Immediately, after the meeting the Pastor and Associate pastors got on the phone and started a search for my replacement. Within twenty minutes I had gone from much loved co-worker to replaceable. It was like I wasn’t even valued or appreciated. The Pastor’s wife was the only one, out of the three, that expressed her desire that I stay and I would be sorely missed if I left. It was like a giant switch had been flipped and I suddenly found myself outside the circle of trust but the Leadership tried to feed me the illusion that I was still within the circle.
Within days the trickle of gossip started making its way back to me. I had been forbidden to tell anyone about the possibility of me moving and I had been informed that all leadership decisions were stripped away from me since I was leaving. Whenever I made a comment about “my team”, I was quickly informed that they were not “my team” anymore and I was only leading worship. From the moment of my informal resignation I was no longer a church leader, although no one outside of head Pastors and I were allowed to know.
Soon the gossip mill really started churning out some juicy tidbits about me. I heard things like that I had never been pregnant in the first place; that I had flipped out and gone unstable when I thought I was pregnant and then found out I was not. I also heard that my miscarriage had caused some sort of post partum which caused me to unhinge mentally. Every tidbit of gossip was entwined around my possible pregnancy and some mental instability. The most interesting thing about the gossip was I hadn’t shared my pregnancy or miscarriage with anyone in the church yet almost everyone in the core group of the church knew. It wasn’t until the rumors started floating back to me that I finally shared my miscarriage with my praise team, and during that time I begged them not to discuss it outside of the praise team because of the personal, sensitive nature of my tragedy. When I shared my loss with my team, they were there for me and lifted me up in prayer.
I wasn’t long after the gossip started getting back to me that the insinuations of my “mental instability” began from the pulpit. By the end of August things were unraveling at an ever quickening pace and by the first week in September I had become the latest target for the Pastors “teaching” examples. He spent half a sermon one Sunday preaching about my PMS and how he knew when my cycle was going to start every month by how I treated people and my children.
I was mortified! It took all my power not to burst out in tears and run out of the sanctuary crying. Here I was sitting in the front row as a Pastor in that church and my Senior Pastor was preaching about how unstable I was during the time before my menstrual cycle. He went on and on about how I would burst into tears at the most harmless of statements and how tedious it was to deal with my emotional instability. All I could do was sit there and endure it. I remember pretending to be extremely absorbed in my bible, searching for some obscure passage, like I wasn’t even aware that I was being discussed openly in front of over a hundred people. By the end of the service, I was a wreck.
I managed to play the closing song and I quickly made my way off the stage and made a beeline for my office so I could finally let the tears fall like they had been threatening to do for the past hour. A few people made their way to me as I descended the stage to express their sympathies and I heard a few people say they didn’t think those statements were true of me at all. They all let me rush past as I stammered something about needing to take care of something in my office. They could see the tears welling up in my eyes and so the few that had huddled around me let me retreat to the sanctuary of my office.
When I got there I locked the door, allowed myself to cry just for a minute. I then quickly fixed my make-up, applied my fake ‘everything is alright’ smile and made my way out of my office to collect my children and make my way of escape. Go figure, Chris had chosen that Sunday to stay at home so I had to endure all of this alone. As I left the building that day, I remember feeling a stirring in my heart that I only had to make it till November 1st. If I could make it till then, November 2nd, I could turn in my resignation, leave them all high and dry, and sail away on my planned cruise and have a week where no one could contact me, a week of peace. I could leave the church and never look back.
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