Author: Bruce Pagano II (Page 2 of 50)

Bruce Pagano is a blogger and podcaster living in the Treasure Valley area of Idaho. He is married and has four children, a retired US military veteran, a licensed clinical professional counselor, and has over 14 years of ministerial leadership experience. Most of his writing focuses on manhood, leadership, relationships, and faith issues. His writing can be found at www.brucepagano.com and his podcast at www.foldingchairtheology.com.

Spiritual Grooming: Culture that Enables Spiritual Harm & Abuse – Pt. 2

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Photo by David Henry on Pexels.com

This is part two in a three-part series on spiritual grooming, harm, and abuse. You can read part one: HERE.

Divisive Heretics

In the growing wave of people deconstructing their faith, I’ve heard many pastors speak against It. They’ll typically frame it as a trend that’s a general danger to your personal “faith” and the Church, at large. They warn their congregants that asking questions and pointing to problematic issues is being “too critical” of the Church. Part of their warning might involve telling congregants not to ask questions or not to point out negative issues. Sometimes it can involve promoting a culture verbalized as “focus on the good, not the bad.” Many of these critiques and questions involve how Christians have historically handled and responded to serious cultural issues. Issues such as racial injustice, the LGBTQIA+ community, and abuse can easily get you labeled as distracting, divisive, and/or heretical.

Ironically, those same pastors have no problem criticizing and critiquing those very same people who are “deconstructing.” They accuse those “deconstructing” of being indoctrinated by the “godless left” to become progressive Marxist communists. When challenging Christian leaders about these issues, it is not unusual for many leaders to dismiss the calls for acknowledgment, accountability, and repentance. Often, they also ignore and reject those echoing God’s continual call for justice (Isaiah 58, Luke 4:18, Matthew 18:6, and Romans 13:10) as heretical disruptors. All the while, church congregants continue to embolden and support these pastors and leaders with nods and hand-lifted “amens.” This is part of why Christians will co-opt words like grooming to use against people whom they don’t like.

Spiritual Grooming

         My intention is not to justify deconstruction or critiquing the Church; no one needs permission to do those things. My purpose is to address pastoral practices, such as teaching and culture building, that promote only “seeing the good.” By dismissing very real concerns, they are ultimately employing elements that resemble grooming and enable abuse. As a reminder, I’ll continue to refer to this as spiritual grooming. And to be clear, it’s not that I don’t want to “see the good.” Believe it or not, I’ve always been hopeful when it comes to the church. It’s the reason that I’ve stayed connected to it and worked on staff for so long.

Unfortunately, in my practice as a professional clinical counselor, I hear so many people dismiss their own traumatic abuse. They’ll say things like, “…but I’m not a victim,” “I’m not supposed to live in a victim mentality,” “In my suffering, I’ll receive a blessing,” or “God doesn’t give us more than we can handle” because they’ve been taught to dismiss it. I’ve also heard clients dismiss a clearly abusive situation by suggesting that they couldn’t trust their feelings. Or, they excuse their pastor’s behavior because they were told that they misread the situation and know he couldn’t do “that” because he’s a “good man of God.”

Often, there’s a teaching they received that told them they were not victims and that their feelings weren’t facts. There’s often an encouragement to embrace suffering, like Jesus. Or that they need to submit to those in spiritual authority because it’s “biblical.” In some cases, the teaching reminds them that God desires their holiness more than their happiness.

Authority & Submission

         This brings us back to the concept of grooming and how spirituality introduces implicit trust between the victim and the pastor. There can be serious consequences when a spiritual leader, who is communicating unbalanced messages about authority and submission, occupies a position of authority in their congregant’s life. The consequences are compounded when the leader becomes the sole arbiter for defining and affirming hurt or abuse for victims. If we consider the definition, as previously stated [HERE or HERE], these circumstances create fertile ground for abuse within our churches. And this isn’t hyperbole. Remember, for every instance of sexual abuse reported, about two more go unreported. And that’s sexual abuse, a type of abuse that we clearly know how to define.

