MK forum

I posted this response at another conversation and then thought it might be good to start this as its own topic.

I remember a couple of people who were kicked out while at Via, but you couldn´t even talk to the people who were leaving. You wanted to say goodbye or hug them, but there was danger that that would make the focus turn on you - and it truly did. I was unaware until recently that I was on the verge of being kicked out myself for asking doctrinally unsound questions. And in my mind I had been such a goody goody while there. I got called in for a board meeting too - I don´t remember crying, but I do remember being so nervous - and not being informed that I was homefree - whether they maintained their belief in their accusations (in which case they believed I was lying - for no reason, as I didn´t have a history of lying) or whether they believed in my innocence (in which case, shouldn´t they have thanked me for being open)? Via was so confusing!

I experienced identical dynamics to this in a church here in the USA. In my case, we were subtly 'told' to leave by the lone pastor leader. In my case, I had felt a bond to the man as if he was my father. It was years before I stopped thinking that somehow I must have done something wrong. I didn't think I had done the things he implied, but maybe I did? The insecurities I already had that made it easy to doubt my own perceptions made me ripe for abuse. He did the same things to numerous others over about a 15 year span. I haven't yet met any who suffered the same emotional devastation that I did. Probably because of my initially unquestioning trust and my temperament. Eventually after finding out, - they left too!? - did I finally that it truly wasn't me. It was him.

Since that time I have read about cults and spiritual abuse. This - what I experienced and what you experienced is spiritual abuse. There are dynamics in this leadership style that are the same dynamics you find in cults. For example, this - you couldn´t even talk to the people who were leaving. You wanted to say goodbye or hug them, but there was danger that that would make the focus turn on you - and it truly did
-- A number of people left before we did. I remember feeling that we were to "shun" them. Trusting what the pastor told us was true, I did. People who were still there did the same to us after we left. I felt kicked out of my family.

Another thing I have learned is that those who come out of cults have things to work through. We have developed a certain mentality. We had certain weaknesses in the first place that made us vulnerable. There are a number of books about healing from spiritual abuse. I have read a number of them and also some secular stuff on cult dynamics. You can probably even find helpful stuff online. I recommend this to people. Even after you get away there are places that need healing. Even without physical or sexual, it is abuse. Spiritual abuse.

When I was a child I thought that when anything bad happened that it was either simply Gods will or that I was being punished by God for my sins. I was taught that if bad things happened it was because I was not right with God and so he was punishing me so that I would turn back to him. Where is the "saved by grace and not by works" in that? I came to believe that if I was not perfect then I was not in "fellowship" with God. If I had un-confessed sins or un-repented sins that God would not listen to me. As a result I would lay in bed at night and try to recall anything I might have done wrong and tell God about it and then say sorry for anything that I may have forgotten or didn't even realize was a sin and even then felt no assurance that God was listening.

I learned to Hate "Gods will" I decided as a teenager that I didn't want anything to do with God because I didn't like "his will" and I didn't want him to continue inflicting "his will" on me so I told him that I didn't want him in my life anymore.

As a teen I knew and believed in Jesus and that he died for me on the cross but refused to call myself a christian because I thought that I was such a rotten sinful person that I didn't want to make God look bad. I knew that there was no hope of me ever being good enough for him so I stopped trying.

As a child I hated the way the Christians that I knew were such hypocrites. That was another reason I didn't want to call myself a christian I didn't want to be like that. I didn't want to preach about how Christians should be and then go home and not live by what I preached. I saw double standards at Fanda. The adults were one thing in front of other adults, and something completely different when it was only us kids around. And I never saw repentance for it. Because of this I believed that almost all of them were going to hell too because I could see that they were not living up to Gods standards that they were teaching. I thought that there were true christians in the world but most of the missionaries weren't. I thought the missionaries were misfits and rejects of society that churches had sent away.

