My story Part 1

[analyzer]

Hello to all,

Before I am sharing my personal story, I would like to mention three principles that I have observed in free evangelical church life. I am sure that you are quite familiar with these observations, so please be patient with me, if I am repetitious. I hope this principles will still offer some of you fresh insight into the all too familiar subject of spriritual abuse. I hope that this account will help some of you to diagnose the selfish behaviour of your leaders prematurely and thus saving yourself a lot of pain. I don’t expect to find the perfect church on earth, all I want is to discern the fine line between “normal” hypocricy and spiritual abuse.

1. The Solar System Principle: only those that are in the pefect distance from the center will receive the maximum benefit and edification. Those that are drawn too close to the center have one of the following options:
a. to become calloused and self-righteous
b. to get burned and to disagree which means that they will be ostracised.

This explains why members experience the same church so differently. Those of us who have been in the game for a while see a “two-faced” leader, while the “new people” see a “true-faced” leader. Often conversations between the “new” and the “old” people are limited to small talk, because you don’t know if it is safe enough to share how you really feel. On the other hand, it would be counterproductive to talk the “new people” out of the blessings they are receiving at the moment, because God can even use ravens (that naturally steal) to supply them with food.

The fact that people’s experiences of the same church can completely contradict each other is bestly described by an ex-member of an abusive church. CS Lewis could nat have put it more aptly:

“Many contradictions in the ministry seem increasingly impossible to reconcile. Here I have found authenticity in my relationships. But the people with whom I find it are far from the epicenter of the organization. The individuals closest to the main Pastor —his inner circle—seem as self-centered and superficial as anyone in the outside world. I believe in the ministry’s vision and mission, but recoil from the leadership. I am a devoted member of this church who feels most comfortable on its fringes. I sense simultaneously the presence of God and something unholy.”

2. The security & significance principle: (1.Jn 2:16)

Remember the 3 things that are not of the Father, namely the lust to:

1. feel
2. have
3. be

You can boil it down further to two things: security & significance. Man will not shrink back to do anything in order to get either one or both of these two. Unjust church governments are taking advantage of men’s craving for significance by using a reward system: loyalty to the leader will be rewarded by a pat on the back, disagreement will be punished by rejection. These evil systems are usually getting exposed when the CEO is breaking his part of the “loyalty contract” with a “faithful” member, because this member is no longer of any use to the CEO’s agenda of self promotion. The members “fault” may have been to seek security and significance from a personality cult rather than directly from God. I admit that I myself belonged to that category. This doesn’t mean that the leader will get away unpunished.

3. The “I have a few things against thee” principle as it is set forth in Rev. 2 and 3:

A leader that is constantly refusing correction and critique will have to reap the consequences that one day his victims will not see anything christlike in him. If I constantly refuse to listen to other church members regarding the “things against me” I have to live with the consequence that one day I will be viewed as somebody who is not (and never has been) a follower of Christ. The most startling thing that I had to witness was that leaders, who once adulated and flattered each other, changed their minds to such an extreme that they don’t even expect to see each other in heaven. I have decided not to follow my (ex-)leader’s example by writing him off completely (the same way he was writing off his (ex-)leaders after he split the church). But I will stay at a healthy distance from him. I will not let him rob me of the good things that he has done to me, because all the glory belongs to God anyway. Here I find a good definition of what it means to be a stumblingblock: If a leader tempts his followers to throw the baby out with the bath-tub water, he is fully responsible.

continued in Part 2 ...

[analyzer]

My story: By the way: luttrell03 used to go to the same church. We are buddies !

