Yesterday I had a message from a woman being summoned in to defend herself to a toxic elders’ board.
She had been going to a very hierarchical, controlling church and had realized it wasn’t healthy and had decided to take her family and go elsewhere.
The elders’ board ordered her in for a meeting. In the message, she told me about being scared to go but knowing she had to, so that she could get herself and her children free.
But why did she feel she had to go?
What authority or control did these people truly have over her? You can’t be placed in church jail. They aren’t allowed to hurt you. Church is a voluntary association, and even if some churches try to pretend that it’s something far more, and that they basically “own” you, they don’t.
Churches have as much power over you as you give them.
In some churches, you are required to sign a membership covenant (that was one of the red flags on our list when vetting a church’s website). That covenant does say that you willingly put yourself under the authority of the elders, and that you will submit to them. So if they order you to attend marriage counseling with your abusive spouse, you have to go. If they say you can’t leave the church, you can’t.
Except that you can.
These covenants don’t stand up to the legal system, and if you say that you cancel that covenant, they are legally required to abide by that (many churches don’t realize this, but they are). You can sue them if they continue to harass you, etc.
In other words, despite the impression some toxic, authoritarian churches give, they have no actual authority over you. The only authority they have over you is what you choose to give them.
So what do you do if you are called into a meeting?
I was once at a book signing in Grand Rapids, Michigan, when a teary woman got to the front of the line to talk with me. She told me about her abusive marriage, and how I had helped her to see what God really wanted for her and how this wasn’t okay. She had decided to divorce him. But now, right after the signing, she was heading over to a meeting with the elders’ board who were upset at her and demanding she continue with marriage counseling (marriage counseling is actually dangerous when abusive dynamics are present).
I told her she didn’t have to go. They had no hold over her.
I don’t know what she ultimately did, but I hope she spared herself the indignity and trauma of being yelled at and berated by multiple men who have no understanding of abuse.
I posted on Facebook about this yesterday, and had hundreds of people respond. Sometimes people want to go to these meetings so they can have their say. So if you are called into a meeting, I would do one of these things:
- Don’t go at all, and shake the dust off your feet and leave
- If you do go, bring a friend who can advocate for you, and let everyone know you will only go if you can record the meeting. Before the meeting, email everyone a copy of the agenda of what you want to talk about.
If you don’t think you are courageous enough to do #2, then please do #1. Only go to the meeting if you feel you need to say.
If your church is harassing you, you may need to seek legal advice. The Wartburg Watch has lots of information on membership covenants here. But rest assured that legally, the church doesn’t have a leg to stand on.
But again: Churches are voluntary associations
They don’t always feel voluntary. They often feel like they have actual authority and power over us.
Why is that? Why is it that women especially forget that we have agency, and we don’t have to obey toxic church leaders? Why is it that we forget that we don’t have to follow toxic husbands either?
Why do we often feel so helpless, when we actually do have agency?
Women especially have been primed to do something called “fawn.” Fawning is actually a useful survival mechanism. Remember that our brains are created by God to survive. So when we feel threatened, our brains go into defensive mode, reacting instinctively in whatever ways will be most effective at keeping us safe. We think of this typically as “fight or flight”–you either lash out to hurt the person hurting you, or you run away.
But those aren’t the only two responses. There’s also freeze–when you know you can be overpowered and it’s not actually safe to fight, you end up freezing. This is common among sexual assault victims, for instance, and afterwards they can berate themselves. Why didn’t I fight back? But your brain literally had you freeze.
And sometimes, when it’s a power differential that endures day after day, fighting, fleeing, or freezing won’t work. So we fawn. We become particularly attractive to the person or group of people who can harm us. We ingratiate ourselves to them. We become people pleasers to deflect anger away from us. We become better at judging how everyone else is feeling, and reading the room, than we do at figuring out how we are feeling.
In a society where girls are inherently more vulnerable, girls often learn to fawn.
And then at church we’re taught that the components of fawning are actually biblical womanhood: they’re what God wants from us.
