We agreed that the pastor would come to our house at 6:00 on the evening of April 21, 2020.
It was an eventful evening. Our dogs stepped out onto the back porch before the pastor’s arrival. There just happened to be a poisonous snake right by our back door, and it bit our English Springer Spaniel on the nose. There was lots of screaming from me, and I was beside myself by the time my husband came to kill the snake.
After a call to the vet to get instructions on what we should do, we gave the poor dog three Benadryl and tucked him in on the couch to recuperate. The kids stayed inside with him when the pastor arrived.
I took a picture on my phone… a selfie to send to my friend. The real deal friend who I hid things from for so long. The one who sat and listened to me cry and told me I wasn’t crazy, that all the things I had endured were not even close to being ok.
She asked me if I was ready for the conversation. She told me to stay strong, tell the truth, and ask tough questions… I sent her a selfie of my game face to prove I was resolved to follow through.
The pastor showed up promptly at 6:00, and we took our seats on the back porch.
I was a nervous wreck.
My husband started the conversation.
He began by telling the pastor how much we loved him as a friend and a pastor. He told him that in no way did we want to just fire accusations at him or come across in an aggressive way. We just wanted to figure out how to get our friendship back on track. We both reiterated how much we missed his friendship. We also wanted some clarification on what had happened recently in the church.
My husband began to tell him how shocked we were by the way the hiring of the new children’s minister was handled. He said it was very hard for us to believe that it wasn’t planned from the beginning. He was kind but upfront about things that concerned us. My husband is a very calm, easy-going man. I’ve mentioned this before, and I mention it again because it’s important that anyone reading this understands that this wasn’t a hostile environment. We had tough questions to ask and hard things to discuss, but this was as laid back as we could make it. The goal was to figure out what had gone wrong and what we could do to make it right again. Forgiveness and reconciliation was the goal. This is how the Bible taught that things between believers should be handled.
My husband passed it over to me to explain to the pastor all the details of my phone conversation with the prospective children’s minister; the one the pastor asked me to have with her way back in February.
Until then, we had never told the pastor any details of that conversation. There hadn’t been an opportunity. Things had been tense between us since then, and conversations hadn’t come as easy with the pastor. This would be the first time he would hear this.
I told him what she said about him calling out of the blue in January to invite them to Tree Town.
He immediately said that he did not invite them. His answer was quick and defensive. They called and asked if they could come to visit Tree Town instead of him calling them. This was his version of the story.
But, this did not line up with what she told me on the phone. And she didn’t have any reason to not tell me the truth, she was just telling me what happened, and I took notes…
This was my first inkling that this conversation was going to include a whole lot of denying.
I told him about the Timothy followed Paul statement she had so taken ahold of. The statement that meant so much to her that she needed to repeat it to me… he answered that he was only joking; he didn’t mean it seriously. I told him that I didn’t think she took it as a joke but instead as a Biblical comparison used to convince her that it was ok to follow a man of God.
I asked him how the hiring had gone down. He assured me that the personnel committee hired her, not him.
Ok, that sounded good, and although it was “technically” accurate, it wasn’t true.
I asked him how many resumes he took to the personnel committee. His answer… only hers.
Only hers… he only took her “resume” to the committee…stop and think about that for a moment…
He spent the three previous hires training the personnel committee to take his recommendations for hiring.
He had even gone so far as to ask their permission to look for people on his own…
He wanted to step away from how things had previously been handled by the committee… to be given liberties… The pastor asked the committee to let him make more of the decisions and for them to approve those decisions.
Let’s review…
He chose the secretary…
Although the church handled the beginning of this hiring the same as they had for years, by asking for resumes, gathering them, etc., the rest of the hiring was handled by the pastor.
Ultimately, the pastor reviewed the resumes and chose the two he wanted to interview. After going back and forth on his decision, in the end, he decided who he wanted, only to regret that decision and then make life miserable for the one he chose.
He chose the youth pastor…
This time, the pastor never even asked for people to send resumes to the church. As far as I know, the job was never publicized. Instead, he just sought out who he wanted by taking recommendations from other pastors he knew.
