Kris says:  Way back in this site’s early days, when I honestly was still sometimes sort of neutral about Sovereign Grace Ministries, a new commenter came around and shared her story with us. 

At that point, I’d already been the recipient of numerous emails from folks who had gone through similar experiences, and there had been multiple others on the site who had, of course, told of their own SGM-related difficulties there.  But there was something about “SGM Casualty’s” story that tipped the scales for me and made me really believe that the organization had deep structural problems that need to be addressed.

I know that most folks rarely read these old posts, much less all the comments that follow, so I’m guessing that the majority of our newer readers have never even seen the story that proved to be my “SGM tipping point.”  I’ve decided to pull it out from obscurity.  Here it is:

“SGM Casualty’s” Story

I was part of PDI-turned-SGM for a long time, and there were too many abuses to recount in a post. In a nutshell, leadership puts up an appearance of humility, while being absolutely unwilling to look at very serious cult-like tendencies. Basically, everyone was expected to be cookie-cutter families: Everyone is to home school, only let their children court, support the same hyper-Calvinist doctrines, etc. When my spouse and I decided not to home school, you would have thought we had decided to sell our children into prostitution. We came under so much scrutiny and “evaluation” as to our motives, we ended up doing it out of a sense of shame.

I also took issue with the fact that leadership in our church refused to report very serious cases of child abuse to local officials – even one case of molestation and another of incest. I have a very good friend whose husband confessed to a pastor he had sexually abused their daughter and other heinous acts. One of the pastors met with the couple one time and then told my friend later – when she had asked when they would meet again – that he thought the situation was pretty much dealt with.

Not only is not reporting these abuses against the law, I think it was indicative of their arrogant presumption that they can effectively take on situations that were way over their head. We also had people in the church who obviously had serious mental diseases, but they were only offered minimal counseling (since they would obviously never be able to carry much weight in the church and were thus valued less). And some were encouraged to go off their medication.

If I went into any more detail about our horrific experience with SGM, it would be obvious who we since we were pretty high profile. But I’ll say this … I think they have the best of intentions and really believe they’re zealously upholding biblical truth. But their methodologies are so fraught with inconsistencies and dangerous error, they have hamstrung themselves in their effectiveness. And as much as they uphold the efficacies of biblical accountability, if anyone outside their tight little leadership circles dare to challenge anything in the movement, they are anathema and shunned altogether.

Although there were many good things about PDI/SGM and I have many fond memories, unfortunately the harm I suffered far outweighs the good. I was so shipwrecked after leaving, I still have a very difficult time walking into a church or trusting anyone who calls him/herself a Christian.

I may one day throw all caution to the wind and list the specific atrocities I witnessed and experienced firsthand while in this movement, but I just can’t go there yet. It’s amazing that even after being out of there for years, I’m still afraid that I’ll get some phone call or email from someone in leadership if I blow the whistle on them. (It wouldn’t be the first inquisition since I left.) I’ve worked really hard to put that horrible season of my life out of my mind; I just don’t want to jeopardize the healing I have experienced by reopening that wound.

But thank you so much for having the courage to speak out! I’m surprised by now the Internet isn’t rife with websites speaking out against this very dangerous cult-like ministry.

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Kris says:  After that introductory comment, “SGM Casualty” returned and added the following…

After witnessing the courage of others who have posted heart-wrenching accounts of abuses suffered while in SGM, I too have decided to go for broke. If my experience could possibly prevent someone else from suffering what I have in SGM’s wake, it would be worth it.

I too experienced horrific abuse growing up. I grew up in the foster care system and was abused in every way. If you’ve ever read the book “A Child Called It,” you could basically take his past down a notch, and that was my life. It was a daily hell living with a foster mother who was the cruelest person I’ve ever met in my life. My punishments from her included things like having my head held in a toilet, being locked in a closet for hours, and being beaten to the point of nearly passing out on any whim (just to give you the idea that even as far as garden-variety abuse goes, mine was extreme). And my foster father was sexually abusive.

