ANN MAREE:
Hello, and welcome to the Safe to Hope podcast. Safe to Hope: Hope Renewed in Light of Eternity exists to offer women space to tell their stories of suffering and loss with care, dignity, and honesty. Though all suffering is loss, we ground that belief in a God who cares and remains present. This is our hope.

My name is Ann Maree, and I am the executive director of Help[H]er and the host of this week’s podcast. Today, I’ll be joined in the studio with our resident expert and board member Julia Fillnow. This podcast is made possible by donors who believe faithfulness means protecting the dignity of women’s stories and creating a space for truth-telling without pressure or performance.

Together, we listen for God’s redemptive thread and look for ways to join Him in His transforming work. Before we begin, we want to take a moment and care for our listeners. The Safe to Hope podcast typically includes discussions of abuse, and this season will as well. In particular, we’ll be talking about spiritual abuse.

However, our conversations may include other abuses. Please listen at your own pace and take breaks as needed. If at any point you need to pause or step away, that’s okay. Your wellbeing matters.

Well, welcome back to the podcast, Safe to Hope listeners. We are—we meaning Julia Fillnow and I—today speaking with an expert contributor on the podcast. We will be interacting on our previous story and our storyteller Elyse. And I’m pleased to tell you that our expert this time is Mary DeMuth. Mary would want you to know something very important about her, and that is that she loves Jesus, and thank God we love Him too.

She is also one of the many #MeToo victims, author of We Too, and then she shares that although those are her circumstances, she is now restored and restorative, and we love that. We love being restoried. Mary has three adult children, and she’s been married to Patrick for 33 years. Amazingly, Mary has written for 30 years, over 52 books, and of those books some have been translated into five languages.

You can see a listing of all her books on Amazon or Barnes & Noble, CBD, LifeWay, and Parable. Mary also pioneered a literary agency in 2022, Mary DeMuth Literary, where she shepherds writers toward traditional publishing. And in her spare time, which I’m sure she has a bunch of, she loves to cook, run, garden, decorate, paint, and do interior design.

And so we are very pleased and excited to share our conversation with Mary with you today. So welcome, Mary. We’re glad to have you here with us today, and maybe if you could just tell us—tell the audience a little bit about yourself, and yeah, introduce us.

MARY:
Yeah. So I wear a lot of hats. I have five jobs. I do a daily podcast for the past eight years called Pray Every Day.

And then I am a literary agent as well as an author of over 50 books now. I’m a speaker, and I’m an artist. So those are my five jobs that I have, or the hats that I wear. I’m considering what can I let go of because I don’t want five jobs. Honestly, I would just rather have one. But it’s just the way, in the creative space, that I am able to make a living.

I just can’t do it on one thing. I’ve got three adult kids. I’ve been married for almost 36 years to my husband Patrick. We were church planters in the south of France in the mid-2000s, and so we have that in our background. Currently attending a PCA church after having been at a church for 23 years and having to leave it.

So we walked through church hurt recently, wrote a book about it. It’s coming out next year called Church Bewilderment. And yeah, I just—I love hiking, I love running, I love nature, I love beauty, and yeah, I love my friends too. So it’s a good life.

ANN MAREE:
So when we spoke with Elyse, she mentioned you. I know you also listened and you heard that. And so I’m just wondering, author, creative person, church planter—although also I’ve read a lot of your Substacks and your We Too, and your abuse stories resonate—but tell us a little bit about how you understand or how you can relate to some of the things maybe even Elyse was talking about?

MARY:
Sure. I think most women would have a touchpoint there with her story.

I kind of look at it like, you know, reading in the epistles just about church and that everyone has a gift and we’re all supposed to bring our gifts to the table. And, you know, when my husband and I were first church planting before we did France, we church planted in another location in the Northwest, and we tried to—we tried, we didn’t do well—but we tried to church plant a cell church. And the point of the cell church was that everyone brings something to the table. They all bring their gifts and they all do their thing, and we all—like, someone shares a hymn, someone shares this, someone does that, someone exegetes Scripture, somebody, you know, maybe they make a painting or—it’s just like everyone brings themselves and their gifts to the body.

