Season 7: Episode 6 - Story "Michelle"

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Transcript

Ann Maree:

I want to introduce to you our storyteller for this episode, and we’re just going to call her Michelle. She has graciously come to join me and has offered to tell her story of spiritual abuse. But also, she has a lot of wisdom, having written about it, having lived it, having experienced abuses, and also just thought very deeply about this issue.

So I’m going to be asking her more questions than just about her story, but let me give the mic over to her and let her just kind of explain a little bit of the foundational information about herself. And then we’ll get going on some of the questions.

So welcome, Michelle. Thanks for being here.

Michelle:

Thanks for having me. It is an honor to be joining you and your listeners.

My name is Michelle. I am a wife, a mom, and a grandma. I grew up near Chicago. Both of my parents were Jewish. They’re both deceased, but I grew up in kind of a Jerry Seinfeld-type Jewish home. If any of your listeners have ever watched an episode of Seinfeld, you get that kind of cultural Judaism, ethnic kinds of insider jokes and things that comprised what my childhood was.

I grew up in a majority Jewish neighborhood, went to an elementary school where we got the Jewish holidays off, and that was my normal. But I was also a very spiritually restless kid, so I was always seeking for more.

My parents did send my sister and me to have some religious education at a synagogue, and I was frustrated because a lot of it had to do with what was happening in Israel during that time period—as in the 60s and early 70s. I wanted to know the author of the story.

Also, home was not a particularly safe or easy place. There was a lot of, particularly with my mom, unhealed trauma from alcoholism in her family, unhealed, unaddressed secrets surrounding her adoption by a relative. All of that was the silent partner in my childhood.

So when I was in eighth grade, we moved from that cozy neighborhood where everyone seemed the same to a neighborhood that was majority Gentile, and I was the minority. So I encountered some mild anti-Semitism for the first time, and I also encountered people that were being affected by the Jesus movement of the late 60s and early 70s.

Everyone was talking about God. Everyone was talking about Jesus, who was saving them.

And so my kind of Christian origin story starts with a friend who came to school one day. By that point, I was smoking a lot of weed. I was pretty promiscuous and very unhappy, considering suicide, just because I felt like I was in a corner and it was very dark and there was no way out.

She started talking about Jesus. It made no sense to me. I had no context. I grew up, for example, knowing there was another holiday in December that was red and green, but I didn’t really know anything about it. Rudolph seemed to be involved—he was a reindeer. There was Santa. That’s about all I knew about Christmas.

But her joy just captured my attention, and it began a months-long struggle to try to understand what she was talking about, first of all, and how the God that I knew something about could have a son like that. It was all so confusing to me.

But that’s where my story with God started. God’s story with me started at conception and before.

But anyway, so that’s a little bit of background. Is that what you were kind of hoping for—some groundwork?

Ann Maree:

Yeah, no, that’s helpful. Also just interesting insight from your eyes looking out at the Gentile Christian world. Never put that in my mind that you would have known God and then been very perplexed that He had a son.

Michelle:

It was very confusing. And I grew up hearing, “That’s not for us.” You know, we would drive by a church and I would ask a question because I was very spiritually curious, and my parents would just shrug and say, “That’s not for us.”

And in my mind, I learned that everyone who wasn’t Jewish was a Christian, because that was kind of the picture of America back in those days.

Certainly we live in a much more diverse culture now, but back then it was this tiny amount of Jewish people and everyone else was Christian. So vast evangelical world.

Ann Maree:

So once you learned of the Son and a little bit more about Christianity, what did you learn early on about some of the essentials of that evangelical lifestyle?

Michelle:

Well, my moment of decision—and not everyone has a moment of decision. If you’ve grown up in a Christian family, maybe you’ve had a bunch of decisions. All of us get decisions every day.

