Season 7: Episode 4 - Story "Helen"

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Transcript

Dorothy Greco's For the Love of Women

Katherine Spearing's A Thousand Tiny Paper Cuts: 

Kate Boyd's article about older women:

The Gospel Coalition article about pornography

Bobby Gilles article about complementarianism and abuse 

Ann Maree: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Safe to Hope podcast. Safe to Hope. Hope Renewed in light of eternity exists to offer women space to tell their stories of suffering and loss with care, dignity and honesty. Though all suffering is loss, we ground that belief in a God who cares and remains present. This is our hope.

My name is Annmarie and I am the Executive Director of Helper. This podcast is made possible by donors who believe faithfulness means protecting the dignity of women's stories and creating a space for truth telling without pressure or performance. Together we listen for God's redemptive thread and look for ways to join him in his transforming work.[00:01:00] 

Before we begin, we want to take a moment and care for our listeners. The Safe To Hope Podcast typically includes discussions of abuse and this season will as well. In particular, we'll be talking about spiritual abuse. However, our conversations may include other abuses. Please listen at your own pace and take breaks as needed.

If at any point you need to pause or step away, that's okay. Your wellbeing matters.

In this conversation, our guest is sharing her story and her own words at her own pace. Nothing in this episode is intended to pressure, forgiveness, reconciliation, or closure. Our aim is to listen with care and honor the dignity of her experience.[00:02:00] 

My name is Lyna Sutherland. I'm the Executive director of Advocacy from the Presbyterian Pew, and I'll be hosting The Safe to Hope podcast today. Helen, thank you so much for being willing to join us today and share your story. And I know you said that you had something particular you wanted to say before we got started, so why don't you go ahead and share that with us.

Helen: Yeah. As you know that a lot of what we're gonna talk about today is my journey from holding a complementarian view of the role of women to a more egalitarian view within the church and society at large. And first off, I just wanted to say that that was something that happened bit by bit for me. I didn't endure.

A lot of technicolor abuse, the way I know a lot of women have, it was more experience by experience and those [00:03:00] experiences opening my eyes to the treatment of women within the church. I didn't do a deep theological study. It was just more painful experiences and alarming things that I saw along the way that really brought me to where I am today.

And also, I wanna say from the get go that it is not my intention to throw any of these churches under the bus. That's not the point. Yes, I went through some hard things with some of these churches, but the point of this is really to really more chronicle my, my journey and what transformed my understanding of the role of women within church systems and the Christian community.

And to add to that, really to let other women know that they are not alone. I think I, I can't possibly be the only woman that has encountered some of these things. In fact, I know I'm not. [00:04:00] And I think we need to be able to speak out and articulate these things and give them words so that other people sometimes don't even know what they experienced.

And I think we, we need each other and we need to know that we're not alone. 

Lynna: Yeah, you're right. These are hard conversations to have and sometimes spaces make it feel as though we're not, we're not free to talk about these things and to point out ways in which a certain system has caused harm. So speaking of, I know the words complementarian egalitarianism, they might mean different things to different folks, or maybe even depending on the church circles you run in.

So would you just give us kind of your rundown of what you mean by those words or how those words were used in the spaces where you've been? 

Helen: Yeah, in, I think in Complementarianism, the way I view see it is that women and men are said to be of equal value, but to have separate and supposedly complementary gender roles.

And what that [00:05:00] comes down to in complementarian churches is that women are typically not allowed in leadership. Some churches are very soft complimentarian, so you may have only male pastors and only male elders, but there may be female deacons and there may be. Female staff members, and you may still have women performing some roles within a church worship service in and of itself.

Other churches are what I would call hard or particularly harsh, complimentary churches where women are not even allowed to speak within a worship service. They're not allowed to have any leadership role within the church. And I've known people who felt so strongly about this that they didn't even want their, their young sons to have a female Sunday school teacher, because that would be a woman leading a [00:06:00] little man.

Even though he's a child, he would still be, it would still be a woman in a leadership position. So I think there is a spectrum within Complementarian churches, but the whole idea is that there are still some roles within a church where women are not allowed to go. And whereas Egalitarianism opens that door up to, for men and women to be equal and on every level in every role.

Lynna: So with that background in mind, tell us a little bit about your personal background growing up, your experience of especially women in the context of church. 

Helen: I did not grow up with any of that I grew up in, in a mainline denomination. I do remember back in the seventies when the denomination we were part of began ordaining women and my mom.

Didn't view that so kindly at the beginning, but she did get used to [00:07:00] that. I don't know what my dad thought about it. My dad, he didn't let on, he liked the ladies. He eventually left my mom for a lady, so he was, he didn't seem to have any opinions about. Such things, even though he was a leader within that church.

And I think I grew up with a little bit of a different background than a lot of people. I grew up in the world of women. My dad, when he was still in the home, he was very detached emotionally and not present very often physically. And then when I was a young teenager, he left and I had very little contact with him.

And I had my older and only brother was also not very interested and having much to do with the family and, and I didn't have any contact with my one living grandfather and my other [00:08:00] grandfather died when I was very young. I had no uncles. And so I was not around men. I went to an all girls high school.

I majored in a field in college that was primarily women. And so my experience of the world was different I think because women did hold a lot of various positions of power and influence in my life for all of my formative years. 

Lynna: So what were your impressions as you were growing up about concepts like feminism and women's lib and things like that?

Helen: It is funny because my parents were both born in the twenties. I am the youngest of several children. My parents were considerably old when I was born for the time. And my mother, who was a primary influence was very traditional. And when the sixties and the seventies rolled around [00:09:00] and heaven, Helen Reddy was doing her I Am Woman, hear me roar.

And I don't remember my mom going, yeah, because she was a very traditional woman. I don't remember her saying anything negative about it, but I don't remember her saying anything positive about it. And it just, it wasn't really on my radar as that big of an issue. My mom did have some very traditional ideas like women should never Have to work, which is an old south old money ideology.

But the women's live movement was neither here nor there growing up for me. 

Lynna: So you mentioned that you grew up in more mainline, broadly evangelical circles. How did you originally come into contact with the Reformed and Presbyterian world? 

Helen: The, I came to know Jesus when I was a teenager and, and then in college first I joined a Southern [00:10:00] Baptist church and then later in college I ended up joining a large reformed Presbyterian church.

But it was much more of a broadly evangelical church. It wasn't the, what we think of now as Reformed Presbyterian. This was the mid eighties and it was just like any other typical large evangelical church. 

Lynna: And you said that for a time you actually worked for a committee of that denomination. So tell us some about your experience there.

Helen: Yes. That actually was what brought me more into the world of the. Reformed, even Presbyterian church as and into the circles that we're talking about now, back in the late eighties, I got a job as a receptionist secretary at the denominational headquarters, and there were, it was a, in some ways a fascinating [00:11:00] job.

There are some parts of it that I absolutely loved and did get to meet some amazing people, whether it was just on the phone or when they came in the office. But I did get to see the inner workings of the denomination and how the sausage is made, so to speak. And I was honestly taken aback by the way the women were treated by these men.

These were very important men. Seminary trained heads of committees, big names in the denomination, and they were barking orders with the tone of arrogance and entitlement and irritation and superiority that I had never encountered before. And for me, it was really an aha moment. And I remember one day thinking to myself, so this is what the Women's Liberation Movement was all about.

It must have been started by a bunch of [00:12:00] overworked, poorly treated, underpaid secretaries. 

Lynna: Yeah. Yeah. During this time as you're coming more into the reformed world, you said that you also heard some teachings about marriage and submission. What were your impressions of those concepts at that time in your journey?

Helen: Yeah. Throughout college I had heard all of the typical college stuff about dump date and believer in our everything. But I had never encountered, other than Elizabeth Elliot's passion of purity, I hadn't encount encountered much in the, in the way of. Teachings on marriage and of course being the late eighties, that's when the, the whole council on biblical manhood and womanhood was forming and stuff.

So there was a lot of stuff really starting to happen at that point in those areas. This was also, obviously during a time [00:13:00] when I'm outta college, I'm dating my now husband. And so I think I was probably just more privy to that kind of talk. And several of my coworkers were very reformed, we might say.

And one, one was a, actually a personal friend of Jay Adams, the new Feic counseling founder in Guru. And I did have to a admit, I was appalled at some of the things that came out of her mouth about marriage. But what's interesting is that my husband, even though he grew up in all of those reformed Presbyterian circles, the whole submission thing really just wasn't front and center for him or his family.

His family was traditional, but those roles were just assumed. But there was flex. There was never a flex, and those roles were never spiritualized. [00:14:00] I guess I, what I heard about was the importance of wives submitting to husbands, and that meant letting them call all the shots and then obeying those shots.

I can honestly can't remember a whole lot else that people talked about. I do remember being thankful that there was guidance out there because my parents had not had a good marriage. And it is so often the case, you go into marriage oftentimes knowing what not to do, but you don't really know what to do.

