I was abused. I need to put it out there, in hopes that this kind of behavior will be stopped. I was abused on multiple occasions by several different pastors/staff in my 25 years of church ministry. Thankfully there was no sexual abuse, but the psychological and emotional abuse that I experienced has massively injured and affected both my emotional/spiritual and physical health. In the past couple of years of therapy, I have realized that I have to deal with these experiences, and part of that is confronting truths that most people do not want to hear. Most church going people do not want to hear that the men in charge of their church can often be abusive. Saying this out loud is a huge risk, as people in church are inclined to believe the pastor before anyone else, especially if it is news that casts the staff/or the church in a bad light. Most church abuse victims are scared to say anything, as they do not want to "damage the ministry" of the church or make it look like they are seeking attention for themselves. This silence is what enables these leaders to continue their abuse unchecked.
There had been some rough times and learning experiences in our first couple of churches, but the third... Parkland Baptist, in Clovis, NM, was where I experienced pastoral abuse for the first time. The pastor there had massive mood swings. He could go from the most friendly and pleasant person to hateful, verbally abusive, and mean in just a few seconds. I endured countless meetings with him like this alone, as he insulted/verbally me. I also endured a full staff meeting where he railed against me and my "lack of integrity" in front of the whole staff for an hour. All because I went to spend time with a church family during their daughter's early morning surgery instead of being at the office at 8:00 AM sharp. After going through this for several months, I decided I could not work there any longer. When I told the chairman of the personnel team that I needed to meet with the team without the pastor, he took all of the information that I had disclosed to him in confidence and passed it along to the pastor. When I arrived at the meeting, the air was quite tense in the room. I looked at faces that I had believed to be friends, allies, and youth workers, and saw nothing but disdain. I gave notice that I would be leaving at the end of the month. It was then that the same chairman revealed that he had revealed everything to the pastor, and that the pastor had told them to fire me on the spot if I didn't resign that night. I was told to leave the property and that I could come under police observation the next day to collect my things. I was devastated. Even with the insane treatment I had endured, God had been moving in the youth ministry, and it was flourishing. To see this man put his control of things above the people we served just didn't make sense to me. We were given one paycheck and then our income and insurance were cut off. Amy and I were left reeling from that, as the pastor and other staff members got up in front of the students and parents the next night and told them all that I had chosen to "abandon them," and then proceeded to lead a Bible study on how to deal with abandonment.
Fast forward a couple of years, and we were asked to serve at Hillcrest Baptist in Austin, TX. From day one, the pastor there was controlling, manipulative, and abusive. When I interviewed there, I shared our experience at Parkland, and asked many probing questions about his leadership style, as we surely did not want a repeat of that. He assured me that he was not like that, but I soon found untrue. He required us to live in close proximity to the church, or our pay would be cut by thousands of dollars. The church was in a very expensive area, and we could not find a place to live as close as he wanted. In the end, we were forced to live in a house that we could not afford, just to be able to get the full amount of pay that was required to live in such an expensive city. What made that even more insane, was that neither the pastor or the other staff members had restrictions on where they lived. It turned out that this pastor was very similar to the pastor we had at Parkland. It was his way or the highway, even though he had never done youth ministry. His disdain for the things we did that were not his idea was evident, both in private and in staff meetings. He often used the financial director/music pastor (long term employee there) to coerce us into doing/not doing things by manipulating money, consent, etc. to guilt me into doing things a certain way. He also liked to change job descriptions, add time consuming tasks to my weekly workload, and then scoff at my request for a raise in pay to cover the extra hours of work I was doing each week. It was relentless, week after week. Then, after five years of service, he made the unilateral decision to make my job a "part-time" position, and then did not offer me the job. He manipulated and lied to the church about the upcoming year's budget to cut my salary without formally announcing it as such. He then stood in front of the church members in the business meeting about the budget and once again lied and said we had interviewed with a church in another country and were pursuing that, which he felt gave him the right to cut my job. We then had to find another job very quickly, as once again we were only afforded a minimum amount of pay/insurance after we "left" that position.
Thankfully, we landed in a church in Carlsbad, NM and were able to heal a bit, and make some good friends. We had a wonderful pastor there, who just loved on us. We needed that. While it was not perfect, there was not the same level of pastoral staff abuse we had seen in previous churches. What I did encounter came from a couple of other staff members that were quite territorial and also very manipulative. They would smile and act one way when face to face, and then have conversations with committee members/members in the church to undermine things we were doing in ministry that they did not like. It got even worse when our pastor took a long break, and then decided to retire. One of those staff members even called another church that I had applied with a couple years after I left Carlsbad to let them know that they thought they should not hire me at their church. Just wow.
