Contents

Sociologists tell us that when it comes to relationships some of our most important connections are what they call weak connections. Many of our most important relationships in life—our spouse, business partner, or even our favorite dog—begin with a weak connection stemming from seemingly accidental (or serendipitous) encounters. 

The serendipity of my meeting Doug began in a tavern in 1969. My newly formed Christian band, "Justice," was playing at the Blue Moon Tavern in Wenatchee, Washington, and we were singing about Jesus. A local sax player named Don Lamphere had come out  to see us, but we had already played our set and were gone. Instead, he found Jesus thanks to Brother Bud, another one of our "Jesus People" friends who happened to be hanging around after the gig.

A couple months later, Justice was back in Wenatchee and this time Don sat in on the show with us. A seventeen-year-old named Doug Murren tagged along with Don, and not long after, came to the Lord himself. Don and Doug formed their own band called "The Last Day"—a jazz-rock fusion featuring Don's sax and his testimony of being delivered from heroin. In those days ministry in the northwest was a DIY, rough-and-tumble world full of colorful characters, undefined boundaries, and very few rules. 

Unbeknownst to either of us we were about to enter into the rule-ridden, boundary-heavy, personality-driven world of the evangelical church.  

Although we went in different directions, our first church experiences turned out to be quite similar. I chose to "submit" to Pastor Baker—a strong-minded woman (not unlike my mom) who led The Kings Temple where, as historian Mike Hertenstein recounts, she "embraced long-haired converts, but kept them in line." "She was autocratic. You did what she told you," says Ken Lloyd, "which is what I needed because I didn't know what to do. Members were expected to ask elders' permission to move, marry, or change jobs."¹

My own upbringing was decidedly secular, and I parachuted into Christianity, joining the church without knowing it. I said yes to Jesus . . . and then discovered He had somehow become attached to the Bible, an institution called "The Church," and a religion called "Christianity."

I was looking for a church that would help me serve the Lord and train me to be the man and leader I wanted to be. Having been raised in a one-parent family, I was vulnerable to the influence of older "saints" and was willing to accept whatever instruction they gave me. I embraced their version of church, worship, morality, the Bible, and eventually even politics. Unfortunately, it turned me into someone I didn't like. 

As I reflect on that period, I still can't imagine ending up anywhere else. At that time, and in my current state, I felt as if I had died and gone to church heaven. We worshiped with abandon and "sat under"(a term I didn't understand but soon discovered was critically important to their agenda) what we referred to as "revelatory teaching." We virtually lived at church and when we weren't there, we still socialized with each other. The leaders reinforced what a great decision I'd made and embraced my little family of five with open arms. I have very fond memories of many spiritual experiences that came from that time as well as lifetime friendships for which I'm profoundly grateful; however, I also learned that just because something "works" doesn't mean it's right. 

They exercised an inordinate amount of control over our lives. On the surface it seemed like strong, hands-on leadership, but I was never encouraged to get an education or do anything that might advance my economic situation unless it was somehow connected to the mission of the church. It took a long time for me to realize that I was not benefitting as much from this relationship as they were. 

Sadly, my story is not uncommon; therefore, the purpose of this book is largely to help young people who, similarly, are being drawn into churches with well-meaning, good-hearted believers who are unwittingly infecting them with a very dangerous germ called spiritual pride. And, how do you know if you've been infected with spiritual pride? Here are some of the symptoms. You believe:

• you have discovered something no one else has ever discovered;

• your church/denomination is the only church with the truth;

• you've been granted "cosmic specialness;"

• other people need to join your group in order to experience the real thing;

• most other churches are deceived, compromised, or clueless; 

• you have received special revelation about the Bible;

• your forms of worship or Bible teaching are superior to all others; 

• everyone needs to speak in tongues to be filled with the Spirit; or

• anyone who speaks in tongues is deceived; 

Additionally, if you have no friends who are nonbelievers or if you use Christianity as a cover for your anger, meanness, jealousy, and pettiness you are demonstrating spiritual pride. Spiritual pride is more dangerous than sexual immorality because sexual immorality is something you and others can actually see, while spiritual pride can be hidden and seem to be benign for long periods. 

