> Bullied in Ministry - Our Story

> (Names have been changed)
> Seven months after moving away from the parishes where we were
> psychologically bullied for almost 5 years, our lives are still
> dominated by the experience as our minds and bodies struggle daily to
> survive the psychiatric injuries we have sustained. And, as we sit
> here thinking how we can write about our experiences, there is the
> sudden realisation that to go through it all is too much and too
> soon; the memories are just too painful, too distressing. So what we
> write below will be incomplete and perhaps confused at times, but we
> hope we will manage to communicate the destructive power of bullying.
> We will probably recover eventually, at least to some degree, but we
> are told it is likely to take years rather than months. (The National
> Health Service has been considerably more supportive than the
> Church.) Whether we will ever feel able to go to church again - or
> whether we will ever want to go again - we just don’t know.
> Meanwhile, Peter’s former parish has just appointed his replacement
> and it seems that life continues there as if we’d never existed!
> Writing this hurt like hell, and was altogether too much for Peter.
> But we hope it helps people to realise just how destructive bullying 
> can be.

Rowland,

I read the letter above with interest. There are a few things that jump out at me, and
I’d like to probe one or two of those things.

The couple described what they did to try to get along with the congregation, and how
"nitpicking" comments were made publicly and privately, and how most of the
bullying was centered around a few people. My immediate question is this, "What kind
of prayer ministry does this church have?". My guess would be that the answer is
"None.". It sounds as if this young couple tried to combat the social and
spiritual ills of that church themselves. Nowhere in their story did they mention how much
prayer they put into the situation, how many people they pulled together to pray about
this, if they followed the scriptural process of talking to those who were doing the
bullying, or if they sought prayer for those with whom they had differences.

Accepting that there are no God-defined divisions within the body of Christ, but rather
only the divisions caused by man and Satan, we have to accept that those who caused
dissension and divisiveness in that church weren’t following the principles of
righteousness as outlined in Romans 12, and that there’s a good chance that the
behavior of the dissension causers was more the product of Satan than of Christ.

This having been said, these young church leaders should have sought the counsel of
their elders, prayed diligently, and confronted their nay-sayers directly. All of these
"should haves" being in the past tense, we have to look at what can be done to
correct the situation. First, these young people need to realize that what happened to
them was the result of human nature and Satan running without restraint, and not something
that God allowed to happen. They have to come to grips with two things: The bullying was
not the work of Christians, and they didn’t handle the situation properly. Second,
they need to spend hours in prayer, seeking healing of their hearts and spirits, and spend
more time in the Word, as the methods of handling these sort of folks is described plainly
throughout the New Testament. From Christ to Paul, the heros of the NT were confronted
with similar bullies, and they handled them successfully (in a spiritual sense), and they
also spent much time in prayer seeking the Lord’s guidance.

May God direct your counseling of these folks, may the three of you prayer together
often, and may you all be blessed by our Lord.

In Him,

Allen McBroom

(Reproduced here with Allen’s permission).