He never brought anyone to the committee except for the one he chose… the committee never interviewed anyone else.
And you can say that technically the committee hired him, that wouldn’t be a lie, but the only thing they really did was go through the motions to approve the pastor’s choice.
He chose the permanent part-time music minister… and this time, he set his salary and job description; we have the email to prove that.
During this hire, the pastor’s involvement was even more than in the previous two. In fact, it was done entirely by him. And let’s not forget that his reason was that it would look good for him to hire someone the other churches in the association had never been able to hire. So it wasn’t based on this man’s ability. Furthermore, this man wasn’t even what the church was looking for as far as his age and worship style. The church wanted someone younger and more modern.
But this hire would be a bandaid. It would take some pressure off the pastor because the church was struggling to find anyone to even come in view of a call. The way the previous music minister had been fired from Tree Town Baptist was known by everyone around. When the pastor realized he might be able to hire this older gentleman, he thought this might be a quick-fix answer. Ultimately, he used this man just like everyone else. And this one was all his doing, from beginning to end.
That’s three people the “committee” hired before the new children’s minister… But since my husband was on the committee and witnessed the previous three hirings, I can assure you that all they really did was affirm the pastor’s choices, just as he asked them to. Because he was the pastor, he reiterated to the committee that he had to work with these people daily. Because of this, he wanted to have the final say.
So, if the only resume the pastor took to the committee was hers… do I even need to say it? I think you can probably figure this out.
Maybe it appeared to the church that the committee hired her.
It would be easy for those who didn’t know to believe that. They wouldn’t have any way to know how the pastor had groomed the committee since he came. They would think that things were just like they had always been. They wouldn’t know the committee was operating differently than it had in previous years. The congregation would never know that even though it might have technically been the committee who hired her, the truth was they just affirmed the pastor’s choice.
I told the pastor all of this on the back porch that night.
I told him that he had conditioned the committee to hire who he wanted. So if he only took this girl’s “resume” to the committee, then he’s the one who hired her. And let’s not forget that the pastor doctored her initial questionnaire to get her to the point of being hired. Had he left it alone, she probably wouldn’t have even been considered.
When I finished telling him all of that, he immediately went into how surely we knew he had prayed about this, that this was who he thought God wanted at Tree Town. He had sought God’s will, and this was the answer he received. He said that surely we would know he only wanted what God wanted.
Now, a better word for this would be gaslighting. Maybe we could even call it God gaslighting. When you take something so important as the will of God, and you twist it like this, it makes the person you are talking to unable to argue anymore.
I mean, he was the king of this.
Isn’t this precisely what he told me to tell everyone when I resigned? Weren’t his words that people couldn’t argue if I said it was God’s will and if I reiterated that I had prayed about it and knew the answer?
He was playing this same game with me, and I wasn’t buying it. It’s called playing the God card… how does someone argue with that… they don’t… and that’s why the pastor used it, and it’s also why the pastor told me to do the same thing when telling people why I resigned.
I asked the pastor if he had offered the job to anyone else. Did he consider that teachers in our area might have been interested if they had known that it would pay $40,000? His answer… no… they didn’t offer it to anyone else with this salary.
I asked him if he thought maybe someone in Tree Town might have wanted the job if they had known it would pay that well. He said that was a possibility, but he wasn’t really interested in hiring someone like that.
I asked him why he chose someone totally unqualified when we discussed that the ministry was ready for someone qualified. What happened to the idea that the job needed someone ministry called and seminary trained?
His answer… he looked me right in the eye. He told me I wasn’t qualified… the girl before me wasn’t qualified… and children’s ministry seemed like the perfect place for someone to get their feet wet in ministry… a good starting point.
I remember looking at him and telling him that was the most offensive thing he could say to me.
No, I wasn’t ministry-called or seminary trained, but I had worked with children my entire life. So I might not have the degree, but I had the life experience.
The girl before me had a teaching degree. She had also worked with kids.
So, saying neither of us was qualified was offensive, and I told him as much.
I reminded him of the many discussions about how far the ministry had come and how it was ready to go to the next level… the conversations we had immediately after my resignation.