When I came to what was then PDI, they were just getting into the whole kafuffle over Christian counseling. Basically we were told there was no credence in rehashing the past b/c God was the God of the present. We would go to Celebrations (their annual mecca-life conference), and there would be times of ministry for all kinds of things … whatever CJ felt God was leading him to call out: twins, sisters, balding men, people who grew up Catholic, even people whose birthdays were in May (to name just a few). But never once was there a ministry time for anyone who suffered abuse. Not once. So if you were balding, you would get the most amazing prophetic song from Bob Kauflin that plumbed the depths of God’s heart for the genuine struggle you would be facing. But if you were afraid to fall asleep every night for fear that you might either be dragged out of bed and beaten for some crime that was discovered or caressed by cold hands in places a girl should never be touched, well, you were on your own.

In the 12 years I was in the ministry, I never once asked for help in dealing with my past. I was so afraid I’d be judged as being self-pitying or not fully embracing the sovereignty of God. But then this one night I was watching a movie where they showed a man molesting his daughter. It was heinous and unbelievably irresponsible to show – even by Hollywood’s standards. It was so shocking to me, and I couldn’t get to the controller in time to fast forward it. I thought I was fine, but then over the next couple days, I was battling this unbelievable anger that I couldn’t get on top of. I wouldn’t even acknowledge that it could be connected to my past or that scene. I just kept saying to myself (as I had been taught), “I’m not even going to give this air time.”

But after getting into a shouting match with a stranger in a parking lot two days later, which is totally unlike me (she started it, btw), I made the tragic mistake of reaching out to one of my pastors’ wives. I’ll spare you the details, but it was not good. So I called a previous pastor who had been like a spiritual father to me in our previous SGM church, and he told me something that chilled me to the bone. I remember it word for word because it played over and over in my mind for a long time. He said, “[My name], isn’t it such a comfort to know that whatever happened to you (and he knew details of my past b/c I had shared some of them w/ his wife … a regret I will take to my grave) was WAS SOVEREIGNLY ORDAINED BY GOD AND WAS STILL BETTER THAN YOU DESERVED?”

I was shocked, horrified, outraged, you name it. For the first time in my life, I challenged his sick doctrine vehemently, although I didn’t attack him personally. I told him that when another pastor’s son experienced a traumatic injury at a young age, his parents didn’t tell him – when he was too afraid to spend the night at anyone’s house for years afterwards – to just get over it. His parents worked with him patiently and sought out help for their son. Another pastor’s daughter was deathly afraid of any kind of fire b/c she witnessed a stove fire that wasn’t even ever out of control at a young age. Her mother spoke of her gripping fear with compassion – not a cavalier attitude that her experience was too long ago to have any valid hold on her. I told him that if someone experiences something horrible while in SGM, they are afforded untold hours of counseling and the church’s utmost of support. I watched it happen on many occasions as tragedy would befall different families. But if you come into SGM broken in any way from past abuse, you’re on your own.

When I got off the phone with this pastor I once trusted with abandon, I threw the phone across the room and told God, “If I weren’t so afraid of hell, I’d turn my back on you!” And sobbed for hours. I can’t tell you how much it took to overcome the juggernaut of those words. But it wasn’t until finally opening up to a very wise and godly woman (after leaving SGM, of course) that I was able to see the depth of distortion to the Father’s heart of God. The Bible says it would be better for a man to have a millstone hung around his neck and cast into the depths of the sea than to make a child stumble. That’s extreme. Yet this man, who spoke so cavalierly of my abuse, has a daughter he adores. There’s no way he could be so cold and calculating in his theology if his daughter were ever molested by another man or beaten mercilessly by someone. So how dare he misrepresent my heavenly Father – and the only true father I’ve ever known – by saying being treated so horribly my entire childhood was still better than I deserved.

Rewind the years back to my earlier experiences with SGM … A few years into being at the church I was also told by a pastor’s wife that she thought I was anorexic. I’m naturally thin with a high metabolism and dropped in my weight while I was nursing. I had very big babies and had a hard time keeping up with the caloric demands of nursing; I’ll give her that. So she had questioned me from time to time about my eating, but I assured her each time that I was NOT anorexic. Then one day she called me and said she wanted to talk to me that day. I was very intimidated by this woman because 1) her husband was on the apostolic team and 2) she lived next door.

