Janice

Lin wrote,
Many of the abusers I knew in Christendom were not public false teachers they were private spiritual abusers.
Hey!  I knew a fellow like that.  He said all the right things from the pulpit.  But then there was the rest.
He took advantage of my spiritual immaturity by telling me he’d been praying and believed God was telling him that I was the right person for a particular job that he wanted filled.  Stupid me.  I was flattered and took the job.  When it turned out all wrong he wouldn’t give me a way out that didn’t involve shutting the project down.  More pressure.  I quit anyway because I felt so bad. 
Then there was a Bible study that was being held in his house.  His wife was a member of the group.  He was out somewhere one evening and came home before the study session was over.  No matter.  He called his wife out of the study to get his dinner ready.  That demonstration of the sort of servant heart he had gave me another inkling that something wasn’t quite right.
Lastly there was the problem of the assistant minister.  He’d been hired by the previous rector to run a new Sunday evening outreach program.  Soon after that rector retired and this new, charming, fellow with the impressive resume was hired.  After 18 months or so the new rector told the Parish Council that the money for the assistant’s stipend was running out so he would have to be dismissed.  I suggested that maybe we could do some fund-raising or let the congregation know that we needed them to give a bit more but the new guy wouldn’t consider those options.  Then he did the closed meeting thing.  He said that he had something to say about the assistant minister that everyone present would have to swear never to mention to anyone else.  If someone felt they couldn’t keep it secret they should leave the room.
Well.  What are you going to do?  Wonder what on earth can be so terrible that everyone gets sworn to secrecy about it and then want to know what it can be?  Of course. 
I figured the only person I’d tell would be my one flesh husband so I stayed and could hardly believe what I heard.  It was nothing!  It was so nothing that I can’t even remember precisely what was the terrible thing that the assistant was supposed to have done; something about answering back to the charming, talk-the-talk, rector.
To cut a long story short the rector eventually got his way and a majority of the parish council agreed to dismiss the assistant and ask him to leave his parish supplied housing even though his wife was 8 1/2 months pregnant at the time.  I asked for an assurance that the assistant and his wife would at least be told about the decision before the next Sunday morning service so they would be prepared in case they got a deluge of phone calls afterwards. 
The assurance was given but not acted upon.  I checked with the assistant.  I checked with the rector’s warden.  They both said that no such notice had been given.  Subsequently, when I directly asked him, that lying sod of a parish priest told me to my face that the notice had been given.  My husband and I finished up the year at that church because I was teaching Sunday School to the junior high school group and my husband was in charge of entertaining the littlies.  And then we left.  So did the other assistant minister and the youth worker who each had their own stories to tell of bullying and intimidation. 
The lying, bully, rector is now a bishop.  The dismissed assistant minister worked for a few years in a pastoral role in higher education and then went into business.  I’ve googled him a few times and never found any mention that he was ever an ordained priest.  The youth worker and the other assistant minister left at the same time we did.
Me? For several years I couldn’t bear sitting through a service anything like what I’d been used to in that parish.  We went high church instead and thereby learned something precious about God’s love for His people and the variety they can bring to their expressions of worship.  But thinking about it all now I think the most valuable thing I learned is that priests, also, are sinners – and might even be sociopaths.