Let’s Review the Timeline…
January 11th… Pastor Invites his friends to Tree Town.
February 1st… Pastor Invites them Again
February 6th… She’s Not Qualified
February 12th… She’s as Good as Hired
February 17th… 2-Hour Phone Call
February 18th… Personnel Committee offers her the job.
February 29th… She Comes to Wild Game Supper
March 1st…She comes in view of a call.
March 2nd… received a request for my keys, and my email is turned off.
March 8th…my family and I hosted a baby shower at our house and didn’t go to church.
March 9th… text message from the pastor saying he missed us
March 11th… lunch with the pastor’s wife
March 13th… dinner with friends
March 15th… the new Children’s Minister’s first official day on the job… I didn’t think it would be fair for me to have been absent for 3 ½ months and then return on her first day. So we all decided to stay home. But, not going to lie; my family was still a little angry about how things went down the day she was hired.
I want to mention some things that happened in March 2020 that are significant to the following parts of this story.
After the church decided to hire this new girl, things started happening very quickly. On March 2nd, they shut down my email without any notice and sent me a text requesting that I turn in all of my church keys. I expected to lose my email, but I was shocked by how they didn’t give me any time to get things switched over. I quickly sent an email requesting that they please turn my church email back on for a few minutes so I could get important things changed over. As for the keys, we had those before I had the job, like several years before. I didn’t mind turning them in, but the way it all happened was strange. I knew by the time of day the email was turned off and the text message came for the keys that it was all done immediately after the staff meeting ended. The youth pastor had been told to turn my email off, and the secretary had been told to ask for my keys. They were moving out the old to make room for the new… and it made sense. But the way the whole thing had gone down made it even harder. Knowing how she was hired, her lack of qualifications, and how he lied…
On the surface, it wasn’t a big deal, but it was abrupt, and it felt weird.
Of course, the pastor’s return email blamed it all on the youth pastor and secretary. He said it wasn’t meant to appear that way at all. I told him that the message was clear regardless of how it was intended to look. I was out, like all the way out… The email, no big deal, the keys, I didn’t get that part at all. If I was to remain active in the church’s ministry, why did my keys need to be turned in? Several church members who weren’t staff members had keys to the church.
It was all so strange, so final. It didn’t feel like I was just quitting the job; it felt like I was losing my church and like I was being punished. And I know I overreacted to it. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise, but I clearly stated that I was only quitting the job, not the church, and this felt like a different level.
Also, if the pastor was the friend he said he was, how in the world did he not call me instead of just emailing me when I told him what had happened that morning and how it made me feel? It was a clear message that the new girl was there; I was out, and by quitting, I had forfeited any rights I ever had, and it hurt.
Amid all that was happening that day, my friend called. This friend is the real deal. She has been with me through thick and thin. But, through everything that had happened, I hadn’t shared anything that had been going on in the church with her. I knew how she felt about the pastor; I knew that she was struggling long before I ever saw any red flags.
I knew it was important that her family be able to come to church and worship without knowing any of the things he had done to me. So, I never told her until that day. She called right after I finished emailing the pastor and youth pastor, asking them to please turn my email back on for just a little while. She asked me what I was doing that day, and the dam broke. I started sobbing. I remember sitting in my closet, talking to her on the phone. I began to tell her everything that happened in 2019, and she was blown away. She couldn’t believe all that had happened. I remember just vomiting words. It was like cleansing myself and finally sharing my burden with someone I trusted outside my family. She validated my feelings and helped me realize that none of this was normal for a business, much less a church. It was the first time in months that I realized all the things that happened were really as bad as I felt like they were.
She didn’t preach to me. She just listened.
When I was done, she began to tell me all the things she had seen. She said she felt like the pastor had been awkward toward them from the beginning, that every conversation with him seemed forced. She said it was apparent that he catered to the wealthier members. She was very aware that he had a circle of people around him. She was even aware that I had been in that group of people, and because of that, she had also been careful about things she said to me. She said it was obvious that he only cared about those in that circle, and those outside it weren’t treated the same.
She told me a story about when her husband was in the hospital, and the pastor stopped by. She said that he was standoffish when she needed a pastor the most and didn’t even offer to pray for them. The pastor was just there because it was his duty and her husband felt it too. He was also an excellent judge of character and wasn’t impressed with the pastor. I look back on this and wonder how I could’ve been so blinded by things. How did I not see it sooner? Why had I protected him?