But for me, it was a pretty dramatic “once was lost and now is found” moment. I knew that when I said, “Yes, Jesus is God’s Son and I want to follow Him,” I knew it was going to be kind of a nuclear bomb in my family, so it took me a few months to get up the courage to have that conversation with my parents.

They noticed a difference because I was not sneaking around. I wasn’t ditching school as much. I wasn’t acting out like I had been. So they saw that something was straightening me out a little.

But when I had the conversation with them, they said, “As long as you live under our roof, you are never going to church, so just put that out of your mind.”

Well, I was 15, and I’m sure they hoped—and understandably—their dismay and their frustration is so understandable because think of all the terrible things that have been done to the Jewish people in the name of Jesus over the last more than 2,000 years.

Their concern, I totally get it. And I got it then too.

So I snuck to stuff when I could get away with it. I listened to Christian radio. I snuck books into the house. I would ride my bike up to the local Christian bookstore—remember when there used to be local Christian bookstores—and I would sneak stuff under my shirt into my bedroom.

Like, this is how I lived the first three years I was a believer.

So I had a lot of time to try to kind of glean what it meant to be a Christian, what it looked like to be a Christian. And my friends at school, the people that I was getting to know in my sneaking, were all evangelical.

So that’s—I adopted the written rules of evangelicalism of what you believed and what a disciple’s life looked like, and also the unwritten rules as best as I could, because I was trying to figure out what it was going to look like to be a part of a church once I was free to do that.

Ann Maree:

Intriguing. Can you give me a sampling of what those rules were, both written and unwritten?

Michelle:

Well, the written rules, you know, are pretty easy. You should read your Bible every day. You should pray. You should—and I hate using the word “should,” I actually kind of cringe—but just for the purposes of this conversation, you know, what discipleship looks like is serving, loving your neighbor, worshiping God, praying, being immersed in Scripture, seeking to grow, seeking to magnify God with your life, because He deserves and is worthy of that magnification.

The unwritten rules, on the other hand, were a little trickier. And they were things like good Christians don’t drink. Some good Christians don’t play cards. I mean, this was—I hung around with a lot of very rule-driven people that would be classified as fundamentalists now.

Good Christian women wear dresses or skirts, and they are gentle and quiet. They don’t have opinions. They bake things.

They bake things—like, you know, that kind of stuff that I was discerning. This is how you fit in. I didn’t have anybody ever say, “You need to wear a dress and bake banana bread.” But, you know, I like banana bread as much as the next person, and a cute dress is fun. But it was more, this is what Christians do. And if you want to fit in, then you need to maybe stop listening to the metal that you love so much and listen to gospel quartets, for example.

It was that kind of lifestyle stuff that I understood was part and parcel of what it meant to be a Christ follower. There was no categorization of, you know, this is preference and personal conviction, and this is actual spiritual growth stuff.

Ann Maree:

You’re sounding very similar to the timeframe of when I became a Christian too. And I think you would agree with this—that these unspoken rules were more or less what we saw in the church. It’s what we viewed in societies that had cultures of believers.

And as you’re talking, I can even imagine—put back into my imagination—looking into it. It’s like looking into a microscope and seeing that world and going, “Oh wait, I have to go in there.”

Michelle:

Yeah, right. Yeah.

Well, and the other thing that has occurred to me—and I’ve written about this—I’m a writer, and so I’m constantly processing the world through words, talking as well as writing. But writing really helps me kind of name some of those things.

I realize how much of our discipleship is actually peer pressure. It’s not really discipleship.

Discipleship is walking alongside and imitating, but also being truly authentic to who you are. Not everybody is meant to wear dresses and bake banana bread. But all the women I knew when I first started attending church after I left home, they were all like identical clones of one another.

And that is the result of peer pressure. It’s not because they were authentically all being the exact same thing.

Ann Maree:

So true. And boy, baking banana bread would actually kill me anyway.

So before we dive into a little bit more of church life, you had said that there were years—several years—where you weren’t able to attend a church. And you and I have talked about this prior, so I’m just asking around the parachurch experience that you had.