But it was as if, in his mind, these conversations never occurred.
The children’s ministry at Tree Town Baptist was important. Every children’s ministry is.
I have repeatedly said that children aren’t only the future of the church, as many people like to say. These kids are the church of right now. Children are gifted. Gifted in ways adults are not. These children are important. So important that I think they deserve the very best.
A pastor once told me that he thought the importance of the children’s ministry was a top priority. He believed the church should hire a good pastor and, after that, the best children’s minister they could afford. After that, youth and music… Because… if you don’t serve your children well, if you don’t teach them, lead them to Jesus, help them grow in their walk with Christ… if you lose them as children, you, in turn, don’t have youth, or even adults in your church as the years pass.
The children are important! They don’t deserve to be treated like the lowest on the totem pole. Their ministry isn’t a place for people to learn. It’s a place for the best.
I wasn’t that… I will admit that, and I’m not trying to say that I was.
I loved what I did, I felt called to it for the time I was there, but I knew that the church needed someone who could take things to the next level, and that wasn’t me.
To say children’s ministry was a good beginner position or perfect for someone that was simply a blank slate is the same as saying the ministry wasn’t as important as the other ones in the church.
The pastor would never hire an unqualified youth pastor. Imagine what the church would say if he brought someone to them who had never even taught a youth Sunday school class, who had never worked with youth whatsoever, but he liked the town, and he wanted to work with a pastor who he thought was the most wonderful man alive, and the youth position at the church would allow them to live in the same town as their hero pastor… so they decided they just might try out youth ministry to be close to him… would they hire him?
What if there was a guy out there who had zero musical ability? What if music wasn’t even their forte? What if they had owned a boutique, worked in the retail world, were a really hard worker, and they had just recently begun to go to church…and just thought they might want to break into the music ministry, you know, just because it was a job that was available, in a town they liked and they were a blank slate,… would the church hire them?
The answers to those questions… a resounding no. The church wouldn’t even consider these people.
But in this situation at Tree Town Baptist, that is exactly what was done. Moreover, it was justified because she was only going to work with children… and that is the perfect place for someone to start, so said the pastor.
When I asked the pastor how he expected this girl to learn about children’s ministry, his answer nearly made me scream. He looked me right in the eyes and said… I thought you would train her…
What the world!!!
Had I not sat in his office and repeatedly told him that I had no desire to train the next person? I couldn’t do it. Because I knew if I did, I would be right back in the middle of things, and I had promised God I would leave the ministry altogether.
I would help and serve, but I couldn’t train the next person. So why exactly had I, an unqualified person, made all those detailed files?
I asked who he had told that I would train this girl… only the personnel committee, the deacons, and anyone else that asked…
Things were starting to make sense. This is why people accepted the pastor’s choice so quickly and easily. They thought she had my seal of approval because she used my name, and on top of that, they had been told I would train her.
This was also why it was so important for the pastor to get us back to church. If I wasn’t there, I couldn’t fulfill the promise he had given them. He needed me again.
I told him that my intention from the beginning had been to step away, never to train anyone…(why would I train her anyway if I wasn’t qualified).
Then, I asked if he remembered me telling him from the beginning that I wouldn’t train the next person, regardless of who it was…
Yes, he recalled, but he thought I would change my mind after I met her, and he asked me to help him.
I asked him why no one ever called to ask me my opinion after I talked to her that night. After working for three years, loving the ministry, wanting what was best, why was I not allowed to share what I knew… his answer… we never wanted or needed your approval…
But you did need me to train her…
I told him I felt like a pawn, that I felt used.
I cried almost the entire time we talked that night… the ugly kind of crying… my heart was broken, I had lost a friend, I wanted his friendship back, I wanted to talk it out, to move on. But, I also wanted to believe that I could trust this pastor again. I needed to hear him say some things that would make me feel confident that he was a good, honest pastor. I was firm in what I said, but I was broken.
He launched into an apology. He said he was sorry that his leadership had caused me to feel bad toward the church.
