An Innocent Man
How I Was Railroaded Out Of My Own Church
Thief
The first email I received
from Scott was a very short note asking for his amp back.
He was planning a garage sale and needed the amp to demo other
equipment. Scott’s amp—an old, beat-up power amp—had been bolted
into my keyboard rig the year before. The amp always came with
the keyboard rig whenever I moved it to go play somewhere else.
I hadn’t actually given the amp all that much thought when I
took the gear home, figuring I’d trade Scott the church’s two
websites for his amp, and that’d be that. Scott wrote me back
saying he wasn’t interested in the trade because he needed the
amp for his garage sale and that I was costing him sales.
Costing him sales.
I just blinked at the screen. I’d left this man’s church. I was
obviously in tremendous pain. And all this pastor was worried
about was that I was costing him sales. I told him I’d return
his amp immediately. I got on the phone and called one of the
deacons who lives nearby, hoping to catch him before he went
down to the church. The deacon said he was already at the
church, so I figured I’d meet him later with Scott’s amp. I then
tried to tell the deacon good-bye, and wish him God’s
blessings—and he hung up on me. Which was when I knew this thing
was going completely south.
I have no way of knowing what Scott told people or what people
told people down at the church. I know I attempted to
communicate with a number of members directly, but only one
chose to communicate with me. From the others there was only
silence. So I’m left to speculate that people were angry and
hurt and surprised by my leaving. Which makes me wonder how that
could be.
My difficulties and conflicts with Scott were both obvious and
well-known. I’d tendered my 30-day notice 74 days before. And,
by that time, most everyone at the church was fairly well
ignoring and dismissing me—following the senior pastor’s lead. I
can’t begin to imagine how my leaving could have surprised
anyone at all, the shock and disappointment seeming, to me, to
be wholly disingenuous.
I returned Scott’s amp to the church. I emailed him and told him
where it was, and that since he wasn’t interested in swapping
the amp for the two web sites, I’d take the sites down. Scott
wrote back saying he didn’t tell me to take the sites down. I
told him I’d made him an offer, and he’d refused it. I waited
three more days for a response from him. Receiving none, I took
the sites down. It was as if I’d dropped an atom bomb.
Scott’s immediate response was rage. He called my swap offer
nonsensical because the amp didn’t belong to the church—it
belonged to him. It wasn’t the church’s property to be swapped
out for the websites. Which sounded, to me, a lot like a
seven-year old’s excuse for not cleaning her room. One of those
head-twisting, “Huh?” statements that make no sense. These
websites weren’t something slapped together out of a box. They
weren’t the greatest websites ever created, either. But
somewhere in the middle, these were custom-designed,
graphics-intensive sites, much like the PraiseNet itself. They
were both a labor of love, one begun before I was even installed
as a pastor there. Had I built them for pay—which I did not—I
would have priced the set at around five grand. I was willing to
trade them for a $100 amp. And Scott’s logic is this couldn’t
happen because the church does not own the amp.
Scott’s message went on to indirectly call me a thief, Scott
apparently floating I stole his amp and then, his words, “Held
[the websites] hostage” trying to, his words, “fleece the
flock.” “Fleece the flock?” For an old beat-up amp? My
suggestion of swapping out the amp was all about providing
resources for God’s ministry. Scott’s amp could have been
leading souls to Christ. Instead it was sitting in his garage.
The website could have been proclaiming the Gospel, instead it
was sitting on a hard drive somewhere. I’ll gladly take my hit
for my role in any of this, but I know my heart. I know I meant
absolutely no harm to that church. I made an enormously generous
offer to them, I was more than willing to share those resources
with the church. Scott, on the other hand, was completely
unwilling to share even his amp—which could now be a doorstop in
his basement for all I know.
When faced with two equally plausible explanations for any given
action, we, as Christians, must and should always give our
brothers and sisters a chance of acting out of right
motives—even if we don’t agree with them. Going to the dark
side, to the most heinous and negative interpretation of a
possible situation, is not what God inspires us to do. In my
deepest despair about Scott, in my moments of bitterness, anger
and rage, I would never—never—call him a thief.