Imagine other types of abuse or harm that may not be as clearly recognizable. Add to that all of the misteaching around authority, submission, divisiveness, and “disrupting the work of God,” and it’s no wonder why abuse perpetuates. How many of those instances go unreported? Spiritual leaders who have made it a practice, even unintentionally, to dismiss this conversation perpetuate spiritual harm and abuse. Please hear that I’m not saying that pastors who say and teach these ideas are trying to create abusive relationships. While there are pastors and Christian leaders who do this intentionally, they’re not who I’m talking to or about.

I’m talking about pastors who, in teaching their congregation to dismiss anything negative as unnecessary criticism, are subtly teaching them not to question those who have “authority” over them. In doing so, they are also teaching them to reject personal accountability and accept a lack of accountability from those in leadership. Not only does this teaching fly in the face of basic Christian teachings about rebuke (Luke 17:3), confession (James 5:16), accountability (Romans 14:12), and repentance (Acts 20:21), it provides fertile ground for abuse and creates a scenario where a victim may question or dismiss their own abuse. This is spiritual grooming.

Confusion & Distration

Spiritual abuse and harm involve complex elements that can make it difficult to define and recognize. Because of that, it is not uncommon for victims to leave the church and sometimes their entire faith system feeling as though they were the “problem.” Add to that the confusion created around the continued misunderstanding and misuse of the term grooming, and it’s easy to see how abuse continues. The accusation that Queer community and drag entertainers are grooming children not only harms those in that community but is also a distraction from the actual grooming that is occurring in our own church spaces. So, what do we do? In the last article of this series, we’ll look at some answers from different positional/role perspectives.

Spiritual Grooming: Culture that Enables Spiritual Harm & Abuse – Pt. 1  

man in white suit standing on street
Photo by David Henry on Pexels.com

Over that last year, there have been numerous accounts of Christian leaders and pastors being involved in morally reprehensible abuses. Stories like Jerry Falwell Jr’s sex scandal and abusive university policies and practices, Mark Discoll’s continued bullying and unrepentant behavior, John MacArthur’s hiring and continued support of multiple pedophiles, and even Hillsong Church founder Brian Houston’s accusations of failing to report abuse and subsequent misconduct are all examples of what can happen when unchecked and unrestrained power become central to a religious institution.

         On the surface, these events seem like worse-case scenarios, mainly confined to high-profile leaders with massive churches and platforms. To a large degree, it is true that pastors in that setting are more prone to these types of scandals. However, in May 2022, Guidepost Solutions issued a detailed report stating that the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) had compiled a list of 700 pastors who had been reported for varying degrees of sexual abuse over a 20-year period.

That report makes it clear that this is not a “megachurch” or celebrity pastor issue. And while there seems to be an ever-growing trail of victims, my biggest question is: How is this happening? How are Christian leaders ignoring this? How have we not condemned and moved to correct this devastating issue? While many factors exist that enable this kind of abuse and make victims reluctant to report it, the spiritual element complicates the issue. And while complicated, there is a very specific rising trend within the American Evangelical Industrial Complex that feeds that complexity.

“Groomers”

         Recently, “grooming” has become an increasingly common part of the modern American Christian lexicon. Unfortunately, its use is incorrect, unhealthy, and exaggerated, only compounding this problematic addition. The most common use of the term that I observe is as a means of expressing disgust with the Queer community, particularly with Transgender issues and toward the entertainment medium known as “drag.” Of the many issues I have with Christians hijacking this word, my primary frustrations have to do with their clear misunderstanding of the term, how its misuse diminishes the seriousness of it, and how it has been unjustly and irrationally applied to an entire group of people.



RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network) identifies grooming as “a tool, used by abusers, of manipulative behaviors used to gain access to a potential victim, coerce them to agree to the abuse and reduce the risk of being caught. While these tactics are used most often against younger kids, teens, and vulnerable adults are also at risk.” This typically takes the form of “building a relationship, trust, and emotional connection with a child or young person so they can manipulate, exploit and abuse them.

Based on this definition, grooming is not occurring in the Transgender community. Neither is it happening during drag show performances or events like library drag story time. I’m not saying that there aren’t individual abusers who are Transgender or drag performers. But, identifying a whole community or all performers as “groomers” reveals a profound misunderstanding of this tool of abuse, the Transgender community, and drag as entertainment. It also reveals your implicit rejection of an entire people group as divine image bearers and a willful refusal to understand the issue in a nuanced way.