Can you tell us a little bit more about that? Maybe the pros and cons of having been a participant in that aspect of evangelicalism?

Michelle:

So for those that maybe have never heard the term parachurch, that can be anything. That’s a ministry that’s not specifically rooted in a local church.

So it could be anything from campus ministries like Campus Crusade for Christ—or Cru, which it’s now known as—or the American Bible Society that facilitates getting Scriptures into people’s hands. It can be youth movements like Young Life, or it can be missions organizations.

It’s anything that people are coming outside of the four walls of their church to work either toward ministering to a specific demographic or doing something together that they could not do on their own in their own local church. Adoption ministries would be another example.

So for me, in evangelicalism, there are so many people that have created ministries—some very big, some tiny and micro and local—to be able to meet some of those needs that a traditional local institutional church didn’t meet.

And thanks be to God that those existed. Those old hippie Christian bookstores with the prayer room and the Bible study in the back—they existed. It wasn’t a church, but it was a place that was easier for someone like me to go, to get a book, to sit in a Bible study at 3:00 on a Wednesday afternoon that wouldn’t draw the ire of my parents, since I was so busy sneaking around.

Christian radio stations—not-for-profit Christian radio stations—are parachurch ministries as well. And I would listen to the sermons on the Christian radio station in Chicago, which was part of the Moody Bible Institute network.

And when the music came on—as much as I tried to like those gospel quartets that they were playing—I would then switch to, you know, the metal station.

And I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the exact demographic of either of those programming directors. I don’t think the Christian radio station people were sitting around thinking, “Now there’s probably some teenage Jewish girl that’s experiencing some mild persecution and can’t go to church, but she’s listening to all these sermons, but she hates our music.”

I don’t think there were that many listeners that were in my exact category.

Ann Maree:

No. Well, that’s helpful again—looking out from your eyes to the world and seeing ministries in a different way.

So okay, now let’s consider that you’ve now moved on and you’re able to attend church. And again, coming from a Jewish background with very little to no probably understanding of even denominations, can you talk to us about your experience with the variety of denominations that you did try or attend or become a member with?

Michelle:

Well, like the Johnny Cash song, “I’ve been everywhere, man.” The minute I say it, I start hearing the music in my head—and maybe some of your listeners will too.

But since I became free to attend church, I’ve been in a variety of church settings. I married my husband when I was 20—we just celebrated our 46th anniversary—so we’ve been in a lot of different church contexts, partly because of moving and partly because of spiritual abuse situations.

So I started out with the Plymouth Brethren, who are a very small denomination. They would tell you they’re not a denomination, but they are.

And they had—they were the ones with a lot of banana bread baking or store-wearing ladies who really loved the Bible. And they taught me to take what I was reading very seriously—literally and seriously.

Also, I’ve spent time in various charismatic circles, Messianic Jewish congregations—and for those who may not be familiar with that, those are congregations that are full of Jewish followers of Jesus. Or they used to be—now there are many more Gentiles that attend most of them.

But they are meant to be more culturally friendly and honoring of Jewish heritage, tradition, teaching, rabbinic teaching—all of that that you wouldn’t find in a typical church. But they also preached Jesus.

So I spent time there, and in all of those—great big church, great big megachurch—I logged some time there and lots of places in between.

So if I was to summarize it, it is that I’m still that kind of spiritually hungry pilgrim. But that pilgrimage has led me mostly into some really challenging and difficult settings.

And I don’t think it’s just because of who I am. It’s because—it’s a report card snapshot on kind of where the church has gotten herself.

In so many—no matter what the stream is—there’s a lot of challenges out there for almost everybody.

Ann Maree:

Yes. Thank you for saying that.

I mean, I get that question often from both victim survivor groups and also any of the churches and leaders that I work with. You know, “Is this just endemic in X denomination?”

