Mega Church Mentality and the Contours of Spiritual Abuse
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You may well have heard the phrase, ‘drank the Kool-Aid’; it crops up a fair bit in modern political discourse especially when it is discussed at a popular or colloquial level. It refers to the uncritical acceptance of some manner of ideological indoctrination, often emerging from a petition that resembles a ‘sales pitch’ and very often one that has potentially destructive effects. What you may not know is the very sordid history of the phrase.
It originates from a notorious religious cult led by yet another one of modernity’s self-styled Messiah figures, Jim Jones. The son of a Klansman, Jones became an impassioned social reformer arguing for the importance of social equality and championing the cause of black civil rights. An ordained minister in both the Independent Assemblies of God and the Disciples of Christ, Jones founded the People's Temple church in the mid-50s and having promised salvation and escape from an impending nuclear Holocaust, persuaded the majority of his followers to move to Guyana in 1977 where he founded a quasi-religious community later named Jonestown. After a visiting congressman tasked with investigating human rights abuses in Jonestown was gunned down by members of Jones’ inner circle, Jones convinced many of his members to drink a lethal cocktail of ‘Kool-Aid’, laced with cyanide and tranquilizers - 918 Jonestown devotees died in the mass suicide, having very literally and very tragically ‘drank the Kool-Aid’. The only comparable recorded tragedy that led to a greater number of deaths was the infamous Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God (MRTCG) – an extremist Catholic sect in Uganda founded upon the alleged visions of Mary by Credonia Mwerinde and Joseph Kibweteere. In that tragedy, 924 lives were lost.
There is a painfully sad irony that a phrase which refers to the uncritical acceptance of dogma should have its origins in quasi-Christian sectarianism. Jesus’ ministry orbited around miraculous deeds, engagement with the marginalised and the posing of deeply critical and thought-provoking questions. He urged people to go and seek the meaning of his own exposition of Israel’s scriptural tradition (Matt. 9:13) and, as his message spread, later adherents were commended for their ability and desire to rigorously scrutinise what they had heard and not simply give blind assent to its truth (Acts 17:11). How could a dynamic of faith which welcomed questioning ever give rise to groups who use the Christian gospel to manipulate, bully, deceive and control?
If this were another kind of investigation, I could lay out a depressingly long list of the most nefarious extremes of people blindly accepting warped, self-serving interpretations of the Christian narrative (mixed with various bits of secular and spiritualist philosophy, extremist politics from the left and the right, deranged revisionist histories and some good old fashioned fairy stories) to Jonestown and the MRTCG - many of which also led to horrible tragedies, mass deaths and destroyed lives. The Branch Davidians under David Koresh, the Solar Temple, Heaven's Gate, The Children of God under David Berg, “The Family” under Anne Hamilton-Byrne, the Manson family, “The Lord Our Righteousness Church” under Wayne Bent, Aum Shinrikyo, Daniel Perez’s “Angel’s Landing”, and I could go on - and on and on. One scarcely needs to be an expert in the sociology of groupthink to imagine some of the threads which unite all these groups. What is far more concerning is how some of the traits detectable in these very extreme expressions of religious sectarianism are not uncommon in far more mainstream religious communities. The infamous “charismatic leader”, a ‘we are right and everybody else is wrong’ mentality, legions of devotees often more enamoured by the vision of leaders than they are by Jesus, heavy-handed approaches to leadership, a sustained stress on the urgency of community activity and the central importance of the group to attaining the ends of some perceived goal or ‘mission’, the demonization of secularism, inflexible in-house rules and the perception of any external critique as either a threat or a satanically deceptive tool. While this list is far from exhaustive, so far, I could be talking about the Branch Davidians, 76 of whom perished in a dreadful fire in Waco, Texas in 1993, or any conservative Christian group with a deeply ingrained mega church mentality. It is most rare that mass deaths occur in the latter, (indeed, mass deaths would typically rule such groups out of the mainstream), but an increasing body of evidence suggests that abuse is rife in such contexts.
