Month: April 2019

My last blog focused on what I believe is a serious trauma that was inflicted on the church congregants by the destruction of the illusion of the perfect pastor/perfect church. This I believe has had a profound effect on the level of trust and safety of many attenders, some of which have responded in their own personal trauma based ways. I believe that the church must step up and courageously speak to the “Elephant In The Room” if safety and trust are to return.

Recently I got a comment on my blog site by a person named Alex. Here is the comment that he shared:

“The WCCC congregation has moved on. We’re doing great things and we’re strengthening the torn fabric of our church. We’ve admitted our faults, we’ve let go of all the pertinent people, and we’ve MOVED ON. Things are really good at Willow right now. Having you continue to pick at the proverbial scab is doing NO ONE any good. You continue to harp on the fact that we haven’t done enough. What else can we do? We’ve admitted there was sin, we‘ve chosen a whole new elder board, we’ve admitted over and over that we were wrong, and we’ve put things in place to ensure that nothing like this will happen again. What would satisfy you? Reparations? Public flogging? Your blog is written anonymously which tells us that in all likelihood you’re afraid of your own convictions (probably because they’re highly flawed) and that the anonymity of the internet is the perfect place for you to continue to opine on matters that everyone else seems to have moved on from. God has not forgotten our church. He sees our brokenness and the earnest efforts of the new leadership to do the right thing. And He is honoring that … no matter what you anonymously say.”y

I must say I was somewhat amused by the fact that the commenter was communicating anonymously about my anonymity. I will admit that I am a novice in the social media world and did not realize that nowhere on my blog site did I have personal information about myself. I have no need to be anonymous, as what I write comes from my heart as well as my mind. I have corrected the lack of information so for Alex, I can be contacted directly.

Who Is Alex?

I do not know Alex but from the way in which he wrote the comment, it sounds as if he believes that he writes for the whole congregation. He uses the word “we” consistently in his comment, which would lead me to that conclusion. Is Alex a leader at the church? Does Alex have both the theological expertise and the organizational insight to make the sweeping conclusions that he declares? Is Alex someone who liked the image of the church and longs for it to return to its public status and glory? Is Alex a part of a group that is closed and  basically an echo chamber for all the goodness of Willow? Why would Alex want Willow to move on so quickly? Does he believe that a church, that has had over forty years of identified sinful government practices, should be able to change so quickly? We do love our illusions and desire their return.

Is Criticism Of Willow Wrong?

I have encountered a number of people who wonder if I am a Willow or Bill hater. They do not like the fact that much of what I say in my blogs focus on what went wrong and what needs to be done. As a result the assumption is that I am out to destroy Willow and Bill’s reputation.

Let me say in bold letters “I LOVE WILLOW CREEK AND BILL HYBELS!”  I still attend Willow Creek Crystal Lake, but I do not love some very serious aspects of what has gone on in the church and with Bill. I think of the verse where Jesus says:  “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.”  Matthew 10:34

Many people are black and white in their thinking. Things are either all good or all bad in their view of the world. It reminds me of the confusion now days with gender identification. Some people have come up with the word “non-binary” if they cannot identify as either female or male. Well I am non-binary when it comes to analysis of Willow and Bill.  I do not identify with the group that sees Willow as all good or those who see it as all bad. One’s inability to see the bad within the good cripples their ability to make substantial changes for the better.

I believe (and if my theological and Biblical training at Trinity Divinity School gives me some credibility) that Jesus was pointing to a very non-binary way of looking at life. As such, he did not come only to bring the peace of white washing everything as good, but instead came with the sword, to separate truth from error. It is the purging process that brings healing and growth. Jesus focused on the vine, and in many ways this could be viewed as the church, with its connection to Jesus, that had to be pruned. The “sucker” branches were stealing nutrients from the flourishing vine. Therefore, it is that when we look at the church, if we cannot see the cancer of sin as a part of the overall function of the church, then the church cannot diagnose and excise what is malignant. People who so quickly want to return to a broad brush focus on the goodness of the church are running from a deep dive into the cancer that, if not excised, is doomed to re-emerge and reconstruct the church around the DNA of pathology. They call for peace at all costs. Jesus, I am confident to say, was more concerned about people being good than looking good.

Why Do We Need To Learn From The Past?

The past is important primarily for this reason. It contains information that we need to extract about what went wrong and why. People who do not want to dwell in the past for very long are seeking to simply re-establish peace. They want peace without purging what was wrong.