That’s actually the thesis for my next book that’s coming out in March 2027–Fawn: How a Trauma Response Became Biblical Womanhood, and How Women Can Find Their Agency Again. Hopefully I’ll have a cover to show you soon!
Often women grow up fawning in their families, and then having that fawning reinforced in church. This creates the very power dynamics that make women more vulnerable again, and make us feel like we don’t have agency.
All that to say: If you’re ever summoned into a potentially threatening church meeting, the reason that you feel like you have to go is likely because you’ve been primed to fawn, and you’ve lived in an environment that has taught you you don’t have agency.
The same dynamics can be present in marriage: If you feel like you have to put up with a man telling you what to do, it’s likely because you’ve been primed to fawn.
But we can learn to exercise agency again. We can break the fawning cycle.
I’ll be exploring this over the next little while, and I know you’re going to love the new book. But I just want everyone to remember today: churches, and often people, only have power over us that we choose to give them. And if someone insists on having power over you, that’s a sign to shake the dust off your feet and leave.
Leave before you get too invested in that church.
Leave before the dating relationship gets too serious.
If you’re married, leave before you have kids with this man.
Leave before things get more dangerous and volatile.
You don’t have to submit to people wanting to control you.
That’s not you being rebellious. That’s not you having an unsubmissive spirit. That’s you, saying along with the apostle Peter, “we must obey God rather than man!”
There is a chance they might retaliate especially if you are in a cult. I remember I had a very creepy history teacher at my Christian high school who constantly flirted with me and tried to get me to study with him after class. I kept telling him I couldn’t because I take the bus and don’t have my own car to drive myself home and I would have to arrange it with my parents which was near impossible because my mom didn’t get home from work until 5:00 and my dad was often gone flying people as a pilot. Because I kept ignoring his advances (mostly due to legitimate reasons, but I couldn’t imagine what he would do to me if I followed through), he said I would have gotten the “most dedicated student” award for his history class, but because I ignored him, he gave it to someone else. That is one way I remember being retaliated for not listening to my abusive teacher who to this day I like to call Frollo just because he would also constantly complain that my skirts were too short. He would usually have a female teacher tell me that on his behalf until I wrote something on the school social media on how the Spanish teacher was a control freak and then she admitted that it was my history teacher telling her to do it even though she disagreed with him. However, I will say in the scheme of things, that whole “most dedicated student” award didn’t really help me get into a good college or really made a difference in my life. Most people in the the adult world don’t care about your high school accomplishments past a certain age.
I also wonder that what if you are in a controlling cult does retaliate and try to harm you in some way? I guess you can call the police, but still, that is a real possibility.
I know a common thing a lot of controlling churches do is harass the members that leave or don’t follow the rules. While it is easy to say just to leave or not show up a lot of these churches I have seen end up trying to do things to make their lives miserable for leaving including constantly showing up at their door and borderline stalking the people who leave. It reminds me of how it is likely that the Church of Scientology were the ones that killed John Travoltas son in retaliation for him leaving
I hope women start getting restraining orders against churches like this. We just need a few and a journalist to expose it because these abusive pastors do PR fast when attacked from credible outside sources, so there would be major changes, more women would be emboldened to leave, and the pastors wouldn’t dare exert as much force to stop them.
The Mormons are like this with a lot of ex members where as soon as you leave or are showing signs of inactivity the members of the church will constantly show up at your door out of “concern” to try to coerce you to go back and keep sending you unwanted stuff. The only way to stop them from harassing you as an ex member is to send a formal letter of resignation and ask to be removed from their registry and be left alone which 99 percent of the time will scare them away. There is a website made by former members for that purpose that luckily makes the process painless. Unfortunately, I don’t know if that works with other churches that harasses former members.
Yes, that’s what’s worked in the past. That worked with Matt Chandler and the Village Church. Scrutiny makes them bad off.
Yes! Churches often have far less control over members than they’d like to admit, which is why they have to resort to emotional manipulation.