As such I want to suggest a relatively straightforward premise in this investigation, the goal of which is to help those who are deconstructing to discern as rationally as possible the sharp, albeit sad, distinction between the message of Jesus and the behaviours of so many claiming to be his followers. For many this distinction will be artificial, and with those I can deeply sympathise. As a Christ believer myself, I consider it obtuse that those who have placed their trust in Jesus should dissuade people from making sense of the framework of the Christian faith on the basis of the lives of its devotees. If I have to say, ‘don't look at my life just read the Bible’, then I clearly have something to hide and that in itself is cause for suspicion.
However, with increasing frequency, Christians are having to admit with great embarrassment, and amidst a maelstrom of scandals, that yet another person entrusted with leadership within believing communities has acted in ways which disgrace the name of Christ. My immediate rejoinder to this depressing reality is to quote the words of the apostle in 1 Peter 4:17: For it is time for judgment to begin with the household of God - perhaps if there was a greater enthusiasm for internal self-auditing, there would be fewer embarrassing indignities to defend or explain away.
It is with this evaluation in the analytical foreground that I want to suggest that ‘spiritual abuse’ may be understood thusly: it is the turmoil and conflict that arises when physically, emotionally, sexually, psychologically or sociologically harmful behaviours are justified or defended by recourse to religious authority. Usually, in what we might call ‘mainstream believing settings’, it is rare that those entrusted with leadership intentionally set out to cause people harm and distress. Needless to say, this is not always true; some who are guilty of deep-seated ungodliness cannot argue diminished capacity or religious authority. They can either admit their evil or deny it. Those who exploit their position to physically, sexually or emotionally harm people invariably have evil motives. Those who are nursing their own deeply ingrained trauma may be deserving of some degree of empathy but have absolutely no business leading in Christian community. The proclivity for them to pass their trauma on to the innocent in ways that are destructive and harmful is too significant to risk.
However, there are many, I might dare to argue a majority, who allow their dogmatic pursuit of a perceived righteous end to become the defence for unrighteous behaviour. If you believe that you have been entrusted with administering the antidote for the world's problems, you may likely persuade yourself that the stakes are too high to be overly concerned about any collateral damage along the way - even if that collateral damage is the hurt, pain, trauma and distress of fellow-believers. If you are only being harsh in furtherance of the gospel, then surely only those uncommitted to the gospel - or not committed enough - would offer complaint or resistance. Indeed, it would seem almost reasonable to suggest that they are the problem. If their stubbornness, insubordination or disobedience stops you from achieving your goals as a Christian leader, goals which you believe have been given to you from heaven itself, then to be harsh with perceived offenders is to have ‘conviction’, speak like a ‘prophet’ and to demonstrate your own passion for the ‘truth’. The more creative types will even precipitate biblical analogues – Jesus’ fury in the temple, the fiery and accusatory sermons of John the Baptist and the occasionally volatile insensitivity of Paul - not to mention some of the very stern warnings of God Himself, often couched in graphically visceral imagery. If you are only breaking someone’s will because you have God's will in mind, only those who have disdain for God's purposes would deign to raise argument. Once doing God's work becomes your ‘get out of jail free card’, there is no behaviour, no matter how out of place, over the top and innately contra Christian, that cannot be justified. For the purposes of this investigation, it is this posture that I wish to depict as “spiritual abuse”. I am, to be sure, adding a particular specification to this definition; other less specific definitions are, however, very much within the same orbit. Ray Anderson, for example, suggests the following:
Abuse of any type occurs when someone uses authority to exercise power over another for the purpose of controlling and exploiting another’s vulnerability. Spiritual abuse happens when a leader with spiritual authority uses that authority to coerce, control, or exploit a follower, thus causing spiritual wounds [Ray S. Anderson, The Soul of Ministry: Forming Leaders for God’s People (Louisville KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997), 191].
Anderson goes on to cite David Johnson and Jeff Van Vonderen, who define spiritual abuse as “the mistreatment of a person who is in need of help, support or greater spiritual empowerment, with the result of weakening, undermining or decreasing that person’s spiritual empowerment” [Ibid; cf. the thesis in Luke Holter and Luke Holkar, A Beautiful Kind of Broken: The Power of Identity (Shippensburg, PA: Destiny Image, 2010)].