But that was the opening salvo: Priest is a thief and a liar and
he’s stolen money (Scott's housing allowance, given to me to
make up for my own housing allowance, which Scott himself
retroactively cancelled the day my check was being cut) and
resources from us and snuck in here and done terrible things and
run off. Which, for anyone who actually knows me—including Scott
and the other pastors—is an utterly ridiculous statement. These
are things I am simply incapable of. But this is the general
tenor of Scott’s subsequent ranting. Again, I cannot say with
any certainty what he specifically said to the membership or
what the membership thought or what they did.
Here’s what they didn’t do:
Nobody, I mean not a single person from that church, bothered to
ask me if I was all right. No one, not a soul, reached out to me
or seemed terribly concerned about or interested in my welfare.
No one, apparently, wondered what went wrong, what could have
caused Priest to leave us. Which speaks volumes of the overall
quality of Christianity at work there and the pastor’s
leadership.
On the issue of the "stolen" money, I sent Scott a note saying,
essentially, if Scott's gesture was genuine—if he was seeing to
my needs out of compassion—he should do so without expecting
something in return. If you're going to help somebody, then help
them. Don't throw it back in their face and don't pervert it
into a terrible lie. If, on the other hand, Scott was paying me
for a service, then he was honoring a commitment the church made
and had failed to keep: paying me for the month of July. I'm not
at all certain what, if anything, Scott may have been accusing
me of as regards that money, but any insinuation that I stole
funds from the church is, flatly, a lie. And a lie which may
have been knowingly and capriciously told by church leadership.
From my chair, it seems the church ate whatever Scott served up.
I do not know, for certain, this is what happened, but this is
certainly what it felt like: Scott told these people I’d flipped
out and turned against them, and they swallowed it without
question. Ignoring the fact I was the second pastor to leave
that church in six months, or that any number of members had
come and gone. The only way the faithful could protect
themselves was by believing whatever Scott told them. For, to do
anything else would be to admit they’d wasted years following
someone who was terribly, terribly wrong.
Messages
I received a message from another of the pastors
chastising my leaving as “unprofessional.” Missing the
point that (1) ministry is not a profession, and (2) the church
had stopped paying me two months before and chosen to not tell
me—If we want to talk about unprofessional.
It also missed the point that this very same pastor, writing
those words and accusing me of unprofessionalism, had publicly
chided me two and one-half months before for having given
30-days’ notice. He’d considered that notice to have been
selfish and not in the best interest of the church, that by
giving notice I would be dragging the church through unnecessary
convulsions and emotional trials. He’d said, in essence, if I
wanted to leave, that I should just leave.
2014 Update: this same pastor, who'd essentially been parroting
whatever Scott told him
to say, abruptly resigned from the church several years later, bringing the total number
of ministers to leave the church to five. The church continues to believe all of these men
were somehow corrupt or burnt out because that's the story Scott sold them, every time,
and the church's irrational loyalty to Scott routinely overrode their common sense.
The following week, Scott repeated the same thing, first to me
(his exact words: “If you’re going, just go”) and then to the
church at a subsequent business meeting. These same men were now
chastising me for leaving in the manner they’d insisted upon—no,
demanded—the manner the church, as a body, accepted at
properly-called business meetings. And the no-notice claim is
bogus as well: I’d given 30 days’ notice 74 days before.
The co-pastor accusing me of “unprofessionalism” connected my
leaving to my taking down the two web sites, as if they happened
at the same time. The sites remained up and functional for two
weeks after my leaving. However, over time, this false
accusation became cemented into the gross distortion of these
events: the church body assuming I left and took the two sites
down in anger, which these men know is not true, but apparently
allow the church body to believe. More important, I didn’t take
the websites down. Scott took the websites down when he rejected
my offer while offering no other way forward.
From that point forward, this entire matter became about the
website. Not about me, not about what could possibly have driven
me from the church. Not questions about the leadership or things
that were seriously wrong in it. This entire matter was now
about the website, completely glossing over and obscuring
Scott's role in my leaving. I built the websites for the church.
I obviously intended for the church to have them. But they were
a gift to the church. They were not purchased, commissioned,
leased or contracted. They were not paid for. They were a gift.
The church's demands and threats were poor choices. Had anyone
at that church—anyone at all—simply asked me for the sites, I’d
have gladly given them to them. Instead, there were false
accusations and threats of legal action, Scott refusing to
simply ask me for the sites. It wasn't a request so much as it
was a mugging. I'm surprised he didn't bring a ski mask and a
pistol.