And there were people telling me, this is what you need to do. And so I believed them. I still thought the J Adams stuff was crazy, but the rest of the stuff is okay. So he's the boss and I do what he says, and if I do, then God will bless us. Okay. Got it. And so I, I bought that 

Lynna: and I remember you shared a story with me [00:15:00] about a time when you said you're actually super thankful for your husband's headship in your home.

Can you tell us that story? 

Helen: Yeah, it, this is a funny story. Because of our job, I was expected to work at our denominations general assembly, which is when the pastors and elders from all over the country get together for their big annual meeting. And at this point, I was five weeks pregnant with our first child.

And so sick as in, I'm green, I am throwing up, I am, I can hardly function sick. And unfortunately that year, general assembly was all the way across the country. And so we go to the airport, my husband gets me up to the gate back when you could walk up to the gate and he takes one look at me and says, you're not going.

And at that point in my life, I think, [00:16:00] I don't, I don't think I would have, I had the agency or felt I had the right to say, I can't go on this trip, but I didn't have to because he did it for me. And the nice thing was that because he was my husband. I had to obey him. And because my boss was so adamant about wife submitting to their husbands, I knew she couldn't get mad at me for not showing up at General Assembly because I had just obeyed my husband.

So that was one time it really worked in my favor. He got me off the hook 

Lynna: and later on you described that there was a speaker who came to your church and she spelled out in more detail what some of those views of Complementarianism were and what was your response to the teaching at that point? 

Helen: Yeah, [00:17:00] A few years later, I was a stay at home mom with two small children, and a woman came to speak at our church and she spelled out the whole Complementarian position in a way that made sense to me.

This was in the nineties, and I, I felt the need to fiercely defend my position of being a stay at home mom. And this woman gave me a theological framework with which to do it. Her explanation was that men don't wanna do anything. They won't do anything if they have an option. So if God let men do the things like at church, if God let women, if God let, I'm sorry.

If God let women do the things like at church, like lead and preach and teach, then men would never do anything. So God limits what women are allowed to do in order to force men [00:18:00] to take responsibility and do things. And somewhere in there, I think she said, it's also something about how men just can't take, can't follow the leadership of women.

It's like just goes against the grain for them thinking about it now. Because at the time that all made sense to me. And I'm like, oh yeah, so we have to get outta the way so that men will actually take responsibility like they're supposed to. Now that I think back on it, I'm like, if that's the reasoning, why isn't it the men that need to work on not being so passive, why are we so limited?

Just because they don't wanna do anything? But at the time I never questioned that. And again, my own childhood was fraught with plenty of dysfunction. And during this time. There was so much about the male headship. I didn't [00:19:00] question partly because I was spending all my time with the Christian parenting stuff.

This was growing kids God's way and as though, and there was so much pressure in the Christian parenting world that I didn't even have time or the mental bandwidth to think about the role of women within the church, the role of women within marriage and within our marriage. It really wasn't an issue because my husband is a very kind, very gentle person who never lorded it over me.

Sure. There were some times when I think because of this teaching, I, I felt I had no agency and I think per, perhaps [00:20:00] that's one of the biggest impacts just. Personally, not on a church front, but personally within our marriage is that I came out of childhood with little to no sense of agency. And then going into a marriage where I am to submit in all things, I get to where I am this far down the road as a upper middle-aged woman and I still really struggle with a sense of agency because I'm just supposed to submit to whatever he wants.

And there are plenty of places where I do wish I had pushed back more when our kids were younger, but I didn't feel like I was able to do that. And I was afraid that God would not bless our family if I did push back for probably after the, after I heard this theological framework of complementarianism in the nineties, it was probably another 15 years or so of being bogged down with [00:21:00] all of the parenting before I started really noticing the roles of women within the church and the various issues and those experiences started happening that really moved and transformed my view of the role of women within church.

Lynna: And you said that the Christian school where your children were attending at that time. How to vote on whether or not to allow women to serve on the board of the school. So just as a like a little glimpse of where you were at that time, how did you vote on that issue? 

Helen: I voted no, and I have no, no idea why.

I really, I, I have some thoughts on that, but at the time it was like, no, if this is right and I'm gonna have to stand on principle, maybe that was what was going on. There were so many other things going on in my life at the time that it just wasn't something, I [00:22:00] don't know if it was, I didn't wanna open Pandora's box to that or what, but for whatever reason, I voted no and not a clue.

Yeah. 

Lynna: And you also shared with me that sadly your mom passed during this time and a few months after she passed, you had a pastoral visit that also impacted your thoughts about women in the church. Can you share with us a little bit about that experience? 

Helen: Yeah. This is probably the first mile marker in my journey of experience after experience that moved me along this transformation.

We were in a conservative reform Presbyterian church for. We were in the Reform Presbyterian denomination for several decades in total, but we had been attending this one conservative Presbyterian [00:23:00] church that had a lot of really good things about it. And that's the thing, so many church experiences that end up being painful don't start out that way.

If they did, you wouldn't have stayed. But churches show up so often can shapeshift over time, and then sometimes it's just a matter of some things you don't see until you see 'em. But in this particular situation, my mother had died back sometime before 2010 and a few months later, our pastor called and asked to pay us a visit, and which he had never done before, even though we had been a part of this church for years.

And when he came over, he explained to me that when he was in seminary, he had been taught that, uh, oftentimes people hit a wall emotionally with their grief at about six months after [00:24:00] the death of a loved one. And that it's important to check in with them. I had never felt so seen. I thought, oh my gosh, he cares.

And yes, life was hard at that point. That was the year I had four teenagers. Life was hard at that point and I was a puddle. I just melted when I heard him say that. And, but after I was able to get out a few words about what was happening with me and what I was feeling, he turned to my husband and started talking to him.

And they talked for the rest of the night. He never said anything else to me. And then he left. And it was like I had never existed and it absolutely broke my heart. And I understand that men are more comfortable with men. [00:25:00] And in the reformed Presbyterian world, emotions are like hot potatoes that you wanna toss to the next player as soon as possible.

And these men aren't terribly comfortable sitting with grief, and they're especially not comfortable sitting with grief with a woman. But. Herein lies the problem with a male only pastoral staff. If men are so uncomfortable with women and they oftentimes put so much caution tape around women because we are considered so dangerous or whatever, then how can we ever get the care we need and deserve from the church?

That was my first experience with that in terms of what was supposed to be a visit to care for me. Ended up shooting the fat with my [00:26:00] husband for a couple of hours and it was like I was invisible because I was a woman. 

Lynna: Yeah. I appreciate what you said about the hot potato. I think that visual is, it can be very relevant.

I appreciate that you had another experience that informed your perspective related to your daughter's relationship and how the church handled that. Can you tell us some more about that situation? 

Helen: Yeah. This was really hard when one of my daughters was 19, she ended up in a relationship with an abusive man.

At the time, we really didn't understand what was happening because she had shut us out from her life, and so we did go to the elders for support. And I would say that they were very supportive for us and they weren't condemning at the beginning. In the beginning, at least a few people in the church sent her letters, which weren't terribly [00:27:00] helpful, but, but at the beginning there was a, oh, I'm so sorry you're going through this.

W what you know here, we're praying for her. We're praying for you. What do, how can we help? Sort of thing. And then she got pregnant out of wedlock. 

Lynna: Yeah, I can imagine how there might be shifting dynamics in those circumstances. So what did you advise your daughter to do in this circumstance? 

Helen: Years earlier, we had watched as the church had put another young adult woman through the excommunication process.

And that process just seems to have practically destroyed her. And I knew my daughter, who's a highly sensitive soul, would be completely traumatized by that. So I suggested to her that she just asked to be removed from the roles she had made. Uh, she had joined the [00:28:00] church by profession of faith a few years earlier, and I just assumed, perhaps not evilly.

I don't know. I assumed that asking to just be taken off the rolls. Would just be that, um, you're no longer a member. End of issue. That's not what happened. They sent her a letter that was two short paragraphs, very short, very not sweet. The letter ended with these words and imagine being, being, by this point she was 20.

Imagine being 20 in an abusive relationship, totally disoriented, pregnant, sensitive, and getting these words. So now with sorrow in our hearts, we say to you that the session has formally removed you from the membership at at Conservative Presbyterian Church. You are [00:29:00] now set outside, not merely this particular church, but the church of Jesus Christ.

Furthermore, we owe it to you to declare that according to the New Testament, when you are outside the church, you can no longer expect to obtain God's gift of salvation. We will pray for you.

I was appalled at that and I really wanted to just go cuss them out, but my Enneagram nine peacemaker husband. Would not let me do that. And I was still submissive at that point. He knew that it would only make matters worse for both of us, but especially for me at that point. And I didn't address it. I held my tongue.

It took me 10 years to address the [00:30:00] situation and we'll get to that later. 

Lynna: And you said that around the same time there was another woman in your church whose husband was abusing her. Tell us some about what happened when she went to the church for help. 

Helen: Yeah, and this is when my eyes were really beginning to be open to the lack of care that women get within a church ruled by men.