I think it is embedded in what I referred to in chapter 8 as ‘mega church mentality’ for a distorted sense of mission to encourage a cross section of leaders within believing community to use the biblical text, Christian tradition and religious authority to justify what basically amounts to cruelty. Biblically defending the misuse of authority is, in the mind of this author, textbook spiritual abuse and it is usually inherently self-serving.
One of the concerns raised in chapter 8 was those in leadership who very quickly attach their ego and their performance to their vocation. Such folk are dangerously misguided nominees for leadership within believing community. If growing a ministry serves to boost your ego, make you look good to your ministry colleagues or empowers you to offer advice to others on how to grow ministries, I would strongly argue that leadership is not for you. Again, I would simply urge those in this category to read 1 Corinthians 3, especially verses 5-15, and to do so within the broader context of the whole of 1 Corinthians. If this is not enough to jolt you out of your leadership stupor, then leadership is definitely not for you! At this juncture I want to suggest a couple of things about ‘mission’ which might help deconstructors to navigate some of the traumatic episodes they may have experienced at the hands of those who use the Bible to defend a cruel, compassionless authoritarianism.
Whilst it is not wholly inaccurate to talk about the church having a mission the majority of missiologists, especially those who have done any sustained biblical reflection, would offer what I consider to be a significant semantic pushback. It is not the case that the church has a mission, but rather that the mission of Jesus Christ has created a community. It is in this way that we can attempt to connect the Missio Dei (the mission of God) with the mission of the believing assembly.
Here I rely on Christopher Wright's rendering of mission as, “our committed participation as God’s people, at God’s invitation and command, in God’s own mission within the history of the world for the redemption of God’s creation” [Christopher J. H. Wright, The Mission of God: Unlocking the Bible’s Grand Narrative (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2006), 22–23].
Paul Hooker, drawing upon the influential German theologian Jurgen Moltmann (who sadly passed in 2024) interprets the missional church by stating:
“In a missional ecclesiology, the Church is not a building or an institution but a community of witness, called into being and equipped by God, and sent into the world to testify to and participate in Christ's work. The Church does not have missions; instead, the mission of God creates the Church” [Paul Hooker, “What is Missional Ecclesiology”, Northeast Georgia Presbytery, (2009): 1. https://www.pcusa.org/site_media/media/uploads/oga/pdf/missional-ecclesiology09.pdf].
Michael Goheen argues that mission is not one of the activities of the church, but the definition of its existence [Michael W. Goheen, “The Role and Identity of the Church in the Biblical Story: Missional by Its Very Nature,” in S. E. Porter & C. L. Westfall (Eds.), The Church, Then and Now (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2012), 191]. Goheen directly draws upon Jurgen Moltmann who acutely observes:
“What we have to learn… is not that the church ‘has’ a mission, but the very reverse: that the mission of Christ creates its own church. Mission does not come from the church; it is from mission and in the light of mission that the church has to be understood” [Jurgen Moltmann, The Church in the Power of the Spirit: A Contribution to Messianic Ecclesiology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1993), 10].
Whilst I claim neither to be in complete agreement with any of these writers nor to suggest that their way of interpreting the mission of the believing community is essential to navigating my understanding of spiritual abuse, I think it provides an important key for Christ centred deconstruction. The community born of the mission of Messiah must by definition be grounded in the Messiah's approach to ‘mission’ and be shaped by his vision of how that mission develops and ultimately manifests. A football (soccer for our American contingent!) trainer eager for his team to win must train the team within the bounds of the pre-existent rules of football. If he encouraged his team to pick the ball up at various points, shove it under their jerseys and run towards the goal whilst his teammates keep the opposition out of the way till he got there, he might succeed in getting the ball into the net, but would get him and his entire team sent off and probably expelled from the Football League!!!!! Attempting to achieve the objective whilst ignoring the foundation of that for which the objective originally emerged is simply a misnomer. Harsh and compassionless leadership could no more be part of the arsenal of believing leadership than misogynistic slurs could be employed to encourage women to engage in public life or racially inflammatory language used to persuade ethnic minorities of the importance of social engagement. It would be inwardly contradictory and irretrievably self-defeating.