We set up a time, and I could tell by her voice I was “in trouble” but had no idea for what. I was a nervous wreck by the time she got there. When she came in, she told me to follow her and walked over to my kitchen table where she set down (literally) a pile of articles. I was scared out of my mind but had no idea why I should be. She told me that she had just found out another woman in the church, who she had compared me to on several occasions b/c we were both into healthy food and fitness (runners), had just been hospitalized for anorexia. And the pile on my table was all resources and articles about eating disorders she had collected.

She also told me that she had tried to penetrate my arrogance on numerous occasions but that I failed to recognize the seriousness of this situation, so she wasn’t going to wait any longer. She said that if she waited for me to recognize my “deeply rooted sin,” I could be dead, and she wasn’t going to sit by and let that happen. And how could I defend myself since one article said that anorexics are nearly impossible to help b/c of their stubborn resistance, so oftentimes friends and families just have to force their hand by admitting them to treatment centers and stuff like that. Keep in mind that at the time of this stinging rebuke I was still in my 20s, 5′5″ and 114 pounds when she had me “weigh in” after our “talk” – although I did very little talking. The woman in the hospital who was diagnosed as anorexic, on the other hand, was under 100 pounds.

I was so floored and afraid. Although I had been corrected by this woman many times and really respected her, I had never seen her this intense. She told me that she wasn’t the only one who “saw this” and that it could become an issue of church discipline if I didn’t submit to the leadership’s direction on this. Again, I won’t bore you with all of the details, but I spent years (yes, that’s right years) in accountability with different members of leadership on this issue. I was given a weight that I was required to maintain (where’s that in the Bible?); I was restricted from exercise for months at a time; I was required to keep eating journals where I had to write down everything I ate; I was told to “widen the circle” and let others know about this area of weakness so they could watch and evaluate my eating at sundry church functions; etc.

I was so confused about this whole issue b/c I did believe that there could be areas of sin in our lives that we are genuinely blind to. And I was very recalcitrant at times to submitting to the level of scrutiny over my eating and my weight. I absolutely hated having to record everything I ate, and I really did come to hate eating. The prevailing argument from one woman was that if there wasn’t an issue, I wouldn’t have a problem submitting to these reasonable requirements. But I did love the women who were leading the brigade and knew they loved me; that I never questioned. I was also very afraid of the potential of giving into pride. I was afraid that if I didn’t submit to the discipline they were doling out, God would resist me b/c of my pride and discipline me with some kind of health crisis (a threat they had sternly warned me about). I had also been told of numerous accounts of sincere Christians being led astray b/c of their own arrogance and lack of teachability or willingness to look at their sin. (Larry Tomczak was at the top of the list.)

So after a while, I came to trust these women and actually believed I had a problem with eating, even though my weight never once dropped down below what every credible health institute deemed an acceptable range for my height and age. And there was a time – when after not being allowed to exercise for more than 6 months and had weighed only 6 pounds less than I did the day I delivered my last child – that I really did start to give into deception and even “purged” with natural laxatives to try to trim off some of the excess weight. Of course, my conscience would later be smitten and I would confess my sin, respond to the correction that would follow, and submit to heightened restrictions and extended periods of consequences. But I never did any of those things before the years of emphasis by church leadership on my weight.

In my case, as sincere as these leaders’ hearts may have been, I think it was evidence of the potential for abuse in their strict positions on the doctrine of sin and the supreme importance of accountability. Don’t get me wrong; I haven’t thrown out the baby with the bath water. I’ve seen the dangers of an accountability-free Christianity in many a church. But the ease with which they handed out what was considered biblical discipline in a very gray area did a lot of damage. For me, I was willing to submit to what seemed like harsh and unreasonable discipline at times because the church was like the only family I had ever known. But that loyalty and trust came at a very high price, which brings me to my next experience … and the proverbial last straw.