As a young believer I met a bunch of street evangelists in Vienna in 1983 who introduced me to their group. They told me absolutely amazing things about home base in America to the point that I couldn’t wait to see it myself in the summer of 1984. Once I was there, my experience exceeded my expectation. Rather unobvious to me seemed to be the personality cult around the main leader and his claim for God given authority. Forgive me folks, at that time I thought it was cool. On a humorous note I would like to add:

“It was like a zoo – but I liked it too”

I stayed with them for 8 months and had a very good overall experience. Later on I discovered a lot of ugly stuff on factnet about “home base” that was so contrary to my own personal experience. Please find the explanation for that in the aforementioned Principle #1 (Solar System Principle). If you happen to google the place up, please understand that I am not running the place down and I can testify that there are many sincere people that follow Christ with all of their heart. In early 1985 the song-leader of that original small group got ordained and returned back to Vienna as the pastor representing home base. According to his own words he was in a “strong voluntary affiliation” to home base. His loyalty to home base can be described best with his own words that he told us when we went to a Mission Convention: “If you are looking for me at the Convention, you have to look for the head pastor, because I will be always close to him.”


The early days in Vienna from 1985 to 1990:

I will not be tempted to throw the baby out with the bath-tub water (see principle #3). I will not forget all the good things that the leader in Vienna has done for us in the beginning, how he was spoon feeding us with the Word of God days and nights. We never considered the time spent on the Word of God with him as a sacrifice. Moreover, the leader would help people improve their home, helping them to build their beds and their cabinets or fixing their cars.


The time from 1990 to 2003: (My buddy luttrell03 joined us in 1992 :))

The strength of “home base” was to provide thorough biblical training to new disciples in a very short time. Its weakness was the cultic approach to leadership giving the pastor absolute authority. Both of these characteristics were transmitted to the affiliation in Vienna. As a result I have a good biblical foundation but at the same time I am also disappointed by the CEO-type of church-leadership. You have to understand that critique of the leadership was absolutely taboo. Homebase was stigmatizing any critical behaviour towards a leader.
In the absence of any critique there is only one way to deal with complaints: you suppress them. By the time it comes up to the surface, the pressure is so strong that it will cause an explosion, making “normal” forgiveness impossible. The perfect setup to label en ex-member as “bitter”.

As the church was growing our leader would slowly exhibit some of his negative characteristics, such as:

1. Very hard to work with on the stage. As a translator I had the feeling that I was never good enough. He would check up on the translators as they spoke, treating them as dogs on a leash, rather than as worthy co-workers. The bottomline: he considers his contribution to the church more important than other people’s contributions. Others made the same observation in the music ministry. He would delegate something to somebody only to rip it out of their hands again, because they wouldn’t do it exactly the way he wanted it. After all, only he knew what is best for his congregation. He wouldn’t want to share the attention of the audience with anybody else and he would let you know if he felt that you were between him and “his” audience. Reminds me of Isaiah 42:8: “I am the LORD: that is my name: and my glory will I not give to another.” One of the few examples we should not act like the Lord. 20 years later, by far too late, I complained to him about this, but his excuses were healf-heartedly turning the blame back on me.

2. He was a master in arousing somebodys pity: He always appointed people to shield him from “demonic” attacks after he preached. Surely there were some wackos that needed to be put in place but the whole thing turned into an ugly dynamic where the leader was always right.

3. In 1997 he kicked out the assistant pastor because of immorality, branding him publicly. The immorality truly happened, however he never mentioned that the assistant’s wife spent her time “building the ministry” at the expense of the time she should have spent with her husband. Unto this day she is the most powerful woman (if not most powerful person) in the Vienna affiliation.

4. In 2000 he appointed 12 elders permanently with the primary purpose to protect him instead of taking care at the flock. I got hurt, because I wasn’t picked (see principle #2), but retrospectively I have to thank God because now, nearly 10 years later, after wasting their time and energy, 9 out of these 12 gentleman have left the church and are hurt and confused. The leader reserves the exclusive right to pick his elders. If somebody disagrees, he gets replaced. So far the remaining 3 elders have never dared to challenge the leader.

5. When the leader summons the general assembley to anonymously pseudo-vote the members of the board, less than 5 % dare to vote against his obvious suggestions. You should see the angry expression on his face when there is not a 100 % agreement, as if he would say: “How can anybody be so stupid ?”. When, in a meeting, somebody brings up a subject that does not line up 100% with the leaders ideas, he puts on this bored look as if to say: “when is he/she going to stop, I want to continue with my program!”.