And it gets very frustrating to me when, as a woman, it’s like, what do you do if you have outward gifts? If you don’t fit the mold of a quiet, meek woman, or if you have any sort of prophetic gifts, or if you—and I do believe the Lord has—not to say I’m a prophet or prophetess, but just there’s this idea of seeing what is wrong with something and calling it out, not for the sake of being controversial, but for the sake of saying, “This is wrong, and the body of Christ needs to do better because we represent Jesus.”

And so when you have those kinds of gifts, and I think Elyse has some of those as well, it’s hard to come to the table as a woman when you’re constantly dancing around a lot of, I would say, prejudice or maybe teaching that is equating a woman’s role in a church with whether or not you’re orthodox and conflating those two.

So, for instance, if a woman gets to read a Scripture on Sunday morning, does that mean that you are on the slippery slope of unorthodoxy? And I think that’s where I relate to her story of just trying to love Jesus, just trying to come to the table, use my gifts, and to just be undermined and assigned all sorts of ill motives like, “Oh, you’re too, you know, ambitious.”

Well, I don’t think that hardly anyone has gone to a male pastor who loves to preach and says, “You just love it too much. You need to step out of the limelight.” I have a friend of mine who is gifted similarly to me, and she is just like, “No. I am going to stand. I actually come alive when I’m on this stage, and it has nothing to do with my glory, my fame. It is just that God has designed me to impart to others, men and women, the glorious message of Jesus.”

And it is—I will say this as someone who’s lived overseas—I had a lot more freedom in Europe than I do in the United States. And I now live in the South, so I really have to walk a very tightrope of being disappointed a lot and sad and just having to suffice and say, “Well, I’m not gonna be welcomed in my own little country here. I can go North, or I can go to Europe, or I can go to any other country in the world and my gifts will be accepted and applauded, but not so much where I am.”

And that’s very difficult, and I struggle with it a lot. But I think that’s the touchpoint of our two stories. I hope that makes sense.

ANN MAREE:
Absolutely.

JULIA:
Yes. Yeah, it does. And off of that, even thinking, can you expound a little bit more? And what are the messages—I’m right there with you—what are the messages that we as women walk away with about ourselves, even about God or even about our gifts? What are some of the messages?

MARY:
I think it’s that we don’t know our place. You’re too much. You need to shrink back, and it’s confounding to me.

I think I also relate to it as not just men and women, but culturally. Like, I remember talking with someone about the prodigal son story. But my friend that I was talking to is in Africa, and we just were having this banter, and I found out that the point of the Prodigal Son story in my mind as an American was the naughty boy who was with the pigs and turned around. That—I mean, that was it. Like, that was the whole point of the whole story. Like, father’s waiting, he comes back, and yes, I could talk about the other brother and all of that and the relationships there.

My African friend would say something different, and they would say, “The whole point of the story is the famine.”

Now THAT is out of the box for me. It is not my common experience to experience famine, and that’s why I need to listen to theologians who have a different perspective than me. Because if you think about it, yeah, the whole point is the famine because he could have just continued on his way. Had there not been a famine, he could have just kept going.

It was the famine that caused him to have to go to work and to have to do these things, and that’s what turned everything around, and it’s so relatable to anyone that’s ever been in a famine.

And so I think that’s why it’s really important that we don’t just silo ourselves theologically and only read white male thinkers. I’m grateful for the white male thinkers. I’m not dissing them. I happen to really love N. T. Wright. But to expand that theological perspective from people in different cultures, people of different genders, you know, like, it just is so important because we’re gonna miss, as the body of Christ, we are going to miss part of the gospel if we do not have a wholehearted, full worldview of what that’s all about.

And I think we’ll grow a lot more, and then we’ll have this expandedness or expansiveness of our theology if we are willing to be non-siloed and if we’re humble enough to know that—I mean, some of those theologians, especially in the African American church, are just really helpful and are asking questions I wouldn’t ask because that has not been my experience.

But then they have this multi-layered fabric of belief that I’m missing, and I have something that they’re missing. And so together, when we get in a room, instead of, like, demonizing the other person because they don’t think exactly the same way that we do, we should, as believers, have a holy curiosity of each other, which I believe asking questions is one of the greatest forms of love, and we’ve lost it.