It is about the same time a friend of mine disclosed that her husband of 20 years had been abusing her. And this wasn't the emotional abuse that church leaders consider a nothing burger. I'm not minimizing emotional abuse, but church leaders tend to minimize emotional abuse. But this wasn't just emotional abuse, but there was some physical abuse and intimidation.

And she went to the church for help asking for a list of men she could call if she was in danger. [00:31:00] And they hemmed and hawed, but did very little for her. And one of the leaders actually admitted to her that he was scared of her husband. And left it at that, about that same time, the pastor of this church, who I had always respected very much, even though he was clearly uncomfortable talking to women, but this pastor told a story.

He was telling the story of how important it is to admonish people to do the right thing, and that God honors that when you admonish people to do the right thing and they do the right thing. And he told this story about how a few years earlier, a female neighbor of his had run to his house for help out of fear of her husband and the pastor and his wife had talked with her about everything that was going on.

And then her [00:32:00] husband showed up at their house with a gun looking for his wife and his, the pastor says that he admonished him to do the right thing and then sent her back home with him rather than calling the police. And the thing was, it was clearly even not on his radar that he should have done something different.

He was, seemed very pleased with himself for admonishing this man. And I was absolutely horrified at how naive. He was on the dynamics of abuse and how confident he was in discharging his duties of counseling this man. And he had just sent this woman who had fled to his house for safety back into her home with an abuser.

And that was back in [00:33:00] the 20 12, 20 13. Ballpark and resources back then on domestic violence were more, much more limited than they are now. And I knew that the powers that be at this church would never accept mate materials from a secular source. So I did a lot of homework, find, trying to find sources, Christian sources on the appropriate responses to domestic abuse.

And I found a document, I printed it out, I put it in the mailboxes of the pastoral staff, and a while later I was like, Hey, did y'all look at this? What do you think? And they're like, oh yeah, we saw it in there. We just hadn't even touched it yet. And I don't know if they ever did even look at it. And I was again, just [00:34:00] flabbergasted that they would not.

Feel such an urgent need to be equipped to care for this woman in our congregation. And during the same time, I was having other friends in other churches in the same denomination who were being excommunicated for leaving abusive husbands. And then even years later, years down the road, I was doing some extensive victim advocacy training.

And it was that same story over and over again. The victim would go to her church seeking care, seeking guidance, seeking safety, and the church would discipline her and would fail to hold her abuser accountable and in some cases would actually come to his defense. And even the research that I've seen since then spells out that patriarchal systems and [00:35:00] complementarian theology can and often does enable abuse.

Bobby Giles did a recent substack post called Complementarianism as a breeding ground for abuse and Infidelity in which he says the harm to women is staggering because women within Complementarianism have little ability to hold men accountable. And we see it. Yeah. Men have each other's back. Band of brothers let's the good old boy system.

And that, that, that whole experience was very powerful to me. And the need for women to be safe. It's not just a, an emotional spiritual, but it's a physical, physical safety issue.

Lynna: Yes. And you wrote an article around that time from, at that point, from solidly within a [00:36:00] complementarian framework. 

Helen: Yes. 

Lynna: You wrote an article begging church leaders to just to listen to the women in the church. So tell us what it was that you desperately wanted church leadership to understand at that point.

And if you would just share a little bit from that article. 

Helen: Yeah. I started off just saying, Hey, I know. I thank you. Thank you so much for all you do. I know that you work hard because I had heard complaints that pastors are always criticized and never think so. It's just like, okay, pastors, we see you. We know you work hard.

Thank you. But then I said, I do. And again, this was when I was still. Firmly in the Complementarian camp. I said, I do believe that God has called men to be leaders within the church, at least in some positions within the church. If I did not believe so, I would've gone hunting down churches that believe otherwise.

But [00:37:00] for a variety of reasons, I'm at peace of the structure that I believe God has put in place. That said, I see problems that arise from all male leadership structure. I don't think these problems are the anything that anybody intentionally set in place. I think there are problems that come from business as usual and a basic desire to stick with then a comfort zone.

But the problems are real and cannot be denied. And I'm asking you, dear brothers in Christ to step up to the plate. Remember Spider-Man with great power comes great responsibility. You have power. You may not even realize how much power you have. You have power over the wellbeing of your congregation.

That power extends not only to their spiritual health, but also their emotional, mental, and yes, even physical health. So this is what I want to say. If men are going to take leadership in the [00:38:00] congregation, then women must know that they will be listened to, respected and protected by those men. Listen to them.

Ask them how they are doing and be genuinely interested. Educate yourselves about the issues that women face and the things that make life challenging. Not only will it make you a better leader, but I bet it will make you a better husband and father as well. If you listen to them. E, even on boring daily RA matters.

They may be more likely to come to you when they have serious concerns, because that had been a complaint I had heard from women is these men don't even know my name. They're not interested in me. Why would I take my concerns to them? I go on, listen to them. I know among some portions of conservative Christianity, there's a male headship thing, and some take it to mean that the [00:39:00] husband is a smoke spokesman for the family.

Oftentimes, the powers that be tend to assess the health of a family based on what the husband says. There are two problems here. The head of the house out of no malice whatsoever, may not be totally in tune with the concerns of his wife or children. Worse yet, the head of the house may not want you to know what is going on in his family.

If he's being neglectful or overbearing or cruel or abusive, or if he is abusing drugs or alcohol or gambling away the family money or spending the evening viewing pornography, he's not going to tell you these things. If you have developed a positive, trusting relationship with his wife, she may not out of fear or shame tell you, but she just might.

The second thing was respect [00:40:00] them. It seems to me that there is still a tendency to be among many men, maybe more so in older generations, to pat women on the head and write them off as overly emotional or excessively alarmist. The fact that women are usually more emotional than men and we are also much more relational, God made us that way.

It means that we see things differently and notice things that you may miss. Use our gifts. Don't dismiss them and protect them. This really flows out of the other two, and this is where the rubber meets the road. You cannot protect them unless you listen to them and respect them.

And I go on about taking issues of abuse seriously, but that was a, a. A huge concern of mine and Dorothy Greco's recent book For the Love of Women, which I cannot [00:41:00] recommend that book highly enough for everybody. She quotes author and theologian, Hannah Anderson, who says, complementarian Complimentarians, who minimize the dangers that women actually face, whether in the church, in a marriage or in the world, will find themselves unable to protect women against these dangers.

You can't protect against a threat you don't see. 

Lynna: Yes, that's, yes. Anybody who espouses a theological position has to be aware of the potential misuses or dangers or pitfalls of that theological position. Right? For sure. Your church was also faced with an issue of childhood sexual abuse. How did the church respond and what did you do to try and provide information about better care?

Helen: Yeah, it's, see, at some point it became clear that years earlier a gentleman in the [00:42:00] church had abused several then young girls who were now adult women. The perpetrator was held somewhat accountable. He was an older gentleman at this point, and he left the church for a different church in the area. But the victims weren't treated with proper care.

The parents of one of the victims did try to get Diane Lang Berg's materials into the hands of the leadership. And I don't know exactly what happened. I wasn't let in on a lot of the details. I just know that it was messy. And then with my husband's encouragement, he ended up in, in hopes of trying to.

Bring some important changes within the church. He ended up as an elder himself on the session at this church, a child protection committee was formed and somehow I ended up on the committee [00:43:00] and I knew the lifelong impact of sexual abuse and had spent years educating myself about sexual abuse within the church.

I'd attend a conference, the access to the Grace Materials, Bo Division, Diane Lang, a variety of different people and it was, there was one other woman on the committee and then the rest were men, including one, one man on the pastoral staff. And it was one of the oddest experiences of my life. They, these men, they were clearly uncomfortable with the subject matter.

They seemed mostly interested. This is strictly policy and legality and the talk of, there was no talk of the subject and of the congregation and healing that might need to take place within the congregation. It was like, we're gonna hammer out a policy and then [00:44:00] we're done with it. And I worked really hard on, on that committee.

I found somebody within the denomination that was skilled and an expert in the field and brought them him in. And it was. It there just some odd things happened. I thought that it was gonna be a requirement for the entire session to attend this training. And then another event in the church got planned for the same night and several of the elders went to that instead.

And when I expressed some exasperation with that, I was chastised that I shouldn't have an opinion on that. And it was, that was just a, again, these men are not comfortable dealing with this and they want to shove it off the table as fast as possible. And I was [00:45:00] under the impression they weren't even comfortable with women being on this committee.

And again, that was concerning to me because I knew enough to know that there was a whole lot of people sitting in the pews in our church that had experienced sexual abuse in one way or another. And there was a whole lot of healing that needed to happen. And the leadership had already really messed up.

And there was just a real stiff arming of the whole. Issue and a discomfort with it because it was, it wasn't theology to them I guess. I don't know. But that, that was a disheartening experience. 

Lynna: Yeah, I like what you said. It wasn't theology to them. I interesting that a shepherd would care only about what he categorizes as theology and interesting that he would view care for souls as [00:46:00] not theology.