Some articulations of the ‘mission’ sound like a growth competition, where the size and speed of growth our essential metrics. Mega church mentality, alas, can often invite this kind of articulation. When elaborate worship services are used to entertain unbelieving visitors, however well-meaning the intention, it is often indicative of a fervour to get people across the threshold in the absence of any intentionality of catering for them once they are across. I have virtually zero experience as a worship leader, and my singing voice is reminiscent of a dying animal, but it takes no real stretch of theological imagination to know that worship must be directed upwards. Worship is to glorify God, and in so doing, engender community spirit and unity, quite precisely because it is God who unifies us. If worship is directed outwards, it betrays a woeful placing of the cart before the horse. Again, I do not wish to over speak here; it is not the case that any believing community with great fervour to bring unbelievers in will necessarily neglect them when they become believers. With that said, ‘worship as entertainment’ is one of the initial warning signs of a community’s understanding of mission. Look good, feel good worship, deals with externalities while being potentially both impressive and enticing. It already points, however, to a side-lining of God. Once God is side-lined, the deeply spiritual and formational attempt to bring someone to Christ, is quickly reduced to a religious discipline, and the convert can quickly become a statistic, a mere cog in a large, unwieldy machine that is ultimately un-redemptive.
If the work of Christ in healing, repairing and restoring humankind's rapport with the divine creates a community through which that work continues, it could never sacrifice the individual for the whole. Luke reports three connected stories Jesus tells of lost things that are found and their being found encouraging joyous celebration. These are a lost sheep, a lost coin and a lost son. He writes the following:
4 “What man among you, if he has a hundred sheep and has lost one of them, does not leave the other ninety-nine in the open pasture and go after the one that is lost, until he finds it? 5 And when he has found it, he puts it on his shoulders, rejoicing (Luke 15:4–5, emphasis added).
If this is how the Good Shepherd himself reckons with looking after the sheep, then it is axiomatic that those in believing leadership actively follow suit. If believing community becomes a machine where the values of the collective override the needs of the individuals, or the perception and understanding of ‘mission’ drowns out the individual concerns and voices of believers, then something has gone very radically wrong. In such contexts, it is scarcely reasonable to consider this to reflect the mission of God.
I want to close this reflection by considering two aspects of ancient Christian liturgy and praxis which might help in the scrutiny of mega church mentality and its propensity to be a seedbed for spiritual abuse. The first concerns strengthening and the second concerns ministry pressure. To address the first issue, consider the following excerpt from Luke:
25 Then Barnabas went to Tarsus to look for Saul, 26 and when he found him, he brought him to Antioch. So, for a whole year Barnabas and Saul met with the church and taught great numbers of people. The disciples were called Christians first at Antioch (Acts 11:25–26).
In Acts 14:22; 15:41; 18:23, Luke relates Paul's practice of going back to assemblies he had either planted or had influence in to strengthen the believers and help galvanise their endurance in the faith. In the earliest example of this recorded in the Book of Acts above, Barnabas brought Paul to Antioch, and he stayed there for a year - he took a full year off his itinerant preaching enterprise to teach the fledgling community. For the purposes of deconstruction, this is significant because it evidences a community which is not a machine. As pivotal as preaching the message was to the Apostle Paul, it was equally significant that preaching the word to unbelievers was staved for a time to teach and encourage those newly baptised. In my own view this would be a very useful approach for modern ministry. It is not the case that the ministry stopped so that teaching could occur; rather it is the case that this kind of teaching and strengthening is an absolutely central part of the ministry of the word. Encouraging believers, addressing complex questions, inviting inquiry from new believers and taking the time to carefully explicate sound approaches to biblical interpretation and drawing upon spiritual resources is how we build. Indeed, I would go as far as to say that this is the difference between building a ministry and simply growing a ministry. If believing assemblies grow in numbers but not in depth, they will not endure for the long haul. As you think through your faith questions, ask yourself whether you are/were part of a community where the strengthening of believers is as significant as outreach to the non-believing world. Is questioning encouraged? Are believers growing in their depth, knowledge, creativity, compassion, confidence in God and love?