I’m like, “Oh no. No, it’s everywhere.”

I don’t remember where I heard this, but somebody said, “It’s the system, dummy.”

So wherever there’s a system and there’s a problem…

Michelle:

I agree. I agree.

It took a long time to see that—partly because of my own experience, with the help of some excellent counseling starting about 15 years ago, and my ongoing conversations with a very wise spiritual director.

I’ve been able to put some context into why I was particularly drawn to some of these high-control environments—because a lot of them were very high-control environments.

And given my own childhood family-of-origin pattern, there were things that were familiar and felt like they also held the promise of getting it right in ways that my childhood home—my experience with my parents—was terribly wrong.

Well, at the time when I was younger, it was just—I was longing for people to be what I imagined they were supposed to be from what I was reading in Scripture, alone in my room, hearing on the radio, and reading in books.

So I formed this picture out of both truth and my own longing that kind of positioned me to experience some very deep hurt.

But I’m still here to tell the story, and I’m grateful for that. That’s God’s kindness—that I’m even sitting here able to tell you the story rather than walking out the doors and never looking back.

Ann Maree:

Yeah. There’s more to deconstruction, if you will, than the black and white—“I’m either with God or I’m not.”

And I think we’re going to hear that a little bit now in your story too.

And so I know you’ve written—you’ve had many experiences of spiritual abuse in those variety of church experiences—but I’m asking today if you could just share, I don’t know, one or two or whatever you feel like, about some specific times and what that looked like, and help our audience even recognize what we’re talking about when we say spiritual abuse.

Michelle:

I will try to talk about two that happened several years apart—just when I thought that I was kind of immune from getting hurt again, I kind of got ambushed from the back.

But my first experience, and the one that kind of set my life on a very painful trajectory—my husband, myself, and our young family were attending a charismatic church. There was a lot of exciting stuff happening, and it was a very tight kind of group.

It was tight because it was high control, and its roots were in the Shepherding Movement. For those that aren’t familiar with that, it’s basically super high control—giving a lot of the autonomy and authority of your life over to leaders that you trust, and they get to tell you whether you are good or bad, making it or not. And you never really ever measure up.

But we were there, and there was so much that was life-giving about it in the beginning. We had a young family. There were lots of other young families. We helped each other move. We took care of each other’s kids—all of those wonderful things that are the mark of real connection.

But there was a dark thing that had been sitting in the leadership.

And I was writing—I was doing a lot of script writing, playwriting in those days. It was kind of the heyday of church skits in the 80s and 90s. I was also writing full-length plays for the educational market during those times.

And the leaders came to me and said, “We want to do something different for Good Friday. Would you write a contemporary script for us?”

And I felt like I need to write about a pastor who needs to repent. That’s just the summary.

And I was invited to sit down with the head pastor and the guy who was kind of his assistant and who was going to direct the play. That guy had read the script ahead of time, and he knew it might not land the way I thought it did.

Well, what ended up happening is I was there alone—my husband was home with the kids—because I thought, “I’m sure it’ll be fine. They like what I write.”

And the pastor screamed at me for nearly an hour.

Accused me of judging him. Accused me of bad motives, of not trusting him, of “Who do you think you are?” It was—he just… I didn’t see it coming.

No one protected me. The other guy just sat back with his arms folded and watched it happen.

And I was so blindsided because I trusted so much that afterward it was like—it was an assault. Spiritually, it was a terrible assault.

And I remember walking around talking to myself. I couldn’t sleep after that. Something was terribly wrong.

Well, then there was gossip about me, and exclusion. They eventually asked my husband and me to leave. We lost all our friends as we were trying to work through this.

And I kept thinking, “I don’t have anything to apologize for. I didn’t write this about him. I wrote this because it felt like it was appropriate to what they wanted to do on Good Friday.”