So you read an article on the Gospel coalition website that made some of what of a light bulb moment for you. So first tell us some about that article to give us the context for this light bulb moment. 

Helen: Yeah. This was an article that was published back in November of 2014 by Jacob Phillips and Joseph Phillips called How the Normalization of Pornography Fuels the Rape Culture.

And it is a very good, I thought it was a very good article and it was like, I was so thrilled that it was not blaming women on this. And I got down to, I, I won't go through the article at all, but I got down to this one point in the article where there was this phrase and it said. But their hearts, minds, opinions, [00:47:00] experiences, feelings and everything else that makes them self-consciously who they are is completely irrelevant.

Now, this was about pornography. What I'm not saying is that our church had a pornography problem. I don't know. I don't know if people in the church had a pornography problem, but what happened, what this article was saying was that

pornography denigrates women and treats them as objects, and all of these things are, all of these wonderful, important, valuable things about women are completely irrelevant in pornography, but I read that sentence. But their hearts, minds, opinions, experiences, feelings and everything else that makes [00:48:00] them self-consciously who they are is completely irrelevant.

I read that and I said, that is my experience in the church. 

Lynna: Wow. Yeah, and like you said, whether that means that there was some pornography issue going on or not. If that's how your experiences of interacting with men and especially leaders in the church, it's gonna have a similar impact on the relationships between men and women in the church.

Helen: It's, it is. It has to do with whether or not you are seen as having value in anything other than what you can provide to men.

Lynna: Yeah. 

Helen: And if all you can provide to men is nursery care and delicious sandwiches and to your husband's sex, [00:49:00] how different is that than pornography? Really? 

Lynna: So many different ways to objectify women, including but not limited to pornography. 

Helen: Yes. 

Lynna: So after you read that article, then you wrote your own thoughts.

So now can you tell us, or even what you share with us, some snippets of what you wrote after chewing on that 

Helen: article? I was still pretty complimentarian it pretty much. And I said, funny thing is, I don't know women who are dying to preach or divvy up the bread or the wine or run the show. I think more than anything, women just want to matter.

We just want to matter, period. We have so much more to give than culinary or childcare care skills. Our thoughts, our experiences, our wisdom, and even our feelings [00:50:00] need to count for something. We are half the church. In fact, based on my observation, we are more than half the church. Find out who we are, where we've been, what we've seen, what we've learned, what gifts we have, and please seek us out.

Listen to us, believe us, value us. We want to matter. 

Lynna: Just being seen as a whole person should matter, no matter what the philosophy or theology is of leadership in the church. 

Helen: I will add that another thing that happened around the same time is that the session forced our youth pastor to resign and the very brave teenage girls, the teenage daughters of a friend went to the session to find out what happened because [00:51:00] they weren't, they didn't have a say and they didn't understand what happened, and so they went to the session to say, Hey, we don't understand why he had to go.

I was not at this meeting, but my husband who was on the session was, and my, my friends and her husband were there with their daughters, and the session for the most part took the posture of, how dare you challenge our authority? How dare you question us. How dare you? These were teenage girls. These are, were, these were all guys in their sixties and seventies and one, one man even stood up and raised his voice in anger and he, my husband was absolutely [00:52:00] horrified at what he saw, and I still have contact with those girls.

They're still traumatized. They are still traumatized by that. It took so much courage for them to go to these men who claim to be in spiritual authority over them, to just say, Hey, we don't understand. And to be treated like that was totally inappropriate. 

Lynna: So after all of these experiences you've explained, interestingly, ironically, I don't know, maybe the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back for you was actually something you read in a church document.

So can you tell us about, what was that document? What did you read, put us in your place? 

Helen: Yeah, I think, yeah, it, this goes back to the mishandling of the sexual abuse [00:53:00] within the church. And like I said, the pastors and elders have been given Diane Lang's material. And if the listeners don't know, I consider Diane Langberger the foremost Christian authority on sexual abuse.

She is a reformed Presbyterian, so she shouldn't be distasteful to anybody in these circles. And she has been dealing with this since the seventies or 50 years. She has been dealing with sexual abuse, much of it within the church. And they, the leaders finally said, yes, they had received those, the, those materials and they'd even read them.

They just didn't agree with them. And then in a, a document that I probably wasn't supposed to see about this particular meeting, I saw a statement by the pastor that. [00:54:00] He basically said, I refuse to surrender my authority to the psychologists. And it clicked for me that the church would never take into consideration any information regarding mental health, abuse or trauma coming from anybody other than Jay Adams and his ilk.

But more here's the crux of matter, that it was all about authority,

and that in their world, power over is more important than care of.

And the reality was nobody was asking him to surrender his authority. Just be informed so that he can wield it wisely. But anything that wasn't his own [00:55:00] un theological standing was suspect. I often call it the toxic combination of ignorance and arrogance. They don't know what they don't know, but they refuse to be informed and equipped.

But they assume that because they know the scripture, they know their theology, they know their doctrine. They are equipped to handle any matter. And we see that so much with the, the Bible is complete for everything. It's descriptive. It is a wonderful book. It's stories, but it doesn't tell you how to do every single thing.

And I think when I realized that I'd spent years under the care of this particular pastor who I was just, I was sick despite the, if I had known that lurking behind his great [00:56:00] intellect and his great preaching skills was this sort of ideology, I never would've it in that church.

And you're like, I've given so many years of my life to this. I didn't know. I didn't know that was back there. 

Lynna: Yeah. Yeah. And when you were sharing your story with me before you, you painted a really clear visual image of what going to church was like for you at this time. Can you share that with us?

'cause I think it was very illustrative of what it was, what it felt like for you at that time. 

Helen: Yeah. By this point our church had gone not so much through, not so much a split, but it was about. Half to a third of the size. It had been a few years earlier really as people trickled out the door. And it was the families that were less strident [00:57:00] in their, and rigid in their theology, who had gradually found other places to go.

The powers that be, the powers that stayed were very reformed and very proud of their orthodoxy above all else. But eventually it was hard for me to walk in the door. And I think what I said to you was that it was like crawling in the door, dying of thirst and being given a tall glass of sand to drink.

And I really got to where I hit a point where I just couldn't go to church. 

Lynna: And I'm almost afraid to ask this next question, but what happened when you stopped attending church for a season? 

Helen: Apparently a couple of times, one of the [00:58:00] elders would come up to my husband and ask where I was, and he would tell them that I was having a really hard time and they never asked.

They didn't inquire more, they never contacted me, they never expressed concern or care. I never heard from any of them. Again, 

Lynna: and eventually you and your husband left the church, which of course then meant your husband had to relinquish his role on the session. Right. So tell me about what happened when he resigned his role in the session.

Helen: Well, the first thing they said was how much of this is because of Helen? And then the second thing they said was, we just don't want you to say anything bad about the church. Top two 

Lynna: priorities. 

Helen: That was it. That was it. Yeah. 

Lynna: So after experiencing a great deal of hurt in that [00:59:00] church, you were without a church home for a time, and then you landed in a church plant in a different denomination, 

Helen: right?

Yeah. We, after we left the Conservative Presbyterian church, we spent about six months visiting other churches, and then we caught wind of a new church plant coming to town that was a collaboration of two large churches in a, another part of the state. And it, this was, it was like a church plant out of this church planting network.

One of these large churches, and it was a very young and vibrant church, which had been, which was in huge contrast to the church we had just left, which by the time we left, we were at, in our early fifties, one of the youngest people in the church. And so it was really neat to be around all of [01:00:00] these young people.

The planting pastor of this church was, had just turned 30 and the launch team that had moved to town with him were almost all in their twenties. And they told us that the goal early on was to plant a different kind of church that met the needs of the community. And we were just so tired of the culture wars rhetoric that we had been, that we had heard ad nauseum before and had always rubbed us the wrong way.

And so this church was truly a breath of fresh air. I remember one of the first sermons, the pastor said, those people out there in your city, they're not your enemies. Go out there and love them. I had never heard of such a thing. These people weren't scared of our city. They were wanting to get out and do make a difference and.

Develop [01:01:00] relationships and actually serve people. So I thought, so we jumped in with both feet immediately with some, had some wonderful connections and be really began pouring our life into this church. And for the next, I would say, at least four years, we poured everything into this church. When we left our other church, I, we had wanted to find a place where we would be needed, where our presence was needed.

And we realized that in a young church like this, we could provide the life experience and stability for a young church where all the young people had the energy and the vision we could provide. The life experience and the stability. We've been around the block a few times. I knew that, I knew what hurt people in churches, what people needed and why people leave churches.

And I, at this point, I wasn't shy or afraid to speak up when something needed to be said. [01:02:00] We dove in and got right to work and were highly involved pretty much from the get go. 

Lynna: And at a certain point you decided you'd actually like to join this church plant. Mm-hmm. So tell me about your experience there when you expressed an interest in membership.

Helen: This was actually a Baptist church plant, so I had been baptized as an infant in my mainline church and then in college when I joined a Baptist church, my husband on the other hand had just been baptized as an infant in his Presbyterian church and with believing parents, and he didn't see a need to ever be baptized again.