We left two churches after run-ins with heavy-handed leadership. Both tried to guilt-trip and Bible thump us into attending an in-person meeting to “discuss concerns,” but we politely declined. In both situations, for different reasons, we had zero reason to trust the process. *Leadership had broken trust with us,* and if they were not willing to be documented either via writing or recording, we were not going through yet another round of “well, I didn’t say that, you’re misremembering.”
Good for you! I hate that so many churches are like this. I highly recommend getting out of denominational circles that act like this.
Over 25 years ago, I was called by the pastor to meet with the elders after my doc said he wouldn’t let me out of the psych ward until he knew I’d arranged to separate from my h or I’d just be right back in even though he said there was nothing wrong with me. I had little information then, but told pastor, no. He asked why, I said, “Five reasons: I’m female, middle aged, blonde, just got out of the psych ward, and you’re all male. I don’t stand a chance”. He said, “You’re probably right” . That pastor hit on me before and after the separation.
FF recently (next marriage): I tell current pastor I’m being abused. He says, “Depends what kind of abuse. Women can be abusers, too, we need to add that to the conversation, eh?” ” are you being sexual? ” That was it, changed the subject. So I gave him TGSR. Months later I asked his opinion. “What book?” ” Oh, I don’t know where it is. ” He did read it then, and “Women complain too much.”
I know. Go to a different church. Sorry, only one in town.
That’s just awful, Connie! I’m so sorry!
I’m so sorry! That’s a horrible way to be treated.
For what it’s worth, you’re not required to attend a group with the label “church” just because it has that label. From what you’ve said, this isn’t a place that follows Christ, no matter how much bible-reading they do. If they don’t follow Christ, then you aren’t leaving off fellowship with believers if you stop going. If anything, you’re stopping fellowship with people who use the name of Jesus for their own purposes. Look how using the name of Jesus when you don’t actually follow him turned out for the sons of Sceva. No one who understands the heart of Jesus would expect someone to stay in a group that doesn’t care about a person’s wellbeing. Leaving that group wouldn’t be leaving the church, it would be leaving a mis-named organization. It’s okay to not go to church if there isn’t a healthy option. God’s not going to be angry that you chose to disassociate from lies, deception, cruelty, and hypocrisy.
One of the most astounding things I’ve learned since discovering this site is that people think they have to do what the church tells them. It breaks my heart. The church is not God. Neither is it or its officers the mediator between God and humans. One of the wonders of the Christian faith is that any person has direct access to God. That has been abused, but it is meant to be liberating. You don’t have to find out what the priest/preacher/elder says God says. You can ask God directly and trust that God will guide you just as much as any other person. (Is that just a Protestant belief? I see biblical evidence for it, but maybe Roman Catholics, Orthodox, St. Thomas, etc. Christians interpret it differently?)
In a context where most people are illiterate or don’t have access to Bibles, there is perhaps a reason to look to the clergy as God’s mouthpiece. In literate societies with easy access to scripture, I think we need to carefully evaluate if considering clergy as special is biblical. In other words, there might be logistical reasons a society might need a person to tell them God’s word, but in all cases, I think it’s worth considering if we’ve let the human need for power be cast as a biblical doctrine of church leadership.
Sheila, your new book title is fire!!!
I can’t remember if I already asked you if you were familiar with Carol Gilligan’s work with children. I read her book Why Does Patriarchy Persist and found it fascinating that both boys and girls (though boys at a younger age, 5-7, and girls around prepubescence) start saying “I don’t…” but boys say “I don’t care” while girls say “I don’t know.” Boys learn how to suppress their feelings and girls learn how to suppress their voice. I feel like our Christian resources merely sacralized this dysfunction.
I know I didn’t ask you about the Guardian article that features Tilly Dillehay and her Wife School because that one went up just two days ago: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/apr/28/wife-school-christian-women-submissive. I wish they’d contacted you for comment. I find it interesting they decided to use the quote evoking marital rape in the title (“A husband expects a ‘yes'”).