Well, it turns out—it took almost ten years and the pastor’s wife divorcing him—but the whole time he was in charge, he was unfaithful to his wife. He had a porn addiction. And all the elders on his team knew about it and covered for him.

So anytime anyone got too close, like I did, they ended up becoming an object of scorn—persecuted, challenged, abused, and pushed out of the fellowship because their motives were “questionable.”

It wasn’t until a decade later that all of his sin was finally exposed.

But meanwhile, my trust, my sense of myself, my sense of who my community was, was shattered.

And it was the 90s. So other than the book The Subtle Power of Spiritual Abuse—which you’re probably familiar with—that was it. There was like one book. That was the book.

I read the book and I was like, “I don’t know what to do with this. This terrible thing has happened.”

I want to follow Jesus. I have paid a high price in my own family, and I believe this is true, and I want to follow You.

And that determination—stubbornness, stupidity maybe—kept me hanging on.

But I was not well. I was deeply, deeply traumatized.

Because I’m condensing a very, very terrible year afterward—and really a terrible few years before that. I just didn’t realize how toxic the environment was until it had blown up in my face.

So that was my first experience with spiritual abuse.

I wish there were networks. I wish there was an internet. I wish there were people to be able to tell me, “It’s not just you. You’re not crazy.”

And that the grief and the disorientation and the loss of innocence and the rage directed at me—this is what bad people who use bad power badly… this is what it looks like.

So I kept patching myself together with the help of some good friends, praying friends. And we kept marching. We had kids to raise. We wanted it to be okay for them.

So fast forward a bunch of years—probably, I don’t know, 15 or so years later—I ended up on staff at a church that was kind of a hybrid of a megachurch model and charismatic at the same time.

It was a weird combination.

But again, it was a lively place that had a deeply committed family culture—people taking care of each other. That was really appealing to me. It felt like a safer place.

And then I realized, in that environment, it wasn’t directed at me—but the environment was very toxic.

Because everyone who was in power in their church was related to each other.

So nepotism—when they’re having church board meetings over Thanksgiving dinner—it’s really hard for an outsider.

And it’s not healthy. As ideal as it is to work with your family and be in ministry together, the dynamics are usually very toxic.

It warps the culture so that it’s a family more than a church.

And so anybody who’s an outsider and ends up getting caught in the crosshairs of whatever the internal family dynamics are—they get hurt.

And a lot of us, especially if we’ve been in smaller churches, have probably experienced it.

Sometimes it can’t be helped—you have the pastor, his wife playing piano, a son leading youth group. But those dynamics are not usually conducive to a healthy culture in most churches.

Sometimes it can work—but I’ve talked to enough people about their church hurt over the last decades to know, for every one that works, there are probably fifteen that leave pain in their wake.

Ann Maree:

Wow. Yeah.

I always feel the weight when somebody tells me their story like that. I feel the burden with them—deep sighs.

I really appreciated that you just gave us two examples, two stories.

Because the first one—it was obvious, right? You have a leader yelling at you. There’s something wrong with that.

And yet the other one—it was happening like an undercurrent. Very subversive, but it created the culture whether you knew it or not.

And so you did—and I would guess it’s because you were on staff and closer to the fire, if you will.

Whereas probably the person sitting in the pew didn’t have any idea they were sitting in something toxic.

But yeah—there is more than one kind of picture to draw with spiritual abuse.

If I can, I would like to dig into some of the things I’ve heard you say—read in your books or in our conversations.

You have such a way with words—like just one word—and it fits perfectly.

One of the ones that we appreciate around here is “refugee.”

But you’ll have to figure out who Michelle is and read her books to know that.

So I know spiritual abuse is devastating. I’m not going to neglect to recognize that.

You even articulated—you walked away with post-traumatic stress, with good reason.

But then you also use a term like “pruning.”

So fill that in for us, if you will.

Michelle:

All right.

Well, in the ways that I’ve used that term in writing is—I’m reflecting because of my own experience.