The pastor in, I guess during one of the sermons was talking about member church membership, and he talked about membership interviews and how he would sit and listen to your story and [01:03:00] then ask how the church could come alongside and support you. And there were a lot of highly complex things going on in our lives and had been for quite a few years.

But life was not easy at this point. And the thought of being able to sit down with a pastor who would listen to what's going on in my life and hear my story and figure out how the church could best support us, that that was like a dream come true to me. And that was the. Kind of pastoral care that I'd never had before.

So I was like, I'm gonna join. At that point, we were feeling very committed. Anyway, I contacted the pastor and told him I, I would like to become a member of the church. So we scheduled a meeting and he said that my husband had to come too, [01:04:00] and I figured he had the Billy Graham rule thing going on. Even though I was old enough to be his mother, he probably still, oh no.

Yeah, I can't just meet with a woman. Gotta have the man come too. So my husband went with me to meet with him, and we sat down, he looked at me and said, I already know all about you. And then turned to my husband, and for the rest of the meeting, talked to my husband trying to talk him and to being baptized so that he become, he could become a member too.

Yeah. Flashbacks to the other time that the pastor came, supposedly to meet with me and talk to my husband, and I was absolutely crushed. I wanted to be seen and listened to and cared for, and again, I wasn't visible. [01:05:00] Then what was even stranger was the next weekend they was, he was like, okay, we're going to receive members, new members of the church.

And so I was waiting for him to call my name because I was now a member of the church and he never called my name. And I was so confused and, and after church we went up to talk to him and he was like, he thought it would just be too awkward and weird for me to get called up front without my husband.

So they would just wait until my husband decided to get baptized and then we could both come, we could both come forward. And it was yet another, I don't matter unless I'm attached in some way to my husband. I as an individual do not matter. I am just a barnacle on my husband in some [01:06:00] way. 

Lynna: So did you have an opportunity to share these concerns with the pastor and what happened when you did that?

Helen: Yeah, about six months later, uh, I, there were a number of things I wanted to talk to him about, and I asked for a meeting and I decided I need to tell him just how painful that was. Let's clear the air on that. Fully expecting this guy to be, oh, I'm so sorry. He's, he was young and very a DD and all over the map, and I just figured he just had no clue.

So I let him know how pain, I had told him earlier how that I, how much I wanted to see women seen and treated more equally in this church. I had let him know that I had learned from our past experience [01:07:00] how important it is for women to not be visible and visible in the church. I let him know that was very painful for me when I had asked for the meeting to for membership, and he spent the whole time talking to my husband and he immediately lit into me that I had waited so long to come to him that I had kept a record of wrongs for too long or something like that.

And then. He said, you've gotta quit projecting your bad experiences onto me.

And I was again, just so taken aback by that, that I didn't know what to say. Wish I'd had the presence of mind saying, I'm not projecting anything. It happened. But I [01:08:00] just, I think I just stared at him there. I was just stunned into silence at that point. 

Lynna: And around this time you said you were also hosting some female college students in your home and they shared something with you that you felt like they, they could use some help with.

Tell me some about that. 

Helen: Yeah. This has to do with that same meeting at a couple of female college students at in the church. Were renting our basement and knowing that we would talk. A lot. They were younger than my youngest child 'cause I was a mom figure, but they were just downstairs in the basement.

And knowing that I was going to go have this meeting anyway, I thought I'll just check in with them and see how they're doing in case there's anything I need to bring up to the pastor. And they let me know that they were the ones running the college [01:09:00] ministry for this new church plant. And they let me know that they, the pastors had been very supportive at the very beginning, and then they had, their attention had turned to some other things.

And it just left everything in the hands of these 19 year olds who were feeling really overwhelmed and over their heads. And I, I did say, I said, have you tried talking to them about this? And they're like, the pastors are really busy and it's hard to get ahold of them and they don't respond to texts.

And they're, they were really intimidated and I don't blame them. They're 19-year-old girls. And they were intimidated to go to these pastors and at this point there were two pastors on staff. And so I was like, oh, I'm meeting with the pastor. I'll put in a word for you. I'll give them a heads up that y'all could maybe use some more support.

So at that same meeting. I [01:10:00] shared about the painful membership meeting. I figured I'll put a bug in the pastor's ear about this too. So I let him know what I just mentioned. And when I did, the pastor actually pointed at me and said, you are dangerous because you're an older woman and people will tell you things and that could lead to gossip.

You have to be careful.

I don't think I'd ever been hugged dangerous before. That was

talk about being stabbed in the heart. I thought I was doing the right thing. I'd been telling my husband for a few months that I had the impression that maybe these guys have been taught in seminary that older women are toxic to the church. This only confirmed my [01:11:00] suspicion. I had wanted to be a useful part of this church.

I'd hoped that my life experiences, in the many ways I'd worked to equip myself, would enable me to share my wisdom. And instead they saw me as poison, dangerous, and that just crushed me. I think that's a really important issue. I didn't realize anybody else had that experience, but a couple of weeks ago, Kate Boyd has a sub substack called Untidy Faith, and a couple of weeks ago she wrote this post called The Danger of Aging Women, and she says, younger women are easier to manipulate and defer to authority.

They often lack the experience of living through cycles to see how patterns come together and systems perpetuate them. This is the kind of woman that most harmful [01:12:00] systems want to keep around. And then she also wrote, women who Survived the Church System long enough to have witnessed abuse hold the lore of church splits and bad pastors and articulate changing theological positions are threats to structures that wish to control people, women, children, and men alike.

If we're old enough to have seen too much, we will only find our sight and question. Anyway. I felt that in my bones, those quotes. It was like, oh my gosh. She knows. She knows. 

Lynna: And around this time you watched the livestream of a certain Presbyterian denomination as they discussed a study committee report on the roles of women in the church, and you heard some things that [01:13:00] stood out to you.

Can you tell us about that? 

Helen: Yeah, there were there. That was a very interesting thing because obviously I was interested in how complementary in churches view the roles of women. So I was interested in watching this and I have to say there were some men who said some wonderful things. It gave me hope. It gave me hope that there are men within these spa, good men within these spaces that see value in us.

But the one thing that really stuck out to me was this one pastor who had been there and his wife had been there with him listening to all the debates and everything, and he said his wife turned to him and said, if the women in this denomination heard how these denominational pastors and elders talked about the women in this denomination, there wouldn't be very many women in this [01:14:00] denomination.

And I, I felt this statement in my gut because I knew how they viewed women, because I knew how they viewed me. I, I was absolute spot on experience. 

Lynna: And you also said that in these debates you kept on hearing warnings about the quote slippery slope. Ah, yes. Um, and that prompted another article that you wrote.

So tell us some about that and share with us a little bit about what you wrote there. 

Helen: Yes, I said, I watched one denomination debate the role of women. I've watched them want to have women as part of the conversation and then seen men blow their stacks at even having women as part of the conversation.

Why? Because of the slippery slope. The reasoning goes like this. If you [01:15:00] open up the conversation about what women can do, perform deacon type work, maybe even be called deacons, you are on the slippery slope to liberalism. And before you know it, you are no better than the wretched mainline denominations that have no place for the word of God, excuse me.

But I fail to see how talking about issues, really talking about them, talking about the millions of women in churches who may not be fully used to their potential because they are not allowed to do anything but hold babies, teach Sunday schoolers cook casserole. I don't see how talking about these issues is in any way a laundry shoot straight to hell.

To me, it seems to be seeking greater stewardship of gifts and better allocation of the gifts in at our disposal. Not to mention ringing the Liberty Bell for those of us who like neither kids nor cooking, but the slippery [01:16:00] slope you say, I'll tell you this, the slippery slope slides both ways. One way to liberalism, but the other to oppression.

And I know plenty of women who are feeling terribly oppressed right now. We can be looked past, looked through, talked over, talked around, set aside, patted on the head, but often not allowed to use the gifts we have to serve the people who need us, in effect, kept in our place. That to me is oppression. I'm concerned that we only see the one side.

We conservative types are so darn wigged out about the possibility of becoming liberal, that we kill our freedom and suck the joy out of life. In the meantime, there has to be a better way. 

Lynna: And then shortly after that, I think you, [01:17:00] you wrote another article in which you really put your heart out there, like what you are truly feeling and experiencing.

So can you share some with us about that? 

Helen: Yeah. By this time I had been on social media for about 10 years and I had noticed a pattern. And then once I noticed it and told my husband, he noticed this pattern, and it was that for the most part men, especially men in some sort of spiritual authority, they either ignored me or corrected me.

And that was really heartbreaking to me on so many levels. It was hard for me because that was the pattern in my home with my father. He was a very strict man, former military, and I wasn't really on his radar except when I needed to be disciplined in some way. And then [01:18:00] again, as we've seen so far, it was You don't matter.