There are numerous religious leaders who've made a very public spectacle of their version of spiritual pride—people such as the late Harold Camping who predicted the end of the world in 2013, the recently departed Fred "I hate fags" Phelps of Westboro Baptist Church, or the inimitable L. Ron Hubbard who founded Scientology. Those guys are public and visible. We compare ourselves with these people and conclude that because we're not that outrageous or vitriolic, we're not infected with spiritual pride. The sobering truth, however, is that these guys aren't the problem, we are. It's our inability to see fault in our own behaviors that creates the biggest opportunity for religious bullies to walk into our lives.

When Jesus said to Peter, "Get behind me, Satan!" He was sticking a super long hypodermic needle into Peter's soul to inject him with an antibody to spiritual pride (Mark 8:33). Peter needed to know what he didn't know—primarily that he wasn't God. 

Just as with Peter, we go about our lives thinking we have all the answers. We don't really know if our interpretation of the Bible is actually 100% correct. We don't really know if our church is the best church. We don't really know if we are right and everyone else is wrong. Actually, we can't even prove the most basic foundational claim we make as Christians—that Jesus is real. We believe it; we hope it; we trust it; but, we can't prove it. So, what is with the epistemic arrogance, the hubris, the reactivity, the angst, and the whining Christians exhibit when we don't get our way? Spiritual pride is not only the primary cause of our inability to spot bullies; it's the number one reason we welcome them and why, in many ways, we need them. 

Ask yourself these questions: 

• How did the church ever become a safe place for religious bullies? 
• Why do we allow them in the pulpits of some of America's largest and most influential churches? 
• Why do we put oversized microphones in their hands, multiple cameras on their faces, and digital resources at their fingertips to reach millions? 
• Why do we pay them garish amounts of money to do it? 
• What are the spiritual genetic markers in our systems that "predispose" us to miss the warning signs and minimize character flaws we swore we'd never accept in a leader?

Forget the bullies. They're not going to read this book. You and I need to lead ourselves out of this place, if not for us then at least for the young people who are the most susceptible to the influence of spiritual bullies. You and I are the ones responsible for creating the environment that welcomes spiritual bullies. Until we own our partnership and co-dependency in this symbiotic relationship, nothing can change. This dangerous dance will continue resulting in spiritual confusion and many rejecting Christ due to His guilt-by-association with the system that gave license to religious bullies. I don't think it's a leap too far to conclude that the dramatic increase in people disavowing any religion (a.k.a. the Nones) has been influenced in part by the sudden increase in awareness of the spiritual bullies leading our churches². Until we realize how we contribute to the problem, we won't be able to eradicate it.

Before doctors and nurses discovered the miraculous power of hand washing they ignorantly passed deadly germs from patient to patient. As the author of The Biography of a Germ put it, "Most experts laughed at the notion that creatures too small to be seen could fell armies and turn cities into cemeteries."³ Consequently, instead of helping people, these caregivers infected them; all the while they were performing sacrificial and even heroic acts, often risking their own lives because God told them to. 

I use what may seem like an odd analogy, comparing this issue of spiritual bullying to a viral infections and I could use any kind of virus, but I want to get a little more specific. Lyme disease is one of the most fascinating illnesses in our society. What's interesting is that it appears to be so benign, so ordinary that we mistakenly believe it is something we could wipe out with an aspirin. The reality is the germ is persistent and intractable and, in spite of all of our high-powered medicines, we've not been able to get rid of it. People actually die from it. Lyme disease gets passed to humans by an unspectacular bug called the deer tick. The deer tick prefers deer, but thanks to suburban sprawl in formerly wooded areas more and more human beings are presenting themselves as a nice alternative. 

It's not the bite that gives people Lyme disease, its what passes from inside the tick—the germ known as borrelia burgdorferia or Bb for short—that makes people sick and some people dead.⁴ The deer tick has no knowledge that it is passing a killer germ; all it thinks it's doing is eating lunch. In other words, the lowly deer tick is simply surviving, hanging out on a bush waiting for an unsuspecting deer (disguised as a human) to pass by. When that happens they pounce. However innocent they may be, the deer tick is nonetheless an accessory to the crime. And while killing all deer ticks is neither practical nor environmentally sound (they do provide some benefits), stopping the spread of Bb has become a major focus of the medical and scientific community.