My friend was extremely upset that the Fall Fest had been canceled the previous year. This was an event that she loved. It was one that she had been involved with from its beginning. She joined the ministry team when the previous pastor implemented teams instead of committees. She loved reaching out to the community with no strings attached. She felt very deeply about it, and it was a way she loved to serve. So, when I told her that the Fall Fest was canceled because it didn’t gain the church enough members, she knew in her heart that this pastor had much deeper issues than she first thought. It gave her the clarity she needed to see that he was all she thought he was… worried about money, having the right people around him, making sure the church grew in number… all the things she knew the church and pastor shouldn’t be.
She also had misgivings about how the music minister was fired from day one. She had called to check on them and stayed in touch even after it happened. She had mentioned this to me previously, and I argued that what was done was fine. It was how it should have been handled. She couldn’t understand how I couldn’t see it.
She was troubled by the direction the pastor was taking the church. She wasn’t completely surprised by everything I told her because she had questioned the pastor’s character from the beginning. She was shocked by some of them, though… especially the salvation/baptism goal. I thought she might have a heart attack when I told her that one.
And lastly, she knew the hiring of the new children’s minister was shady. She also saw this from the very first weekend she arrived on the scene, and I never said a word to her about it. When I told her the details of the phone conversation with the children’s minister, the way the pastor had handled it, the Timothy followed Paul statement, all the things… she was floored.
When our conversation was over, I felt like a weight had been lifted…
To hear her say all of this, to know that she saw what was happening so early on… It showed me some things.
1) I wasn’t crazy
2) We had been protecting one another’s feelings… we didn’t agree on things about the pastor for a very long time, but it didn’t hinder our friendship.
3) She could see things much clearer than I could, and she had seen them quickly. I had been working under a leader I felt the need to protect, a boss I needed to impress, and a pastor to whom I needed to be a friend. She had been right from the start, and I was just able to see it.
4) This was what real friendship looked like.
She and I have a mutual friend who is very wise. She asked if I had told this other friend anything about what was happening. When I told her no, she said we both needed to sit down with her to get some advice about what we should do next. We needed to meet her somewhere for dinner, outside of Tree Town.
We made plans to go out Friday, March 13th.
My family hosted a baby shower on Sunday, March 8th, giving us the perfect excuse to stay home from church. Unfortunately, I had no desire to return.
I received a text from the pastor on March 9th saying he missed us.
We chatted back and forth about how we hadn’t seen each other in quite some time. Since it seemed evident that the pastor wasn’t interested in having an in-person meeting, I addressed the issues through text messages that night. I confessed that I was struggling with how things were handled with the hiring of the new Children’s Minister. I was candid with him and told him we were struggling. Maybe I was too honest? And let me be completely clear, he apologized. He said he was sorry that his decisions and leadership had caused me to struggle. It was kind, it seemed sincere, and as I was responding, he sent a quick follow-up text that he had an EGD that day and found out that he had stomach ulcers and made a joke that the church had caused them. It was weird. The quick changing of the subject immediately downplayed all of the last serious parts of the conversation. What I wanted was an actual sit-down conversation about this. I wanted to be able to see his face when I asked him things, to be able to show and read emotion. I didn’t want to do this over text message or email. His big thing when I worked there was never to have serious conversations over text messages because you can’t read emotion. If we had an issue with anyone in the church, we were required to call or visit them. We weren’t allowed to do it over text. Maybe admitting that we were confused and concerned about how this hiring went down caused him to think we were no longer loyal to him. He had been mostly silent for so long, and it felt like he was doing recon work. It was as if he had waited until this girl was hired to speak to us again. We were no longer a threat now that his plan had worked. I don’t know what was going on in his mind, but I do know that things between us were never the same.
It felt like he was sending in the troops when I received a text message from the pastor’s wife asking me to go to lunch with her on the 11th.
She was such a sweet lady. She texted me shortly after the exchange between me and the pastor earlier that week. When she asked me to go, I was extremely hesitant. So much so that I contacted my counselor for advice. My hesitancy was that I couldn’t see that anything good could come from me saying negative things about her husband. I didn’t want to do that. After talking to my husband and counselor, we decided that she had never been anything but a good friend to me. Lunch was something friends did… so I would go to lunch, but I would not mention anything about the pastor, and I would stay away from church topics as much as possible.
We had a good lunch. We had a good conversation. It felt a little strained, but not too bad. She didn’t bring up the church until the very end, when she told me that she missed us and hoped we would return soon. I promised her I would come back on March 22nd, and she asked me to please come back that Sunday, the 15th. I knew in my heart that I couldn’t keep that promise.
I always wondered if the pastor asked her to go to lunch to see if she could figure out what was going on with us.