We do not do it. So I guess, I don’t know if that answers your question, but, in a little bit of a rabbit trail, that’s kind of how I feel that we need to—as we grow older, we need to be willing to have our boundaries poked a little bit and have our minds expanded a little bit and to think about how the whole body of Christ is not just white males.

It’s like the whole wide world and people that are living in poverty. In fact, most of the Christians and Christ followers are dealing with that kind of thing. We just need to expand and be willing to be—and like I said—humble enough to accept that we are one small person and our minds are super little.

God’s is expansive and amazing, so He holds all the correct theology in His head. But all of us together, you know, in an orthodox way—of course, I’m not talking about becoming culty or anything like that—but in an orthodox, Nicene Creed way, we can learn from each other, and I am grateful for that.

ANN MAREE:
I see you painting pictures even with your thoughts and words. I’m interested, Mary, even just experientially, hearing from you and your journey in the church spaces that, you know, most women who serve in the church, they don’t foresee that their gifts are gonna be limited. They’re often told that they’re needed and they’re necessary, they’re something good for the community.

And then all of a sudden there’s an experience that happens where they find that the thing that they thought was true wasn’t, and actually their belonging is very much tied to how useful they are to the church or to—

MARY:
Mm-hmm.

ANN MAREE:
—church leadership. So what was that like in your experience, if you’re willing to share?

MARY:
Yeah. I think one of the things that happened in our former megachurch that we went to was my husband and I sat down with the leadership, and we had been, like, leaders in that church, and we had been the first—it was a Southern Baptist church, and so we’d been the first non-IMB missionary sent out from this megachurch.

So we had a bit of credibility to us, and we’d been leading ministries, and my husband had been an elder for several years at that church. So we had definitely done all the things. And at the end of this conversation, I finally just asked—we were in a group of leaders—and I said, “Well, what do you see for us? What’s next for us?”

Like, we want to serve, and we listed several different areas that we could serve in that we had actually been good at and we had been commended in, so it wasn’t like we were trying to do something weird. And they just said, “There’s no place for you.”

And to my husband he said, “We’ll never need your ThM. It’s not important. We don’t need it.”

And that was the beginning of the end for us at that church. It wasn’t gender-based. It was just—what we’ve seen with that particular church is a dismantling of all ministries, and that they have gone to what they call the weekend event, and that’s the only important thing, where you platform a celebrity.

And so anybody that would compete with that in any sort of way had to be gotten rid of. And then, you know, I don’t even know—like, I’m not on the inside anymore—but from the outside looking in, I don’t even know what kind of discipleship is going on, because that’s basically what we were offering. You know, we wanna disciple people, whichever age group that would be.

And there’s just something that happens when you hear—I think what you’re asking is, you hear these words—

ANN MAREE:
Mm-hmm.

MARY:
—that say, “We’re all believers. We’re all part of the body of Christ. We need you. You’re important,” and then you experience an action that doesn’t line up with those words. It’s very bewildering, which is why I called my book Church Bewilderment.

It’s just like, I just don’t—you’re flabbergasted. Like, okay, well, but you said this, and you’re saying—but your actions say this. And that’s kind of the point for us, is like, well, then we’re obviously not wanted here, and we don’t wanna just be pew sitters for the rest of our ministry.

We also feel like when you reach, you know, the age where you have kids out of the house, you have all this extra energy and time to be able to give to the church. And so it’s just rough to feel like, oh, you know, I guess I’ll just, you know, go hide in the corner.

But it is—I would say, yes, it’s bewildering, it’s confusing, and it’s disappointing. And I think more, sadly, I think more women than men have experienced this because we will hear things like, “Oh, we need you in childcare.”

And look, if you look at any church, like, women are running all of that. I would like to say, what happens if we all withdraw from those spaces that no man wants to do? How would the church run with us taking—you know, getting out of more of these, you know, lesser roles, so to speak? I think it’s a great role to teach children, so don’t hear me saying that.

But what they would see as lesser roles. What would happen to the church if women walked out? And I think we’re actually seeing that happen right now.

JULIA:
Mm.

MARY:
You know, with Barna and all these statistics and all of that. Women, you know, from like 30 forward, are walking out in droves because there’s no place for us, at least not a place that feels significant or uses our gifts or any of those things.

