The confusion usually sounds something like this: I saw what that leader did, I know who helped hide it, and I can’t sit under it anymore, but I don’t want to walk away from God or from God’s people. Is there a way to stay? There is. You can remain part of the church after watching a trusted leader do real harm. To do it, you stop waiting for the room to agree with you, and you do the inner work yourself. For many people, staying in the body of Christ also means leaving one particular building.
That answer has three parts, and each one corrects an assumption that keeps hurt people stuck. The first assumption is that you can’t move until other people see it the way you do. The second is that healing waits on the person who caused the harm. The third is that “staying in church” and “staying at this church” mean the same thing. Take them one at a time.
Why the room may never agree with you
Most people who have watched a leader fall expect a moment of shared recognition. You tell the truth, other people gasp, and the community responds. Lisa Fields describes what often happens instead. In her own experience, she told other leaders and preachers what had happened to her, and they kept going as if nothing had changed. Her conclusion is blunt: “But it’s kinda like everybody doesn’t feel it like you feel it.” Then she draws out the consequence: “if you waiting for everybody to get on board with your trauma, you’re gonna be stuck.”
This isn’t a call to pretend the harm was small. It describes the room you are actually standing in. People process the same facts differently. Fields notes a generational difference in particular. Older church members may respond with a shrug that amounts to people are people, keep moving. Younger believers are often stunned that nobody plans to do anything. She also notices the practical side. When the funders haven’t moved and nothing illegal happened, the people around you may simply expect you to get over it. Neither reaction is the yardstick for whether you were wronged.
Rev. Dr. Brianna Parker adds a harder observation. The people you go to for support are not always neutral. “sometimes you’re talking to their twin,” she says, someone who is relieved the spotlight landed elsewhere and may carry your words back. “You don’t always know who you’re talking to.” And sometimes the problem goes higher: “sometimes leadership is aware.” In that case, the person who speaks up becomes the problem. As Parker puts it, “So when you go say something it’s like, oh here’s another troublemaker.”
Parker names what that does to a person: “If you are in community with people, that hurts more than whatever the leader has done.” That sentence explains why so many people leave over the response to a failure more than the failure itself. A fallen leader breaks your trust in one person. A community that closes ranks breaks your trust in the place where you were supposed to find God’s people.
Scripture knows that second ache. David’s lament in Psalm 55 doesn’t describe a stranger. “But it was thou, a man mine equal, my guide, and mine acquaintance. We took sweet counsel together, and walked unto the house of God in company” (Psalm 55:13-14). The betrayal happened on the road to worship, and David doesn’t wait for a crowd to confirm it before he brings it to God. That’s the move Fields is pointing toward. Your grief is real whether or not anyone else ratifies it. If ratification is the condition for your next step, you have handed the timing of your healing to people who may never give it.
Fields says it as plainly as anyone could: “if you’re waiting for people to feel how you feel about an offense to move on, you’re gonna always be broken.”
She also points out how unwinnable the warning project is. A leader who did harm can start another church or another online movement, and “because the internet is so vast, you’re not gonna be able get everybody to warn everybody.” That’s a sober point, not a cynical one. If your peace depends on everyone being told, you’ll never have it.
None of this applies to crime. Both women are emphatic here. If what happened is abuse or anything illegal, Fields’s counsel is to skip the church and call the police. Parker says she has intentionally kept the church out of situations until she called the police, “Because sometimes the cover up is intentional.” A congregation’s process is no substitute for law enforcement, and forgiveness is no substitute for safety. If you or someone you love is being harmed at home, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233.
The work no apology can do for you
The second assumption is quieter. It says that healing comes when the person who hurt you finally changes, admits it, or faces consequences. When the leader is dead, Fields observes, you can at least look back at their work and sort out what helped from what harmed. A living leader keeps acting. They keep preaching, posting and building. The wound stays open because the story isn’t over.
Parker’s answer to that situation is the hinge of this whole question: “I think when they’re living, you have to resolve some things in self that will never be resolved in relationship.” She doesn’t soften the cost. “Even if you can have a conversation, that relationship probably is not going to return in that way.” She doesn’t think we get to set the terms of someone else’s accountability, and she warns that “I think you’ll be waiting and wasting too much time waiting for it to happen.” So she lands somewhere practical: “a lot of it is going to be like inner work.”
Inner work can sound vague, so it helps to see what it rules out. For Parker, it ruled out the revenge plan. She describes once working out, in detail, how she would make sure someone’s fall kept burying them, until she caught herself and realized she had become the one doing the plotting. She is also skeptical of believers who read every misfortune that hits their enemies as God’s vengeance. “Rarely will you see people get what you want them to get, and especially in a timely fashion.” Romans 12:19 puts the matter where it belongs: “Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.” Fields draws the same conclusion in her own words: you have to let God handle people.
Giving up revenge isn’t the same as giving up your claim that the harm was real. It is refusing to let the harm keep running your life. Parker’s line is memorable because it puts the cost where it actually lands: “There’s no way I’m gonna let you live free, and I’m gonna live bound.” She adds, “if I’m waiting around for somebody else to get payback, you know it’s a waste of my time.”
