The Woman They Wanted: Shattering the Illusion of the Good Christian Wife

starving.

IT WAS A Sunday morning after breakfast, and my husband was preaching in a few hours. My three children were somewhere in our four-thousand-square-foot colonial in the suburbs. My husband was the pastor of a large, conservative American evangelical church, and I was His Wife.

At this point, we had been on staff at the church for nearly fifteen years. And when I say we, what I really mean is he. I was not on staff. My husband was on staff. Only men were pastors there. But for some reason every move I made mattered—as if his job depended on it. That is the way it always was. But I did not get paid for all this mattering. I had not minded that before, but I was starting to. It was not so much about the money, though the money would have been nice. It was more about the mattering.

My husband, Joshua, was the hip young guy hired to carry the church through the next generation. He was the head pastor now, and our church was the mothership church in a growing network of churches. We were Reformed Charismatic. It was a whole brand.

On this particular Sunday, I was having a breakdown. Or more like, I was sending out an SOS.

You should know that up until this point in my life—my church life, that is—I had been mostly unconscious. Not literally, but figuratively. I didn’t know you could be unconscious and at the same time think you are living your life, but you can. But my depression was changing that. It was forcing me to pay attention to myself, and it was only getting worse. I was crying all the time and hiding it from my friends. I had to figure out what the cause was before I ruined everything. My three kids needed me.

I wondered if I was going crazy because I kept seeing the same exact scene in my mind. Months would go by and I’d forget about it, but the scene always returned. It was me, but instead of me I was a gnarly, hungry old beggar woman in a burlap dress with long, frizzy hair. The beggar woman was crawling on the floor searching for crumbs. Whenever she found one, she pulled it close to her chest and looked over her shoulder anxiously, worried that someone might steal it from her.

A few years from that day, I would know exactly why I was having this vision.

I lost myself trying to be good for other people. I was trying to be the woman they wanted. I was happy to do it at one time, but not anymore. I had nothing left to give. The crumbs were the last little bits of me I was trying to hold onto. I was starving for my life.

That Sunday I called to my husband, who was downstairs preparing his sermon in his office, which was next to the Great Room. The Great Room was where we hosted our twenty-some pastors and their wives about once a month. I asked my husband to come up to my bedroom because I had something important to tell him. I met him at the door. I was trying to make a scene, but a quiet one because I didn’t want to alarm the kids. They were twelve, ten, and six.

I said I wasn’t going to church that day, that I needed him to take the kids, and that I was locking myself in our bedroom and wasn’t coming out for three whole days. And I said I wasn’t sure I could keep going to church anymore. At that, his eyes widened for a second. I could see the wheels turning in his head, but not much ever rattled my husband. He was the oldest of seven children, and I often said he was the best mother in the house. He looked at me and said okay and then turned to head downstairs to handle the fray. It wasn’t exactly the response I was hoping for. I shut the bedroom door and took my computer from the dresser where I’d left it. I walked over to my bed, slid my hand underneath the mattress, and took out the book on Catholicism I had hidden there. Then I settled onto the bed to look for answers.

My mother knew the place was trouble from the very start. On her very first visit to church I was giving my testimony. That’s where I stood up to tell everyone my story of how I’d come to believe in God and why I was now a changed person forever. The pastors of the church had asked me to share my story on a Sunday morning for the service and I had invited both of my parents to attend. It was maybe a year after I started coming to church. During my testimony, I talked about how my parents’ divorce had been difficult for me and how I’d been able to make peace with it.

After I spoke and the sermon was over, CJ, the head pastor, invited those in the congregation whose lives had been affected by divorce to come forward to receive ministry. Often, this just meant prayer. But sometimes, like that day, it meant Bob. Bob was the music pastor and an extraordinary pianist and musician. Earlier in his career he had created and developed a highly successful Christian music group. Bob was CJ’s other half and, in my opinion, a huge reason for the success of the ministry. Many churches have a charismatic leader, but they also need to have heart. They need vulnerability. Bob could make a room of ten thousand people feel intimate and personal. CJ may have been the one to first attract people, but it was Bob who kept them there.

Bob had a special gift for making up songs spontaneously, in real time, with no advance preparation. The church called them prophetic songs. They were complete with story, meaning, melody, and rhyme. Bob would sing them in the first person, as if it were God speaking. There was something magical, emotional, and powerful about these songs. If the intent was to get an emotional response from people, it worked, and CJ seemed to take full advantage of this. If he wanted a prophetic song after a sermon, all he had to do was cue Bob with a look from across the stage to order it.

On the day I was giving my testimony, CJ did want one. And as I mentioned, those who had been affected by divorce had gathered at the front of the stage. Bob started to play the piano while collecting his thoughts, and then he began to sing. It didn’t take long before half of us were crying. Someone handed me a tissue. When the song was finished we all went back to our seats. Wrecked for God.

When the service ended we walked out to the lobby and to my surprise my mother turned and placed herself squarely in front of me. She was abrupt and sharp with a warning, which was out of the ordinary for her; she isn’t one to interfere. But she wanted me to hear that she didn’t trust the church. She thought it was disingenuous and manipulative. I brushed her off and came to Bob and CJ’s defense, and then we went out for lunch. And for the next two decades my mother never said another word.

My mother has never been wrong. Not yet anyway.

Downstairs, I heard a new voice in the kitchen. It was Bev, a woman from church who babysat for us on occasion. Josh must have called her to help with the kids. God bless her. A few minutes later I heard the side door shut, and the house went quiet. I was alone now.

I googled the Five Points of Calvinism, half-thinking maybe I should just change religions. Church had started out so positive (or so I thought) but over the years our church doctrine had veered more and more Calvinist and in my opinion, it hadn’t been good for anyone. The Puritans were Calvinists, and they sure didn’t seem happy. Maybe that was the problem.