So, you know, I don’t know how more to say it other than it’s very frustrating, and I don’t understand it. And I do perceive that in the new heavens, in the new earth, there’s gonna be a lot of men that are like, “Why are all these ladies doing stuff?” Gonna start to be like, “Well, because you never let them do anything on the earth.”

Or we have to go out into the marketplace and be cool and awesome, and we can—you know, I guess according to John Piper, we can’t even be police officers, so we can’t have any sort of authority in our daily lives. So it can get really—you can get into the weeds on, you know, some deeper theological questions there.

But anyway, hope that answers it.

JULIA:
Mm-hmm. I keep trying to get traction on the title of the book that I would write if I wrote a book called Women Walking, #WomenWalking.

MARY:
Hmm.

JULIA:
And in many cases, sadly, I mean, one other thing I’d add to your list is we start our own ministries to be able to use our—

MARY:
Yeah.

JULIA:
—our gifts.

But yeah, it is frustrating. And I just, I wonder, would you have words for somebody like that? I know you’ve experienced it yourself. Maybe what would you want to hear from somebody else? What would be helpful?

MARY:
Yeah. I think—I mean, there is certainly the idea of going to the Lord and asking Him, “What do I do?” Obviously.

I mean, where we are, where we live, I knew that in our physical locale, because of the county that we live in, I wasn’t gonna be able to find a church that would be more welcoming to women. And so we had to compromise because we didn’t wanna drive an hour to church, because I don’t feel like that’s community to me.

It’s too far away. And I don’t wanna be so, you know, like, “Well, I have to use my gift, so I’m gonna drive an hour.” I feel like the Lord would want us to prosper in our little community that we’re in. So we did have to go in with eyes wide open, and I’m still having to navigate that, for sure.

But I would just say there are churches out there that are kinder to women or more welcoming to women in leadership and things like that. And to begin to ask around, and maybe you might have friends who are really happy in their church, and they are able to lead a ministry or something like that.

I also affirm that sometimes, because we’ve been so harmed in church environments, that there is a place for taking a time-out. And we—my husband and I, in this new church that we’re in, we’ve led two church hurt cohorts of about six weeks long, about 40 people each time.

And there were some—and we housed it not in our church, but, like, in another kind of building that’s near the church. But even—but it had the moniker, you know? And so some people even had a hard time walking into this, like, non-church building and had to take a couple deep breaths, you know?

So I see that, and I understand that, and sometimes we need to step away.

I do still believe in the body of Christ. I don’t think I’d be where I am today without the friendships I have in my new church. They have been life to me. So I would hate for someone just to completely stay away forever. But again, no one really gets to prescribe to you what that healing journey looks like.

You know, no one can say, “Well, that takes one month, takes seven months, it takes four years.” You know when the Lord has set you free, healed you enough that you can darken the doors of another church.

And you do see this a lot, like with people kind of changing traditions. I’m seeing a lot of people going into Anglican or Greek Orthodox when they were kind of a non-denom person for so long because there’s just something so blessedly different about it and a little more historical and high church that helps them to kind of untether themselves from the last place that they were in.

So that’s what I would say.

ANN MAREE:
Yeah, and I just so appreciate that you’re giving people an opportunity and even permission to rest, to pause, to heal. And even thinking about the Proverbs talking about wisdom calling from the streets.

MARY:
Mm-hmm.

ANN MAREE:
But sometimes that connection with the Lord doesn’t always happen in the traditional places that we think that it does, and that’s okay.

We can be challenged in that way, and we can see where the Lord is moving even in spaces that may not be where we typically think we would find Him.

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MARY:
I wanted to address something too that was brought up a little bit earlier of this idea of women starting their own ministries, which I’ve—and I’m not a 501(c)(3), so I guess I can’t call myself a ministry, but I’m basically doing ministry.

And I just wanna say how incredibly lonely it is.

ANN MAREE:
Mm-hmm.

JULIA:
Hmm.

MARY:
And I actually really want to be connected to, you know, an entity or some leadership or something because I know the danger. I watched it in my last church of what no accountability looks like.