Inner work also includes an uncomfortable bit of honesty about your own view of things. Parker is careful to say she is not talking about abuse or the clear cases. In the gray cases of betrayal and disappointment, though, she cautions herself to remember “it’s a possibility that some part of this is skewed as far as what you owe somebody.” Church life is crowded with expectations. People believe their giving or their years of service earn them say, and “I think we forget all the other players in it.” That doesn’t make your pain false. It means part of the work is separating what was truly done to you from what you assumed you were owed.
There is a story in John 5 that Fields brings up for exactly this reason. A man has lain by the pool for years, and Jesus asks him, “Wilt thou be made whole?” (John 5:6). Parker reads the man sympathetically. He isn’t making excuses; he is explaining that he has tried. She is less sure about many of the others around the pool, who she suspects are “more comfortable at the pool than they are anywhere else.” In her reading, pain can become an identity and even a brand, and leaving it means starting over. That question from Jesus is the question underneath inner work. Do you want to be whole, or do you want to stay where the pain is familiar? Wanting to be whole doesn’t require you to minimize anything. It requires you to stop waiting at the edge of the water for someone else to move first.
What about speaking up? Parker’s rule for her own situation, which was betrayal and not a crime, was simple: “either you talk to the right person or you talk to no person.” She is explicit that silence isn’t for everyone. Her point is narrower. Telling the truth to someone who can act on it is different from airing someone out for sport. One protects people. The other mostly keeps you at the pool.
Then comes the third assumption, the one that keeps people sitting in pews they no longer trust. Many believers feel that leaving a church amounts to leaving the faith, or that they need a special word from God before they may go. Hebrews 10:25 is often cited here: “Not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is; but exhorting one another: and so much the more, as ye see the day approaching.” Read in context, the verse tells believers to keep gathering with God’s people and encouraging one another. It warns against abandoning Christian fellowship. Most interpreters don’t read it as binding you to one congregation’s address. You can obey it fully by joining another faithful church.
Parker has little patience for the idea that you must stay put until you are released. “God ain’t told me to leave yet. I mean, is there an exit door? Are they holding you? Are you tied to something?” Her point isn’t that leaving is casual. It’s that people sometimes describe a choice they are free to make as if it were a command they are waiting on.
Part of what makes leaving reasonable is her view of preaching from a compromised pulpit. She rejects the idea that a fallen leader has never spoken truth: “I’m not arrogant enough to believe that God cannot and has not ever used them.” Jesus said something similar about the scribes and Pharisees: “All therefore whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe and do; but do not ye after their works: for they say, and do not” (Matthew 23:3). The word can be true even when the speaker is not. Parker’s conclusion is “The word is true. It’s not changing.” Still, she has moved past the familiar advice that “old school would tell you take the meat, leave the bone.” Her position now: “If your heart not right and I know better, you can’t you can’t minister to me.”
That isn’t a demand for a perfect pastor. Parker says outright she isn’t talking about perfection. She means a leader who keeps “playing with God on a consistent basis” while standing up to deliver a word. Fields adds a scriptural test from 1 Peter 3:7, where Peter tells husbands to honor their wives so their prayers are not hindered. She applies the principle beyond one gender: God cares how you treat the person closest to you. If a leader has consistently failed there, why would you want them as your intercessor? You can grant that God has used someone and still decide you can no longer sit under them.
Leaving one building to stay in the body also has a practical side. Parker offers counsel for the messages you’ve already heard: “These days, if it’s a message that you’ve already heard, I think you sit with it and you ask God what you should keep from it.” That doesn’t require throwing out everything you received. You can carry what was true with you while you find a place to hear the next word.
The strongest objection to all of this is that it sounds like letting institutions off the hook. If hurt people quietly do their inner work and switch churches, don’t the leaders and the cover-ups win? The concern is fair, and the answer has limits. Inner work doesn’t mean silence where silence protects harm. Crimes go to the police. Betrayal can go to the right person. What the counsel refuses is the idea that your wholeness must wait on the institution’s repentance. You may never get that repentance. Fields’s warning about the size of the internet and Parker’s warning about timely payback both point the same way. The outcome you want for them is out of your hands. The person you become is not.
Parker also refuses to let the wrong place get the last word on your gifts. “I refuse to leave my best on the cutting room floor,” she says. Her service and her love may have been invested in the wrong hands, but that doesn’t mean the next church, the next friendship or the next ministry should get her worst. Her view is that when your best has gone to the wrong place, the answer is to take it to the right one.
She describes how the vindication she once wanted eventually came. She was given the chance to say what she had wanted to say, and by then there was nothing left to say. “Because my life had said it by then.” Fields heard Joseph in that. His brothers sold him, and the proof of God’s faithfulness turned out to be the life he lived afterward, not a speech.
So staying in church after you’ve seen a leader fall probably won’t look like the room finally agreeing with you. It looks like settling in yourself, before God, what may never be settled with them. It looks like telling the truth where truth can protect someone. And it may look like walking out one set of doors and through another, still gathering with God’s people, carrying the true word you were given, and refusing to let someone else’s unfaithfulness decide whether you stay faithful.
Go deeper in the Jude 3 library
- Separating the Leader From the Lord: A Study on Healing After Spiritual Betrayal (Study guide)
- What Do You Do When a Spiritual Leader Betrays You? (Article)
This article draws on a Jude 3 Project conversation with Lisa Fields and Rev. Dr. Brianna Parker. Hear it in full on the Watch page.