I think that the extreme guilt I felt about being a sinner and so obviously not good enough for God was one of the contributing factors to the start of my paranoid delusions. In my first delusions I could trace everything bad that happened back to something I had done wrong. Then after a while I could trace every bad thing in the world back to something I had done wrong. It was a profound burden! I believed that I deserved bad things so when they happened to me I didn't see them as injustice but justice.

How does all this still affect me now? I have had to discard almost everything I learned as a child about God. They had the words right but all the translations wrong! And being a child and not understanding all the “thee's” and “thou's” I relied on there translation.

Another effect that it has had on me is that I cant teach my children about God. I have no idea how to teach them without spiritual abuse and when I think about trying to tell them anything about God I feel this terror and guilt about doing that to a child. I do desperately want them to know the God I know today though so I take them to church and send them to a christian school hoping that others can teach my children what I can't but I also fear that these other people are teaching my children the in the same way I was taught!

I still struggle very much with Christians who have double standards or a blind faith and with God, but now I understand that God did not create a puppet or robot when he created me. He created a human and he meant to do that, that was his purpose from the beginning, that he would have creations with free will that chose to love him and seek a relationship with him. I now know that He died for my sins because I am not good enough and never will be! And best of all, he knows that and loves me anyway!I know that I can sin and still be a child of God. All he requires of me is that I am open and honest and admit my sins and that I forgive others when they sin against me. That is the bottom line. And that is pretty much the opposite of what I was taught at Fanda.