Secondly, it is common for ministers to feel a sense of pressure. It is an unhealthy pressure; pressure to produce an elaborate and sophisticated worship experience, pressure to expand the size of a congregation quickly, pressure to raise a certain amount of funds, etc. I have personal experience of ministers feeling this kind of pressure and defending it on the grounds that the Apostle Paul felt pressure as outlined in 2 Corinthians 11:28. There should be no ambiguity, however, about the pressure Paul claims to experience in that text; it is a pressure of his concern for the churches' well-being, as is further made clear by the substance of the letters he writes to believing congregations. There are occasions where he is anxious to raise funds for the church in Jerusalem experiencing the aftereffects of famine (e.g., 2 Cor. 8-9) but certainly no indication that the pressure is to expand the size of the communities quickly, to raise funds for other projects or add bells and whistles to the public worship. It is precisely these pressures which cause ministers to become short tempered, harsh, aggressive and bullish. Once they are self-convinced that the pressure comes from heaven to attain these 'godly' goals, it is considerably easier to justify the unreasonable treatment of the rank-and-file members of the body.
There is some minimal evidence in the Pauline sources that the early church was conscious of which elements of the worship experience were primarily to appeal to the unbelievers. Tongue speaking is said to be specifically a sign for unbelievers (1 Corinthians 14:22). This is why the Apostle was so adamant that tongues were performed in an orderly fashion: If anyone speaks in a tongue, two—or at the most three—should speak, one at a time, and someone must interpret. If there is no interpreter, the speaker should keep quiet in the church and speak to himself and to God (1 Corinthians 14:27-28). We may surmise from Paul’s instruction that the opposite was going on in Corinth; that multiple people were speaking, perhaps speaking over one another and without interpretation. Any unbeliever witnessing that would simply hear babble and consider the congregation crazy (1 Corinthians 14:23). Prophetic speech was for the believers, and it does not strike me as remarkable that it was prophecy and not tongue speaking that Paul preferred in the assembly. In other words, the worship experience was primarily an experience for those who believed and only secondarily for inquirers and unbelievers (1 Corinthians 14:19, 24-25, 31). All this is to say that the pressure to bring in unbelievers, which can often make ministers behave irrationally and even justify cruelty, is a self-imposed pressure. There is no evidence from scripture that assemblies must grow quickly or that the larger the congregation the better. As we have seen previously and I stress once more, it is God that gives the growth (1 Corinthians 3:6-7), so any question of the speed or size of growth is in His hands. One might argue obliquely that there is an eschatological urgency; no one knows when the Lord will return, and naturally one may argue on those grounds that there is an urgency to win unbelievers quickly. Whilst not an unreasonable premise, we serve a God who will delay the end so that as many can come to know Him as possible (2 Peter 3:8-9; 1 Timothy 2:3-4).
In conclusion, I wish to reiterate my definition of spiritual abuse as the turmoil and conflict that arises when physically, emotionally, sexually, psychologically or sociologically harmful behaviours are justified or defended by recourse to religious authority. I have argued in this reflection that key planks in mega church mentality, most notably a misunderstanding of the contours of mission, can either directly or indirectly create the soil from which spiritual abuse can germinate. It is by no means a simple equation, and the former does not necessarily lead to the latter. However, the frequency with which spiritual abuse occurs in mega church contexts is too great to ignore the warning signs. Those in the throes of deconstruction are naturally wrestling with the question of what Christ believing community should look, feel and act like. Whilst there could be no completely definitive answer to this question, there are some self-evident signs of when it has gone awry. Jesus cared for the individual sheep; he did not lead like certain Jewish or Roman leaders of his day with either religious superiority or political authoritarianism. Yet he drew in the crowds; many abandoned him when they considered the cost of discipleship to him, but that was their choice - a choice indeed Jesus even offered to his own selected apprentices (John 6:66-67). Harshness, combativeness, heavy-handedness, aggression and bullishness never characterised his mission or his leadership. The idea that any of these characteristics can be present in contemporary conceptualizations of mission or leadership and still be considered ‘Christian’ borders on a mockery of everything Jesus stood for. It is, therefore, incumbent upon us all to not be naïve. The church does not have a mission; the ministry of the Good Shepherd has created a community to carry on his work. If the two bear little resemblance to one another then serious questions have to be asked, and it is the responsibility of all who claim discipleship to Christ to ask them.
