The person who betrayed you may be the same person who taught you to pray and to believe that God keeps his word. That is what makes this wound so disorienting. Healing usually begins by pulling apart two things that grew together in your mind: who God is, and who this leader turned out to be. From there, tell one mature person who stands outside the situation. Then stop waiting for everyone else to be as angry as you are before you let yourself heal.
That answer is simple to say and slow to live. It will not make the grief shorter than it needs to be. It may keep the grief from spreading into places it does not belong.
Brenda Palmer, a former television producer who now preaches and writes, knows this from the inside. She described the discovery plainly in a conversation with Lisa Fields, founder and host of the Jude 3 Project: “I was serving on staff at a church and found out that my boyfriend was in an inappropriate relationship with my pastor.” Then she explained why the word pastor was too small for what she lost: “And it wasn’t just my pastor. He was my spiritual father. I had keys to their house. I traveled with them. I had a room in their house. I took care of their children.”
Keys, a room, children she cared for. A betrayal like that does not stay in one compartment of life. It reaches your schedule, your friendships, your sense of home and the words you use when you talk to God. Before anyone offers you an answer, that much deserves to be said out loud.
It also deserves protection from the quick responses that so often arrive first. You may hear that the leader repented, so it is finished. You may hear that their ministry reaches thousands and you are one person. Palmer has heard that reasoning and rejects it: “I do think someone’s impact sometimes overrides their responsibility as a leader.” Fields answers the arithmetic by pointing to how Jesus counts. People forget, she said, that “God would leave the 99 for the one.” In Luke 15:4, the shepherd leaves the ninety and nine and goes after the one that is lost until he finds it. In that parable the one is not an acceptable loss. The one is the reason for the trip.
Scripture also gives you language for the specific pain of being hurt by someone you worshiped beside:
“For it was not an enemy that reproached me; then I could have borne it: neither was it he that hated me that did magnify himself against me; then I would have hid myself from him: 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 55:12–14)
The psalm is a lament, and it does not hurry to a resolution. It describes betrayal by a companion in worship and lets that hurt be as bad as it is. If your prayers right now sound more like David’s than like a praise chorus, you are on biblical ground.
God Is Not the One Who Failed You
When a leader represented God to you, their failure can feel like evidence about God. If the voice that said “trust the Lord” turns out to be untrustworthy, the message itself can start to sound false. That reaction is understandable. It is not the same as being true.
Palmer credits one distinction with keeping her faith intact: “I knew the difference between the character of God and the character of someone who made a mistake.” She did not mean the distinction made the pain smaller. She meant it gave her somewhere to go with it. “It helped me be able to not walk away from God, but cling to him in a season where I didn’t know what else to do.”
The failures of leaders are real and grievous, and they are not the failure of Christ. Jesus never used his authority to take from the people he was given to protect. A leader who abuses trust is acting against the One they claimed to represent, not revealing him. That is why Palmer now speaks about her story at all. She does it, she said, because people “need to know how to separate my leader from God.”
The separation sometimes takes more work than people expect, because a leader’s failure can shape their teaching long before it is exposed. Palmer noticed that her church’s theology began to bend around the sin hidden in it. “When you are unrepentant, everything starts to change. Your lens starts to change too, right?” Fields added that a leader hiding something may quietly reshape what people believe so that, if it comes out, the ground has already been prepared. If that happened where you were, part of healing may be reading some familiar passages again, slowly, without that voice in your ear. Some of what you learned was true. Some of it may have been arranged to protect someone. You are allowed to sort it out with Scripture open.
Separating God from the leader does not require you to feel peaceful toward God right away. Palmer moved cities and started over with almost nothing, and she found herself angry at the unfairness of it. “I had to be honest with God and say, Hey, I feel like you kinda left me out here.” She did not hide that complaint behind a polite prayer. She said it to God, which is what the psalms teach people to do:
“Trust in him at all times; ye people, pour out your heart before him: God is a refuge for us.” (Psalm 62:8)
Pouring out a heart is not tidy. It is also not unbelief. It is what people do with the One they still expect to listen.
Telling One Person Who Stands Outside It
One of the loneliest parts of this kind of betrayal is that the people who would normally help are often too close to it. Palmer had no idea where to turn. “And I didn’t have language. I didn’t even know who to tell or who to talk to.” Her church did have a structure on paper, but it offered no real distance: “We had a board of elders. My parents were on the board and so were his parents.” So she said nothing and kept going to work. She told Fields, “I internalized a lot of it,” until she reached the point where she could not keep doing it.
Looking back, she knows what she needed. Not a crowd, and not silence, but one person. She would have chosen, she said, “a person who was outside of it, mature, that could handle it, that could tell me the next steps to take because I didn’t know.” Each part of that description matters:
- Outside of it means they do not need to protect the church, the leader or their own position.
- Mature means they will not panic or turn your pain into a campaign.
- Able to handle it means you do not end up comforting them.
Palmer described that last trap well. As more people learned what happened, “I felt like I was pastoring them through it.” The person who had been hurt was managing everyone else’s reaction.
