After decades of dysfunction, one church publicly confessed its mistreatment of former ministers.
Roving journalist Charles Kuralt once called Madison, Indiana, "the
most beautiful river town in America." It's a little place—just 13,000
people—across the Ohio River from Kentucky. If you walked along the
riverfront, you'd see quaint shops, a marina for passing boaters, and
established trees lining the street.
For decades though, the beauty masked an ugly truth. Madison First
Assembly of God, one of the town's key congregations, was rife with
toxic church politics that hurt and expelled minister after minister.
Four successive pastors had come and painfully left the congregation.
The church earned a reputation—in their town and denomination—for
backstabbing and hypocrisy.
That's hardly news. But unlike many similar stories, there's more to this church's tale.
"We smiled a lot, but it all masked decades of dysfunction."
I first heard of Madison First Assembly after the town's local paper
reported on an unusual church service: a reconciliation event in October
of 2012. The church called its former ministers back to Madison to ask
their forgiveness for how they were treated. The church paid their way,
publicized the service, invited the community. The church was open about
wrongs done, and serious about setting them right.
One photo from the paper shows Peter Joudry, the current pastor, bent
washing the feet of former ministers on behalf of the congregation. An
unusual image for an unusual news item, and one that pricked my
curiosity. How did the little church go from being a serial "widowmaker"
to literally washing the feet of abused former pastors?
Peter Joudry washes feet of former pastor Don Fisher.
Decades of dysfunction
On the phone, Joudry was genial and quick to chuckle. He told the backstory of the service.
"To Sunday morning visitors, we looked like the healthiest church in
town. The worship was red hot and the preaching was strong. We smiled a
lot. But it all masked decades of dysfunction.
"The roots of the problem went all the way back to the beginning of our
church in the 1950s. From the start, there were factions within the
congregation. A few influential people in the church—big tithers, and
people with big opinions—became increasingly important. Eventually, it
was literally their way or the highway for pastors. Their divisive
nature patterned the DNA of the church, and no one dealt with it. It
festered, and grew, until eventually, it seemed normal."
Pastor after pastor was chewed up and spit out by a growing pattern of hostility.
While turnover can be common in small-town churches, and is never easy,
over the decades a pattern established itself. Over the years, minister
after minister was faced with a church that welcomed them with a smile,
then slowly soured, turned on them, and drove them out of the church on
one pretext or another. The issues were minor, but the political power
of an elite few in the church was not. While Joudry speaks in
generalities about what happened long before he came to pastor there,
the church's reputation as a pastor-killer was attested to by the town,
the denomination, and by his own experience.
"Every church has conflict and differences of opinion. I understand
that," Joudry said. "It can be a healthy, cleansing thing. But this was
not that kind of conflict. Where it should have been open, this was
covert. Where it should have been discussed, this was hidden."
Its secret nature made it nearly impossible to call out. And as pastor
after pastor was chewed up and spit out by a growing pattern of
hostility, the church began to have a reputation in the community as a
"widowmaker" for ministers.
"This systemic problem became the corporate identity of the church."
Joudry told The Madison Courier, in an article the community paper
published on the service. "The reputation was national, and the
reputation was bad."
You're the pastor … as long as we like you
On the phone, I asked him to tell me more.
"Key lay leaders saw pastors as just chaplains for the church, not
leaders. In their view, a pastor was supposed to preach, to supervise
worship, to marry and bury. Ultimately, he was just an employee, and his
value was tied to their satisfaction with his services. His performance
had to meet their stringent personal requirements for style and
comfort. Step out of line, by going against the grain, or by taking true
directional leadership of the congregation, and you'd be warned. Step
out again, and you'd be gone.
"Really, there were always two congregations: one led by the pastor,
and one led by a quiet lay competitor who was uninterested in the title
but obsessed with things going his way. He was well intentioned, I'm
sure, but power hungry, angry, and dangerous if crossed. And it was his
way or the highway. For decades."
Every church experiences conflict. It's a natural part of worshiping in
a community with other people. "But it is one thing to have shallow
conflict and deep unity," said Joudry. "It's another to have shallow
unity—surface pleasantness most of the time—and deep conflict. Our
brokenness was at our most basic levels of organization."
Pastors were not merely replaced, they were driven out, he said, and
for "offenses" that were far from deserving of such treatment. Sermons
that were too short. Or too long. Or small misbehaviors from the
pastor's children. Criticism would start with small, passive-aggressive
digs, then bloom cruelly. It impacted not just the ministers, but their
entire families.
"One pastor's wife, like me, was a little rotund rather than the
petite, thin pastor's wife that these people thought she should be,"
Joudry said. "They would invite him places but conspicuously leave her
out or ignore her because of her appearance. At Christmastime they
backhandedly gave her a membership to a gym—a 'gift' that was a cruel
jab at her struggle with her weight. When I first came, I didn't believe
that passive-aggressive horror stories like this really happened. But
they did. Ministry qualification was all about image."
Joudry says that one of his predecessors' children had been so hurt at
the church that the teenager considered suicide at a cliff in the state
park across the street. During the reconciliation weekend, "that family
stood on the cliff where the suicide would have happened. They dealt
with the hurt."
During the service, the Joudrys washed the feet of one pastor's
children. "We pulled off their tennis shoes, and said, 'We're sorry.
