Paranoia and vision-driven churches

From Pajama Pages, this observation about modern "visionary" leaders. A key line: When followers must completely sell out to the leader’s vision, they dare not question it publicly.
Though Pajama Pages is looking specifically at one church, the vocabulary is something cropping up elsewhere and suggests that members of such "visionary" churches be on guard for leadership paranoia and the spiritual abuse that often accompanies it.

When leadership apathy encourages spiritual abuse

I found this link on FBCJAXwatchdog's blog. Pajama pages blog chronicles a horrific series of acts church members did to a Christian college professor critical of church practices. The abuse included sending a fake letter of resignation to his college-employer, interfering with an adoption and posting fake, obscene twitters to smear the member-critic. The leadership did almost nothing to stop the harassment.

Newspaper in California covers spiritual abuse

A major newspaper in California covered the issue of spiritual abuse focusing on several families from different churches in the Sacramento area. Though the article did not name the churches, the treatment was decent and the issue was brought out in the open. Light in a dark place.
The paper examined the issue of spiritual abuse in a story titled Some Sacramento-area faithful turn backs on pastors, 'spiritual abuse' published in December 2009. At least 20 pages of comments followed the story, some revealing other incidents of abuse.


Spiritual abuse is a topic that churches neglect and that secular sources often don't care about or understand.

It is a hopeful development for a major media source like the Bee to take notice and investigate this issue. Spiritual abuse devastates families, destroys faith, hurts other churches that are tainted by neighboring church mistreatment and scandal, and leaves a lot of people disillusioned and lost.

Manipulation in Churches

When Geocities folded in October, a very important site on spiritual abuse from Rest Ministries was no longer accessible. Before it disappeared, however, I copied some of the information on the site and saved it. I now have it linked to the Provender site. It's valuable because it describes in vivid detail the way abusive leaders manipulate followers.