Wednesday, January 09, 2008

Recovering From Spiritual Abuse (link)

Found this website on spiritual abuse, which, it says at the bottom, is run by Christian Recovery International. Below is a snippet of an article written by Barbara Milligan, about her experience in a spiritually abusive group. It was so close to what I saw in Elim, I couldn't stop reading! Click here for the entire article. Here are a couple of paragraphs from it. I hope I don't get sued for this:

"John and I soon began to notice, however, some other things that disturbed us. First, there was the gradual and steady disappearance of the more spiritually mature people in the church. And no one seemed to know why any of them had left. Then there were the subtle beliefs that originated with the pastor. There was the belief that if you are truly serving God, either you are in “full-time ministry” or you are preparing for it, and the rest of us working folks are a disappointment to God. (Don’t ask who was funding the full-time ministries.) And that God wants to heal you emotionally or physically, but if the problem isn’t gone after we’ve prayed for you two or three times, then you must be doing something wrong. And that the best way to heal an emotional need is to get busy for God—never mind your troublesome feelings, which aren’t important anyway. These beliefs were never publicly spoken, of course; in fact, I believe Richard would have said quite the opposite, if pressed. But the actions we observed revealed his true colors.

Not surprisingly, all the ministries of the church had to endure Richard’s invasive micromanagement. And the central feature of any meeting involving the pastor was hearing him lecture for an hour or more. Then there were the self-serving claims Richard made in the church newsletters: Because the church was obeying God, he had blessed it by multiplying its numbers and enabling it to spin off several other churches and numerous highly successful ministries. A gross exaggeration. In addition, we learned that there was no one within the church whom Richard and Jill trusted as intimate friends. Whether they had intimate friends outside the church, I don’t know, but Richard’s persistent attempts to bring under his authority the pastors of other churches in the area made me wonder if he trusted anyone but himself and his wife.

Part of the overall problem was that any attempt to confront someone in leadership had disastrous consequences. Anyone who expressed an opinion that the pastor didn’t like was understood to be unsubmissive, if not outright rebellious. Worse still, the associate pastors aspired to become clones of the pastor and were afraid to challenge him on anything. But none of this was common knowledge; it happened in secret.

Stunned by what we were discovering, we tried to communicate with a few people who had left the church. But we were disappointed when they wouldn’t talk to us about their reasons for leaving or their feelings about it. We soon woke up to a startling realization: We had become members of an oversized dysfunctional family, governed by the unspoken rules Don’t talk, Don’t trust and Don’t feel."

--- Barbara Milligan is the associate editor of STEPS and the author of Desperate Hope: Experiencing God in the Midst of Breast Cancer (InterVarsity Press, 1999). You are invited to visit her Web site at www.desperatehope.com. This article orginally appeared in STEPS, a publication of the National Association for Christian Recovery. All rights reserved.

Thursday, January 03, 2008

A CHRISTMAS WISH...

Got this message a couple of weeks ago. My apologies for the late response:

"hello!
i really love this site. it speaks of TRUTH! hahaha! not like the lies they come up in El**. hahaha!
I hope you'll post something new this Christmas season as your gift to all of us who left and who awakened to the truth! :D hehe!
do you know anything about the Elections of 1998? about nene pimentel leaving the group?? ooops, i said too much.. they might get mad at me! haha! but who cares! hahaha! :D
so can you please grant my simple Christmas wish?? :D
Thank you so much! merry Christmas!
i have a trivia for everyone! i heard from Reliable sources that the person that evil ones ask to pay for the center's electric bill left the cult already! hallelujah! and buti nga sa evil ones! hahaha! atleast now, magagamit na rin ang tithes niyo! hahaha!"


-- unfortunately, i don't know enough to speak about the nene pimentel issue, but i will ask around. there is one glaring thing we should not miss about this entire fiasco. the demi-leader prophesied once that BAGO's (Elim's) candidate will win the elections in 1998. biblically, we judge prophets by their prophecies. so sa tingin mo, prophet ba talaga? claro ba?

-- were you there when someone went onstage after the huge loss and said "even if we lost, we won!" haaay. saang planeta ba sila nanalo?

-- were you there when people at the top fled the country and left the members to pick up the pieces on their own? now what kind of leadershit is that? ay sorry, leadership pala.

-- to the electric bill financier: nice one! congratulations, ma'am! you're free to do as you will, without that conniving, beady-eyed thief looking over your shoulder, making sure your money goes to her and her family. dun ka na lang sa grupong marunong mag-accounting at magbigay ng expense breakdown-- dun sa mga taong nagsasabi na ang tithe ay maari ring ibigay sa mga kamag-anak na nangangailangan, or charitable institution na iyong napupusuan.

-- to all the people who drop by every now and then, thank you! may each day bring you closer to freedom and healing from the clutches of the evil ones and their crazy cult!