That first experience that happened in the 90s—I spent the last couple, three decades walking alongside other people who have been through terrible church experiences.

If for no other reason—I’m not a counselor, I’m a writer and an observer, and I am full of questions. Always full of questions.

And the questions and the curiosity actually serve to create an environment that welcomes the stories of others. Because it looks like empathy when you’re asking, “Can you tell me more about that?” And “That’s really hard—then what did you do?”

Even things like that—to cultivate a place, a way to be a true spiritual friend for somebody who has been walloped and clobbered—is important.

Pruning, I think—because these cultures of abuse of power happen in so many streams—the minute institutions get created, whether it is a single non-denominational church that meets in a gym somewhere, or whether it’s a multi-state, multi-site megachurch, or whether it’s a denomination.

Power has its own personality.

And I think that many of us are seeing—many of us church refugees, people that are struggling—maybe even you’re still in a church, but every Sunday you’re eyeing the exit door, or you’re standing on the other side of the exit door.

The reality is that if you’ve been in that place of leaving or being left behind, being asked to leave—you are kind of the tip of the iceberg for, I believe, the pruning that has to come.

There’s so much unhealth.

And so those of us that have been in these circles—dealing with hurting and abused people, like you have, Ann Maree—to dignify the fact that it’s not these people who’ve been hurt that are the pruned ones.

But they are the living kind of fruit of what is being cut away from so many institutions with bad leaders and bad enablers that just keep hurting people.

Ann Maree:

I’m sorry—I’m writing down every word I possibly can.

It makes tears come to my eyes to think of it that way.

I’ve heard from others—they speak of shining a light in a dark space. And I appreciate that.

But I have a hard time believing myself as a light.

But what you’re saying—when you use the word “cut,” cut away in that pruning—that’s what it feels like.

And boy, does that explain the difficulty of how long it takes.

Michelle:

So long. Yeah.

And if I had wisdom to say to my 30-something self who got screamed at—and then went through a hellish year afterward from their pastor—someone said to me, “Why didn’t you just stand up and walk out?”

The person I was then believed that this pastor was for me, and he was doing what was best for me, and I needed to trust him.

Because this was the one way that I could express my trust in God.

This was all part and parcel of the same thing.

Michelle today would have stood up and walked out within three minutes and said, “We’ll have this conversation later—and we need a moderator.”

And that’s it—we’re done.

This is not about me. This is about something bigger.

So to be able to recognize and affirm that whatever happened—this is the rest of your life.

You don’t get to go back.

There is no making you the person you were before the abuse.

It also doesn’t honor the process that God is at work in you to help you discard the garbage and help you be more authentically the person that He loves and made you to be.

So yeah—no going back.

You don’t get to go away.

And I don’t want to be that innocent person.

I loved the way it felt, in a sense—yes.

It was so fun to have things be simpler and not have my guard up all the time, my trust “BS detector” on all the time.

But that innocence was naivety.

It wasn’t childlike innocence.

I get that now.

Ann Maree:

Yeah. Thank you.

Thank you for your wisdom.

So that leads then, I think, into this question—which I still don’t have the answer for myself.

But can you please speak to the grieving and the loss?

I mean, if you’ve been in that pruning and you’re walking away with that cut—we need to recognize, but also encourage, the grieving and the grief and the loss.

Because otherwise it just gets stuck inside your body.

Michelle:

It absolutely does.

Right around the year 2000, my family and I were foster parents.

I’m answering your question with a story because I’m Jewish—and this is what we do.

But we’re all made of stories. So it’s not just a Jewish thing—it’s a people thing.

Back then, I remember looking at—we had fostered babies—but I was always looking at the older kids that were in the system.

And I remember saying to a social worker, “Every single kid in this book of waiting children—pages and pages—every single one of these kids, with the exception of a couple, all have an ADHD diagnosis. Every single one.”

And she said, “Michelle, it’s hard for grief to hit a moving target.”

