I Escaped a Cult, and You Can, Too
Some of you may recognize this picture from my social media, The Greenville News, or the Spartanburg Herald-Journal. This picture was taken by the talented McKenzie Lange, and it is of me - standing with a church ominously looming in the dark background.
This wasn’t just some random church: it was MY church. It’s called “Church at the Mill,” and was originally known as Anderson Mill Road Baptist Church. CatM (as I will call the church for brevity) had some 3,000-3,500 people in weekly attendance when I was there. It fits well within the definition of a megachurch.
My partner and I - both very devout evangelical Christians at the time - were looking for a church to attend since we had moved to Spartanburg County from western Greenville County. CatM was much closer to home, and it seemed pretty obvious to us that the church was growing, because they were in the process of building their newest worship center. Before the building was even finished, the church had already grown beyond the worship center’s capacity - meaning they would open the new worship center ALREADY having to hold multiple morning services.
When we approached the campus on a Sunday morning, the first thing we noticed was traffic. With so many cars needing to get in to and out of the campus in a matter of an hour or less between services, church volunteers and uniformed police officers blanketed the roads around the church, trying to bring order to utter chaos. My partner and I were frustrated by the traffic, but we saw it as a good sign of a healthy, growing church.
When we entered, we were first greeted with a VERY crowded lobby. Inside, church volunteers stood and greeted people, opened doors, handed out literature, and more. To our left, a small coffee and gift shop they called “The Good Tree Cafe.”
We took our time in deciding to actually join the church. For those who don’t know, most evangelical churches expect their parishioners to formally declare that they are affiliated with the church body. (This is often done in the form of a “membership letter” kept at the church. When you join another church, the church you are joining can choose to ask your former church for their membership letter. This gives churches the chance to communicate whether or not they had issues with you as a member.) We waited because we had experienced scandal with TWO pastors at our previous church, and we wanted to make sure we were confident in CatM before we joined.
Eventually, we decided to join the church. At CatM, this was a much more complicated process than churches we had joined before. Instead of just going down during the end of the service and saying “I want to be a member,” we were guided through a mutli-step process. First, we had to fill out a “connection card.” This simply gathered some basic information about us. After that, we were contacted by a member of the church and asked if we could meet with their Connections Pastor.
When we sat down with Jarrett, he began to explain the church’s onboarding process:
Fill out a connection card
Meet with a pastor on staff
Attend a membership class
Sign a “covenant pledge”
Announce your membership publicly
After first stating that CatM did not offer membership to LGBTQ+ families (I wasn’t out at this time, and I had drank a LOT of evangelical Kool-Aid), Jarrett explained that CatM didn’t behave like other Southern Baptist churches. Instead of contacting your previous church for your membership letter, CatM wanted you to attend a class and sign a covenant between you and the church. Items on this covenant included, but are not limited to:
Submission to the authority of the Bible
Have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ (aka “be saved”)
Submission to the elders and leaders of the church
Commit to attend a small group (like Sunday School)
Commit to work in 1-2 unpaid volunteer positions
Commit to give “abundantly and voluntarily” to the church’s finances
Refrain from activity which would tarnish the reputation of the church
A few Sundays later, my partner and I found ourselves in the new members’ class. There, several of the church’s pastors stepped up and discussed everything from their student programs to their mission trips. After that, the Executive Pastor (a.k.a. the finance guy) gave a breakdown of the church’s revenue, their projected revenue, and ways that you can contribute to the church’s financial statement. He even discussed something they called “Kingdom giving,” which is where members of a congregation donate capital assets - such as houses, vehicles, and other property - to the church. The church then either turns that property into an investment, or liquidates it for cash.
Finally, the Senior Pastor discussed the church’s theology. To be clear, the church’s theology is simply whatever theology the Senior Pastor follows. After listening to the pastor, it was clear to me that I had a significant disagreement with him on doctrine at the time. When I asked him about this difference, and explained that it was an issue for me that may make me not want to join the church, he simply said, “I think you’ll be fine here.” This was the lengthiest conversation I ever had with DJ in my time there.
Upon joining the church, my partner and I immediately got involved. We joined a small group, and while she worked in the nursery, I signed up to volunteer with the “praise band.” Praise bands took the place of traditional piano and organ in a lot of Baptist and non-denominational churches in the 90s and 2000s. I wanted to be a bass guitarist in the CatM band.
Joining the band meant another meeting. This time with the Worship Pastor and the Associate Worship Pastor (Jeff Brockelman and Josh Epton, respectively).
I knew of Jeff’s work. He had previously worked at Prestonwood Baptist Church in Texas alongside Bradley Knight. That church was “royalty” in the eyes of many evangelical musicians, and Josh Epton was one of the best pianists I had ever heard. I was extremely excited to be working with them.
Jeff started out by asking me to share my story, how I came to know Christ, and other typical evangelical questions. After we discussed these points, he shared with me details about how the church schedules musicians to work, what technologies are used on stage, that you are expected to sit in the sanctuary for one of the two services every Sunday, what you are expected to wear, and more. The choir, band, and worship team (singers) were all expected to color coordinate every Sunday.