You don't matter. You don't matter. You're wrong. And so many of these men, it's like they would not interact with anything I said on Facebook. Until it was something they disagreed with. And then they would pop up and I was like, I didn't know you even read my stuff, but I was always being corrected. They never engaged with anything I said unless they were correcting me.

And I began to realize that we are taught that God as our father and those of us who didn't have a great relationship with our father can struggle with that. And Diane Langberger always talked about the importance of healing relationships. If, and I always thought the church is a great place to heal some of these things, but then when you start seeing the same pa, same patterns happen [01:19:00] in the church, no healing happens.

It the, the damage is multiplied exponentially. So I get very personal and this post, and I said, think about every woman who has been sexually abused by the time they are 18. Think about every woman who has experienced control and abuse at the hands of her husband, maybe even an apparently fine upstanding Christian husband.

Both of these statistics, I had shared statistics earlier in the article. Both of these statistics. Alone are around one in three. One third of women in the congregation who have been traumatized by a man. Think about that. Then think about all the women who grew up without a father or with a father physically present, but emotionally absent or perhaps even physically or verbally abusive.

I would dare say that it might be the minority of women who enter the church [01:20:00] doors with a remotely positive view of God as a kind compassionate father who values them. So do you see how very damaging it can be to women when we are shoved aside, left to have our own tea parties with cookies and doilies?

If we, and if we speak up, we are put in our place. Do you think that in any way that helps us to see God as one who might care about us, value us? How men treat women within the church matters. That matters a lot. We aren't scary, we aren't trash. We aren't out to seduce you and ruin your reputation. We aren't out to grab at your power and run down the streets with it, squealing with glee.

We are here wanting to matter. Again, I'm a broken record on this and I've said it and I'll say it again. We [01:21:00] want to matter. 

Lynna: We want to matter.

So in the context, a lot of this thinking and processing that you're doing, we're circling back around to an earlier part of your story. You reached out to the previous church that had written that really soul crushing letter to your daughter, and you shared just how damaging that letter had been. Tell us some about that.

Helen: Yeah, it, for years, I, I wrestled with that and that had been so painful to me and I believe very painful to my daughter. And I, at one point I was like, I've got to, I've got to let them know, I've got to let them know if, if your brother sends it against you, go and tell him. So I was like, I've gotta let them know how damaging this was.

So I finally sent the session a letter detailing to them just how [01:22:00] damaging that letter was. And I basically said, what, where was Jesus in this letter? And I waited so eagerly for their response and I think I really, truly believed my husband will say, oh, you're a pessimist. And I said, no, I'm not. I really, truly believed that.

They didn't know that they had done anything wrong. They, anyway, they still may not believe they'd done anything wrong, but I truly believe that they didn't know that they had caused. An issue and that they didn't realize how harsh their words were or how damaging it had been. And that if they knew that they would be horrified.

I thought that would be the case. A few weeks go by and I finally, I check in, am I gonna get a response? And what I got back was, these men do not believe they owe you a response. [01:23:00] And

I was so taken aback by that. How do you not, isn't this basic human decency here? Even when you don't intend to hurt somebody and you hurt somebody, you still apologize. You, you may, they may have been in your blind spot, you may not have seen them when you backed up, but that's what you do as a human being, is you engage with them at least.

And when I pressed a little more for why are we not worthy of a even a response, I was told that my tone seemed harsh and accusatory. And I, I'm thinking, so their harshness is okay, but mine's not, even though they're the ones in a position of power. And yet my, I was the one who had my tongue policed. [01:24:00] And ever since then, I've just gotten to where if you cannot treat someone with basic human decency, your theology means nothing to me.

Lynna: Roots and fruit. Roots and fruit. 

Helen: Yeah. 

Lynna: Yeah. So what were your thoughts and reactions as the Me Too movement started exploding? What did you hope for? What did you see as responses inside the church? 

Helen: When the Me Too Movement broke, we were still at the Baptist Church plant and it was a lot of people in their twenties and now a lot of young families with kids in their thirties, young families in their thirties with kids.

And I the hope that finally at long last, we'd be take this issue seriously as an individual church and as the church universal, we would like, oh wow, we can't ignore this anymore. We are gonna take it seriously. We're gonna talk [01:25:00] about it. We're gonna acknowledge the damage. We're gonna weep with those who weep.

We're gonna take trauma seriously. We're gonna listen to women. And what an opportunity the church had at this point to bring safety and camaraderie and healing to so many women. And instead, I saw evangelical leaders. Dismiss and minimize the damage and squirm uncomfortably with the topic. And then like in the Baptist church that I Baptist church plant it.

That was not important. We need to talk about evangelism. 

Lynna: So after investing all of these years in this church plant, you eventually left and tell us some about what prompted you to leave and then if, and I would care to share what you witnessed as the church plant fell apart after you left. [01:26:00] 

Helen: Gosh, that that could be a book in and of itself over time.

Probably I would say after about the first year that things just really shifted within this church from a let's go out there and love the people in our city to let's get as many people in the doors and get 'em baptized. And it became like a machine. I think part of the problem is that this church was part of a church planting network.

They were comparing numbers and these guys were all out there going so and so over here has had seven baptisms since this month, and I've only had two. And I can only imagine the pressure on these guys, but. It basically turned into this, this machine, and I'll have to say this [01:27:00] about the church. I have very strong opinions now about church planting and the whole church planting industry, and I believe it is an industry and that rule number one is you need to understand that you're going to plant a church.

This is not a missionary organization, this is not a, I don't know, a factory. This is a church. And we became cogs in the wheel of, okay, we have to, we want this many people to be coming in the church. I did ask them at one point, how do we, how do, how are we gonna care for the people that come in our church?

There was no answer to that. I even said, what happens if we don't care for the people coming in our church? They're just gonna go out the back door more wounded than [01:28:00] when they came in. There was no answer to that, but it became clear to me that actually caring for people was not even on their radar, and that was heartbreaking to me.

As time went on, I started seeing more and more red flags, especially having to do with authority. And its parent. And I did find out later that this particular church planting network taught their planting pastors to target young people who would not question authority.

And I was like, oh, no wonder they didn't like me around. But I did question and I did push back and I did point out when people were getting hurt and when I was getting hurt [01:29:00] and it was not appreciated. And eventually the initial planting pastor decided to leave. And this was being, being a church plant and being in a Baptist church.

The other pastor and the one elder in the church picked the next lead pastor, which I'd always been in churches where there's like a committee and the church has input. We did not have any input on who came next. The guy who came next, he kind of showed up kicking butts and taking names. And that was just heartbreaking because a lot of people in the church are struggling.

Due to the inexperienced leadership and the, and some toxic things that had gone on there. There was a lot of healing that needed to happen within the church. And this guy came in and [01:30:00] it was all about foreign missions, and it was all about setting goals and where we want this many people in the church and we want this many baptisms by the end of the year, and we wanna be able to plant another church by this amount of time.

And it's like we as a church body, we're completely invisible to him. He renamed the church without our input and then he started in on, you're not doing enough, you're not, the sermons were just absolutely disheartening. The, what's the phrase? The beatings will continue until morale approves or whatever.

And as time went on, I was just seeing so many red flags and things like passive aggressive sermons. He would change the way things had been working that were so important to the body of the church. And then he would [01:31:00] just change that. And if we questioned it, we would get a passive aggressive sermon about how our culture is so individualistic and the spirit isn't in questioning authority and all that stuff.

If you wanted to be on this leadership committee, you had to pledge personal fidelity to the pastor. Uh, and it, again, everything changed. And I was just, I was hitting a point where I was having so many questions about so much, and a lot of the things that happened with, when all of a sudden you're realizing what spiritual abuse is and that you've been living with in it.

And at one point I just, I quit going to church. I, I couldn't handle it anymore. One time my husband came home and said, I think that sermon was about you. And he had preached this awful sermon about how [01:32:00] there wolves within the church and weak sheep and wolves and how the weak sheep are really the wolves.

And if you're, if you're weak year, it's because you're not doing it right, not working hard enough in this. It was really an indefensible sermon. Of course my not going to church raised eyebrows and made me suspect. So eventually we ended up with a meeting with the two pastors and there were several alarming things that he said through that meeting.

But finally it came down to he said that I wasn't trusting him. And I said, it takes a long time to build trust. Trust needs to be earned. And he said, if you don't trust me, then you're not trusting God. And

I [01:33:00] told him he was dangerous and we left and went out and had a couple of really good beers. And what's funny is the bartender treated me with so much more care than either of those pastors ever had. So what is going on? What is going on here? And what I will say is, as hard as that was, knowing what I know now, I mean he there, he was a classic narcissistic pastor wielding his power.

Since then, I've read all the books and as, oh yeah, here he is. Here he is. Back then, I didn't have the language for it, but I knew there was something wrong. What still hurts is the fact that we lost our small group had, which had become our family. They never asked why we left, and of [01:34:00] course we didn't.

When we told them we were leaving, we didn't say we're leaving because of these things, because you don't wanna be accused of being divisive and upon of Satan and all of that stuff. So we tried to be very, we left it open for them to ask questions and they never did. And that was just intensely painful.

