A strange thing happened shortly after I posted my last article, my wife and I left the church we were with and the pastor who had been such a good friend. Our pastor told others that the reason for our departure was that we were discouraged with his intention to move to California, but that was not true. The real reason was that he lied to me. But that was just the beginning…
For years my wife had pointed out similarities in our pastor’s sermons and Mike Bickle’s sermons, but I never looked that closely since I knew that Mike Bickle had worked with John Wimber, and our pastor claimed to have worked with him as well. Our pastor made it seem like Wimber was the source for his theology. Then one day my wife showed me something: she put in a google search a phrase that our pastor had used and the first result was a Mike Bickle sermon. I looked further and discovered a few of our pastor’s sermons that followed Mike Bickle’s points verse by verse. This may not seem like that big of a deal, but our pastor had always told us not to use commentaries in our study of the Bible, and here he was copying verse by verse other people’s sermons.
I confronted our pastor as politely as I could (I am not really good at confrontation). I asked why his sermons followed Mike Bickle’s so closely, even pointing out how Mike Bickle’s most recent Facebook post showed the same teaching verses as our pastor’s last sermon. Our pastor denied it, saying it was just coincidence. And I wanted so much to believe him that I went along with it. Things just kept nagging at me, though. To explain why, I will give some back story – remember my mention of him moving to California in the first paragraph?
About six months before this, our pastor announced to the church that he was moving to California in about a year. He did this while my wife and I were away on vacation, which is odd since our church had only 13 members including the pastor and his wife – why didn’t he wait a week? He said it was because he wanted to address us separately knowing we would have questions (is it peculiar that he knew everyone else would just accept it without challenging him on it?). After this announcement, I met with him repeatedly and challenged him on his stated purpose of growing our group into leaders who would in turn be developing their own groups under his guidance. I also pointed out that since half the group intended to go with him, he would be leaving nothing behind since there were no leaders appointed within our small group.
Shortly following my challenges to him, his story about going to California changed, and he said he did not know when or if he would be leaving. He also began making strange accusations of me, like telling me I was too legalistic because I disagreed with him on whether or not the Declaration of Independence was biblical. At one point I suggested a night of food and fellowship that all our church would be able to attend, because up to that point the only fellowship night was him meeting with people downtown at 5pm on Fridays, and most of us could not attend this due to work schedules (conspicuously, only those intending to go to California were able to attend this fellowship meeting). His response to my suggestion was to call me an Absalom! This contradicted his statements that he wanted to develop us into leaders and that he wanted us to take the initiative to love one another better.
During these six months, I began to realize that for the five years I had known him, despite claiming he wanted us to become leaders, not once did he ever give us an assignment or do anything to actually develop us into leaders. All he ever did was preach at us once a week. He also seemed to avoid growing our group. Instead, he had excuses for why he did not want various people to come into our group, usually it was that they were unwilling to give up the sin in their life.
Thinking about all this, and remembering the look on his face when he lied to me about copying sermons, I still wanted to believe him! Yet, I decided to leave anyway, but I did so very peacefully, even telling him that I still wanted to be friendly.
However, after leaving, I started looking more into his past, and I discovered even more lies. Even a simple internet search showed that he lied about his age and the number of times he had been married! I met with a person who used to be a part of the church and who hired a private investigator to uncover our pastor’s lies. This man spoke with people who knew our pastor recently as well as those from twenty years ago, and there was a consistent story about our pastor being fired from past churches for sexual misconduct and refusing to work with other leaders.
Discovering his additional marriages may not seem like such a big deal, but he had specifically told my wife and I that he had virtually no sexual experience before marrying his current wife. I spoke with another member of the church who told me that our pastor had bragged about his number of sexual conquests, and even seemed to refer to his current wife as a conquest in pointing out that he took her virginity. He gave two completely different stories about what kind of person he was!
Now there is nothing conspicuous about being married multiple times and having a history of sexual conquests, but it does make it clear that our pastor is a liar and a hypocrite, because he preaches purity and repentance – all he had to do was confess the truth and he would be in the clear. He clearly had not lived the pure life that he claimed, and if there is no confession then there is no repentance. Why did he lie? Probably because the truth would have made it hard to hook up with his current wife. The rest of the world could probably care less about all this, but to a Christian who meets regularly with a pastor for discipleship where he divulges the most personal parts of himself as he tries to uncover his life of sin and turn it toward Christ, this is unspeakable hypocrisy and wickedness. He was lying about his past while we poured out our own truthfully and in faith.
Our pastor also made much of a Special Forces background, claiming he was a team leader of a black ops group working under a DOD title. He even correlated his alleged military experience to his Christian walk, as if the experience gave him insight into struggle, perseverance, and true servant leadership. We contacted the Guardians of the Green Beret to verify his claims and they came back telling us that there was no record of him ever being in the military! They would publicly out him if we could provide a sermon recording where he claimed to be Special Forces. Of course, we stopped recording his sermons back in 2015 except for a handful of times where someone used a cell phone to record it for someone who could not be there, but we are still digging through what we have. (UPDATE: we found a sermon, and a few others contacted him, and now he is listed on their website here.)
This, too, may not seem like a grievous evil to others, but to those of us who spent so much time with him listening to his stories and how he made himself seem so faithful and righteous, now he is not only a liar and a hypocrite, but a fraud. As I mentioned above, our lives were wide open to him while he has been telling us fairy tales about who he really is.
Another story of his is that he works with a private military contractor, that he trains their security contractors, and that he spends time weekly doing this. He also went on trips claiming to be doing executive protection (bodyguard) work with this group. However, he told me the man who recruited him into the company was Erik Prince and the company was Academi. An internet search will show that Erik Prince sold his company Blackwater to a group of private investors in 2011 (after which it was renamed Academi), and that Erik Prince works with an entirely different company that is focused on work overseas. I am very curious about what our pastor is really doing while he pretends to be a famed former Special Forces leader doing training for one of the biggest private military contractors in the world.
I would like to mention here that since leaving his church and visiting others in the area, my wife and I have found, and heard, that it is amazingly common for pastors to plagiarize other’s sermons. I believe this is due to churches being too business focused and forgetting the words in Acts 6:1-4, which make it clear that senior church leaders should be teaching and praying, not administering. However, what makes our pastor such a hypocrite is how often he told us that we should not be using commentaries in our study of the Bible. I always thought this was silly, since there is so much good historical information in commentaries that is needed to understand scriptures, but to find our pastor pulling right out of other sermons is very surprising, and discouraging.
As we uncovered all this, and there is more than I can mention here, I also took a good look at myself and the others who have followed him for so many years. For some time I have questioned what we were doing as a group, but I went along with it because so many of the important things seemed to be in place, such as my pastor being a good friend, and because I did not expect perfection in my leadership. But others in the group appear to think our pastor walks on water, and they treat everything he says as if it was the word of God himself. One lady told us about her one-on-one sessions where she endured verbal abuse from him, and yet she still returned to him for advice and followed his counsel. Why do we do this? We all made victims of ourselves, for sure.
To be honest, I do not know the answer, I am no psychologist. But after the sinking feeling of betrayal went through me, the very first thought in my head was this, “I have a good Shepherd, a perfect Pastor, and his name is Jesus Christ. I have nothing to fear.” God worked through a liar, hypocrite and fraud to bring me closer to him, and to strengthen my marriage. And though I may question every other pastor with much greater scrutiny, though I may be more distrustful of others and the stories they tell, and though it may be hard to find a church to commit to after all this, I know I will persevere in faith. I know what truth is, I know what being a disciple of Christ is, and I know I have a good Father in heaven looking out for me.
Blessings!