This book is about a similar type of insidious infection that's spreading in the church. Unwittingly, many pastors, board members, and ordinary people are passing it to each other in the name of God. It's making a lot of people sick and more and more are losing their spiritual lives because of it. The disease is our spiritual pride and its presence is the chief reason religious bullying is active in the church. Spiritual pride weakens our immune system and makes it easier for bullies to emerge into influential roles in our churches. 

Our a) lack of humility, b) high degree of reactivity to difference, c) epistemic arrogance, and d) uncertainty avoidance conspire like a deadly cocktail both to blind us and to bind us to religious bullies. Like Israel of old we ask for a king thinking he will provide protection only to discover we've become his victim. (See 1 Samuel 8:6-18.) 

Our purpose for this book is to relate how Doug and I and countless others we know managed to survive the infections we received from the church without completely abandoning the Bible, its morals, or the institution. Edwin Friedman says that the job of a leader is to "define his or her own goals and values, while trying to [stay connected with] . . . a non-anxious presence within the system."⁵ We will share with you the problem we inherited in terms of our perception of what the church is supposed to be about, how we escaped it, why its even worse today and what we need to do to change it. 

We do not think that religious bullies are the cause or the core of the problem. They're the symptom—what physicians call the presenting problem. The actual problem is us . . . you and me. We welcome bullies. We seek them out, and when the bully is our bully, we'll defend him to the death. All of that is to say that if I'd been saved in 1998 instead of 1968, it is entirely likely I could have chosen to join a church named Mars Hill with a male autocrat named Mark Driscoll.

As the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky cynically put it, "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you."⁶ When war is not affecting us personally we can look the other way. We can wax philosophical and assert that these kinds of problems have been with us from time immemorial, but when war comes to my neighborhood it becomes personal. My head must be unceremoniously pulled from the sand, forcing me to engage.

While Mark Driscoll is not the subject of this book, he is clearly object lesson #1. With his unrelenting drive to hold onto power in the face of abandonment by his friends, his movement, and his staff, he dragged his church and his family into the klieg lights of the public eye. His bullying leadership style placed him in rarified company reserved by history. One is forced to recall Bill Clinton's attempt to bully the press with his brazen public dare, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman,"⁷ or Richard Nixon's infamous, "I am not a crook,"⁸ to make meaning out of Driscoll's motives. Few religious figures have come close to receiving the level of negative public attention as Driscoll since the TV evangelists of the 80s and 90s. We would be remiss not to draw lessons from Driscoll's very public modeling of what a religious bully looks like, what happens to the people who are close to them, and what kind of fruit the systems they develop end up producing.

This book was written by a team of producers, authors, editors, and researchers. It is not the authoritative or final word on the topic of religious bullies. It is meant as a pastoral response to a problem we see as very damaging to the church, the Kingdom, and the mission of Jesus. The only person you have any real control over is you. You can lead others only as far as you've led yourself. Until you and I stop supporting church systems that essentially require bullies, until you and I stop looking the other way when spiritual abuse is taking place, and until you and I stop putting our trust in a king instead of The King, we have only ourselves to blame for the bully in the pulpit, on the board, or in the Sunday School class. 

We began our formulation of this book with an analysis of the current research about religious bullies and conducted our own informal survey that produced some surprising insights. We then looked at how our theological, historical, biblical, and sociological assumptions predispose the church to welcoming religious bullies. As we present this information to you we will share how we and others have chosen to respond to bullies and will conclude with some thoughts on what a bully-resistant church might look like. We will introduce you to some leaders and lay people we think represent the polar opposite of religious bullies.

This book is not a diatribe on celebrity pastors or even rock star pastors. Nor is it a screed on mega churches. In fact, we have a hunch that there are more religious bullies per capita in small churches than in large churches. This book is written to help young Christians who are loaded with the one thing religious bullies need to control them—idealism—but lack the one thing they need to defend against bullies: life experience.