We're sorry for the things that were done to your parents. We're sorry
for the things that were said to you.' After they returned from the
service, they wrote to me to tell me the story: 'Now we can think about
this city without thinking about the horrors of what it did to us.'"
Joudry, from the colorful Pentecostal tradition, talks about an
"Absalom spirit" in the congregation. Like David's usurping son, the key
members supported the pastor verbally while "plotting treason" at the
gates. The church's unity was broken. And it didn't stop at the walls of
the church. As pastor after pastor left painfully, the reputation of
the church soured in the community.
He's quick to advocate for churches to hold their leaders to high
standards of accountability. But the depth and strangeness of this
manipulation was toxic. Something had to give.
And something did. The church split.
Even new church members prayed for reconciliation.
Costly division
Prompted by what (under normal circumstances) should have been a minor
run-in with a staff member, the church split. It was ugly, with the
crisis coming at a meeting characterized by shouting and accusation. The
congregation cracked along the lines of those influential members who
had been at the center of the church's disunity for years.
"The level of their toxicity meant that as soon as they were opposed,
it was them leaving or the pastor. Until I stood up to them, it had
always been the pastor who'd left," Joudry said.
He's not sure exactly why he stayed when others had left, but suspects
that it was because he had the unified support of the other ministry
leaders, and an emphasis from the first on discussing and improving the
church's culture and DNA. When the faction saw that they couldn't divide
the board (leading to the pastor's dismissal) as in the past, they
left. But even though Joudry was still there when the smoke cleared,
he's not untouched.
"We are still dealing with the fallout." There's pain in his voice.
"The split hurt in every way possible. We lost a third of our
congregation, maybe more. It broke relationships. It hit us financially.
In our small town, the half that left built a bigger, better building
just up the road. It is a constant, public reminder of the pain."
He said that the church split has been like the death of a close family
member. Ministries have suffered from fewer volunteers and resources.
The congregation has struggled with various combinations of sorrow,
ambivalence, and celebration.
"A year and a half later, it's still messy," he said. "I've lost
friends. One wife in our church still comes, but her husband left. Some
people are rejoicing that a group that bullied them for 30 years is
gone. Others are deeply hurt, grieving, and heartbroken."
The split by no means fixed things. Members who left actively tried to
persuade others to come with them. Years of dysfunction meant that even
those who stayed needed to relearn what it meant to be a church family.
They weren't used to the healthy give and take of life together.
The split took a personal toll, too. For weeks afterward, Joudry's
post-sermon Sunday routine included weeping in the foyer. He's largely
stopped his personal habit of traveling to do missions work (he's been
to 50 countries), and when we spoke, hadn't been on a plane since the
split. He struggles with anxiety, an issue that he didn't have before
the recent stress. Leading his church toward health and restoration has
come at a cost.
Even newer members of the church identified with the sins of the past to repent, pray for reconciliation, and start anew.
"I'm fundamentally a different person than I was two years ago. Before I
came here, I traveled regularly to speak in churches. Not anymore. I
had heart-attack-like symptoms from the stress of it all. I was
exercising every day. Doing all of that stuff, and yet I had
heart-attack-like symptoms. I've had real health issues that seem to be
linked more to the mental and emotional strain of it than anything else.
I don't go out to eat anymore. I rarely go anywhere. For stretches of
weeks and months, my nine-mile commute is all the traveling that I can
handle."
He paused. "Over and over again, we have had to work through the fact
that we couldn't be the church that had existed there for the past
60-plus years. We had to cast a new vision—that we could become one
body. That we all could submit ourselves to godly leaders in our church
and denomination."
At least two of Madison First Assembly's former pastors have gone on to
successful ministries elsewhere, leading 1500-plus person
congregations. If size matters, they've stepped "up" from the small
congregation along the Ohio River. But they were eager to return, to
reconcile with the church, to gain a sense of closure from a strange,
shared chapter in each of their lives.
A message and a model
In a press release titled "An Open Message to Our Community," Joudry spoke on behalf of the church:
"We recognize that in the past we have not always been in Christian
unity …. We have not always treated our brothers and sisters in Christ
with respect and love …. We have not been a Godly witness to the power
of the gospel of Christ because of our disobedience to God's word.
"We are resolved to put these patterns of behavior behind us, and
become the unified body of believers that Christ anticipated when he
prayed in John 17:23 ' … that they may be brought to complete unity. Then the world will know that you sent me.'"
"I hope this can be a model for others," Joudry said to me on the
phone. "Each church has its story, has its 'stuff.' Our job is to face
it. Face our junk. Face that elephant in the sanctuary that nobody talks
about. Face it, stare it down, cry over it. Work through it. And when
it's been wrestled to the ground, to get up and begin to look forward.
"It's dumb to act like we have no problems. And it's just as bad to
take half measures. You can't fix congestive heart failure with
band-aids. You have to dig down, dig right to the cause, look at
ourselves."
Facing the problem has been messy and painful, and still is. Conflict
always comes with aftershocks, with sad "what-if"s, with a sense of lost
time, lost love, lost opportunities. But in the water and tears of an
odd church service last year, many wounds were washed as one
congregation faced their stuff and saw light on the other side.
A church repented for old sins. Reconciliation began. Something beautiful happened by the river in Madison.
Paul Pastor is associate editor of Leadership Journal.
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