In all of these years the pro’s still outweighed the cons. I am sure you are quite familiar with the illustration: “eat the chicken and spit out the bones”. We still had some chicken, because at this time:

a) the leader was still accountable to his leaders at home base. Even in a corrupt system checks and balances may be beneficial to third parties, in this case to us as “dumb” sheep. The pastor couldn’t simply do what he wanted to, in retrospect I can only thank God for providing for us and protecting us in this condition of equilibrium.

b) the leader was still teaching the Word of God categorically. For the most part the leader was not afraid to “preach the word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all long suffering and doctrine.” (2.Tim 4:2)

c) We still had the opportunity to listen to other people’s portions: we had frequent visits from other branch ministries that refreshed us with their messages. Besides, men from the vienna church were at least allowed to do introductions.

continued in Part 3 ...

[analyzer]

The time from 2003 until now:

In 2003 the super-leader of home base in America became sick unto death and, typically for abusive leaderships, people were fighting for the succession to the throne. Our vienna leader jumped on a plain overnight to keep his arch-enemy from becoming the new CEO at home base, but his effort was to no avail. This was the first time that I saw him not getting his way. As a result he got furiously mad and broke away from home-base in 2005, sacrificing many long-term friendships. We also lost the variety that guest speakers from other branch ministries supplied to us.

This is what happened immediately afterwards: in his frenzied attempt to break away from home base he would demonstratively do away with the secondary doctrines and traditions, that we have kept for so long. It doesn’t matter if these traditions were theologically correct, but we surely had some good values. Now the leader would trample on this values like a wild pig not seeing a need to give us any explanations. His way was like the way of a serpent upon a rock (proverbs 30:19), slick and unpredictable. Just an example: he used to teach us that rock music, especially the distortion of sound, was satanic, but now this same kind of music became his primary promotion tool to boost his empire into a “state-of-the-art-seeker-sensitive-church”. Some others compared him more to a bus driver, who, in his mad attempt to break away drove so carelessly that he lost his passengers on the way. I can testify that many people were left behind wounden confused, bitter and disappointed.

In his disaffiliation letter the leader mentioned 7 reasons why he is leaving home base:

1. A serious lack of accountability
2. A serious lack of biblical ethics
3. A serious lack of proper hermeneutics
4. A serious lack of freedom
5. A serious lack of having a “voice”
6. A serious lack of concern: labeling those who were pushed out as “dead wood”
7. A serious lack of repentance

What is hurting us the most (with “us” I don’t mean the 300 new people that have joined the church within the last 2 years) is the fact that we have been offended in 6 of the 7 points that he was using against homebase. If the time comes to leave, all I would have to is to shove this letter in his face.

Lets look at point 7: A serious lack of repentance: The leader turned away from an abusive system as a victim, but not as a perpetrator.

The two phrases others should hear from us most frequently are:
“thank you” and “I am sorry” according to our leaders teaching. Sad to say these were the words that we heard him say the least.

Now woe is us! There is no longer accountability to home base, and nobody can put a finger into the leaders life. There is no more chicken left and it is getting very bony. Oversimplified I would say: he is winning a new audience and (almost) persecuting those that have been with him from the beginning, by giving them no room to grow.

A character trait of the leader that we observed from the beginning now became rampant: as soon as some of his men would develop their talents and gifts and would gain more influence they were cut back by the leader. Even those that are not directly affected by these conflicts have to live with the consequences: because the leader is neither delegating nor sharing the pulpit with his own people we have to listen to the same man all of the time. It is like a spiritual monoculture. When he preaches he is trying to make the message more palatable by “acting out the message” like a show-master, carefully studying the response of the audience. He is using entertainment and marketing strategies to win an ever greater audience, but at the same time he is suppressing the past, forgetting the contribution of home base and of his “mighty men” who helped him to be the man that he is today. Whenever he speaks about the history of the church, you can be sure that he is claiming to have the copyright over it. The last guest speaker that we enjoyed lives a three hour car ride away from us, far enough not to be a threat to the leader. A leaders willingness to share the pulpit is best expressed to his own men, not to guest speakers that are out of reach. Please don’t think that I am eager to stand upfront and preach. I am only yearning for variety, for getting blessed by different portions.