As a psychologist, I see many couples in my practice. I have had people who come in for marriage counseling and they explain that this is their fifth marriage and they are having the same problems they had in their first. When asked why, they tend to explain the reason as in their poor choosing ability. “I keep choosing the same kind of person!” they state.  As we explore their marriage, what usually gets uncovered is that they, being unaware of their own wounds and brokenness, keep recreating the same relationship dynamics with new people. Because we as fallen individuals have a bias towards our own goodness, we see the problem as outside of ourselves. It is only when we do a deep dive into how we have been hurt and how therefore we keep recreating our own hurt, that we can start to change. This takes time and comes with an understanding that our default way of doing relationships is guided by these past wounds and coping patterns.

In many ways, this pattern can be seen in churches that form around the brokenness of leaders. Because charismatic leader types are often narcissistic in their personality development, the idea of looking internal to their own brokenness evades them. They design the church around the DNA of their own brokenness. As I have pointed out before, they can create the church in their own image by using deceit and a lack of transparency.

Alex, Why Am I Harping On This Or Picking At The Same Wound?

My dentist, or more frequently my dental hygiengist, tends to bring up every time I get my teeth cleaned that I need to work more on flossing. I personally feel that my teeth are doing fine and I do not need the lecture. However, the truth is, my hygiengist particularly sees what I do not see, he or she sees pockets that get formed that can hold disease when I do not floss. They care more about the health of my teeth than I do.  If I lived in denial, I would not go to the dentist, believe that things were ok, and only when pain flared up would I seek help. By that time what was a problem becomes a disaster.

So it is with the church. People who clearly see things that others (even leaders immersed in the church) do not see, are not bringing problems forward just to be negative, but because they care for the long term health of the church. There are, I am sure, people who simply want to tear down the church because of some hidden grudge, but those can be detected if they bring forward no solutions. In a way, like a parent to a child, if you love your church you will bring discipline to it so that healthy change can occur. Individuals who are satisfied with an incomplete and unhealthy model of the church, only wanting it to look good, do not love the church at the deepest level. It is like a parent who settles for a child’s less than potential performance because they do not want to have done the hard work of bringing discipline to the child.

Therefore Alex, I am afraid, I am going to keep picking!

 

 

Now that we are at the year mark post revelation of the sins of the founder, Bill Hybels, where is the church at at this point?

Institutional Trauma

Willow Creek Community Church (WCCC) continues to be in a state of trauma that has not been addressed openly and honestly from the leadership and publicly from the stage. Statements to the effect that the church is going through a difficult season are equivalent to placing a band aid on a gaping wound. It appears that the leadership’s approach is to say the least possible about the reality of the crisis and hope that time diminishes the impact on the church. Meanwhile the numbers of both attenders and income has slowly diminished.

First what is trauma? Trauma occurs when an event happens to a person or community that is so intense and frightening or painful that it shatters one’s sense of self protection. The boundaries of ones’ life get penetrated in such a forceful way that one’s defenses get destroyed, leading to a sudden shift from a sense of safety to one of vulnerability. The emotions of fear become intense, and individuals seek any method to try to regain a sense of protection. The fear alert center of the brain goes on tilt, staying in a defensive and over vigilant state, scanning the world for further triggers of threat. This can lead to a lifetime of emotional turmoil and destructive patterns of trying to soothe the fear one feels.

What is institutional trauma? Let me give an example from outside of WCCC. On October 24th of 1995 a train hit a school bus in Fox River Grove, Illinois, killing 7 students. Instantaneously the communities of Fox River Grove and Cary Illinois went from having a sense of security to one of anxiousness. What had happened? The illusion that was unconsciously accepted that students were safe on public transportation was shattered. An illusion is like a bubble that gets poked by a pin and shatters into a million molecules. Suddenly a community that took safety for granted goes on high alert for the possibility of danger to students. Hundreds of parents became instantly distrustful of allowing their children to ride buses to school, and instead drove them in their cars.

Illusions are mostly unconscious and involve a set of unchallenged assumptions. What happened at WCCC was the explosion of the illusion of a perfect church and a perfect pastor. The bubble that surrounded the church with the illusions of its’ greatness was suddenly punctured and the underbelly of what had sustained that illusion was exposed. As with any trauma, many of the people affected went into a state of disorientation and ultimately, disillusionment.

Two Great Illusions Destroyed

With the revelation and confirmation by the IAG report that Bill Hybels had sexually abused women in the church and that he had used a governmental structure that gave him an unhealthy amount of power and control, two fundamental illusions were shattered.

The first illusion shattered was that of the assumption that Bill Hybels’s respected women and was someone who could be trusted to treat them with dignity and would protect them from sexual violation. The church placed him in a vaunted position that gave him an aura of perfection, so the idea that he could possibly violate the trust of women was almost impossible to accept in the view of many. This illusion was so powerful that if one or two women came forward with allegations, they would quickly be discounted, because the overwhelming illusion of Bill’s goodness would crush their stories. It was only after multiple women came forward saying basically the same thing that it was taken seriously.

