This topic contains 6 replies, has 4 voices, and was last updated by 
David Hayward 4 months, 3 weeks ago.
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AnonymousSo even though I’m not at our former church anymore, I still have friends there. We got together a few days ago, and one of them told me something that just had me upset the rest of the evening. I know it’s partly my issue, but still.
The church we used to go to has (unwisely, IMO) spent $25,000 to bring in pro-football players to speak there, in the hopes that it will draw more people to the church. (Newsflash: It didn’t.) Anyway, last week’s guest was a player for the Buffalo Bills who, according to the stuff put out by the church, has been a Christian for 2 years. The pastor considers him “new” in his faith. (Seriously, that alone is triggering for me. Who is anyone to judge how “new” or “mature” someone else is?) Apparently, he has a child with a woman to whom he is not married (so freakin’ what) and they live together (again, so freakin’ what). The Sunday service was Q&A-style, so the pastor took the opportunity to grill the football player about his relationship/living situation. Then he–no lie–mocked him about it and told him that he should “make it right” (meaning either marry the woman or move out). Yes, this was ON STAGE in front of 800 people. No, it wasn’t relevant to anything, as far as I’m concerned.
When my friend told me about it, I said that was pretty harsh. She said, “Well, that’s Pastor X. He just tells it like it is.” I felt physically ill after that. This is the same pastor who made an unmarried couple stand up in front of the church and admit their “sin” when they got pregnant–or else lose their membership and be asked to leave. (Of course, the pastor didn’t do the same thing to his own daughter when SHE got pregnant with her live-in boyfriend, and the pastor parades his grandson around to everyone. But that didn’t stop him from publicly harassing the guest speaker over it, so clearly having his daughter have a baby didn’t soften him any.)
Arrgh, it was so triggering. I couldn’t help flashing back to that fear that I might be called out for not being everything the church expected.
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This topic was modified 1 year, 11 months ago by David Hayward.
Well that’s just wrong. This is something I’ve come to realize comes with a lot of church culture. There is no privacy. Everything is everyone’s business.
AnonymousYes! That was it exactly. It felt like such an invasion of privacy. First the pastor reaming him out in public, then church members discussing it like they had any right to comment. If this man is relatively new to church/church culture, this kind of thing is likely to drive him away. Actually, maybe it should, now that I think about it.
Oh goodness. That triggers stuff for me too.
It’s so classic. And even if it was anyone’s business, how on earth does a father leaving his child and partner make something more ‘right’ than him loving them and staying with them????!It DOES hurt. That sort of self-righteous judgement of other people’s lives and situations; the assumption that one particular hermeneutic or way of seeing things is right and everyone who disagrees with it is wrong…
I feel your pain and I feel so bad for the people left behind in that church and that poor man who was so patronised (new in his faith) and publicly then told off!
I suppose the consolation, if you can call it that, is that you’re free now. You’re no longer a part of that church and although you still feel the hurt and the church can do things that trigger the hurt, it can’t actually touch you any more. You’re not bound to it. You’re free.
Wishing you a speedy return to peaceful equilibrium. x
AnonymousThanks…it did make me glad I’m not going there anymore. It also made it a bit more clear in my mind just how deep into that kind of belief some of my friends still are, that they would just accept the pastor’s humiliation as a valid way to interact.
I remember when pastors used to refuse to marry a couple because they had been “living in sin”. My father, a pastor, used to marry anyone, because he felt those ministers were just forcing them to continue living that way
Pastors really do have a lot of power when it comes to certain things, like weddings.
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This topic was modified 1 year, 11 months ago by
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