Besides, the leader appointed business man around him. Demonstratively he listens to their advice regarding the building project to prove to us that he is still accountable. However, in spiritual matters he listens to nobody. By teaching the Bible to the “old” people in the past he made himself accountable to us but he doesn’t value our viewpoint, our experience and our help. He refuses to talk about his weaknesses with anybody, therefore there are no spiritual “checks and balances” in his life.

The leader is charismatic and knows how to win a lot of people in a short time, but fails in every longterm-relationship except in his marriage, which I want to add for fairness sake. May be, because he lived in a dysfunctional family with two brothers and a father that tortured him all the time, he has become the “ugly brother” to his “mighty men” here in Vienna. Not an accuser but an abuser of the brethren (pun intended). Because of a dynamic of it’s own, “new people” may get tempted to protect the leader against the “old people” until they realize that the leader is not as true-faced as they thought him to be, but rather two-faced. Remember, I shared with you earlier that the leader is a master in arousing somebodys pity, which is, by the way a significant character trait of a sociopath. Most of the people from the old days that can testify to my story are no longer around, except for a few families. My wife agrees with the way I view things but she in not yet ready to leave the church, and I am respecting that.

I want to emphasize that this is not an Emmaus experience, where the disciples were disappointed with their leader, the Lord Jesus Christ, because of their narrow sightedness. We don’t want to tell the leader how to live his christian life and we don’t expect him to hold our hands for the rest of our life. All we would want to see him do is to admit the hurts that he has caused in many of us and to respect us in our own rights.

Sadly my overall impression of home base has been better than of the affiliation in Vienna, simply because of different degrees of involvement. (see the aforementioned principle #1). My brother in law has thrown the baby out with the bathtub-water and cannot remember anything good coming from the Vienna-leader (see the aforementioned principle #3) but doesn’t find any fault with homebase. I have to walk on eggshells when talking with different people about the past and it seems like only a few, such as luttrell03 and myself interprete our personal church history objectively.

In closing I would like to mention that the leader was used by God to propagate the good news to thousands of people, and to lead many to Christ, but based on his God given accomplishments (“the end is justifying the means”) he is destroying long-term relationships. No longer do I see things in black and white (the way that I was spiritually raised) but objectively. I wouldn’t agree with some that would say this leader is of the devil, nor would I agree with the leader himself who would say that I am I demonized because I am bringing these things up. If the leader should ever happen to read this, I want him to know that I still love him with an objective love and that I am sad that he has left people behind that don’t see any christlikeness in him. I have a healthy fear that I, myself may one day not be recognized as a Christian by those who remember me, because I have refused the warning signals of the pople around me that wanted me to know: “I have a few things against thee ...” Home base in America has ignored these warning signals in the early 80 ies when a research group tried to encourage them for the good things and made them accountable for the bad things. Because they refused to listen, many people ended up wounded, separated and confused.

Thank you again for your patience to read this lengthy post. Any suggestion and comment is welcomed.

[Anna Marta]

Dear Analyzer,

Welcome!

I have just finished reading your posts. Thank you for your insights, I found them helpful in the evaluation process I continue in connection with my personal experience here in Norway. I identify with much of what you wrote and personally experienced and observed.

I too was part of an American church plant to another country. Maybe that is why I can identify so much with the difference between what you experienced at "home base" and the Vienna church. In our case the pastor here shows the same personality disordered behavior and did many of the same things your pastor did. After 25+ years of this denomination being in Norway with this man as its' head there are only 3 remaining church plants that function (more or less) successfully. The "home base" for this church denomination is a highly respected "temple" in Los Angeles whose leader is nearly a house hold name in the Christian world. We are unable to comprehend how he can be so intelligent, respected for his wisdom, leadership, scholarship and Christian witness and yet be so blind to what is happening here (and in many other congregations we are told...)