No one wants our illusions to be crushed. We want heroes and people that we can trust. Many people at WCCC, to hold onto the illusion, had to cling onto a belief that these accusations were made up by unstable women. When illusions get destroyed, the aftermath is one of great distrust. If we cannot trust that our pastor is safe, who can we trust?

The second shattered illusion was that of the perfect church. WCCC has striven to create a product of perfection, apparently to show off God’s best to a watching world. The idea that we are a flawed community seeking to demonstrate to the world how Christians organically deal with visible pain apparently did not occur to the architect of the Willow model. As such it has pushed for showing off the best of everything, believing apparently that people who see the results will somehow be impressed and see Christians as flawless. One recurring theme in this perfectionist model is that of the “guest experience”. This idea is close to the same concept that Disney uses when people come to their theme parks. Everything must be perfect and magical, a little microcosm of heaven on earth. Not reality folks.

The revelation that Bill Hybels’ style of leadership was driven by his own narcissistic perfectionism, and involved behind the scenes patterns of unhealthy levels of power and control, has pulled back the curtain on how this “perfect” church actually functioned. The illusion that we all wanted to believe is that this perfect product (the church) was created by a healthy process. Because it looks good it must have been built in a healthy way. That, as I have described in previous blogs, is a form of hypnotism, where we get so mesmerized by the greatness of what we see that we automatically assume that it was produced in healthy, Godly ways. But that in fact was not true. When we focus on the product (a well oiled machine church) and presume that it was produced by a good process, we are shocked and disillusioned when reality breaks through. The Hoover Dam is a spectacular achievement, but the number of people that died and the demanding work pressure that operated behind the scenes to produce it is out of our awareness. It is just awesome!

Secrecy, deception , and fear were the operative principles in keeping the church’s facade intact. Secrecy was enforced using Non Disclosure Agreements, where in exchange for silence about the tactics the church used, money was offered for a severance package. This guaranteed that the hurtful practices of how the church eliminated potential threats to its’ image got spirited away. It assured that the distasteful practices behind the scenes would not be revealed. It hid the bullying practices of the senior pastor and his henchmen that were loyal to him. It created the Elder Response Team with its’ trauma inducing strong arm approach to cleansing “problem people” in the church. So what got uncovered as the illusion broke was the fact that this good looking product, WCCC, was in fact created and sustained by behind the scenes sinful behavior that sought to only let people see what made the church look good. Fired and traumatized individuals were collateral damage in the service of protecting the brand. At this point only the courage of Mike Breaux has provided an honest peep hole into the practice of getting people out of the church when they may have questioned the strong arm tactics of the leader by making them say that “God is leading me in a new direction”. True if Bill Hybels is God.

The Intersection of Individual and Institutional Trauma

In the example of the bus accident trauma, the communities provided a number of resources to help people cope. I was part of a mental health trauma team that recognized that this trauma affected everyone and that people would need to seek help to re stabilize their lives. It is interesting and sad that secular institutions recognize the need for intervention when trauma occurs, while the church responds in a somewhat indifferent way. The reality is that due to the shattering of the illusions described above, thousands of people have been affected by traumatic emotions. WCCC leadership has failed to give a broad congregational framework from the public stage to help people give an understanding to what they may be feeling emotionally. The church is called to “speak the Truth” but the severe minimization of this earthquake event at WCCC has been treated like just a “bad season”. I think the prophets of old would get in the face of WCCC leadership and challenge them to call what has happened what it is. A quake of 9 or 10 on the emotional Richter scale. History has shown that when people are not treated with the honest information they need to cope, organizations falter. And this is as it should be, since if leaders cannot speak honestly and call sin sin, there is a deep and abiding sense that they are not trustworthy and not worthy of our belief that they will protect the Body of Christ from the destructiveness of sinful practices. Are we worried about lawsuits? Have we joined the litigious spirit of the age? Can you imagine Jesus not saying the Truth because He feared a law suit? Clearly the cost of discipleship involves speaking Truth and trusting God with the outcome.

The broader institutional trauma affected people in different ways. The breaking of the illusion of trust of the senior pastor relative to sexual improprieties likely activated an enormous traumatic reaction to a huge number of women in the church who have been sexually violated. In the United States one out of three women have reported some kind of contact sexual violence in their lives. These micro traumas had a huge impact on these women’s sense of vulnerability and lack of safety. If the statistics bear out at WCCC, a conservative estimate would be that about 2500 women in the church have experienced this trauma. When the larger systemic trauma occurred and the illusion of safety in the male senior pastor was destroyed, it is likely that many of these women experienced a reactivation of their original trauma. Women who felt that at least the church was a safe place to trust men, now, may well be disillusioned. The church will not know how often this trauma reaction occurred because they have not set up mechanisms to allow these affected women to come forth and get help. Many of these women may have simply left the church, disillusioned and in pain.