That was what was so painful because we had poured everything into this group for four years, and I know I'm not the only one with that story. That seems to be a common thread with a lot of people. The church, that particular church did continue to have many issues and within, let's see, from the time we left, within a year and a half, the whole church had dissolved and there were a lot of young people staggering around town, not knowing what hit them.

At that point, I tried to hold the church planting network accountable. [01:35:00] I, I found out who the head was. I emailed him, he pat me on the head and then called somebody locally still in the church and told him to handle me. Or take care of me, take me out. But, and so I emailed him again and basically, here are these things that are so important that people need to know when they are planting a church because they're sending out all these young men who don't have much life experience and this is really important stuff.

And he never responded. I never heard a word.

And it, like I said, it was at this time that I think that was about the time that Chuck Degroat's book, when Narcissism comes to church came out and Wade Mullen, DNE Langberger came out with a book eventually, Michael Krueger and Bully Pulpit, all of these books. And I was like, oh yeah, now I have the words [01:36:00] and the language to understand what I've been witnessing.

And that was very validating for me. It was like, okay, this is what it looks like. 

Lynna: Yeah. And so after your experience in the conservative reformed Presbyterian style church and then a Baptist church planting network church plant, that you joined up a church plant in a third different denomination. Yes.

What drew you to this work? What did you find initially encouraging or hopeful?

Helen: I knew at this point that I probably did not ever wanna go back into a church where women didn't have. More input and more respect, a stronger role within the church for one. And I knew I didn't wanna go back to any place that was a culture wars mentality. Anyway, what drew me to this particular church plant, it was much more [01:37:00] organic in some ways.

This was a pastor and a group of people from a church. Some things had gone on within that church, the over some cultural war issues. And the pastor and a group of people had left that church. I had, I knew the pastor because a close friend of mine had been in that church and I had been walking alongside her through a very messy divorce with an abusive spouse.

And I'd had a lot of communication with him and he seemed to be very kind and compassionate man who actually believed women. He seemed to value women. And so given my past experiences, I was really starved for that. And I love the focus of the church was more on welcoming people who were less tidy.

There was more of a desire for racial diversity and partnering with other churches and [01:38:00] focus on more on the marginalized. And there, there was a very much a lack of precinct there. It was Jesus without all the culture wars and. The dogma, it was the church I'd always wanted. This church was fully egalitarian and over time, the pastor, he had originally asked me to be on the original kind of leadership committee.

And at the time I was still reeling so much from the past church. I just didn't feel prepared for that, so declined that. But e originally, E eventually he started having me asking me to open the church service every so often. And he always had a woman do that. He said he wanted to see women, he said the congregation is seeing him up there, a man.

So he wanted them to see women up there. And the congregation [01:39:00] was majority female, most definitely, and twice even asked me to preach, which I had never preached as sermon before. This pastor told me I had shepherding gifts. And even when he was introducing me the first time I preached, he, he actually called me a prophet and he, and I was like, whoa.

It was, I'd never had any man other than my husband see value in me and to see that I had anything to offer the church or the world for that matter. 

Lynna: And this pastor actually asked you to consider being an elder, right? Tell us some about that. 

Helen: Yeah, because this was a church plant in this other denomination, he was able to handpick the people he want.

He thought were, would do well as elders had the gifts to be elders in this church, and there were six of us that he picked. [01:40:00] And so we met once or twice a month for a year to prepare and go through some things and talk about various issues and prepare for that. And I was so excited, and I believe that finally maybe all of these past painful church experiences and all that I learned in the process were preparing me for this.

I couldn't wait to care for people and that capacity to be able to help form a church culture of kindness and compassion. Of course, I had read a church called Tove, so I was like, okay, these are the things. There was so much that I wanted to bring to the table and I was so excited and I really just wanted to be the safe shepherd to other people that I'd always needed.

And I was really, after all these years, I thought, [01:41:00] finally, I may have a purpose here. 

Lynna: Wow. Yeah. So your church had a particular ministry and a friend of yours, not a member of the church, but just a, someone you were connected to as a friend was housing one of the women from this ministry, and your friend came to you with concerns.

So tell us some about her concerns. What did you do in response? 

Helen: Yeah, there was a woman who'd been attending our church who would fit into the category of a marginalized woman. And she had needed a place to live. And this friend of mine had a basement apartment and the pastor had been instrumental in going with this woman to look at the apartment.

And he was a big part of this woman getting this apartment. And apparently after a couple of months, things really took a downturn. Things were not going well. I won't go into the [01:42:00] details, but the, this woman felt like she had, she, this woman had to leave. And so she asked the pastor, I need her out of here.

And through a course of events, things did not go well. The woman did leave, but my, this friend of mine was very frustrated and disillusioned in the process and she called me and told me about this and she said, is this how this. Church plant is going to do ministry. And I was like, oh no. I knew that this was not gonna be the last time we needed to find housing for somebody.

And our church was small and we were not going to be able to meet all of these needs. And we were gonna need to be able to partner with other people. And if we're partnering with other people, they need to have a [01:43:00] very good experience with our church. The best thing we can do for the marginalized people is to have a very wide network of people who have very positive experiences with us so that we can better meet these needs.

I asked to meet with the pastor to find out what happened. This was 17 days before we were to be installed as elders in those church. And so I asked for a meeting and I went into that meeting with the re goals, find out what happened from his perspective. What can we learn from this? Because this was our first go round, but it was not gonna be our last.

And how can we repair things with this person because. We need to repair things with people when there's harm. And my [01:44:00] husband went with me to this meeting. He had been on the phone call with this friend of ours and he went with me to this meeting and I'm so glad he did. We took two separate cars 'cause he had to go somewhere else after this meeting.

So we took two separate cars, went to this meeting, and right out of the gate, the first thing the pastor says to me is, you have no business being here. This is not your concern. You have inserted yourself into a situation that is none of your business. And again, I don't think well on my feet. I again, I was just blown away by that.

And I bumbled through trying to explain, these are my concerns. These are the things she told me. Can you tell me what happened here and here? And he was getting angrier and angrier. And then at one [01:45:00] point his anger just turned to rage and it was just one of those Jekyll and Hyde moments and I couldn't stay.

I was like, I don't know what to do. I didn't know how to handle it. I was about to burst into tears because I knew what I was seeing and I made the excuse I had to pick up our granddaughter from school and I just left. I left my husband to to clean things up and end the meeting, driving home. I knew what that meeting meant.

I knew I could not be an elder under this man, under somebody who erupted like this. I had learned enough to know that if you cannot go to a pastor with a [01:46:00] concern or a question or a disagreement and not be met with anger or defensiveness, then you have a real big problem, and I just sobbed on the way home because.

I loved this church with everything in me. These were my people. This was the church I had waited my life for. Over the next few weeks we tried communicating about what happened, and at first things looked a little more conciliatory. And then he started accusing me. It was, uh, it was like he backed up to the kitchen sink and reached back and started throwing knives at me and admitted how intensely angry he was at me and things just got really complex it, and we ended up [01:47:00] the, all of us, almost elders got together and tried to talk it out and it was a very hard, very intense, painful meeting.

And I left there that there was no going back. Two of the other, almost elders ended up confiding that they had some alarming experiences as well. None near as personal as this. It was more over other things, but it was situations where there was an eruption of anger. And if you don't do it my way, you're against it.

There was a lot of, a lot more. Control issues going on. And so three of the six of us left. And that was a hard decision to make, but there was no other [01:48:00] option at that point. So after we made that decision, we had to tell our not so small group. And that was a very hard experience. And there were several people within that group who had been through a couple of other church splits, and I think they saw the, oh no, it's happening again.

One person when I tried to talk, said, basically stood up and said, I don't wanna hear it, and walked out the door. After that meeting with our not so small group, the pastor called a meeting of the church of the congregation, and he basically reframed the narrative to make it sound like I, I don't know exactly what he said because they wouldn't tell me exactly what he said.

But somebody who was there said to me, he said things about [01:49:00] you that no pastor should ever say about a person. Uh, and so again, we let lost our community. Again, and these were the people that we thought were our people. And while the, the about faced by the pastor was horrible there, there was definitely a sense of betrayal there because I had shared with him, because he had been so compassionate and seemed so interested in me, and I had opened up to him about all sorts of things.

I felt like he, he turned around and used that against me. There is some, in a minute I'll get into something that he had said that now I realize that he had issues with some of my ideas and he was trying to undermine things earlier that, that, [01:50:00] that was all terrible, but just losing our community. It was the loss of the community.

And also knowing that, I thought,

I thought that they knew me, me better than that, but that they didn't even question the pastor's assessment of me

was intensely painful. I think in a lot of ways I fought myself for this in that I was. I think my past experiences have made me so vulnerable to my past experiences, both as a child and then within the church with these experiences that I've shared so far that I was so vulnerable to any man in a position of spiritual authority in the [01:51:00] church who would give me the time of day.