Scott's rage seemed directed not so much at my leaving, but at
my taking my gifts with me. In all the back-and-forth between
myself and the pastors, there was no effort made—none—to (1)
show any concern whatsoever about me or (2) make any serious
attempt to reconcile our differences. It was all about them
grabbing at the gifts. About the logos and graphic design. About
losing the church's musician. About the websites and email
system. It seemed to me that Scott had spent so much time and
energy putting me down and marginalizing my contributions to the
ministry that he didn't realize how valuable those contributions
actually were. Having destroyed my enthusiasm and self-esteem
and convinced most everyone that I was irrelevant and perhaps
useless, Scott was now using ethical, moral and legal pressure,
threats, and intimidation to force me to continue vital services
to the church—things I was more than willing to do anyway and
would still be doing—for free— if Scott hadn't chosen to be such
a moron about the whole thing. Three pastors, including one
who'd been a friend for years. Not one of them asked me if I was
all right. If I needed anything. If we could pray together.
Instead it was all threats and gimme, gimme, gimme.
This was part and parcel of Scott's crippling myopia: it was
more important for Scott to win the argument than it was to
achieve the goal. And whether or not I was destroyed, my
reputation trashed along the way, was irrelevant so long as
Scott won, no matter how pyrrhic the victory. God does not give
us salvation because we demand it. God does not provide
deliverance because we paid for it. Salvation is a free gift.
Those websites hardly compare to the most precious gift from
God, but they were, in fact, a gift. Only Scott would not allow
me to give it, Scott rather demanding and bullying and
threatening—behavior which was in no way inspired by the Holy
Spirit.
Had any of the three pastors said anything like, “Well, brother,
we need the amp, and the church really needs the site, won’t you
pray about it?” The site would still be up. Instead, I was
called a thief.
This co-pastor, who’d accused me of unprofessionalism, then
floated a legal concept, along with an implied threat of legal
action, claiming the church need not swap Scott’s amp for the
websites because they already owned the websites. They owned
everything I did because I was an employee, and common business
practice is that anything created by an employee belongs to the
employer. This concept then became the spearhead of the
campaign: that I had fleeced the church by taking their money
and then pulling the websites down, sites the church had bought
and paid for.
First of all, the church logos and websites were begun before I
was installed as pastor. I provided all the resources, did all
the work, and they were hosted on the PraiseNet’s servers. The
work(s) never left my custody or control and the church didn’t
pay a dime for any of it.
Second: working on the website was, perhaps, the smallest part
of what I did there at that church. Being the de-facto minister
of music was certainly the largest part. The small housing
allowance the church paid was not enough to even cover my rent,
let alone utilities and transportation and health. It was a
token of their love, but not even close to being a bad salary.
But the frontline premise at work was that the church paid me
for this website, and I received a letter of demand from the
church ordering me to either restore the site or return “all
monies paid” me in the past year, as if working on the website
was the only thing I did.
Even a mediocre church musician would be pulling in $150 a week.
That alone would have been more than the housing allowance the
church provided for me—the money they were now demanding I
return because of this website nonsense. Add in maintenance and
repair of the church’s computers, design of their printed matter
(brochures, signs, letterhead, etc.), administration of their
network and email, and, yes, maintenance of the two websites
they never paid for in the first place, and if we actually
started attaching a value to those tasks—which their logic here
demands—the church would end up owing me a significant amount of
money. And that’s before compensating me for my pastoral duties.
The fact was, it was inappropriate and wrong to attach a value
to what I did at the church because I didn’t do any of those
things for money and the church was not paying me. It was an
insane argument, a baseless charge, and a legal claim fraught
with peril from an inevitable cross-complaint.
Here’s what I told the church clerk who’d sent the demand
letter:
There seems to be a misunderstanding in that the church
leadership apparently believes (1) the church owns the website
and (or because) (2) the church paid me to build it, and that
(3) I took it down and, therefore (4) have acted in an unethical
fashion. None of those statements are true, and I address those
issues in my attachment.