The weak and glossed over way that the women’s trauma has been handled is disgraceful. These women experienced the traumatic violation of their illusions that their pastor/leader was safe. Little has been said about the reality of how these women have been hurt. They should be celebrated as courageous whistle blowers of an ugly truth in the church. The most the church will say at this point is that the investigative report confirmed the legitimacy of the women’s stories. Duh! What the leadership is not acknowledging is the reality of the way that this sexual behaviour likely destabilized both the women who came forward and the women in the church who have experienced past sexual trauma. If this is not owned, discussed publicly, and a strong commitment to regaining the trust of women, the church will not, I believe, see God’s long-term blessing. WCCC needs to declare strongly that this happened, harmed multiple women, likely created a sense of distrust in the safety of men and male leaders in the church, and that they will do what it takes to regain women’s sense of safety. If I was a women who had been sexually violated, either by BH or other perpetrators, I would not feel that I could trust a church that minimizes this trauma in the way that WCCC is seeking to “manage it”. Take the bull by the horns and wrestle this problem into a healthy resolution. Image be damned!

The revelation of the strong armed tactics used to sanitize the church’s image, may have triggered many in the church who have their own trauma stories of abuse in the workplace. This could have, for them, triggered enormous pain and distrust, because they may have felt that at least the church is a place that we can trust to treat people with dignity and respect. The revelation of tactics of abuse and deception likely have activated the trauma of many who have experienced work place abuse. And so many people who were driven out of WCCC employment by insensitive and sinful tactics have their own ongoing trauma to deal with. And regular congregants who were forced out of the church due to the church’s need to eliminate “problem people” are living with the pain of their own trauma. No where does it appear that the church is going to publicly acknowledge this wrong doing or offer help for those afflicted.

The real problem is that many who are still on staff were complicit in enabling or even engaging in the behaviors modeled by BH. In dealing with this openly and honestly they may be afraid of implicating themselves. It seems like everyone wants to focus only on the behavior of BH, as if they were victims of his bullying behavior, and could not do anything to stop it. The truth is that they did not collectively confront the broken-ness, either out of fear of BH’s disapproval, or fear of loss of their job. The reality is that the work culture of WCCC was formed from the perfectionistic driven-ness of BH, but every person that bought into that model and learned to treat people consistent with his bullying behavior is complicit. There is no public acknowledgement of this reality, where people show lament for their sins in engaging in the broken tactics of a sinful model of perfection. How do we as congregants know that these people have owned their own participation in these destructive and soul damaging tactics? The number of people who participated in the trauma inducing behaviors of the Elder Response Team have not publically owned their sinful behavior, at least not to the larger body of Christ. Multiple stories of traumatic abuse by the Human Resource department of WCCC exist. Are these people still free to continue their behavior? Has their behavior been identified and how is it going to be held accountable?

Summary

The intersection of the larger institutional trauma that WCCC has experienced, which very likely triggered trauma in multiple individuals within the church, has not been dealt with in a strong, aggressive way. Although I have seen attempts in one of the regional campuses to address the trauma, the problem is that only a few people have enough understanding of the trauma to engage in discussion groups. The congregants in the church have to have a conceptual framework about the institutional effects of trauma in order for them to recognize or identify with its’ impact on them.

So why has leadership for the most part ignored dealing with the earthquake that has hit WCCC? Is it because the leadership that remains was so much a part of the fabric of this abusive process that they are still minimizing the reality of the disillusionment that has been created? Those that have been formed or molded into the use of tactics that seek to hide and eliminate any ugliness in WCCC may be so immersed in this process that they cannot step back and recognize their underlying participation in the perfection producing culture at WCCC.

As I have previously explained, churches are like larger families. Families that minimize trauma and pain and seek to ignore it and hope that time diminishes it ultimately fail. This is because the deep healing needed is not brought to the surface. Families where trauma has occurred need parents to own their part and speak to the reality of the pain that exists. Only then do the family members start to heal and trust again.

This blog is about where we are at, and the next two blogs will be about how we got here, and then what we need to do. Those that are involved with WCCC must demand change, and not just passively sit back and hope the church leadership does what should be done. If we want a church that eventually, and not in our lifetime, gets presented as “without spot and wrinkle” we must find ways to pursue honest and transparent engagement with our leadership. We have to move away from an elitist view of leadership. The new “set point” of a healthy WCCC must be shifting from an image of perfection to a process of honest and visible wrestling with the real issues of how human families (churches) reveal their struggles and demonstrate healthy ways to resolve them. We need to have confidence that those who lead us have the courage to identify and confront sin in the culture of WCCC. If they do not , we can have no confidence that the illusion that has been shattered will not simply be recreated.