From an early age, I adhered to an unspoken rule of my family, community and church culture, though I would have assured you the rule didn’t exist:

If it appears to be Good Christian – the way we define Good Christian – take it at face value. Do not look behind the façade. If, accidentally, you get a peek and something doesn’t seem to honor Christ, don’t explore it. Don’t speak of it. Play whatever mind tricks you have to play to make it go away.

The backstory

Born and raised in the Deep South, I grew up Southern Baptist, in a family I believed to be happy and healthy.

By the age of eight, I had absorbed a lot of religious stuff that didn’t truly reflect God.

And yet, one month before my ninth birthday, when the Lord Jesus invited me to follow him, I knew it was him – and I said yes. It happened Spirit-to-spirit, during the closing hymn of an otherwise lifeless Sunday morning worship service, without either of us uttering a word.

I grew into adulthood genuinely knowing Christ and yet fooled by much that masqueraded as him, both within me and around me. I became a classic Good Christian high achiever.

By my mid-40s, I was married, with two children. I had served in almost every volunteer leadership role open to Southern Baptist women, especially roles associated with the century-old Woman’s Missionary Union and LifeWay’s newly formed Women’s Enrichment Ministry. I spoke a lot to women involved in both groups, at small- to mid-sized women’s gatherings.

I had three books and 1,200 articles to my name. My writings included a weekly newspaper column and some pieces in regional magazines. Most of the rest – from books to Sunday School lessons to missions articles to a monthly women’s column – was published by the SBC.

I expected to grow old serving God in that way.

The choice

Then, Anthony Jordan, executive director of the Baptist General Convention of Oklahoma (BGCO) asked me to come on staff full-time as “Women’s Missions & Ministries Specialist.” I hadn’t seen that coming. I didn’t want to say yes. But I did want to go with God.

One afternoon, I prayed, “Father, you don’t want me to do this, right?” Then, I told God all the reasons why a denominational position wasn’t a good fit.

In reply, my Lord asked only: “Will you follow me?”

When he put it that way, I said yes. I thought that, once I followed where he led, it would feel right and make sense.

But for weeks, months, years, it did not feel right. It did not make sense. Only afterward would I realize: God was teaching me to humble my soul, release my spirit, so that I could go where he was taking me.

For God was taking me behind the façade.

The fog

From my new vantage point within the structure, I began to glimpse what I called “stress fractures” in the SBC. The stresses that affected my work the most were caused by:

• The sometimes condescending, sometimes exploitive, sometimes brutal, generally dismissive, and never truly honoring behavior toward women.
• The bitter turf wars that resulted as women vied for the limited leadership roles allowed.
• The way the Southern Baptist structure itself created division among the women, pitting Women’s Ministry against WMU.
• The determination of leaders, both male and female, to protect their organizations and their own places in the system, at the expense of following Christ.
• The subterfuge designed into the system.

The SBC describes itself as cooperating, autonomous churches; its various entities, just there to help. It’s rarely apparent to the rank-and-file church members – even those serving on the state or national boards – just who is actually steering the ship, pulling the strings.

That’s because key leaders in the SBC are masters of misdirection. And the system is designed to enable them.

Working inside the structure, I began to glimpse all the above – yet only as if through a fog. I deeply felt the oppression, though. Many days, I would disappear into the women’s restroom for a good cry, then fix my face and reappear.

I knew God had called me there, although I still didn’t know why. I poured my heart into the work.

Five-and-a-half years passed. Little by little, good things began to happen among the women in the churches. We were learning, making progress, beginning to move together. But some women didn’t like that. Some WMU leaders, especially, counted me a traitor because I didn’t push loyalty to the organization above all else.

The pummeling

One February morning, I walked into my office, not knowing I would leave that evening feeling I’d been dragged behind a Mack truck. The full force of all that I had only begun to acknowledge had suddenly turned on me.

A small group of denominational leaders spearheaded the abuse that erupted that day. A handful of women led the charge. Wanda Lee, head of WMU, SBC, along with Anthony Jordan, instigated the pummeling. Yet both managed to appear uninvolved.