So I want that, and I long for that. But, I mean, otherwise, how would I have been able to do these things had I not gone out on my own? And that’s lonely and sad, and I wish it was different, but I don’t know how to change that. At least not where I’m, you know, currently am.

ANN MAREE:
Agree. It is very lonely.

MARY:
Mm-hmm.

ANN MAREE:
And it’s also just a different topic. You just never know if, while I’m using my gifts, I think they’re being helpful to somebody somewhere, and rarely, I guess, do I get the opportunity to hear from somebody. And it’s such a blessing when I go out and hear that, “Yeah, you gave language to my story,” or, “That really helped me on my journey.”

And it’s few and far between because I’m in my office all day, all every day.

MARY:
Mm-hmm.

ANN MAREE:
So agree. Totally agree.

MARY:
Yeah, I just finished recording another 10 episodes of Pray Every Day, and every, like, fifth or sixth episode, I’ll say, “Here’s my personal email address.”

ANN MAREE:
Mm-hmm.

MARY:
“Please let me know how you found the podcast,” because I just need to know those things. And sometimes you just need that encouragement, and you kinda have to ask for it, because people typically don’t go outta their way to say, “Hey, your words really help me.”

And especially as a book writer, with all these books I’ve written, I wrote it, like, a year and a half ago. Someone finally has it in their hand, and I might get feedback two years after I wrote those words. I probably even forgot what’s on page 43.

ANN MAREE:
Mm-hmm.

MARY:
In fact, I have.

So, you know, it is really helpful that we as women Christ followers, we take notice of other women and we take time to tell them that they are doing good work, and, you know, because maybe they’re not hearing it from anybody else.

And we don’t need to be petty or jealous or any of those things. We can just call out women doing awesome things, because it’s lonely, and it’s difficult, and there’s a lot of hurdles that I feel like we have to hurdle over.

I remember reading this analogy in a Christianity Today article, and it wasn’t about any of these things, but I loved the analogy, and it was like one of those British mazes that are made out of shrubbery, like in Harry Potter.

And I used it in the We Too book to say that if you’re a sexual abuse survivor, you’re basically starting at the back of the maze, and you have to make 57 correct turns to get to the end of the maze. It’s really unfair if someone is toward the end of the maze and they only have four turns to judge you for your journey of trying to make your way through the maze.

And I think that’s—I think a lot of times in the church, women are standing way back in the back, and I don’t think a lot of male leaders understand how many decisions and things we have to hurdle to get to the very end of that maze when they’ve, you know, had it all.

I remember sitting in that same meeting where they said we weren’t needed, “We don’t want you.” I asked the man who said it, “Well, what are you gonna do?” I don’t know, we were just talking. What are you gonna—I was still kinda processing, you know. Like you’re in the minute and you’re like, “What was that? But I don’t know how to respond.” But I was being nice and asking questions. “And what are you gonna do after you retire?”

And he goes, “Oh, you know, I’m gonna do some consulting with churches.”

And something inside of me got really mad because I would never be able to do that. It’ll never happen for me because I have never been given or even opened up to me a position of leadership where now I could go and consult with people.

Now I can consult on how to write a book, for sure. But it just made me mad, and I think he did not realize the privilege that he had of always being platformed all along as a male leader, and I’ve had to scrub and scrounge for every inch that I’ve ever been able to speak.

JULIA:
That hurts.

MARY:
That hurts.

JULIA:
Mm-hmm. And you just put words, probably for me too, at least one of the reasons that anytime I hear our pastor’s becoming a consultant, it’s like a knife in my heart. Thanks for doing that.

So I think the theme I’m hearing with you as well—and not think, I know, because Elyse even said it too—these are high-control organizations, high-control cultures. What do you think, if you do, helps hold those cultures up?

What keeps them thriving the way they are? What keeps us going back to the celebrity church with a celebrity pastor who gets to consult when he retires?

MARY:
I think it gets down to this, and I write about this in the Bewilderment book, this pyramidic structure that we somehow think is Christian, and it’s not.

And it starts at a leader, one leader at the top, and then everybody’s the peon below. And it’s like pastor, not as shepherd, but pastor as a CEO. And you’ve seen it, like with Mars Hill and Driscoll. I have friends that were in that world in high leadership positions, so I know exactly what went on behind the scenes, and it was not pretty.