I found out from my husband, in a meeting with the pastor and his wife who were like spiritual parents to me, that he had been unfaithful to me. In that same meeting we were told that we would step down from care group leadership. Needless to say, I was devastated but responded with grace and dignity in that meeting, as every good Christian wife was expected to. I didn’t care about stepping down from care group leadership and, in fact, very much agreed with that and saw it as a no brainer. What came as a shock was I was (literally) assigned two women I was allowed to talk to about what I was going through. And one was a single woman who had never been married but was a church secretary and could report to this pastor how I was doing. The other was my pastor’s wife (the one who was like the spiritual mother, not the apostle’s wife who had at one time lived next door). As much as I adored his wife, everyone knew following up with people was not her forte. She was a busy home school mom with four kids (the SGM way) and was constantly overwhelmed with the never-ending demands of ministry. I could count on one hand the number of times she ever called me in our 9-year relationship, and this crisis was no exception.

Also, even though this pastor and wife had met with us regularly for years (usually twice a month for discipleship), and our families shared so many really fond memories together, we never met with them as couples again. And one time, when I was presumptuous enough to ask my friend why they had stopped meeting with us and had told her I felt that we had been abandoned as soon as we were deemed no longer “useful” to the church, she told me that there were biblical grounds for pouring their energies into people they were “co-laboring with” and would not apologize for doing that. I could hardly believe my ears. So when we had the largest care group in the church and God was moving powerfully through us, we were considered co-laborers and worthy of their time. But when we were bleeding out on the sidelines (at the risk of sounding dramatic), we were no longer their responsibility.

We eventually decided to leave the church and move out of the state altogether after my husband had lost so many jobs, he could no longer get a job in his field in that city. Before leaving, we asked to meet with this couple to say good bye. We had decided not to bring up any of the many issues we had with the church and the way his discipline was handled. I just so desperately wanted to keep some shred of the relationship alive. And I still loved this woman too much (and feared her too much) to confront her. But a few minutes into our meal, the pastor said that they had called the meeting (even though they didn’t initiate the meeting at all) to bring us some very serious concerns they had with us and told us that they were going to share these concerns with one of the pastors of the SGM they presumed we would be attending in our new city of residence.

He shared a few things with my husband that weren’t off target at all, and he was surprisingly quite gracious. But then his wife turned her attention to me. She unleashed the most intense series of rebukes she had ever given me. Just as I had with the other pastor’s wife who had once lived next door, I had rolled with many of her punches, but they were always seasoned with grace. However, this rebuke session was laced with anger and disappointment. The most shocking thing she shared with me was her disappointment that she didn’t feel I totally embraced “our” season of discipline. When I asked her what I was being disciplined for, she said that when a husband goes through church discipline, his wife is naturally included in that. And she went on to tell me all the ways she thought I stood aloof to the discipline process.

But how is it that a husband can cheat on his wife, and the wife is also subject to the discipline process? I was baffled and very hurt. And – as strange as this may seem – I argued with her for the first time in our relationship. I never raised my voice or treated her with any disrespect, but I did recount all of the things that I was asked to do and did. One of these was to go to the care group we had been assigned to without my husband (b/c he was working nights at the time), even though the care group leader had told us he didn’t feel comfortable with us being in his care group! I had appealed to our pastor to let me go to a different care group, but the appeal was denied. I look back on that now and see it as beyond ridiculous that grown adults have to ask pastors to be allowed to switch care groups. That’s pretty sick.

Oh, and this care group leader didn’t want us to leave his care group b/c he didn’t like us; his reason was that he had taken over our care group and told us he was afraid we could lead the people’s heart away from him like Absalom did to David. (No exaggeration – God is my witness.) But, in obedience to my pastor, I continued to go by myself, knowing that I was seen as a threat b/c our care group was very close and loyal to us. I also listed all of the other ridiculous things I was required to do, which I had done. So when I challenged her to give me specific examples of how I had resisted the discipline process in any way, she conceded that I had “gone through the motion” of obedience in my actions but that she did not feel my heart was in it. How nebulous can you get?