As I struggled to make it through each next day, blinders that had been slipping, slipping, were torn away. For the first time in my life, I glimpsed the reality behind my culture’s Good Christian façade. I did not deny it or turn away, but I did try to make what I was seeing fit with what I thought I knew. The effort left me bewildered and spent.

Gaslighting and collusion

In desperation, I approached leaders with the power to take things in hand. I described to each one the slander, sabotage and bullying I thought they knew nothing about. I believed they would be shocked and would rise up to act.

I was wrong. None stood against the abuse. More than one had incited it.

I did not know the word gaslighting then, but I met it at every turn. People agreed together to call right, wrong and falsehood, truth. They engaged in – or turned a blind eye to – behavior that, come Sunday, they would preach and teach against.

The fury of the abuse was evident only in secret, behind closed doors. Publicly, the abusers still looked like Good Christian leaders, especially to the Southern Baptists they led. And while I approached leaders in private, urging them to do what was right, a story began to circulate of a troublemaker in the ranks.

In time, the colluders included all my coworkers, people I had thought friends and every pastor and state and national SBC leader to whom I appealed.

Questioning and confusion

Deeply confused, questioning myself, I kept asking God to show me what in me I needed to see and correct. Repeatedly, the Lord affirmed: It was right for me to present organizational options to the women in the churches, without pressuring them to choose. It was good for me to encourage women to listen to God and follow him.

He also showed me why I was so confused.

All my life, I had been taught that I could serve two masters. Not openly, but implicitly, I had been told these two were one and the same:

• a system that appeared to offer me significance and belonging; and
• the Lord, in whom I said I had found both.

I would have told you the one did not equal the other. But they had become commingled in my heart.

Now, I was torn by competing demands for loyalty. On the one hand, Christian leaders pummeled and guilted me. On the other hand, the quiet voice I had spent 40 years learning to know spoke by the Spirit and the Word. Both voices claimed to be God’s. And I had to choose.

I chose the voice that was Spirit and life.
I chose the Lord Jesus.
I choose him.

The powerful

The abuse intensified for 15 months. Eleven months in, I realized Anthony Jordan was the primary abuser, though I still did not know to what extent. That’s when God told me to leave – in another four months. He also told me to submit a resignation letter stating as much.

And he gave me grace to do it – to resign as he had said, to stay until the day he said, to see everything he wanted me to see, to say everything he wanted me to say. Mostly, I continued appealing to different SBC leaders in behalf of the women. I appealed to them in behalf of God. I pled with them to choose God.

I left the state convention exactly seven years after I arrived. With six weeks still to go, I was spent. God carried me the rest of the way. Afterward, I didn’t get out of bed for a week and was sick for about six more.

LifeWay and Beth Moore

Three months later, a LifeWay rep called and asked me to chair a Beth Moore Living Proof Live event. I was stunned. I didn’t want to do it. But I did want to go with God. I prayed. A lot.

Once again:

• I knew he wanted me to say yes, but didn’t have a clue why.
• I followed him – and saw women treated with disdain as a matter of course.
• I poured my heart into the assignment and finished it well.

And then, once again, I spoke up in behalf of the women. I sent a letter to my supervisor for the event, asking LifeWay to make small changes in its Living Proof Live procedures to make them more honoring to the women attendees and, especially, to the onsite team.

In response, I received a curt letter saying, in effect, “We think we’re doing a great job. We’re sorry you feel otherwise.” I wasn’t surprised. But I didn’t expect what happened next.

In a swift series of moves, LifeWay:

• cancelled my long-running monthly column – that they had just asked me to write for another year;
• cancelled a book signing, previously scheduled by the manager of the local LifeWay store;
• removed my books from LifeWay stores;
• blackballed me from writing for the denomination again.

Appealing in writing to Beth Moore and to Thom Rainer, I included details and documentation of what had happened.

To the head of LifeWay, I wrote: “Dr. Rainer, all these issues taken together paint a very sobering picture of how LifeWay Christian Resources operates.”

To Beth Moore, I wrote: “The women to whom you are ministering are not being well-treated. Will you speak out on our behalf?”