Our last stop, was at Summer Grove Baptist Church in Shreveport, LA. One of my closest friends (at least so I thought) had recently become the pastor there, and called me to see if I was interested in being their youth/young adult pastor. With the situation becoming worse by the day in Carlsbad, and after a lot of prayer, we decided to proceed with the interview process. We flew out, had great interviews, and loved the people there. The only problematic character there was their executive pastor. He had no church experience prior to this job, and had only been on staff there a few months when we interviewed. I knew from the first time I met him, and the first call I had with him during the process that he was cut from the same cloth as many of the problematic pastors we had previously worked with. During that initial meeting after our interview, he proceeded to pull my entire credit history (without my consent) and wanted to know about everything on it. Throughout the entire hiring process, he did his dead level best to make things difficult, wanting us to have to rely on him for some reason. He also made it very plain that he did not like the fact that the pastor and I were such close friends, much closer than he and the pastor were. In fact, after being hired, the pastor would often call me to go have a meeting over coffee, but would ask me to sneak out the back and meet him at the car, so the exec pastor did not see us and get jealous. This exec pastor liked to remind people all the time that he was "more than the money man" and that was "just as much a pastor as any of the rest of us." His obvious insecurity fed his bad behavior.
We were at Summer Grove for 18 months during all of the Covid stuff in 2020-21. Ministry was going well, our ministries were growing, but so was this exec pastor's desire for control. Once a couple of people were no longer on the personnel committee at church, he ramped up his efforts to control everything from the money, to what songs were picked for worship, how money was spent on anything, and adding young staff members that he could manipulate/control. The employees (some who had been with the church for years) that did not bow to his wishes found themselves faced with changes in their work schedule (increased hours), harsh scrutiny, and verbal bashing to other staff/church members. This went on until both staff members (who were both amazing employees and friends) found other jobs and moved on. Covid and it's crazy rules only seemed to feed his narcissistic ways. Each week, he would provide us all with a new copy of the "employee handbook" that outlined how the staff should operate. Each new edition would give him more power, more oversight, and more control over different parts of the church as a whole. Sadly, our pastor would not stand up to him, and allowed this to continue unchecked.
One day, I was in an online meeting with other youth pastors when I was ordered by the pastor's secretary into a meeting in his office. I had no idea what could be so important that it could not wait, but I signed off of the meeting and went to the pastor's office. I walked into the meeting room to see the pastor, the exec pastor, and the education pastor sitting on one side of the table, and I was asked to sit on the other. As I sat down, the tension in the room was palpable. My friend, the pastor, then began that they needed to ask me to resign. I was floored! I asked them what in the world would cause that kind of a request, as I had not been made aware of any problems. They responded that they could not tell me, and would not tell me, but I had to resign on the spot. In fact the exec pastor had already pre-written a resignation letter for me, and wanted me to simply sign it! I sat absolutely stunned at what was happening. I looked at the pastor and asked him how he could let this happen without any kind of a meeting beforehand, and he simply said he couldn't do anything about it. I asked to speak to the personnel committee, to which the exec pastor replied, "They don't want to even speak to you!" Then, I was told that if I breathed a word of what went on, my family would get no severance and no insurance. I was forced to sign a Non-disclosure document in order to receive anything further from the church. After all of that, I was escorted by the exec pastor to my office where I was told to collect my bag and then marched out in front of the whole office to my car, stripped of my keys, and told to leave. Any further interaction with the church had to be done through the lawyer they had hired.
The most hurtful, and what left the deepest scars for our family, was what came next. The pastor and exec pastor had a meeting with the entire staff and informed them that they were not to talk to or associate with our family (my kids included), or they would also be fired. A couple of the staff reached out one time, and then were screamed at by these two pastors for daring to talk to the Clouds. Most of the staff never talked to us again. Our family was in another state, hundreds of miles from home, and our church staff and family completely cut us off. It was like we never existed. What made matters worse were the promises the pastor had made to my family, particularly my kids, about taking amazing care of us and never abusing us. He knew our past and wanted to assure them that Summer Grove would be there home for years. So many promises broken, but worse than that... so many negative and repeated forms of abuse which affected our entire family. In fact, nearly all of our family has been in therapy ever since.
Why am I talking in such detail about this? Because I believe that these patterns of abuse have become all too common in the modern church. I never would have dreamt that I would be treated for PTSD based on work in the church. These things need to be brought to the light and stopped. A position of leadership does NOT give one the right to abuse those working/attending church under your care. These men have done real damage to my family. They have also caused us to fear/not trust the church. If that has happened to staff members, how many others have been turned off from church because of this type of behavior? I posted the above video from Matt Redman, as he and his wife have recently confronted the abuse that they were exposed to in their ministry. Worth a watch.
Thank you for taking time to read this. We are no longer in church ministry. God has placed us in other jobs in education. Our family is slowly healing, but our prayer is that things will begin to change in the church. It has to.
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