been a part of or what they've perpetuated, uh, it has been so good for me, my spiritual life, my walk with Jesus, to have to come to terms with this myself and to come clean and to see what's really going on. It's, it has opened up new avenues of closeness. to God that I never, I don't think would have encountered if I didn't experience this. And I've experienced grace with people forgiving me that has been profound in my life. And like no other grace I've experienced, like I have felt so awful about my participation and people have been so kind and so gracious. And I want that for the folks that, they're all my friends. I mean, I, as I said, I spent a lot of time with these people and I care about them and I don't know if they'd ever listened to something like this, but I pray for them to have some opportunity to face reality and then give, hand it over to God to have him use it to help them heal. So well said. I think, yeah, this is, I could, we could talk for a long time, Walker. There's so many things that are going on in this church that I think are worthy of discussion and the inner workings of how the church operated and how people like yourself and others tried to approach to make change and how those were stifled at each pass is, is. It's something that I think is worthy of conversation, a longer form of conversation. Uh, I know we are going to have you back because we do need to talk about the grace assessment and, and the lack of transparency with that, the, uh, the assessment results, which I think are telling, but thank you so much for being here. It was, it was just such an honor to hear your story. Thank you for your courage and bravery. We really appreciate it. You bet. It's been an honor as well. Thank you guys for all you do. This has been part two of a three part series with Chrissy and Walker. Be sure to tune in next week for our final episode of the series where we'll bring them both together to talk about their experience. For J. Coyle, I'm Jonna Harris, and this has been the Bodies Behind the Bus podcast. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed here are the speaker's own and not those of this podcast. This content is presented for informational and educational purposes that constitute fair use, commentary, or criticism. While we make every effort to ensure that the information shared is accurate, we welcome any comment, suggestion, or correction of errors.