Why Do They Stay?: Ten Reasons Why People Fail to Leave a Toxic Church and, in this case, David C Pack

 

That has always become the question with Apostle/Elijah to come/Joshua the High Priest/Messenger of the Covenant/ and over all Jesus incarnate to come, David C Pack and his Restored Church of God. 

https://www.readingremy.com/blog/ten-reasons-why-people-fail-to-leave-a-toxic-church

Ten Reasons Why People Fail to Leave A Toxic Church:

1. You don’t want to be accused of being rebellious. 

Spiritually abusive leaders make you feel like disagreeing with them is equal to questioning God. And we all know that bad things happen to people who question God, right? At least that’s what they want you to think. You don’t want to be labeled a rebel, or having a “rebellious spirit.” 

2. You are full of self-doubt. 

Abusive leaders make you feel like YOU are the problem. They say things like,

 “The reason you disagree with me is because you aren’t as spiritually mature as I am. You need to trust my leadership and submit to my authority like the Bible tells you to do.” 

They flip the discussion upside down and before you know it, you are asking for their forgiveness when it should be the other way around.

3. You fear losing your circle of friends. 

Sometimes we tolerate an unhealthy community simply because that’s where our friends and family are. The peer pressure to stay can be overwhelming. 

When given the choice of speaking the truth and losing your community, or staying quiet but keeping your community, the community often wins out.

4. You don’t want to lose your equity investment. 

What I mean is that you’ve invested so much time and energy into your church through the years that you don’t want to lose that investment. It feels like wasted time. 

So you stay a little longer, hoping it will eventually work.  

5. You like to be liked and needed. 

A legalistic system can be very rewarding. You might feed off of the praise you get for performing well. Or maybe you simply can’t handle the thought of people not liking you if you leave the community. Your low self-worth and need to please keep you trapped. 

6. You fear being wrong and losing your salvation. 

You might think that your group is spiritually off track and even abusive, but what if you're wrong? You fear that YOU might be the problem like they say you are. You’re not sure it’s worth the risk. This self-doubt causes you to do nothing about your concerns. 

7. You fear exposure, humiliation, and physical harm. 

You know that, if you leave, members of the congregation will trash your name and reputation. Sometimes even worse. You’ve seen it happen to others who left, and you don’t want it to happen to you.  

8. You fear not making it on your own.

Even though you know your spiritual leaders are wrong, you fear falling away from God without their strong input into your life. You’re not sure you can make it on your own. 

9. You lack boundaries. 

Maybe you were raised to believe that people had the right to impose their thoughts, beliefs, and will upon you. You don’t feel like it’s your right to question others or resist their power. You're used to being violated in this way. You feel powerless, and so you let the abuse continue. 

And the final reason you might not confront abusive leaders or leave an abusive church is because…

10. You believe God met you in that church.

There was a moment or moments when you KNOW that God showed up in a sermon, the music, a prayer, or a counseling session. This is strong proof to you that God is in your church and/or leadership. So how can you leave? The leaders will even remind you of this.

I don’t doubt that you may have had a God moment in an abusive church, but don’t take that as a justification to stay. Rather, see it as God’s grace and goodness showing up in the middle of abuse. He wanted to show you that he loves you and he’s with you. But that doesn’t mean that you should stay. It doesn’t excuse the abuse.

Please Do Something

If you see yourself in any of these ten reasons, just realize that you are not alone. These are common reasons why people stay in toxic churches and abusive relationships. My hope in pointing out these reasons is that you’ll find the courage to fight against your natural tendency to stay and be quiet. 

I want to encourage you to DO something. 

FYI… I created two videos that cover this topic. I posted them below.

If you’d like to learn more about how to recover from a spiritually abusive church be sure to check out my book Broken Trust. A recent reader said this about the book, 

I highly recommend this book to anyone who has experienced any type of spiritual abuse or church hurt. The book is excellent from beginning to end …Broken Trust deals with all of the issues along with solutions on how to go through the healing process. You can read almost 200 reviews on Amazon.com

You can read over 200 reviews of Broken Trust on Amazon.com, available on Kindle, paperback and audiobook.