In answer? Smoke and mirrors. And a commitment to continue using women and treating them with disdain, in Jesus’ name.

Wade Burleson

Finally, I approached the man who had served as BGCO president during the time I was being abused by its executive director and other leaders.

A prominent pastor (now retired) and a blogger with a large following, Wade Burleson has billed himself as a champion of underdogs in the SBC, and especially a champion of abused women.

In the opening paragraphs of a blog post published in 2012, reposted January 8, 2018, and still online in March 2021, Wade wrote:

It was during 2005-2008 (the years I served as an IMB trustee) that I began to see the problems we had in the Southern Baptist Convention went far beyond the International Mission Board …

I saw with my own eyes the unethical, unbiblical, and godless treatment of women in the Southern Baptist Convention and I vowed to do something about it.¹

Wade’s notoriety, and clout, in the SBC has rested on his being seen as the people’s champion, standing up to the establishment on others’ behalf.

First meeting

Sitting in Wade’s office at the church he pastored, I began to tell him my story. He listened attentively and pressed for details. Seeming appalled at the abuse I had experienced, he assured me he had known nothing of it.

He led me to believe he was going to stand with me and speak up in my behalf. Then, he ended our meeting and told me to schedule another so we could plan a way forward.

Second meeting

I walked in to betrayal. The former BGCO president who, just weeks before, had known nothing of the unethical, unbiblical, and godless treatment I’d experienced there, now began to minimize it. He concluded coldly, “So. You. Just. Quit.”

I remember those four words – and the tone of voice he used, and where he stood in the room and where I sat when he said them – because they crushed me.

The false narrative he now spouted sounded eerily familiar, and it crushed me too.

Suddenly, I knew what Wade had done between our two meetings. He had tested the waters and discovered the profound political fallout he would face from BGCO leaders if he supported me.

The rest of the meeting only confirmed: Wade was championing Wade.

As I sat, stunned:

• He said he had no influence among Southern Baptists, so he could not help me.
• He advised me to forget the abuse I had experienced at the BGCO, to focus on confronting LifeWay and to take my appeal to Frank Page, an SBC leader I did not know at all.

I left Wade’s office, done with making pointless appeals. Thank God for that. Frank Page was later outed for clergy sexual abuse.

The beginning

All my life, I had been deceived by Good Christian appearances.
Now, for the first time, I saw.

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The original version of this post was published June 21, 2019. It was updated March 12, 2021, to include the names of prominent SBC leaders who participated in abusing me. Another update on February 21, 2024, includes more details of my appeal to Wade Burleson.

Image by Zen Lee from Pixabay

Series: Will You Follow Me?

My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me. – Jesus, in John 10:27

• Part 1: Behind the façade in the SBC – On the one hand, Christian leaders pummeled and guilted me to choose a denominational organization above all else. On the other hand, the quiet voice I had spent 40 years learning to know spoke by the Spirit and the Word.
• Part 2: The Civil War, the South and the church – After abuse began to open my eyes to evils in my church culture, God took me on a pilgrimage into the past, to help me understand events happening now.
• Part 3: Going with God – Choosing to go with God where my church culture had forbidden, I had no clue how much seeing, how much grieving, how much pain lay ahead. And how very much love and life.

More about the SBC

• When Christian leaders reject God
• Behind the scenes at Living Proof Live
• Dear Beth Moore and LifeWay: My plea
• Beth Moore and LifeWay: The ploy
• Is the SBC capable of Caring Well?

More seeing and healing from toxic church

• Illusionists! The abusers we have not seen
• The world in church clothing
• Exploited in the church, I’m Leah no more
• This “good Christian girl” is a woman now
• A spirit like Caleb’s – fully following God

Footnotes

1. Wade Burleson made these statements in paragraphs 3 and 5 of his post, “The New Testament Equality of Males and Females,” published on wadeburleson.org, Jan. 8, 2018, reblogged from 2012. Wade’s website is now named istoriaministries.com. I have a screenshot taken March 14, 2021, that shows the post and the quotation still live. Since then, the post has apparently been taken down. ↩︎