The church system that infected me with spiritual pride made me into a junior bully. I thought more highly of myself than I should have. As a result, I avoided people, leaders, and ideas that would challenge my own ideas. I cultivated spiritual pride in young people I discipled and spent time doing things to advance my own church instead of the kingdom. I was deeply certain that I was right and everyone else was wrong. Youth was celebrated; elders were tolerated. Age and experience were interpreted as weakness since those who lived "back in the day" could not know what had only recently been revealed to my group. 

As I look back, I now know that the decade of my thirties was spent becoming someone I ended up not liking. A decade of my life was wasted by spiritual pride. I have spent the subsequent decades doing my best to change this in myself and to bring to light the bullying tactics of others. Now my efforts are focused on helping individuals and churches identify this problem in their own circles and equipping them not only to stop the bullying, but also to reconstruct the culture so this kind of leadership can no longer thrive.

We have three goals in this book:

1. to help you avoid giving ten years of your life (as I did) to spiritual pride;
2. to provide the tools you need to spot bullies early on;
3. to help your church grow past the spiritual adolescence bullies depend on.

Maybe the insights and experience we pour into this book can help you avoid the pain of spiritual abuse and the distraction from what you are supposed to get from participating in a faith community. We hope Question Mark will add to and illuminate the conversation surrounding religious bullies so positive change can come out of the history of wounds too many have experienced in church.

Chapter 1

The Bully Rules

Over the last decade I have become increasingly aware of and distressed by a phenomenon of religious abuse in my city. I didn't experience it directly on a weekly basis since I don't attend the church where much of this was happening; but, the voices of those who had experienced it directly became increasingly easier to hear as more and more of them were "thrown under the bus" and found the courage to say clearly, publicly, and frequently, "Something's wrong here." In the following quotes, Mark Driscoll unintentionally illuminated what eventually would escalate into a serious problem:

Early on Driscoll was defining successful leadership as increases in people, property, and prestige rather than in terms of the loving and compassionate care of a congregation. The Mars Hill church has come under great scrutiny over the past several months and is in the process of closing its doors, but unseating a dictator does not change the culture if the people are not prepared for change. Our purpose is to show just how widespread this issue of spiritual abuse we call religious bullying is and that it extends well beyond the reach of Driscoll and his elders. This is a systemic problem that has existed for centuries, and we are only now beginning to speak up about it and speak loudly enough to be heard.

Building a Case for Intervention

In the back of the book you will find an appendix that details the results of an informal survey we published via Facebook over Labor Day weekend 2014, asking anyone who came across the survey to take three minutes and let us know what they thought about the subject of religious bullying. We received 2,198 responses over the three-day holiday weekend. During the remainder of the week, another 500+ people took the survey. We also gave them a chance to let us know if they wanted us to keep them informed as we analyzed the results from our survey. Almost one in four requested further information by providing an email address. Clearly, we had a hot topic.

The first question we asked was whether people believed that the seeming increased awareness of religious bullying was due to an increase in the actual number of incidents or if it was due to increased reporting of incidents in various media including social media. Four times more respondents thought that increased reporting accounted for the growth in awareness rather than it being attributable to an actual acceleration in prevalence. That perception was given validity by an instructor in statistics at a Midwest university who wrote this to us, "Frequently, large increases in reports of certain types of crimes [as an example] is due more to awareness rather than an increase in actual crime rates."¹¹

While some of the responses fell in line with what we anticipated, I was not fully prepared for arriving at the conclusion that this was not a new phenomenon. I expected to hear that people were noticing an escalating trend in bullying among church leadership. Instead, the prevailing opinion was that this was a problem that had its roots in a long and storied history within the church. And, our assessment of the feedback provided is that we have heard the rising chorus of dissenting voices because of the Internet. The Internet is the propelling force behind the explosion of The Information Age and is this century's version of the village well, the public square, the country store, and the old telephone party line. It's where public opinion gets expressed one voice at a time. It's where folks get a sense of what people think is important and what the consensus is about those issues.