I think women can be so very hungry within these church circles for respect and for their gifts and their insights and experiences to be taken seriously, to be valued and to matter. And so when a man swoops in and seems to take you seriously and sees your gifts and actually listens to you, and that's heady stuff and you don't question it, and you don't proceed with caution, and you drink it up and you may trust way too.

I have to admit, it was really disorienting because I had always equated the narcissist narcissistic leadership with the conservative misogynistic into the spectrum, and I was positively dumbfounded when I encountered it in a [01:52:00] space that claimed to value women. My friend Catherine s Spearing wrote a recent book called A thousand Tiny Paper Cuts about her experience within high control religion, but also within conservative church circles.

And I read, I'm gonna read what she wrote here, because I was like, oh my gosh, were, was she just, I thought she was writing about my experience and this was her experience. So it wasn't just my experience, she said, I watched as male pastors who'd been abused in their congregations, went on to form safe churches to reach those who had been wounded.

Then those same pastors who'd been abused, turned around and abused their congregation. And this is the kicker. Male pastors who'd once been part of [01:53:00] a system dominated by men try to create equitable systems by placing women in leadership. Then we discover a dark side to the pastor's motives. As they surrounded themselves with women as a new way to maintain power and control.

Some women were so grateful for the opportunity, they overlooked the red flags. If any of those women pushed back or became more influential than the pastor's ego would flare revealing their inclusive actions were just a smoke screen to hide their quest for power.

I pushed back. I didn't even push back. I questioned a few things a few months before this all happened. I [01:54:00] had just made an observation about something and suggested possibly making a few changes that I was a little concerned about how something had gone over here and I made a few change and thought maybe we should think about this.

And at that point, he had said to me, your past experiences have skewed your perception,

and what a convenient way to completely dismiss anything you don't want to hear. While at the same time crushing someone for speaking up and trying to apply hard earned wisdom and causing them to doubt their own sanity. And now I wanna say, of course I didn't say it then. I would love to say my past experiences didn't skew my perceptions.

They educated me, they informed me, they gave me wisdom to see [01:55:00] behind the scenes and to have an idea of what harms people. 

Lynna: Amen. So you have people in the church who haven't experienced any abuse and maybe not realize what to look out for. And then you have people who have experienced abuse, but anything they say can be written off as well.

You've experienced abuse before. So your perspective is skewed. Yes. That's extremely convenient. 

Helen: Yes. Yes. 

Lynna: So since then you've witnessed other things that have discouraged you about the way the church views women. Tell us some about that. 

Helen: Just one other thing that I think after all of this, and this goes back to more of the complementarian egalitarian thing, was I was watching the live stream of a general assembly of one of the reformed Presbyterian denominations.

I think there was some, there was an issue that they were dealing with and I was like, I wanna see how [01:56:00] this denomination is gonna handle this. And I had been out of. Complementarian spaces for several years at this point. And so I was watching almost with, with fresh eyes, and I watched, I watched all these men speak, and there's these men standing up front and speaking, and then men would get up and ask questions, and then they would do all this voting and it shows all the men voting, and they were all men.

And all of a sudden it just struck me how demeaning and discouraging and oppressive and bizarre it was to me. Why can't women have input? Even if they can't preach, why can't they have input? [01:57:00] And it just seems so offensive to me now. 

Lynna: So as you reflect back on your journey through Complementarianism and kind of out the other side again, what thoughts do you have in retrospect?

What reflections do you have? 

Helen: Oh, I have so many thoughts and so I've jotted down a few here, and I don't know if they will come up in any. Coherent order, but I'll just throw 'em out there for y'all. This past week, Kate Boyd wrote an incredible article in her Substack Untidy Faith, and she said that the lived experience of women is often dismissed for its inconvenience.

I don't think women are taken seriously by men. They are viewed as too emotional, [01:58:00] alarmist. Even I was told by another guy in the egalitarian, more progressive church plant, oh, you tend to make a mountain out of a mole hill, and it's, but what if the mole hill is a tip of the iceberg that's gonna sink the whole ship?

There's just this sense of bravado. Oh, women are too emotional. Oh, that causes so much damage. They don't take things seriously. This is how people get hurt. Dorothy Grieco in her book says, if men hope to see women are right and love them fully, they'll need to stop dismissing or reacting defensively to women's pain, and instead choose to empathize with them.

Oops. She used the word empathize. I reckon that's a sin anyway. Oh, not empathy. Anyway, but I so often I think [01:59:00] women are the canaries in the coal mine, in churches and, but if you tell the canaries she's making a mountain out of a molehill, everybody's gonna die.

Women aren't believed. They aren't believed when they're raped. They're not believed when they're abused, and they aren't believed when they see danger coming. And groups of men just telling women that it is their fault, that rapes their fault because they caused a man to sin. Abuse is their fault because they aren't submitting enough.

A husband's porn use is her fault because if she was just the sex goddess he craved, this wouldn't be a problem. They'll say that women are the weaker sex and need the protection and provision and leadership of a man. Yet women are still held up as cause of and responsible for men's failures and sins.

How, when this is the [02:00:00] case, can women flourish in a church system that dismisses them, subordinates them, and blames them? I've come to de to describe Complementarianism as the Jim Crow of the church. Separate but equal. It wasn't equal when society did it with race. And it's not equal when the church does it with gender.

We, women are denied power and influence and input. Even when they claim women can come to session meetings. A lot of these places still have what's called executive session where men can still go in, shut the door, shut everybody out, and it's still the men that vote. Even if women can come and listen, even if they are asked their inputs, they don't get a say, they don't get a vote.

And to me it is nothing but the [02:01:00] good old boys network with spiritual dressing. There is no way a male pastor, a male elder or a group of men is going to be able to understand a woman better than other women will. They will and do identify with men. I've heard stories about women going to sessions to talk about very damaging things their husband might be doing and hearing one of the elders say I do that they, I think it is very easy for men to.

Circle the wagons and identify with the man without being able to step back. And so when you have situations like abusive situations, they are just naturally gonna identify with the man. It's the air they breathe, it's the water. [02:02:00] They swim. And they have, they can't understand the perspective of life as a woman because they've never walked in our shoes.

I know with some situations I've heard that we don't want to believe that our brother's doing this because we wouldn't want somebody to say that we did that. And it's like step back a little bit. But there's a band of brothers. Circle the wagon, protect our own culture. I kinda laugh that I say that men are notorious for not asking for directions.

And I think that points to the idea that men never wanna ask for help or I'm not, I won't say never. They more likely don't wanna ask for help. But that's a problem when you're not sure how to handle a situation. And you may need to ask for help. You may need to be more equipped. And I think, [02:03:00] I think that is a limitation here.

I'm not gonna say that. Women in in leadership positions will never do any wrong. And I'm not gonna say that women are never toxic in the church because they are. We've all experienced it. I do think with the limited roles available for women in the church, you often get piety. Enforcer become, becomes a big one.

Let's keep you in line. Let's keep you with the program. Because there isn't the freedom to expand into these other areas. And especially in churches where there is a very rigid theology and a tight bubble, women can become very toxic. So I'm not gonna say that. I'm not saying that all men are bad and all women are good.

I've seen that [02:04:00] both genders do tremendous harm and tremendous good. I do think that women need to be cared for well by men. We need that. I think men need to be cared for well by women. I think we need that as well. Another thing that Kate Boyd said in her substack, it's called The Danger of aging Women.

I've read a couple of things already. She said Women's authority shouldn't be contingent on their palatability, not their appearance, not their tone, not their willingness to soften inconvenient truths, let them be dangerous witnesses value precisely because they challenge power rather than protect it.

And Dorothy Greco in her book says, we have to be willing to acknowledge that Complementarian theology provides and [02:05:00] sometimes fosters an environment for abuse. Again, that doesn't mean all churches or all individuals subscribe ascribing to complementarian practice and theology will be blind to or tolerate abuse.

However, complementarianism seems to deny the reality that we live in a broken world. The belief that all men will faithfully protect women and consistently create spaces, whether familial or institutional, for women to be safe and flourish is noble, but it's an ideal that doesn't consistently work as intended because misogyny is so endemic and the pull to the world, the power is so strong.

So that's where I've landed. I think the overlap between misogyny and complementarianism is [02:06:00] way too large, and so I have to ask, how can a church run by men for men truly and adequately care for and shepherd women? How can women be listened to, respected, protected? How can women's voices be heard? Their gifts utilized, their wisdom heated?

I don't think I no longer think it's truly possible in a system that does not allow them to be seen as truly equal in every facet of the church body.

Ann Maree: Safe to hope is made possible by donors who believe faithfulness means protecting survivors and honoring the dignity of their stories. Their support allows us to remain independent trauma specialized and committed to truth telling without pressure or performance. We are deeply grateful to our donors for their [02:07:00] partnership.

If this conversation stirred something for you, please know you do not have to carry it alone. Support resources are listed in the show notes, and you're welcome to reach out in the ways that feel safest for you.

Safe to Hope is a production of Help Her. Our executive producer is Annmarie G.