Like in your situation there have been a large number of people who have been hurt as a consequence of their contact with this man in Norway and his leadership style. He recruits leaders and helpers with flattery and promises, rocks them gently, mentors them for a period of time, then discards them when they begin to show potential that he senses threatens to overshadow his place in the spot light. The elders and council leaders are fierce protectors even though some of them are able to acknowledge the problems - nothing is done.

There appears to be a never ending pool of recruits and new people ready to funnel through the doors in response to the facade of friendliness and upbeat ministry.

My personal battle has been coming to terms with the frustration that there is no way to stop these kinds of abusive organizations. They exist, will continue to exist and the best we can do is dedicate ourselves to the ministry of healing and reconciliation with Christ for those who God leads our way.

It is probably the "spiritual facade" these places facilitate that appeals and draws people (like us) who love God and want to dedicate their lives to serving Him. Much like Saul of Tarsus we believed we were serving God and His real church and leadership. So God let us be knocked off our religious horse and spend some time thinking about what it was we were so dedicated to before we could see things more objectively. In other words, we had been blind while riding our horse and it was the pain of hitting the ground that gave us sight.

Anyway, this analogy applies to me. I was in leadership and caught up in the whole corporate church organizational style for most of my life. I yearned for a more spiritually enriching way and becuase of that desire I drifted into one of those "spirited places" only to see the exact same kind of corporate stuff only much nastier and well hidden behind a veil of piety and commraderi.

I admit I don't how "church" is supposed to be expressed effectively so that people do not fall prey to the base human weaknesses that chew up and destroy the lives of those around them and eventually their own, huh?

We are seeking fellowship, friendship and communion with others like us.

Warmly
AM

[luttrell03]

Much like Saul of Tarsus we believed we were serving God and His real church and leadership. So God let us be knocked off our religious horse and spend some time thinking about what it was we were so dedicated to before we could see things more objectively. In other words, we had been blind while riding our horse and it was the pain of hitting the ground that gave us sight.

And what a great analogy! This is exaclty what I felt like....knocked off my religious horse.

[simka2]

In many ways you could be describing my situation. At least the part about "home base" taking no action to acknowledge or help in your church's situation. When we asked about this we got the typical answer of "every church is soverign." That may be something unique to our group...and was probly set up because of others that just stepped in to any church and took over. But when you swing the pendulum so far the other way you create a whole new set of problems.

Also in your second post you brought up an assistant pastor who was fired because of imorality...but that the wife obbsesive devotion to the ministry was never aknowledged. My experience was different but again similar...my husband was the assistant pastor...and he was one of the only bright spots in this mans ministry. As fast as our pastor would tear people apart and destroy ministries...my dh would be picking up the pieces and keeping ministries afloat. At first dh was a win for pastor...because he had found him and brought him on staff...eventually pastor had put so much on dh plate that he began to burn out...

When he told pastor of his struggles...pastor blew him apart. Dh wasn't allowed to have weakness to be imperfect...because that would reflect poorly on him. So he found one little "sin" in dh life and blew it up to HUGE porportions! Forced him to resign and labeled him sexually immoral! The only problem was he didn't count on our denomination looking at Dh's little "sin" as not really sin at all :( Yes it was that small a deal! Ultimately, I think this is what took him down. He tried so hard to keep up the accusations...but he couldn't deny that dh was still ordained and still in ministry. Eventually, some of those broken peices hubby had put back together began to ask ?'s. SA Pastor couldn't handle ?'s I think thats why he began firing other pastors...maybe distraction would work? But instead it reinforced that something was wrong! Sorry to interject some of my story...the writing bug just sort of hit :)

Thanks for sharing...again it's nice to know I'm not alone.

[Timid]

Thank you for telling us your experiences. It has helped me identify some of the things I went through.

I am sorry you have gone through this. I hope and pray that God protects you as your wife is still in the church, and that He will protect her heart too.

Timid