An Introduction

In May of 2017 my wife and I celebrated our wedding with friends and family. What people didn’t know is that we had actually been married for a few months. Our original wedding took place in early October of 2016. Earlier that year in June we found a good deal on plane tickets for the week of our fall break. As the date approached, we realized there wasn’t much that we wanted to do. We had been engaged for a month and decided that a private ceremony would alleviate the stress of planning a wedding. Although the wedding in May was the wedding, it really feels like our wedding was in October. 

While we were in line to check in at the MGM Grand Hotel, my wife received a notification that the pastor of her old church had resigned. She asked me for some space as she reached out to several individuals to find out what was going on. Her family was upset and so was she. My wife has never been religious in the time I’ve known her, so this definitely caught me off guard. I knew that she grew up a Christian, but just two years prior to us meeting she had left the church for personal reasons.

Even though we still had an unforgettable vacation, the pastor’s departure loomed over us. I couldn’t figure out why my wife was so angry. This pastor had been given the job as president of a Christian media company where he would undoubtedly make good money. My wife’s family had also stopped attending this church years prior. So what was it about this departure that made so many people upset?

Before going any further, it is worth noting that I myself know very little about the church. I was raised in a very-low key Jewish household. Religion was not a centerpiece of my family. We moved to the South in 2001 and I had never seen Christianity represented in such a massive form. We saw churches the size of stadiums. The church you went to was a defining component of one’s identity. For the most part, however, I remained an outsider to it all. I knew that religion meant a lot to people, but the inner-workings of a church were still unbeknownst to me. 

I also assumed that anyone going to church did nothing wrong. I felt alienated from my peers in this sense. Church people seemed, to put it simply, better than me. For that reason, most of my friends were non-religious or at the very least non-Christian. My best friend went to church in middle school, but after his confirmation never went back. Needless to say, I didn’t have any real knowledge of the culture. At a wedding in 2016, I saw my first communion. On Christmas Eve 2017, I went to my first ever church service.

Since the start of 2018 my wife and I have been going to therapy sessions in order to become stronger. One of the main things we’ve had to do is come face to face with our past trauma. Because we are still at the stage of recognition, it feels as if these wounds have suddenly become reopened. My issues have been mostly internal and relatively easy to deal with. My wife’s trauma, however, stems way deeper into a giant community that shares the same wound. It also revolves around a level of corruption that may still exist to this day. I’m hoping that by exploring this I can bring a level of closure to my wife while also striving to better understand what it is that she and so many others went through.

While I do not know much about Christianity, I do know that religion is a very sensitive subject to many people. Faith is, in many ways, stronger than logic. It is also emotional. For this reason I am going to refrain from any direct accusations. The people I speak to will remain anonymous, and the information I share will only be with the appropriate consent. I do not wish to find anything conclusive nor definitive on the pastor or his church. Instead, I want to tell the story of a church through the words of those who made it into what it is today, as well as the lasting impact it had on so many people.