Real Grooming

  Alternatively, we do see, in the previously mentioned examples, literal and rampant grooming and sexual abuse within the Church. We see Christian leaders and pastors, typically straight white men, building trusting relationships and then perpetrating horrible abuse. While 700 pastors over 20 years may not seem like a lot, this is one report pertaining to one denomination and doesn’t consider the over 400,000 clergies in America. It also does not account for the statistically significant 63% of abuse cases that go unreported.

That means, considering those 700 cases, more than 1,200 other cases potentially went unreported to the SBC. Those numbers don’t even account for other denominations that have both reported and unreported cases (think of the Catholic church, Presbyterian Church, Mennonite Church, LDS, or the 30,000 other denominations that exist). This also ignores that other pastors may have been aware of the abuse and did nothing. That knowledge and failure to act automatically make them complicit in the abuse. It also doesn’t account for additional victims who may never come forward. And this only considers sexual abuse and rape.

Calling All Pastors

To be clear, I’m not only, or even primarily, addressing sexual abuse in the church. I want to speak more broadly to other, sometimes less obvious, spiritual abuse and harm that causes religious trauma. This includes the seemingly harmless, and often presented as good, teachings about authority and submission. Often these teachings bare many of the same elements and results as grooming. For this series of posts, I’ll refer to these teachings and the culture they produce as spiritual grooming. Additionally, we’ll define spiritual abuse and harm as “when someone uses spiritual or religious beliefs to hurt, scare or control another person.”  

Because abuse within the Church is serious and widespread, we need to understand the problem in a nuanced way. We also need to find ways to take urgent action. The Guidepost Solutions report makes clear that Christian leaders can no longer dismiss the prevalence of abuse within the Church. Pastors must understand how the implicit trust connected to their position creates fertile ground for abuse and harm. In realizing this, they must reconsider how and what they are teaching regarding topics like authority and submission. In the following accompanying blog posts, we’ll explore the issue deeper and consider some ways forward.

This is part three in a three-part series on spiritual grooming, harm, and abuse. You can read parts two HERE and three HERE.

Lent 2021: A Call for the American Church to Lament and Repent

Starting on Ash Wednesday (February 17, 2021) we will enter a time of lament and repentance. Our lament will be over the church’s complicity in a range of issues (sins) that have caused so much hurt. They’ve also negatively impacted our ability to witness to a world desperately in need of Jesus.

Something New, but Old

Because lament and repentance are not typically regular practices, for us as a Church, it is beneficial to be specific about the purpose of this week. Specifically, as we intentionally position ourselves in a posture of lament we will be moved toward the act of repentance. This is often difficult for us, both individually and communally, for two reasons. The first is because lament, or grieving, is hard and we make many attempts to avoid it. Because of that, we’ve not made lament a part of the discipleship or taught what it means to grieve well. The second is because we have largely misunderstood what repentance is, again, both individually and communally.

There was a time that I assumed that repentance meant that I had to take responsibility for whatever the sin was as if I had actually done it or participated in it. For example, the church has a long and well documented complicity in racism and racist practices.

I would look at the issue and the church’s involvement and assume that repentance meant that I had to admit to personal racist behavior. I would try to process that idea and really struggle with the implication that I needed to take responsibility for something I didn’t actually do. I’m sure that I have situations in my life that involved unintentional actions that were, at the very least, racially insensitive. But, racist? Absolutely not. For me, the focus became about intention and I would never intentionally treat someone different because of their skin color. In my mind, I couldn’t align the idea of historic complicity with my own lack of personal intent.

Gaining Understanding

At the same time, I would struggle with the biblical principle of communal repentance, shown in Israel’s repentance for the previous generation’s sins, even though they had not participated in that particular sin. After years of prayer, counsel, and study, I’ve come to understand the real intent of repentance. Before we continue, it will be helpful to define some key terms.

Complicity: the state of being an accomplice or in partnership or involvement in wrongdoing. In the context of the issues presented over the coming weeks, complicity means either intentional participation in and/or compromising in those areas by making shameful concessions.