When I started this blog, I knew that the things I said would be hurtful for her to hear if she ever found out. I knew she would feel betrayed. I think that’s one thing that kept me quiet for so long. I genuinely never wanted her to be hurt.
When March 13th rolled around, my friend made good on her promise to take me to dinner. We did indeed meet the wise friend that night as well. The three of us now joke that we shut the world down that night. After all, it was Friday the 13th, and that very weekend we began our two weeks to slow the Covid curve.
When I began to tell the wise friend everything that happened, she was also blown away. She had some experience with church issues, but many of the things I told her she had never even heard of, much less experienced. She couldn’t believe that we had a “goal” of baptisms to reach; she was floored when I told her that he pulled my tithing record, and she was amazed when I told her about the hiring of the music minister and the new children’s minister as well as the way the pastor had treated the secretary. She had spoken to the former music minister and already knew portions of that story.
She said in all her years in churches; she had never seen a pastor do these kinds of things or at least not do them and get away with it. This wasn’t ok, and it was time for me to address the issues.
She said all the things I needed to hear. So when I left that night, I knew what I had experienced at Tree Town Baptist wasn’t normal, wasn’t even close to ok, and was the toxic place I had come to realize it was.
Then came Sunday morning, March 15th, 2020. The day of the Children’s Musical. The first official day for the new children’s minister, and I couldn’t go. I just couldn’t make myself do it. There were too many emotions surrounding it.
I had been absent from the church since December 29th, 2019. I hadn’t stepped foot in the sanctuary for service since that day. I could not bring myself to walk into that church to celebrate this new person coming in, this person who I knew had been hand-picked by the pastor, this person who I knew worshipped him, whose husband was the pastor’s new built-in best friend… knowing she was not qualified, knowing the pastor doctored her questionnaire to help her get hired, knowing that he didn’t offer the job to anyone in Tree Town that might have been actually qualified to take it, knowing that she used my name to help her gain the approval of the congregation… I couldn’t go celebrate this. I couldn’t… My face betrays me and shows my emotions even if my words do not… so we stayed home that day as a family and watched the church we loved so much online.
The world would literally close the very next day.
Covid was a terrible thing, but in many ways, for me, it was a gift.
I hate to even say that because I know how many people have been hurt by Covid. My family has experienced a significant loss of friends and family through the virus. I want to be sure that I’m clear that I don’t mean that the virus itself was a gift, but the fact that the world stopped at that time was a gift to me.
If it had not been for Covid, I would have felt like I had to return to Tree Town. I had obligations to fulfill. I had camps to chaperone, mission trips to go on… My three-month sabbatical was over and done. It was time to put up or shut up. Decisions had to be made quickly.
I think I’ve talked about this before, but during this time, before Covid, my husband and I decided that we would return to Tree Town Baptist for my daughter’s last three years of high school. We didn’t want to take those experiences away from her. So, we decided to chaperone the camps and go on the mission trip that summer, but after that, we would become casual members. We would help with the church plant my parent’s pastor wanted us to and attend Tree Town when we weren’t there. We couldn’t buy into the things that were going on any longer. We had seen the truth, but we didn’t want our daughter to have to change churches. So, that was the plan.
But, Covid… and when the church could no longer meet in person, things began to change.
The Sunday that Tree Town Baptist had its first online-only service, we got up as a family, dressed, and gathered in the living room. What should we do? We could watch the service we preferred from the church in the city, or we could watch Tree Town… so, I pulled up the Tree Town service on my phone, muted it, and set it to the side… we streamed the service from the church in the city that we preferred over the television and speakers in the living room. My phone continued to be logged in to the Tree Town service, so to all those watching, it would appear that we were present in Tree Town Baptist’s service, but we were not.
My husband was still a Sunday school teacher and continued to teach via Zoom when the classes were moved online. So I attended occasionally, but not much.
I was struggling in a big way. I didn’t want to go back. And because of Covid, I didn’t have to.
After that text message on March 9th, we didn’t hear from the pastor again until April 10th.
By this time, the permanent part-time music minister had resigned. I don’t know the story behind his resignation. However, his tenure at Tree Town Baptist was very brief. He was officially hired in September 2019 and was gone by April 2020.
The pastor came to Tree Town in January 2018. In two years, the secretary resigned. The one he hired he didn’t like. He fired the music minister and failed to hire a new one for several months. Finally, he hired a permanent part-time music minister to make things look better, and I resigned. A few months later, the permanent part-time music minister resigned as well.
Maybe I wasn’t the only one who thought this man was hard to work for.
Until Next Time,
Whitney