After this briefing, we migrated to the worship center, where I gave an audition that proved I was capable enough to join the band. After my performance, Jeff approached me and asked, “Do you sing, move around, anything like that?” I explained to Jeff that I was raised in very reserved churches, and I did not enjoy making a spectacle of myself on-stage. I told him that I worshipped best “through music” instead of by raising my hands, swaying, singing, etc.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: I know a lot of the preceding paragraph may sound pedantic and even silly to most people. I think so as well. This is just the “lingo” of evangelicals.
Jeff encouraged me to “look more lively” if I could, because it “helps the audience feel connected.” I agreed to try, and I was given the green light to start playing in the band
On Wednesday nights, the band practiced, and we also met about an hour and a half before the first service on Sunday mornings to go through the music. This was easily 8-9 hours of work every week I was scheduled to play. That’s a full-time workday. As I mentioned earlier, we were expected to attend at least one of the services when we were scheduled to perform, but the other we could spend in the green room. This was a comfy room backstage where praise band and worship team members could congregate and relax between services or when they weren’t attending the service.
My experiences in the green room were fairly unremarkable. Transient members of the worship team would float in and out, get a snack out of the fridge, or just sit and chat on the couch until it was time to go play music again. I think the most notable experience I had in the green room was witnessing the night-and-day difference in the moods of Jeff and Josh between the green room and the stage. On stage, they were all smiles, all praise, all exactly what you would expect a well-known musician to be. In the green room, they were grumpy, anti-social, and sometimes even combative with one another. I once sat in the green room - alone - with Jeff for over an hour, and we only exchanged a single sentence in all that time.
Despite the mountain of red flags I had encountered up until this point, my partner and I continued to attend, work for free, and donate to the church. We were giving nearly $14,000 per year to the church at this point.
Then came COVID.
“Your health and safety are important to us. Therefore, masks are not required, but encouraged.”
That sentence, worded in exactly that order, appeared in the beginning of every in-person service at CatM during the pandemic. I remember it so well, because I remember thinking, “If my health and safety is important to you, wouldn’t masks be required, and why would the fact that they are NOT required be the first thing you tell congregants?” This is a thought I had in my head as I sat next to our lead guitarist, who had just lost BOTH of his parents to COVID. We sat in the green room, side-by-side without masks, as did the rest of the worship team.
Yet, we persisted.
After a while, my partner and I launched our adoption journey. As we began gathering information, we began asking our church members and our church leaders for help with the adoption process. As best as we could figure, we had given over $40,000 to the church at this point, and it would make sense that the church would help share the burden of a massive undertaking like adopting a child. After all, they had a whole “foster and adoption Sunday” service about the topic.
The response we got from church staff was that they would not help us financially, but once our child was placed with us, they would send us a gift basket and occasionally offer childcare for a date night - provided the date was to a banquet at the church. Oh, and they had “daddy-daughter dances” at the church as well.
The point that I decided to leave CatM was when I finally came to terms with the life-long fact that I was trans. I HAD to transition, or I was going to die. One month before I came out, I was sitting in a service with my partner and my child. DJ was preaching out of Jeremiah. In the middle of his message, he went down a bit of a rabbit hole, and spoke negatively for several minutes about transgender people. When he finished his thought, some 1,500 people stood to their feet in applause to - what I perceived at the time was - my demise. At that point, I knew my family was no longer safe there.
After leaving, I listened in on a few of DJ’s sermons - just to see if his viewpoints ever changed. The last time I watched one of his segments, he was answering a question from someone asking whether or not they should see a psychologist or psychiatrist. He responded by saying (paraphrased), “not at first. You should first seek biblical counsel from a pastor or Christian counselor. If they are unable to help you, THEN consider a psychologist or psychiatrist.”
I was floored. This was a pastor using his position of authority to discourage people from getting the medical care they need. This was the final nail in the coffin that confirmed for me that I had just escaped a cult.
How can you identify a cult? Psychology Today details it as an environment where:
Recruiting people in a vulnerable stage of life, such as illness, death, hardship, or moving to another place. (We were in this state.)
Undue influence by manipulation. (We signed a commitment that we would accept the pastor’s words as authoritative.)
Expecting people to work hard for little or no pay. (We signed a commitment that we would volunteer for at least one ministry.)
Identity change and behavior modification by techniques such as rewards/punishments, thought-stopping, and control of the environment by isolating you from others. (DJ refused to allow his congregants to participate in interfaith activities for fear they would be influenced by people he considered to be sinners. He also discouraged people from seeing licensed therapists for mental health issues. Finally, as noted above, you are slowly indoctrinated to even “talk different.”)
So there you have it. I am pretty sure I was in a cult, but I am not anymore. After being away from CatM for nearly three years, I still have panic attacks when people try to witness to me, or talk about their Christian faith. The amount of control they took from me, and the fact that they gaslit me into believing I had free will is probably the most terrifying thing I have ever experienced in my life.
If you or a loved one are also lost to a cult, I hope this post helps. At the very least, I am rooting for you to get away!
Much Love,
Amberlyn