Fields draws a clear line here. Hiding everything is not the answer, but neither is broadcasting it: “you need to go to somebody but you don’t have to go to the internet.” Strangers online do not know you, and they cannot walk with you over months. Palmer adds a freeing sentence for anyone who feels pressure to explain themselves: “And you don’t owe the world an explanation for what you’re navigating.” If you ever do share your story more widely, she suggests first asking what is driving it. If the goal is to make the leader feel what you feel, she warns, you will never be satisfied. Fields asks a harder version of the same question of people heading toward public exposure: do they really want to be healed, or do they want their pain finally noticed after being ignored? Both can be true at once. Only one of them leads anywhere good.
A therapist can be that somebody, and for many people that is the wisest first call. Seeking therapy is not a failure of faith. God works through trained counselors, and caring for your mind is part of caring for the life he gave you. Palmer’s therapist asked her a question that broke a hope she had been carrying: “What is the expectation here? This ain’t going back to normal.” Hearing that hurt, but it also released her. She could stop trying to restore a life that no longer existed and start grieving it instead.
Some betrayals by leaders are not only moral failures. If a leader abused you, sexually or in any other way, or if what was done to you was a crime, the one person you tell should include someone with the power to act, such as law enforcement or an attorney. Fields put the limit honestly: “unless it’s criminal, you might not get the justice or you might not see it.” Where it is criminal, telling the right people is not disloyalty. It is telling the truth to people who can do something with it.
If the harm involves a partner or someone in your home: National Domestic Violence Hotline, 1-800-799-7233.
Palmer’s story also adds a caution about timing. People asked her why she did not just leave right away. “I didn’t feel like that’s what the Lord was asking me to do until he gave me permission to leave.” Your situation may call for leaving sooner, especially if you are not safe. That decision is exactly why you need a wise outside voice and not a comment section.
What If No One Else Is as Angry as You Are?
This may be the slowest wound of all. You tell people what happened, and they keep booking the speaker. Friends go quiet. The leader rebuilds somewhere else. Fields has lived this. After a betrayal of her own, she watched other preachers keep inviting the man who hurt her to speak. At first it consumed her. Then she reached a realization she now offers to others: “everybody’s not processing this the way you are.” She did not decide that their response was right. She decided something about her own life: “My healing can’t be held up because of that.”
She states the principle bluntly: “if your healing is held hostage by their response, you will always be broken.” Palmer reached the same place after paying a high price. “I lost essentially everybody, especially when I started talking about it.” Some people simply could not stay close to her, and she came to see why. Sometimes, she said, “my truth is a mirror to a decision they made or didn’t wanna make.” Their distance said more about them than about her. She also named the hunger that makes waiting so tempting: “sometimes we need somebody to amen our hurt before we accept the truth of what it is.” You can accept the truth of what happened to you before anyone else agrees with it. Your pain is not less real because the group did not confirm it.
The strongest objection is easy to feel. Does letting go of other people’s reactions mean letting the leader off the hook? Palmer says no. When people accused her of failing to cover for her pastor, she answered, “That is not my job to cover the pastor.” Telling the truth about your own experience is not the same as hunting the other person. She tells her story and declines to narrate theirs, because whatever they did to repent belongs to them and God.
Scripture moves the question of punishment out of your hands without saying the wrong did not matter:
“Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.” (Romans 12:19)
The verse assumes there is real wrong to repay. It simply assigns the repaying to God. Fields gives a practical reason this is a mercy: you do not actually know what would reach the person. People often think they are getting someone back, she said, when it does not affect that person at all. Only God knows what will truly reach them. Palmer adds what God is after: “we want them to hurt, God wants them to heal.”
Palmer also found that the urge to win can hide inside self-protection. She built walls so that no one would hurt her that way again, then found she could not receive the new people God was bringing into her life. Her conclusion was hard and honest: “You’re limiting the way that God’s trying to redeem what happened.” Guarding yourself wisely is good. Refusing all closeness forever turns the first wound into a second one.
None of this runs on a timetable. Palmer said the thing she struggled with most was “not getting over it fast as I wanted to.” Small things set her off years later. She had to stop treating that as failure. “I had to learn to give myself grace and enter the process and watch the Lord unfold it.” Fields describes the goal not as forgetting but as coming home to yourself after a season of only surviving: “So you can actually be present in your own life again.”
When Fields once tried to work out whether she could trust someone again, her therapist told her, “Lisa, I’m not asking you to trust them. I’m asking you to trust God.” You do not have to decide this week what you think of the leader, the church or the people who stayed silent. A smaller step is enough for now. Think of one person who stands outside your situation, who is mature enough to carry what you say and who will tell you the truth. Tell them. Then bring the rest, still unfinished, to the God who is “nigh unto them that are of a broken heart” (Psalm 34:18), and who was never the one who betrayed you.
Go Deeper in the Jude 3 Library
- How Do You Heal From Church Hurt? (article)
- How Do You Heal From Church Hurt? (study guide)
- How Do You Recognize and Heal From Spiritual Manipulation by Church Leaders? (article)
- How Do You Recognize and Heal From Spiritual Manipulation by Church Leaders? (study guide)
This article draws on a Jude 3 Project conversation between Lisa Fields and Brenda Palmer. Hear it in full on the Watch page.