I just sat there and cried. I don’t remember saying the words, I accept your apology, or you are forgiven. Since I don’t remember saying those exact words, chances are I didn’t. I do remember crying, nodding, and saying I just wanted things to return to normal.
My husband also told him we just wanted to have dinner and play games again. We didn’t like the tension between us and just wanted this whole thing to be over. He told the pastor that we might not be able to return to Tree Town Baptist, but that didn’t mean the friendship needed to end. He told him that we just needed some time to process things about the church, that we would take some time, and we wanted to take things slowly…
The pastor said we needed to decide if we were all in or all out…there was no room for anything in between… and we needed to decide soon.
I remember my husband telling him that if that was the decision we had to make, and if it needed to be immediate, then we were all out.
But that’s not what we wanted, and we would like some more time to think about it if we could have it.
I asked him why he sent me the text that morning that said, Can u talk a min?… his answer…
He was calling to ask us again if we would lead worship… (insert face palm emoji)
If he had only looked back to the previous text message, he would’ve been reminded that I clearly said I could not do that. Did he think that things had magically changed since the last time I told him no?
But, he said, he was just trying to plug us in, to make it easier for us to return. I will always think that people were asking questions and wondering where we were…
To put us on stage leading worship would prove that we were still in, that we were still active members…
The pastor needed it to appear that we were still actively involved because if we didn’t come back, who would train this girl?
He didn’t want to plug us in. He wanted it to look good for him. And the fact that I was surprised by this amazes me. Had this not been what he had done from day one? Hadn’t his focus always been on himself? A good friend told me that the pastor had been consistent in looking out for only himself since day one, and this friend said that the definition of insanity was doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. This man had proven himself to me over and again; so why was I continually shocked by the things he did?
We made small talk. After the complicated conversation, we had almost an hour of regular conversation that seemed completely normal. It was good; it was fun, and it was comfortable. Looking back, I think we were grasping at straws. We wanted it to be something it wasn’t. We wanted the pastor to be something he wasn’t. We wanted to pretend that everything was fine. And so, at that moment, it seemed like we had moved on.
The pastor even told us a little church gossip and shared things with us that people were doing that drove him crazy… he made us feel like we were back in the loop again. I’ve since realized that this is a tactic used by people like him to make you feel important, to take the pressure off the conversation. A distraction…
His apology had been enough for us. We might have had misgivings about some things, but we forgave him, and we were ready to move forward and return to the way things had been.
I look back on things and wonder why we were so willing to forgive. I’m not sure why this man meant so much to us that we would continue to take abuse from him. Especially after being away from it for so long now, it boggles my mind.
We walked him to his truck. The last words we said to him were.. “are we good” and his answer was, yes, we are good.
To us, it didn’t feel like things were good. The last hour of our conversation felt good, but in the other parts of it, we felt like we were being lied to and manipulated. I think in our hearts, we knew that it was over, and that’s why we asked him so many times if we were good. We needed that reassurance.
He drove away. I almost sent him a funny text that night about something random like I would’ve done when things were good just to test the waters, but I decided to let him make the next move.
I felt like we would hear from him the next day, and I thought the same thing the next day and the day after that… but we never did.
I think when he thought about all that we said, all that we knew, all the things we had figured out… it was just too much.
He knew that we knew too much.
We had become a threat. A threat to his position at Tree Town Baptist and a threat to his reputation there as well. If people knew what we knew, they might figure him out.
Evidently, when you feel like someone is a threat, you begin to create your own narrative. We didn’t know until later, but the pastor was telling his own version of the story. If I would have had the presence of mind to let others at Tree Town know what happened that night, things may have ended differently, but it took me almost a month to realize that something just wasn’t right.
From our point of view, I think that the longer we thought about things, the more we realized things would never be the same. We didn’t feel like we could trust this pastor anymore. He had been consistent in his selfishness…these weren’t new traits; these were just traits that we chose to ignore for the sake of friendship. And when it was all said and done, the friendship wasn’t real… not even close. It was something we could not overlook any longer. We could forgive what he had done, but we couldn’t trust him.
We were all out.
Until Next Time,
Whitney