Calvinism’s essential teaching is called total depravity, which teaches that people are corrupt to the core. Even the good that comes from a person is said to be God acting from within them and not the actual person. It was a very depressing way to live. It meant that even if you did something nice for someone, like buying them a latte, you had to be sure to remind yourself that it wasn’t your idea. Good job, Shannon! Just don’t forget the latte was God’s idea and not yours, because nothing good comes from you, k? It’s because of Calvinism that I now pay my therapist hundreds of dollars to remind me that I’m fabulous.

To be fair, not everything was terrible at church. There was a lot of good too. Like the people. So many good people. The all-in types.

I was half-seriously considering becoming a Catholic. My grandmother was Catholic, so there was family history there. They also had tangibles like beads and candles. Things you could actually touch, which sounded nice for some reason. Frankly, our pastors didn’t consider Catholics real Christians. They said the Catholics placed too much importance on Mary. I wasn’t sure I cared what our pastors thought anymore.

The theologians in our camp had the right answers to everything. Everything. Actually, they had been right about too many things for too many years. It started to give them away because everybody knows no one can be that right all of the time. If they had at least thrown in a few I don’t knows in the mix, maybe I would have gone on for another decade. But no one else was doing Christianity right enough or hard enough or biblical enough, and their unquestionable certainty had grown tiresome. I wasn’t just skeptical. I was tired.

I was really, really, really tired.

church.

THERE ARE CHURCHES and then there are circuses.

CJ, whose official name is Charles Joseph Mahaney, was a young twentysomething when he founded the church along with Larry Tomzack, a man about ten years his senior. CJ was a self-professed former pothead who hadn’t bothered to finish college. The two met sometime during the hippie Jesus movement. By 1982 they weren’t just building a church, they were building a denomination and a name for themselves. A movement, a brand.

It started as a small, tight-knit group of young adults in the Washington, DC, area meeting in somebody’s home. Just a bunch of young people casually getting together for fellowship and prayer. But then those young adults married each other and became young families. And young families attracted more young families. And soon they were a growing church. They moved the Sunday services out of the living room and into school auditoriums. Eventually, they saved enough money to buy some land in the suburbs and build. They called it Covenant Life Church.

In simplest terms, the church was evangelical (think Billy Graham) and charismatic (think faith healings and people falling over) and Reformed (think Puritans who, you may recall, hung a bunch of women, most likely for getting sick from a fungus in the rye). The charismatic part was the emotion. The Reformed part was the tradition. And then there was female submission.

As the church grew, so did the vision of its leaders. They added a publishing branch and a music branch. CJ started the Pastor’s College and began training and sending out men to plant churches. Bob trained men to be music leaders. All the while Covenant Life Church remained the blueprint and model for all the other churches in the ministry to follow. They called it People of Destiny International, which definitely sounded strange to me at first, but the people were so very nice and normal I got used to it. When I heard they were planning on changing the name I assumed it was because they wanted something sensible, but it may have been to escape the past or get a fresh start. Eventually, the name was changed to Sovereign Grace Ministries. At that time, there were roughly eighty churches across the country under the Sovereign Grace umbrella.

I don’t think the church intended to become as unhealthy as it did. It appears to have gradually and quietly headed in that direction. As the church grew, so did CJ’s power within it. He began lording over his flock. He used his position and power to serve his own needs and not the needs of his congregation. He surrounded himself with younger men who idolized him, and he trained them as leaders. He asked that they protect him from scrutiny. And he was quick to cut off relationships with those who did not show him the loyalty and admiration he felt he deserved. And most significant was what I would come to learn later. CJ’s misconduct would become public through some six hundred pages of evidence compiled by a former associate, titled The Documents. In the months that followed, CJ’s leadership was again (as it still is) noticeably absent in matters pertaining to allegations of sexual abuse cover-up that would have occurred during his time of leadership.

This was a leader who rose to his position because he was charismatic and could hold the attention of a crowd. I’m not aware that he had any qualifications beyond that. He did not attend seminary or divinity school. But somehow he ended up in the role of a shepherd when he might have been better suited for a career as a used-car salesman or an actor. Did he even believe in God? Who really knows? If you think about it, being a pastor-celebrity is a pretty sweet job. People give you 10 percent of their income and you hardly have to ask. You get lot of attention, but the job is far more stable than an acting career. Besides, you can put on an act anytime you want. You can pretend to care and love others.

Whatever the case, in reflecting on the entirety of my experience at Covenant Life Church, no other single individual’s ideas and behavior bring more clarity or understanding to the broader context of the stories I share in this book.

cj.

MY MOTHER SAYS that the first time I introduced her to CJ, which we think was at my wedding, he didn’t look into her eyes. She never forgot that.

For me, now, CJ lives in my mind as a caricature of himself. He’s on a stage wearing black coattails and a top hat, looking out with a sly smile as he performs his tricks. He is the Ringmaster. The Salesman. The Magician. He quickly builds a house out of cards and whoosh! It’s back in his hand again as a full deck. Look, now he’s making something new! We are all mesmerized, and our eyes are fixed on his waving and shouting and antics. The show moves on at a steady clip, so there is no time to process. His stories keep us laughing or crying, but most of all they keep our eyes glued on him. We are too busy being entertained and hoping for a chance to participate in the fun to realize that we are growing old.

I believed him back then, on the stage. And I believed he believed the words he preached. Off the stage, though, I was seeing things more accurately. He was different on the ground. Distant. He looked through me whenever we spoke, and I could tell that he didn’t truly see me. His smile went no deeper than