Also, either folks are not aware of or are for some reason
disregarding the fact that I offered to let the church keep the
site and that offer was declined. Taking the site down was not
my desire or my decision, it was Pastor Scott’s. I kept the site
up for two weeks waiting for Pastor Scott to suggest an
alternate way forward, but received only insults and threats.
I'm sorry that people are apparently angry at me, but they are
venting their frustration at the wrong guy. Taking the site down
was not my desire or my call.
I am terribly sorry for being the cause of any confusion or
frustration at the church. That was never my intention. The
membership is not talking to me and are, as a result, reaching
uninformed conclusions based on inadequate information about
what's going on. Please try and understand that leaving was
absolutely the last thing I ever wanted to do, but it was,
ultimately, the only choice left to me. I left in the manner the
pastors’ group insisted upon, and the church body accepted, at
our last business meeting. Criticizing me now for submitting to
a process everyone agreed to is confusing.
I fully appreciate your disappointment, but I have to wonder if
there was any point at all where you asked yourself, "What is
Priest going through that would make him feel leaving was his
only option?" "Is there anything I can do to help?" Did the
thought not ever occur that I might be *bleeding*, that
something terrible had transpired at the church?
Not one word of compassion or concern has been extended to me
from this church. It's as if no one at the church cares for me
at all. The only message I've received from the church is bile
and scorn, grabbing for things and arguing over who gets the
china, rather than being concerned about a brother who is
CLEARLY hurting. I'm terribly shocked and disappointed that,
after a year of great personal sacrifice for this ministry, the
church has shown me only attacks and threats. It is a reaction I
could scarcely have imagined, and it's taken it's toll on me.
But, what's done is done. Bottom line: the church does not own
these things. The church did not pay me to build these tools. I
did offer them to the church, however, for the electronic
equivalent of a Lotto ticket and a ham sandwich, and my offer
was declined.
Everything else is just us fussing for the sake of fussing, and,
honestly, Sis, who needs that?
I'll really miss you—you were one of the sane ones (smile). I
pray you are doing well and are happy. Please continue to pray
for me and for the church, please hear your pastors with your
whole heart and pray to God for a complete understanding of
these problems.
Praying for you, love you all,
Pastor Christopher J. Priest
I never heard from her again.
What followed was a progression of hostile phone calls and
emails from Scott and the other pastors. I’m not entirely sure
what would make them think showing me hatred and rebuke would
somehow bring me around, but I guess that’s what happens when
you drink the Kool-Aid. The anger vented at me no longer seemed
to be about my leaving, no longer seemed to be about the
website, but seemed, to me, to be anger vented at my staunch
refusal to admit I was a liar. That Scott’s version of the story
was the true one and that I was causing all these problems.
There was a business meeting scheduled for August and Scott
threatened to “bring me before the church” if I did not do what
he demanded. I informed one of the co-pastors (after having
called me a thief, I was no longer corresponding with Scott
directly) that I would not be available for this meeting nor did
I think the meeting was a good idea. Tempers were flaring,
people were hurting. I know I needed time to calm down, to be
able to deal with this in any semblance of an objective manner.
Forcing this meeting to happen this quick would result only in
shouting matches and would accomplish nothing.
The meeting took place as scheduled. My guess is the rationale
was that the meeting was on the calendar and it wouldn’t be fair
to postpone the business of the church just because of me.
Which, if true, would put a lie to Scott’s utterly ridiculous
claim that people come before process. To my observation, people
indeed, came before process—so long as it suited Scott. When it
benefited Scott’s agenda, the process became intractable, the
date set in stone. These people love Scott, will do anything
Scott asks them. Pushing the meeting—or, at least, my part of
it—back a week or two would have been a conciliatory gesture
that would have forced me to respond. Insisting on the
preexisting meeting date only guaranteed I would not be there,
which was the likely motive. I was too hurt and too angry to set
foot in that church and expect positive results. I decided not
to attend, explaining my reasons to the co-pastor and requesting
time to heal, to calm down. I sent my farewell letter to the
church.
The co-pastor informed me the meeting would take place as scheduled, that he had not read my letter and would not present it to the church. And I just gave up. Not presenting my letter was evidence of how biased the process was, and I had no intention of participating in any process—any organization—that distorts and perverts God’s word to suit its leader’s agenda. And, with that, I signed off. There would be no further communicating with the leadership of that church.