The blogosphere is doubling in size every six months. Every second of every day a new blog is created—that's 86,400 every day.¹² In that same second, thirty new posts are added to existing blogs. Each day some of the world's 3 billion internet users make at least one Google search to locate information on over 1 billion websites hosted by almost 1 billion web servers while sending 148 billion emails.¹³ The "noise" that comes from such an explosion of data and ease of access to it is a morass of misinformation, opinion, and deliberate deceit propagated across the web. Filtering the truth through the noise can be a tough task. 

The Internet had given us lots of reports of religious bullying. Because it was happening in my home of Seattle, and because I knew some of the people who had been "thrown under the bus," we decided to probe a little deeper into the problem of religious bullying. What better way is there than to ask people who frequent the Internet?

We also asked if the respondents thought that instances of religious bullying were grossly over-reported in the media or grossly under-reported. Our purpose in using the word "grossly" was to determine if this was a statistical non-starter or a big deal. By a ratio of ten to one our respondents thought that religious bullying was grossly under-reported. Our conclusion from the responses to this and the previous question is that while the awareness of religious bullying is increasing, it is still grossly under-reported. These conclusions strengthened our resolve to write this book. 

Our purpose for writing Question Mark was two-fold. First, we wanted to raise the awareness of the problem of religious bullying in Christian churches. Many of the respondents said they had personally been victims of religious bullying—almost seventy percent. The same number of respondents who said they had been victims of religious bullying through emotional abuse also said they have personally observed others being emotionally abused. Coincidence? We think not. In fact, we believe that people who have experienced something seem better able to see it occurring in situations around them than those who have not been victimized. We hope this book will contribute to raising awareness by educating people as to what constitutes religious bullying by spiritual abuse so they may see it when it occurs in their surroundings. 

Our second reason for writing the book came from the overwhelming perception that religious bullying is grossly under-reported. We had to ask why this is so. Again, one of our respondents provided insight for us as we tried to formulate an answer for why victims of religious bullying tend not to talk about it. The person wrote, "It doesn't surprise me that many of us stay silent . . . because of fear and embarrassment"—fear that they would be labeled "a crazy, angry, vindictive person," and embarrassment that they would be "defined as a victim."¹⁴ Victims stay silent in the hope that they can "just move on." While school bullying is a different topic, we find it interesting that only one in ten victims of cyber-bullying tell a parent.¹⁵

But silence does not create a healing environment. Theologian Miroslav Volf wrote, 

Therefore, it is our hope in writing this book that we can help create a healing environment in churches, remove the silencers of shame, fear, embarrassment, and disgrace so victims can name the abuse truthfully and find their own healing.

All societies and organizations need leaders; but leaders aren't always benign or benevolent. Sometimes they're bullies even though they reflect the traits we look for in leaders. Like the Lyme disease mentioned in the Introduction, bullies infect our congregations and our churches in a pernicious way. As you'll see, it is most definitely a pervasive problem. 

Leadership Hasn't Changed; the World Around It Has

Connective technologies (the Internet, smartphones, etc.) may have changed the pipeline for reporting these abuses both in kind and in volume, but we can take a walk back through history and see how the abuse of power in the religious community is nothing new. 

Power used to be asymmetrically weighted on the bully's side. The bully once had the microphone and the organization behind him. It was literally his big word against your little one. That's changing fast. Even as recently as the 1990's we were still limited in our ability to share information, and if you were bullied your only option might be to tell someone over a beer that night. Now you can record the bully with your phone, post it to Twitter or Facebook, and start a rebellion in real time! 

LET'S GO BACK TO 1450

Whether through emotional manipulation or restricting the dissemination of information, church leadership has been controlling those under their care for as long as there have been men in those positions. We only need to look at the history of how scripture was shared to see evidence of this. 

In the Library of Congress in Washington D.C., there is a hall where you'll see the Mainz Giant Bible.¹⁷ It's beautiful handwritten, illuminated manuscript. Published between 1452 and 1453, it is one of the finest handwritten books ever made in Europe. Also, it is indicative of the way books were produced up until the printing press was invented. At the time of the Mainz Bible's printing there were approximately 5,000 books existing in all of Europe. The whole continent had 5,000 books total.

^th