And I was like—Selah. Mic drop.

Think about it.

And it applies to lots of things.

You’re right—it does not go away. It resides in our body.

So these little ones that are very busy and distracted—because they’ve suffered terrible trauma and loss—if they’re in the system, loss is their reality.

And that truth applies in lots of different ways in our lives.

And I got very busy after my first experience of spiritual abuse—which is perhaps why I ended up on staff at that church eventually.

I was an excellent server.

I had a skill set that was helpful in churches. I was good with communications and strategy and creating worship experiences for people and bringing teams together.

All of those things—they’re wonderful skills.

And I could be very busy and kind of tamp down the grief.

It wasn’t until after that second really cataclysmic experience in my life that I ended up in counseling.

And I thought I was there because I was grieving the death of my mom—which was partially true.

But I was also grieving a lot of this church hurt that I had never named or made space for.

Ann Maree:

Yes. So important to do that.

I think when someone dies, we have a lot more patience with our loved ones and our friends in allowing them that grieving time—and even encouraging it.

But when it comes to something like a toxic church community—people don’t always recognize that grief.

Instead it’s, “Why didn’t you just…” or “Why don’t you just…” or “You need to forgive them.”

Michelle:

And let’s whip out some Matthew 18 out of context while we’re at it.

It does not honor the deep loss that happened.

I am so grateful every time I see people working to become trauma-informed in churches—who are recognizing and naming spiritual abuse.

There is a part of me that just rejoices.

Because this is hard.

I can look back at something that happened a long time ago, and it’s still there. It didn’t go away.

And it’s not because I haven’t forgiven.

Forgiveness is not the question.

So much was stolen from me—from my kids, from my husband.

We lost community. We lost friends. We lost a sense of security and identity.

We lost our understanding of what we could trust about what a church leader would say.

So much.

Not small things at all.

Ann Maree:

No.

Ann Maree:

I think this is something that I hear about daily.

So I’m in the work of hearing from victims and survivors, but also there are victims and survivors on our staff and on our board—and my own story.

And it’s that mediating—how to even process those betrayals of the people who say those things and believe those things with all of their hearts, and believe how wrong you are.

And so I have no answer to this question—and maybe you do—but what do you do with that?

Michelle:

I realize one of the habits of trauma is that you keep replaying conversations, events, interactions with different people—you keep replaying them over and over and over again, looking for a different outcome.

And that is also a sign of—if there is an invitation to bring in some outside voices in your life—it’s that stuckness.

That is the only way to begin to find a way through.

Because replaying it over and over again on the hamster wheel in your head will never get you off the hamster wheel.

And it has a lot of other negative effects.

But there is no making sense of it this side of heaven. There really isn’t.

When you see people flourish and succeed—even though they are doing terrible things to people and getting away with it for years or even decades—it’s kind of like the cries of the psalmist.

There are a whole lot of them throughout the Psalms:

“Where is the justice?”
 “Where are You, God?”

That language is the only thing that makes sense.

And there is no “and then God said, ‘I’m here,’ and they all lived happily ever after.”

It doesn’t work that way.

The longing for justice—which we are sometimes afraid to tap into because it feels like anger and a live wire—that longing for justice is a sacred thing.

And a biblical thing to ask for and hope for and pray for.

Ann Maree:

Yeah.

Well, my friend, you are possibly not a counselor, but you certainly have a lot of counseling wisdom—maybe it’s from being counseled.

But yeah—thank you for sharing some very touchy, difficult things.

I don’t want to ever make this sound like a 70s series on TV—like we’re going to wrap it up and all’s good.

But I do hope—and I ask my storytellers—if they could share anything about whether they saw God’s redemptive work throughout their circumstances.

Maybe you didn’t—and that’s okay to hear too.

I’m just going to leave it open for you to answer.

Michelle:

There’s nothing that can repair what’s happened.