Naomi,
I think that is not only what was taught in Fanda but what was taught to every person in NTM unless you were a tribal person. In my interview with GRACE Diane asked "my poor child, weren't you ever taught about grace?" I said "Grace was for the unsaved people we were there to save. We were supposed to know better, so grace was not for us". I feel so very sad for you Naomi, that you are afraid of harming your children by telling them about God. In my life it was the complete opposite. My dad, David Amstutz, did such an amazing job at explaining to me just how great God truly is. Most people knew him as the pilot who would go out of his way to help someone, the vocalist who loved to sing at the top of his lungs in church, the Sunday school teacher who loved to teach little kids about God's saving grace, and the deacon who would serve anywhere needed. Malaria could not stop him, almost cutting his leg off could not stop him, near death from food poisoning could not stop him from loving God. To me he was just 'dad'. The man who would play video games with us, rent scary movies and let us watch them when mom was not home, tell us that he was going to quiz us on our daily devotions and if we couldn't answer the question we would get in trouble then at the end the question was "what is your name" because he did not believe in using the Bible as a punishment. He was the man that when I had done something very wrong at school in 2nd grade and had a parent drive to our house and yell at me he found me hiding under my covers crying and instead of yelling at me he picked me up and hugged me and that was it, that was all I needed right then. That was GRACE. He used to run to stay fit and would let me run with him, as we ran he would talk about God more, would tell me whu he loved him so much, would talk about how great Heaven was going to be. I learned, through my dads actions that God was a gentle loving God. That he was super pleased when we did good, but even when we messed up He would hug us and comfort us and put us back on our feet. I was 10 when he got called in on his day off to fly up and try to find a murder suspect in a red car. I was 10 when his plane went down and he went to Heaven to sing for God in person. I was 10 when my world came crashing down. My hero was gone and all I could think about when the assistant pastor was sitting there telling us about the crash is that he was at least in a great place. From that point on I shut the world out. We didn't get counseling, which we greatly needed, I don't know why we didn't, maybe it was too expensive, maybe they thought we didn't need it, maybe they thought "God will get us through this without help", whatever the reason I was left at 10 without the one person I trusted the most in this world to try to figure things out on my own. I decided that even though my dad was no longer there I was still going to try to do the best I could at everything so as to make him proud. But family life was severly messed up, the balance was gone, and I found myslef messing up, as far as my attitude went, a lot. Then I started being told that "I sure hope your dad isn't watching you now because he would be so ashamed" over and over I heard it until I did not have to hear it anymore because I started telling myself that everytime I messed up. I would get so down on myself because the dad that I had looked up to for so long no longer would love me and would be so ahamed of me. I spent my entire teenage years telling myself that. And then it got bigger till I was telling myself that anytime I did not get an A on a test or in a class, everytime I missed a soccer goal or let a goal get past me, anytime I hurt anyones feelings, I was devistated my senior year of high school because I was prom queen, was voted 'best smile' of the entire class, and yet I was not voted 'most friendly' and that stopped my world. I sat out in the woods at my house just crying because I thought that I had let my dad down because I apparently was not friendly enough. Of course we all were taught that our actions affected our parents minisrty, so naturaly I assumed that my messups affected my dads great name. I lived in fear of failure and held myself to such a high standard. I could never let my guard down for a second but even after taking such great steps to keep my testimony perfectly spotless some family members always found something to talk to my mom about. By the time I was in my 20s it reached the breaking point and I wanted to end my life. Sat there several times with a knife to my wrists, but could not go through with it. I was never angry at God, through all those years He is the only thing that I had to cling to. I always remembered the great God my dad had told me about. It was the pressure from this world to look and act like the "perfect Christian" that pulled me so far down in a pit that I could not get out. My husband and I went through marriage counseling for a year and after giving us a survey to do the first week he turned to my husband and told him that we had to concentrate on me. He knew right away from my answers that I did not know what true grace or love was. I looked to others to tell me if I was loved. I always looked for other people's approval of my choices in life to know if I was being good or bad. It took us a year of counseling and more than half of that time was just re-teaching me what it was to be human and just live. That is when I was reminded what true Grace was. That is also when I allowed myself to remember my dad the way he truly was. The man who came to me when I messed up and spoke no upset words at all because he could tell that I was sorry and hurting, the man who just picked me up and hugged me until I was ready to get back on my feet. All these years of convicing myself that I had to act perfectly or he would be ashamed at me were a complete lie. I was not living life, I was trapped inside myself with a giant wall around me so desperately trying to act how everyone was telling me I had to so that I would not hurt my dad (who was happy in Heaven) and so as not to detroy his testimony through my actions. I am still afraid of failure. I look at my family now and love everything about it, my husband and my boys, and yet I still have a nagging voice in my head telling me that I failed 7 years ago because I failed to kill myself. I did not go through with my plans so I failed. But when these feelings come I can now push them away, I can remind myself that I am allowed to fail, and I am allowed to fall because God will always be there to catch me and hold me until I am ready to stand up again. I talk to my kids all the time about God. It brings me great joy to tell them all the wonderful things. That He is a God that loves them so much and is there for them no matter what time of day or night it is. A God who cries when they cry and who, no matter what, will be there for them even if they stumble. Hopefully, if I die when they are young they will remember everything that I have taught them like I did with my dad. That even through the darkest of nights, no matter how long that night lasts, they can know that morning IS coming. Ok, I know that was a bit long, but I have written it so many times and deleted it and this time I am going to hit submit and this time I am going to leave this brick on the floor and take down my wall a little.

Thank you so much Denise.

Denise, your story made me cry. Thank you for sharing it. You are so blessed to have an awesome, gracious earthly father and a loving, gracious, un-condemning Heavenly Father. I'm so glad you are able to feel the love from both of them now. And I'm so glad your walls are coming down. Brick by brick. I admire and honor you.
Raz

SOOOOOO many things fly through my mind when I read this thread. I find so much I can relate to in what Naomi was saying. And find hope and thought in what Denise has said. Then there is my own experiences with Spiritual Abuse..... the lies, so close to the truth.... I still don't know how to pull them apart. I keep telling myself that the god I know is not the God *HE* wants me to know, but rather a lie warped by men. I want to know Denise's God. Not the God who punishes me for falling short and ignores me because there is sin in my life.

I am reading "The Subtle Power of Spiritual Abuse" by Jeff VanVonderen and David Johnson. It is GOOD! I highly recommend! When I finish reading it, I plan to go back over it again and take notes, it is that good.

denise, i just read your story and i have tears in my eyes. i remember you so well as a little girl - best smile indeed! thanks so much for sharing about your experience discovering grace.

Thanks Joie, I wish that I remembered some of you.