Lament: the dictionary definition is “to feel or express sorrow or regret for something.” However, it’s more than that and uniquely Christian. Biblical lament is first, and foremost, a prayer. But not any prayer, it is a prayer that is directly focused on expressing fear, regret, and sorrow to God and communicating, to Him, our desire for restoration and renewal. Specifically, restoration of our connection to Him and renewal of our mind to His way of thinking.

Repentance: Again, the dictionary definition is, a deep sorrow, compunction, or contrition for a past sin, wrongdoing, or the like. However, this misses the nuances and intention of biblical repentance. Repentance is more specifically the intentional recognition of past wrongdoing, whether individual or communal, the decision to change your mind, and then act in a manner contrary to the act that prompted the need for repentance.

Toward Repentance

It is with these definitions and clarifications in mind that we are able to lament the Church’s complicity and compromise of these sins. Then we are able to approach them with “a broken and humbled heart” (Psalm 51:7) and understand that repentance is not about acknowledging direct responsibility for committing them (sometimes they might be), but rather an acknowledgment of their opposition to the Gospel of Jesus and our desire to change our minds about them and commit to actions that move the church in a direction opposite of the Church’s historical actions within that specific sins. In essence, it is a complete rejection of the previous intentional acts or beliefs, or passive allowance, and the deliberate move toward beliefs and actions that are Christ-honoring and people welcoming.

Before we move into repentance, we must first lament our past. Deep sorrow and grief are necessary for repentance and the vehicle by which the Holy Spirit moves us through conviction and into repentance.

Here are the issues we lament as a church and then seek repentance in:

  • Allowing Leaders unchecked and unaccountable power/authority (WK 1)
  • Complicity in Racial injustices (WK 2)
  • Misplaced Allegiance (Idolatry) (WK 3)
  • Christian Nationalism (WK 4)
  • Enemy Making (WK 5)
  • Turning Toward and Celebration (WK 6)

The Process

During each week (Mon – Fri) there will be daily issues presented for how these have played out in specific ways (i.e. Wk 1, Day 1 – Sexual Abuse).

Each week will feature:

  1. A Daily Reading
  2. A Reflective Question
  3. A weekly prayer
  4. A list of resources

The intention is to spend time in prayer and reflection to allow the Holy Spirit to guide you toward specific action in some or all of these areas. It’s important to understand that while we can begin to move God’s church away from each of these sins through individual action, we may feel God calling us to do work, on a communal scale, in one specific area. This is okay and not a rejection of the work needed in the other areas.

Toward Christ

It’s also important to remember that some of these issues may rub you the wrong way. You may feel the urge to reject the notion of complicity and the need for repentance. I urge you to still seek the Holy Spirit in these areas; remember that repentance is not an admission of responsibility for committing these sins. Instead, it is a commitment to and taking responsibility for the renewing of our minds in these areas. It’s our intentional act to move the church far in the opposite direction of them.

As we enter the last week of Lent, we will enter with a heart moved toward celebration. This will be a week of preparation and celebration for the coming Good Friday and Easter. We will celebrate the resurrection and promised return of our Good King, Jesus, who has defeated every one of these sins. This week also allows us to acknowledge that Jesus’s defeat of these sins is seen in our good works, He has prepared for us to do, in these areas. With that in mind, one of the primary purposes of this week is a commitment to action. Repentance is only as good as its ability to invoke action in the opposite direction of the repented of offense.

As we prepare for this next season, I’m praying for you; for us, as Jesus’s Church. This is how we usher heaven to earth. Let’s get to ushering.

You can download this as a PDF at the below link:

The daily readings, questions, and weekly prayer will be posted on my Instagram profile: @bpags2


Weekly Guides

Week of Lament (Starting Ash Wednesday to Feb 21)

Week 1 (Feb 22-26), Authority & Power

Week 2 (Mar 1-5), Complicity in Racial Injustices

Week 3 (Mar 8-12), Misplaced Allegiance (Idolatry)

Week 4 (Mar 15-19), Christian Nationalism

Week 5 (Mar 22-26), Enemy Making

Passion Week (Mar 29-Apr 2), Celebration

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