 

:Same Fruit-Different Tree: The Bob Jones University Cult is WCG and Ambassador College on Steroids.

I spent more than two decades just down the street from Bob Jones University. My practice was just a few blocks down the same street the campus was located on.  It didn't take long to realize that BJU produced and continues to produce the same drama, scandal and blowback that WCG/AC did. Truly two birds of a feather if there ever was one. 

Bob Jones Sr was a contemporary of HWA and was said to detest HWA as both competed on the radio for the religious audience. Bob Jones Sr also detested Billy Graham, a graduate of BJU because Graham went him therefore into all the world and avoiding the world was classic BJU. 

A client told me of the sermon Bob Jones Sr gave assuring the students that it would be over his dead body when kissing was ever allowed on this campus. In time he died and ended up being buried on the campus. You guessed it. It is now the place where forbidden couples go to kiss. 

Bob Jones University has its own gay community that it is in complete denial over.  My gay BJU clients assured me that they did well on the campus. BJU has an excellent music program as well as theatre. Their art collection is incredible. I asked how they managed to lay low on the campus to which they said it was easy. Not wishing to date women, they looked like very compliant and obedient students concerning the prohibition against dating. Students were forbidden to stand around with the girls to chat. They had to chat on the move. I met a student who was expelled for catching a female student in a fall. He was told it would have been better to let her fall than to touch her. 

Dating was by permission and dating outside the campus required the couple to take a faculty member with them. In reality, I was assured that paying off the faculty member to not stick around was also not unheard of. 

As legalists, BJU graduates of go into ministry, police work or City Government in Greenville. Control and Bible based law and order was the goal. It drove the good old boys nuts when BMW and the Germans moved to Greenville and wouldn't have part in their control. 

When I asked clients, gay/male or female who found the experience authoritarian and controlling the answer was always the same. It's the only school my parents will pay for. As well, going against their local church connected to BJU was a death sentence spiritually. Guilt, fear and shame is a powerful control mechanism. 

I present this to those who might be interested in seeing the WCG/AC experience was and is not unique. It is the product of fundamentalism, authoritarianism and getting mixed up with the one-man founder and show where it becomes a family dynasty over time. 

Many a BJU graduate spends years overcoming the experience. 

This will resonate with most here on Banned

The Dangers of the "God Given Purpose"

 

If you are like myself, and I assume you are, having a purpose in life is kinda what it all seems to be about. From "what's the purpose" to "what's my purpose", it tends to niggle at us in the background of our lives.

When we came "into the truth" back in the day, we found purpose. Not only did we find purpose, but we found a God given purpose. The Book told us that, as the chosen ones in the exact true church, our purpose was to become Kings and Priests and of course, go us therefore into all the world telling everyone else they could be too. 

For better or worse, in hindsight, worse, I felt my purpose was to go into ministry. At first it wasn't WCG ministry as I had been accepted at another seminary in New York before choosing WCG that in my mind was more accurate. So, my purpose was to go there and become a pastor. While GTA announced the first student forum that "if anyone here thinks they came here to be a minister, get that idea right out your head!", I thought to myself, "We' see..."  I didn't' understand then that God would decide who was the to be in ministry of WCG through the wisdom and leading of the Holy Spirit of the "Manpower Committee".  I guess that "we'll see" thing followed me through AC and the WCG. When my fourth year public speaking teacher announced "No one gets and 'A' in my class,"  "We'll see" thinks I and I made him retract that by getting an 'A'. 

All this because I had found my purpose. Of course, be careful what you wish for as I had no clue what was to follow over the next two decades of fulfilling my purpose in life. 

One personal note.  When I was told I was going into the ministry I called my dad to tell him. He got real quiet and I could tell he got teary, which I had never seen my dad ever do. I asked if he was, ok?  He said, "You know, when we had your brother (my only brother is blind, deaf and cannot speak from birth trauma and being born at 6 months weighing 1.5 lbs.,) I told God that if he gave me a healthy normal son, that He could have him."  (Questionable results I know :) Well, first I heard of that! No pressure there but I had purpose so obviously God made my dad a Diehl, err...deal.  I think this one conversation kept me in WCG ministry longer than my heart was actually in it not wanting to disappoint my dad or remove purpose form his own perceptions of his life and family. 

