It was a Tuesday when all hell broke loose against me at my workplace. Tension had been building for several weeks, but that day brutal behavior erupted. By evening, I arrived home feeling like I’d been dragged behind a Mack truck.

The truck kept going – and dragging me behind it – for nearly 15 months. The abuse stopped only when I left the abusive situation.

I worked for a church organization.

Four years later, I learned a name for what I had experienced. It’s called mobbing, or adult bullying. I learned that this type of abuse happens a lot – and devastates victims.¹

Five more years had passed when I came across a post titled, “Grown-up Bullying.” The author, Lynne Shallcross, features and quotes Jessi Eden Brown, a licensed counselor and professional coach with the Workplace Bullying Institute.²

Brown and Shallcross describe what I experienced – and the damage such experiences can cause.

Subtle, insidious, persistent

To begin, Brown references this definition:³

Workplace Bullying is repeated, health-harming mistreatment of one or more persons (the targets) by one or more perpetrators. It is abusive conduct that is:

• Threatening, humiliating, or intimidating, or
• Work interference – sabotage – which prevents work from getting done, or
• Verbal abuse

I can attest: The psychological violence of bullying sometimes includes all three types of abusive conduct. The excerpts below from “Grown-up Bullying” nail it.

As you read, keep in mind that these facts about bullying in the workplace also apply to bullying in the church. Especially this:

Although popular media frequently portray the workplace bully as a volatile, verbally abusive boss, in actuality, the behaviors tend to be more subtle, insidious and persistent.

Examples of bullying

Examples include stealing credit for others’ work, assigning undue blame, using highly public and humiliating criticism, threatening job loss or punishment, denying access to critical resources, applying unrealistic workloads or deadlines, engaging in rumors and gossip, endeavoring to turn others against a person and deliberate attempts to sabotage someone’s work or professional reputation.

Types of harm

There is a significant body of research linking workplace bullying to physical, mental, social and economic health harm for the bullied target.

Studies have linked repeated exposure to stressful events such as bullying to severe physical ailments, including cardiovascular disease, gastrointestinal problems and increased levels of cortisol, among other things.

The psychological harm from bullying can be just as devastating. Panic disorder, general anxiety disorder, major depression, substance abuse and dependence, acute stress disorder and posttraumatic stress disorder are but a few of the diagnoses encountered when working with targets of workplace bullying.

Dynamics of bullying

The stress and exhaustion that targets endure is often isolating and paralyzing. After all, it is generally the bully’s goal to disempower the target. Even when they do speak up, targets of workplace bullying tell us their employers, family and friends do not often believe them nor understand how it could be so distressing.

In most cases, the target has done nothing to deserve the treatment [he or she is] receiving. The bully chooses the target, timing and tactics. Also, the target may have very little control or influence over these factors. The responsibility to stop the abusive behavior rests with the employer … [Yet] 72 percent of bullies are bosses, and standing up to the boss can easily be misinterpreted as insubordination.

Clever bullies

As of 2024, the article from which I’ve quoted can no longer be accessed online. However, this Workplace Bullying pdf gives lots more info, and suggestions, that can also apply to bullying in the church.

It affirms, for example, that the most successful bullies (in both institutions) are not “obvious bullies.” It says of the “clever” bully (who may also be a “she”):

His methods are very subtle, disguised with all the right behaviors. In that lies his treachery. People respect and trust him, and he quietly betrays their trust whenever necessary to fulfill his ambitions.

If the bully is particularly good at this, no one except his victims sees the betrayals. In some cases, not even the victims realize what has happened.⁴

To sum up:

Those who only consider bullying to be blatantly aggressive behavior are missing the point.

Any habitual pattern of intentional, socially cruel behavior is bullying, including the subtle tactics of deceit, distortion, misrepresentation and misdirection.

It’s agonizing to be bullied. The agony multiplies exponentially when you have believed the abusers and their colluders to be godly Christians. The pain of such a betrayal cannot be overstated.

If

If you’ve experienced bullying in a church or ministry setting, know this: You did not deserve such treatment. It did not come from God. He hates that such abuse has been done in his name. He is not fragile or narcissistic.

You can go to him with your grief, your anger, your questions, your complaints. He will hear you, and he loves you. He may not answer in the time or the way you would like. But he is faithful and just.

If you have not been bullied in a church or ministry setting, know this: It is so common as to be epidemic. What’s more, it’s often well-hidden by the godly appearance of the perpetrators and the whisper campaigns used to discredit and isolate the target.

Before I was bullied, two people came to me and told me how badly they had been mistreated by the person who later instigated the mobbing done to me. I wanted to believe them, but I could not see it. I still thought the abusive leader godly. Bullying in a “Christian” setting may well have devastated someone you know.

If you’ve participated in bullying in a church or ministry setting, know this: Bullying exposes control issues and cowardice. It exposes misplaced loyalties and divided hearts. What you did, or failed to do, reveals a hidden idol in your heart – something you’re so eager to protect that you colluded in hurting someone deeply and in dragging God’s name through the mud.

I urge you: Ask God to show you what has hooked you into participating in such a thing. Choose to see, and to turn.

Culture of bullying

The bullying I experienced years ago stopped when I chose to leave the abusive situation. But then it reoccurred, more than once, in different settings.

As I struggled to understand, “Why does this keep happening?” I finally realized:

Bullying of adults by other adults doesn’t take place in a vacuum.

Bullying thrives in abusive systems
where manipulation, coercion and control
are practiced and accepted as the norm.

The abusive system may be a family, a workplace, a school, a community, a culture, a church culture.

Here’s the tell: When someone speaks up about bullying in such a system, the people with power to stop the abuse do not. Instead, the bullying by the one escalates and expands into mobbing by the many. Vicious but insidious pummeling by a growing crowd continues, seeking to force the “troublemaker ” – who dared to ask that a wrong be made right – to knuckle under, or get out.

I grew up in a toxic system and did not know it. As an adult, I accepted coercive control as the norm – until the trauma of repeated bullying propelled me to do what I otherwise would never have done:

Run to God, asking to see. Press in to the awful truth he had begun to reveal. Cling to him and go with him, as he worked to free me, from the inside out. Begin by refusing to agree with a culture of bullying. Especially a culture of bullying in the church.

---

I published the original version of this post on March 29, 2013. Updates made June 30, 2024.

See also

• Illusionists! The abusers we have not seen
• Masters of misdirection
• Shunning in the church
• Cliques in the church
• The world in church clothing
• Checklists, idols and loving God
• Behind the façade in the SBC
• When Christian leaders reject God

Footnotes

1. For an in-depth look at adult bullying in the workplace, see the book, Mobbed! by Janice Harper. ↩︎
2. Lynne Shallcross, “Grown-up Bullying,” Counseling Today, March 1, 2013. This article is apparently no longer online. ↩︎
3. What follows is the definition of workplace bullying included on the Workplace Bullying Institute website when this post was first published. ↩︎
4. Some of the treacherous in the church bully their own spouses. See the post, Treachery and divorce: When God sees betrayal. ↩︎