And even—I don’t know—maybe four or five years ago, the man that sat at that table in the 90s and watched the senior pastor scream at me for an hour and did nothing…

He reached out to me.

He had seen something I wrote online about this story—just referenced it—and he realized I was talking about that terrible night.

At the time, he had been full of excuses about why he didn’t do anything.

My husband had gone to him back then and asked, “Why didn’t you stop this pastor?”

And he came back years later and said he had left the church after many years because of something terrible that happened to him.

Because it was a very unhealthy group.

And he said, “Now I understand. And I’m so sorry for what happened to you. And I’m sorry for my part in it.”

And that moment—it was a nice moment.

There was nothing—I have nothing to forgive. I’ve been forgiving you all along. Working on that—it’s a process.

There’s a reason that it’s a math problem—seventy times seven.

It’s not a solution. It’s an ongoing process.

But did I feel different? Did the years that the locusts had eaten get restored to me in that?

No.

I’m grateful for his sake that he recognized it.

And I’m sorry that he has gone through his own kind of suffering.

But the comfort that God has given me is what I hope to be able to give to others—in the form of empathy and curiosity.

That’s what I have.

Ann Maree:

Right. But it’s a capital-A “All.”

Because you’re giving it to me right now.

You’re giving it to our audience too.

Thank you.

Okay, again—just because of conversations we’ve had, things I’ve read that you’ve written—this question arises from that.

But I think—and I hope—that there’s a movement happening right now.

Earlier we were talking about pruning.

I don’t have evidence of that—I just feel like it’s an undercurrent toward change in the church.

Mainly because of the many things we’re talking about today that others are discussing on other podcasts and writing about.

But you have a vision, I think, for that future.

And I was hoping maybe you could paint that picture for us.

Michelle:

I’m not a counselor, and I’m not a prophet either—so those things are way above my pay grade.

But I am a student of church history.

And the church has gotten herself into some very toxic territory before—and needed reformation.

I think we’re at the end of a cycle for lots of reasons.

Culturally, technologically—there’s a lot that has brought us to this point where change is coming.

And I believe the church is in a period, in the West certainly, of downsizing.

Even as we see numbers growing—people flocking to rallies, stadiums—you can draw a crowd.

It’s easy to get a crowd together.

Being a church is a whole different conversation.

And my hope—especially for all of those who have felt like they’ve been cut away from an institution or an organization—they are the ones carrying the life of Jesus.

That is part of what will build the future—not an institution.

Some of these institutions just need to die.

They’re so unhealthy.

Some have a history of covering abuse systemically.

Why would we want to perpetuate that?

Will it happen in my lifetime or yours, Ann Maree?

No.

But we are a bridge to that.

If we can recognize that what is being downsized in our lives is all the stuff that didn’t matter anyway.

Ann Maree:

Which brings us full circle back to what it looked like to be evangelical in the unwritten rules.

Michelle:

Exactly.

Ann Maree:

I think that was the most hopeful thing I read in your work.

And no, it probably won’t happen in our lifetime.

If we think about the prophets in Scripture—what did they see?

Hebrews 11—they saw from afar.

And so might we.

And that’s okay.

I did want to circle back and just mention—someone last season talked about forgiveness beautifully.

One thing she brought up was how the ultimate justice we long for is to see someone come back and say, “I did wrong. Please forgive me.”

So I’m grateful you had that.

But it didn’t undo the damage.

Michelle:

Right. And not everybody will have that.

And then you still have to do the work of grieving—over and over.

Ann Maree:

So much richness to everything you’ve shared.

Thank you for telling us your story.

Michelle:

I’m on holy ground here—with you and with your audience.

You guys—you’re my people.

Ann Maree:

Yes. And you’re mine.

Michelle:

I do feel that connection—back to the word refugee.

Even though there are many camps, I feel the connection between them.

Much love to you, friend.

And gratitude for having me here.

It has been like being on holy ground.