‘I believer her. I don’t know the full story but I do. My life has been rocked.’ Journal entry

Ice cold shock ran down my back. For a split second it felt like everything blurred and then came back into focus.

I sat in a filled cafe, my hands around my coffee cup.

Quiet conversations, the sounds of plates and silverware it all went silent in my head for a moment.

Jane Doe sat across the table from me and shared a world rocking truth of her abuse she suffered at the hands of the pastor I had looked up to all my life.

I believed her.

I went to coffee with her imagining that we’d say something like, “IHOP messed me up, did it mess you up too? Where do we go from here?”

I never would have thought, ever, that this pastor was living not only a double life but has been a hypocrite for decades. The emperor has no clothes.

I’m sad. I’m angry. I didn’t know.

When you grow up in an unhealthy environment you can’t tell what’s truly off and what’s truly good. My measuring rod for normal was off balance at the starting line. It has been years of unwinding the wrongness out my foundation.

My heart breaks for people who gave so much of their life to IHOPKC. I grasp at straws to try and justify my time there instead of just saying ‘I regret being there.’

I could have been a Christian at a healthy local church, living a more regular life with way less anxious noise in my head.

I can’t think of one person I knew from IHOPKC who said they purposefully joined this cult. No one knowingly joins a cult. People don’t willingly sign up for a cult. That, in fact, is a defining marker of a cult.

Cults prey on good people, on smart people, on influential people, on wealthy people. They surround themselves with genius and influence to make themselves look good. They search out people in the middle of a life crisis and pull them in.

Hearts are moved by the message and people believe they are joining a good thing. They sign up for something they thought they were making a difference in. They want to be world changers. They want more people to experience Jesus like they did.

The world hates the church and so does the church. It’s a blurry time to be alive in the Christian faith. And yet, just when it looks like the fields of flowers have been stamped out and died, they eventually come back again in greater number. God has always sustained His church and when it’s been stamped out, it multiples in strength and numbers. We’ve read about it time and time again.

So let the wolves keep showing their true colors. Let the stories come out and the floods of justice flow. What is true will remain, and what is not will be left as debris in the valley of the shadows.

While the world and the church sits back and thinks this must be the end, God tends to His hurting flock. With gentleness and kindness He keeps leading. In time, we will see flowers growing again.

Man did not start Christianity and man will not sustain it. Once again, His church will continue through another century.

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