For all of its rocky start, Jade’s testimony picked up until she almost forgot that she was the one speaking. Explaining her history, it felt more like she was one of the dozens of church members sitting in the rows of chairs, listening to her talk about the way God had worked in her life.
She sensed the general interest in the room, and when she talked about the church she grew up in while she was still living in Palmer, Alaska, she saw her audience leaning in as if refusing to miss a single word. She painted them a picture with her words, a picture of the extreme control the leadership at Morning Glory International held over her family, over their congregation. At one point, her eyes landed on Ben, the trooper sitting in the back row, and she saw the same interest and curiosity in his expression as she felt from the rest of the church.
Her hands clammed up for an instant, making it hard to hold onto the microphone. She pried her eyes away from his and avoided looking at that section of the sanctuary for the rest of her speech.
“The funny thing about it,” she explained, “is that we would have never used a word like cult to describe ourselves. Even though it sounds pretty obvious to other people that what we were involved with was definitely not a healthy Christian church, we didn’t know that. We were all taught, not just the kids but our parents too, that it was a grave sin to disrespect our leaders or question their authority in any way. Since we all upheld and respected the Bible, we believed that it would be wrong to go against anything our pastor said. At least once a month the preacher would talk about how Miriam bad-mouthed Moses and was struck with leprosy. The moral was always that we should never question God’s leaders. I asked my five-year-old about it a few weeks ago, and that particular part of Scripture hasn’t even come up in her Sunday school lessons. She’s never even heard of it, but it was more common at our church than Noah’s ark or Easter Sunday or any of the other Bible stories.
“It wasn’t just Sundays either. We had meetings just about every night of the week, and if you missed something, you needed to have a really good reason or the elders would start to question if you were backslidden. You couldn’t miss a service if you were sick, either. You were supposed to come even if you were throwing up a lung and have the elders pray for you and anoint you with oil, right there in front of everybody. And if you didn’t recover by the end of the service, that was another time where people would question if you were backslidden. My mom pushed vitamins on all of us like we’d die without them because she knew people would question her spiritual health if her family ever caught a cold.”
Jade’s hands were still sweaty, but that wasn’t because she was staring at the trooper anymore. It was because she knew what part of the story was coming up. She swallowed once, trying to recapture the sense of calm she’d had just a moment earlier.
Unfortunately, she knew that this part of her testimony wouldn’t be nearly so easy to get through.
“The biggest problem was that there was no accountability for the elders or the head pastor. If they did something wrong, nobody would dare call them out on it. There was abuse of all kinds. If it’s a kind of abuse you can imagine, it was probably happening at Morning Glory, and most of the leaders knew about it. Some of them were honest and God-fearing, but some were the actual perpetrators. Due to this whole idea that you can’t question what your leaders do, lots of people got hurt, including children.”
She winced, hating to even say the words, hating to remember what she went through.
She was staring at her hands now, wondering if anyone else could see them tremble. She glanced up once and caught Aisha’s eye, gleaning an extra dose of strength. If she told her story — even the humiliating and painful parts — maybe she’d help someone else in the future, someone going through the same thing.
“The pastor of Morning Glory took an interest in me, and I got pregnant when I was seventeen. I’ve since then learned that I wasn’t the only underaged girl who found herself in that situation, but the others were encouraged to go have abortions. I refused. I knew what had happened to me was wrong, but the idea of an abortion terrified me. So I told my parents.”
She swallowed down the lump in her throat. A few members of the congregation were looking at her with so much sympathy it was like they were trying to squeeze the tears straight out of her body. One woman toward the front was silently weeping.
Jade felt bad for making everyone else depressed. Weren’t testimonies supposed to be uplifting? She forced a smile. “Thankfully, my parents believed me and took action. We left the church, which is a whole long and complicated story in and of itself.” Jade took in a deep, choppy breath. She wanted to tell them everything. She’d never skipped over this part of her testimony before, but tonight she couldn’t get the words out. Couldn’t tell them what it really cost her family when they filed charges against the Morning Glory leadership.
She raised her head and glanced at the clock. Mercifully, her time was almost over.
“I won’t get into all the details, but the short version is I ended up delivering my healthy daughter, Dezzirae, right before I started my senior year of high school. I later grew to realize that all believers have access to the same God. We don’t need a pastor or an elder telling us when we have to go to church or how we should raise our kids or what we should do with our futures. We can all talk to God on our own. And that’s not to discount how important it is to have a church family and to have mentors who can give you wisdom and support, even though I’ll be the first to admit I still really struggle when it comes to issues of authority after everything we went through.”
She glanced once at Ben, who was studying her attentively.
“I’m just really thankful that my parents had the courage to stand up to the leadership like they did because I have other friends whose parents were too afraid to do or say anything.” Jade’s mouth turned dry, and her words caught somewhere in the back of her throat. A picture of her dad, smiling and serene, flitted uninvited into her mind.
She blinked, forcing herself to stay composed. “I guess that’s what I want to end with tonight. A reminder that we’re all children of God, whether or not we’re a pastor or an elder or have any kind of fancy title, and we all are given the Holy Spirit to lead us and guide us.”
She gave the audience a brief nod and turned off the microphone. She wasn’t sure if one of the elders was going to close the meeting right away or if they would take a little time for prayer requests before everyone left, but she didn’t care.
Walking down the side aisle to keep from distracting anyone, Jade hurried out of the sanctuary. She turned on her car’s autostart as she made her way downstairs. If she was lucky, she could grab Dez and have the car warmed up before the congregation was dismissed. The last thing she felt like doing was making chitchat with three dozen people who wanted to talk to her about her life’s deepest pain.
Breathless and impatient, she swung open the door of the church nursery, hoping that Dez might have forgotten the promise of ice cream and instead would settle on some hot chocolate back home.
“How’d it go upstairs?” Mrs. Spencer asked, glancing up from the book she was reading to her twin grandchildren in the rocking chair.
“Fine. Thanks so much for being down here.”
“My pleasure.”
Jade glanced around the room. “Is Dez ready to go?”
Mrs. Spencer blinked at her. “I’m sorry?”
“I’ve got the car running,” Jade explained as she picked up her daughter’s jacket from the nursery coat rack. “Is Dez ready?”
“I thought she went upstairs with you. She told me she was going to ask if that was okay.” Mrs. Spencer stood up, setting her girls down on the ground.
“No,” Jade answered. “She came up to ask if she could stay, but I sent her back down here.” She mentally rehearsed everybody she’d seen in that sanctuary. It was a larger crowd than she’d expected but certainly not big enough that she would have missed seeing her own child.
The dry lump returned to her throat, and her heart started pounding high in her chest.
Where was her daughter?