When we left that church, we were just shy of shipwrecked. We were exhausted, disillusioned, and broken. We did try the SGM church in our new city (don’t ask me why), but we were too far gone. Actually, one pastor and his wife took us on as a couple and really seemed to have faith in seeing us through the post-op process. They had also been through a grueling and highly public discipline process and admitted that SGM’s discipline processes tended to lack grace. They even included us in a discipleship group they had just started.

But she was the one I reached out to after seeing that movie, and she was freaked. Although she was gracious when she talked to me at first, they took a big step back from us in short order. I also found out that the pastor at this new church had called my old pastor, and my old pastor had freely shared intimate details of my past. I knew this had happened by their freak-out response, but I couldn’t prove it. So I emailed my previous pastor (spiritual father), asking him why he violated my privacy by sharing my past with this other pastor. (It was a high-risk operation, but he had no way of knowing I didn’t know for certain he had done that.) He emailed me back an explanation that this new pastor cared about me and that he had only asked about my past to help me … So he felt he did the right thing.

But this new pastor’s intention was hardly one of wanting to help me. Instead, we were uninvited from their group the following group, and his wife wrote me an email asking me not to contact her anymore. She said it was b/c she was really busy. But she hardly even acknowledged me at church. It was so unbelievably painful, and I was so mad at myself for ever bringing up my past or trusting any leadership in SGM. We left the church within a matter of weeks even more devastated than we had come 6 months before.

When we found a new church that was like a spiritual ER for us, I got help. But my husband was too disillusioned and angry to talk to anyone. He was actually much angrier about how I had been shunned for something I had no control over (my horrific past) than their incredibly harsh discipline process that was nearly void of grace and leaned much more Puritanical. Sadly, in the end, he decided cast the whole thing aside and turned to another woman for comfort and camaraderie. He’s now leading a completely immoral lifestyle and has left me a single mother with four kids. I barely recognize him when I see the depths of his callous disregard for anything that pertains to God. He’s also an alcoholic drowning his anger and disillusionment instead of getting the help he needs.

I’m sorry. I know this was really long. But if anyone is reading this who has reservations about some of the more insidious undertows of SGM’s dogmatic doctrines and methodologies, I would encourage you NOT to succumb to the notion that questioning things is, in and of itself, manifest proof of an arrogant and unteachable spirit. In looking back, there were so many things that gave me pause, but I had learned to doubt myself at every turn and put my trust in the ability of God to speak and lead through others to the neglect of my own discernment and ability to hear from God … a claim that, especially for a woman to assert, is nearly tantamount to heresy.

So I wasn’t being dramatic when I chose the moniker “SGM Casualty.” I’m also not hiding behind a cloak of anonymity, as Jesse seems to be asserting (in a general sense, not necessarily directed at anyone in particular). Anyone involved in any of the SGM churches I was a part of (to wit, Virginia Beach, Denver, and Orlando) would be able to identify me in a heartbeat and also identify the people I’m referring to … although my motive was, in no way, to expose specific people.

However, at the same time, I do search engine optimization for a living and realize the dangers of attaching your name to any kind of public site. So the last thing I want is for my name to come up in this sort of context if one of my clients were to do a search of my name. Also, no one in my professional life has any clue that I was once so foolish as to subject myself to this kind of twisted Christianity and cultish practices, and I intend to keep it that way.

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Kris says:  After she originally posted her story last year, “SGM Casualty” became one of our regular commenters for awhile.  She and I also struck up an ongoing email conversation, and our friendship completely apart from the subject of Sovereign Grace Ministries continues to this day.  Several months ago, she shared with me that although she’d found telling her story and interacting with other SGM survivors extremely cathartic, it was time for her to move on and leave.  She was, frankly, simply BORED with the topic of SGM, tired of wasting any more of her life and her energy on thinking about it.

So she’s no longer a “regular” around here, although we still correspond and she still does read from time to time, especially if I think there’s a story that will be of particular interest to her.

But just know that “SGM Casualty” will likely NOT be by to respond to any further comments.  We can discuss elements of her story, but we can’t count on “SGM Casualty” to add anything further to the discussion.