Gerald Waterhouse showed up every year or two to tell us all even more about our "God given purpose". It was to follow "Mr Urmstrong", who of course, would never die before the Jesus returned. I did ask him what he'd do when, not if, Mr Urmstrong, died?  He said "I'll believe it after three days and three nights!"  Ugh....hopeless. His God given purpose was getting really old and very annoying for me personally. I'm not sure it had not always been annoying to me personally when he showed up and I do recall telling him that he caused me more problems with the members than helped them. All he said to that was "really?". Yes, really. God given purposes are like that. 

As the years of scandal, BS and authoritarian control rolled on I convinced myself for a time that my God given purpose was to have come to the ministry "for such a time as this".  I thought I was there to stop the majoring in the minors and help the church grow up.  Wrong!  I failed to understand just how many first- and second-generation ministers were waiting to come up with their own God give purpose and either take over the church when HWA died or simply start their own version as the loons, Gerald Flurry, Rod Meredith, Dave Pack and many others did. 

Dave Pack is about as foolish and stupid a man believing in his own version of his God given purpose as it gets. I thank Marc Cebrian for exposing in the details what a foolish shepherd the guy is. Foolish, stupid, ill-trained in theology, delusional and not a little dangerous as he pretends to have his own version of a God given purpose. 

All this to say, that I have come to accept that one does not need a purpose to live life, learn all one can and exit. I don't need or even want a "God given purpose". I can't speak for anyone but me and in my own experience, but I have concluded that the most dangerous people on the planet are those who claim to live their lives with a God given purpose. Nothing but trouble especially if they insist that your God given purpose be identical to theirs with "send it in" attached for good measure. 

Those who claim a "God Given Purpose" have done most all of the most horrible things on the planet both in history and to this day. The concept of being "God's chosen people" doesn't help either. 

If one is not careful, life here in the now becomes less important and life in the fuzzy future more important.  For some, as it is said, "Some people are seeking the heavenly such that they are of no Earthly good". The Book tell us "the day of death than the day of one's birth." (Ecc 7:1). You can miss your entire life if that becomes your "God given purpose". I believe is one follows that path too obsessively "woulda, coulda and shoulda" will rear their heads somewhere down the line and regrets will pile up and infect the life we actually have.

I have become comfortable with being just a very small part of "life" and have my own personal experience of what some say is the Universe observing itself." That's enough purpose for me at this stage. I think most know I am not a believer in the Biblical story any longer. That is the result of my own questions, observations and studies about the Book. Your experience may vary as I am sure it does.

I did not know I did not exist the first 13.87 billion years before I showed up and I can "live" returning to that state when the time comes. I have no God given purpose to "make it into the Kingdom" or "do everything I can to avoid the Lake of Fire, which I have been consigned to many times in the past 20 years by those with their own God given purposes.

I had my DNA mutations outline my genetic trip out of Africa a few years back around 60,000 years ago. It only took one person between me and those genetic ancestors who either ducked or didn't duck to not lead to me. The chance of you being you today is pretty remote.

So I just wanted to share the two concepts that have brought me to making peace with my personal and original "God given purpose" gone awry.

While I have long ago gotten over following anyone else's path or purposes, I do recognize words of wisdom on the topic. These two views resonate with me. I don't expect it to resonate with many because many find fear of death or "what's going to happen to me" is much stronger than just accepting this present moment and experience leaving the rest up to reality and what actually is.

So for those so inclined at this stage in all our lives and with having had all our own experiences with the WCG experience, both as members and ministers...

Gotta go climb Larch Mountain in the Columbia Gorge. Ride here. Sorry is you find typos :) My heart was right!

THE MOST ASTOUNDING FACT

STOP LOOKING FOR PURPOSE