Henry's Story
My wife and I are not church planters, but we love being part of new ministries and have some experience that allows us to serve as key lay leaders. So when a church plant was starting in our new neighbourhood and the church planter asked us to join as part of the core team, we were excited! We threw ourselves into the opportunity and got involved in several aspects of church life. I was invited to serve as an elder, and we initially loved having a new and energetic church where we could bring friends. However, we started to see worrying signs after a year or so, people were staying for a few months and then leaving. Each time someone left the pastor would criticise them behind their backs, it was usually down to a failure of commitment, lack of robust theology or problems with mental health.
Unfortunately, after a couple of years of service our own relationship with the church’s lead pastor started to become quite strained. It turns out he believed our role, as the leadership team, was to rubber-stamp his agenda and vision for the church. Any new ideas that weren’t his were met with indifference or resistance. Worse, any differences of opinion about current practices or future plans, particularly the querying of proposed risky financial commitments, were taken as signs of disloyalty. He accused me of trying to undermine his leadership by questioning his views and encouraging others to leave. In fact, I had been doing the exact opposite as I had tried to convince very unhappy people to give him the benefit of the doubt and to stay. While we were willing to continue serving and supporting, we realised that our pastor felt differently about our involvement. Our family was slowly pushed to the margins of church life despite having made costly sacrifices over several years to support the pastor, his family, and the church. Opportunities for ministry were taken away. Where the birth of children in other families was celebrated and met with generous offers of help, our own new arrival was never mentioned at church, and we received no offers of practical support. It’s one thing to have differences of opinion on how things should happen at a church, but it’s quite another to be blacklisted because the leader places you in the ‘not properly on board’ category. He was also caught out in a number of lies, verified by others, which he refused to acknowledge.
Unfortunately this church plant was part of a wider church-planting network which lacked robust structures of accountability. The board of reference for our pastor included two of his own personal friends which made it very difficult when concerns needed to be raised. In the end, after countless emails, several intense meetings with others on the leadership team, many long phone calls and personal meetings with the pastor, the board of reference and with much prayer, we decided to leave the church. When we decided we needed to move on we were asked not to return to church again, not even to say good-bye to the church members who had become so important to us. This was very difficult. Sadly, but unsurprisingly, we gradually learned of more and more families having similar experiences and deciding to leave the church. There are only two members of the original launch team who are still attending. As far as we know, there has been no disciplinary action taken.
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