But how I would answer that question is, it is often, almost always, one man with a group of yes-men beneath, and no accountability that is any sort of biblical accountability.

In fact, I’m gonna be writing a post soon about elders because I feel like elders have capitulated their role. And even in our last church, the elders said out loud, “Our job is not to take care of the flock. Our job is to protect the leader.”

And when—I mean, that’s offensive to hear. And they said it as if it was honorable to say. They didn’t see it as problematic. And I’m like, “No, that’s not your job.”

If I could’ve—I wasn’t in that particular conversation, it’s a secondhand conversation—but if I had the gumption in the moment, and if I were in that conversation, I would say, “That is not your job. Your job is actually to protect the flock, and if the pastor/celebrity is harming the flock, then he needs to be taken out, and you need to do the right thing, and you need to say the hard things.”

But then we also realize, too, that it also is very American, this system, and in these kind of high megachurch models, it is 100% about money.

ANN MAREE:
Mm-hmm.

MARY:
It is always about money. Publishing is—Christian publishing is about money. Christian worship music is about money. It all is a business. It is about money.

If you do not bring the money in, then you will be marginalized. But even if you’re like Beth Moore, who brings in the money, you can still be marginalized because she doesn’t fit the mold of the pyramidic structure that we have created.

ANN MAREE:
Yeah, so not even gender bias in that. Of course, I had a professor in seminary who, throughout his teaching, which was on Martin Luther, he just kept repeating the phrase, “Follow the money. Follow the money.”

MARY:
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

ANN MAREE:
That’s profound and also, like, duh.

MARY:
Well, when you have millionaire pastors with multimillion-dollar homes, multiple homes, expensive vehicles, first-class flights, and/or personal jets, I don’t know how that at all, in any possible way, is anything close to how Jesus lived His life.

It’s offensive.

ANN MAREE:
Hmm.

MARY:
And it’s wrong, and I’m sorry.

ANN MAREE:
Hmm.

MARY:
But if God blessed me that much with those kinds of finances, I would be in trouble with the Holy Spirit if I hoarded it to myself. The only reason that we are blessed is to be a blessing.

And, I mean, I think part of that pyramidic structure is also a distorted theology of wealth. And it is a health-and-wealth gospel of, you know, name it, claim it, and all that’s from the pit of hell.

I’m sorry, but it is. Jesus didn’t die so that we could have all our dreams come true. He died as an example for us to also die and to be disciples, which is going to get—it says those who desire to live godly in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.

And we have a bunch of—I’m sorry, I’m on a roll—we have a bunch of baby Christians in the U.S. who are like, “Oh, I’m being—someone doesn’t like what I had to say, so I’m being persecuted.”

No, you’re not being persecuted. Go to a closed country and watch someone get their head cut off. Those people are persecuted. That’s persecution. Someone disagreeing with you is not persecution.

In fact, we should expect it, and if we’re not being persecuted, we should probably wonder where we are with Jesus.

ANN MAREE:
Mm-hmm.

MARY:
Because it says we will be persecuted. And if they did that to Jesus, they’re gonna do it to us.

But we think that Christianity is—well, first, we don’t have a good theology of suffering, but we also think Christianity is about us, and we think it’s about our dreams and goals being met, and that is not what it—that’s not the gospel.

So not only do we have a gospel problem, but we’ve got a discipleship problem because we’re discipling people into American Christianity, which is no Christianity at all.

I think that, you know, I think back to, like, World War II and the real church and the non-real church, you know? Like, there was an actual church doing the Bonhoeffer-y kind of things, and then there was the church that capitulated to the state, and we all are like, “Oh yes, I would be just like Bonhoeffer.”

Well, no, I don’t think we would, and I think a lot of American Christians would capitulate, and that is terrifying to me.

JULIA:
Are capitulating.

MARY:
Mm. Yes. Are.

JULIA:
I appreciate your mentioning the false shepherds. My first edit in my mind is they shepherd the wrong people, but in actuality they’re not actually shepherding. They’re just protecting the wrong people. They’re supposed to be tending to the flock and protecting the flock, but they protect themselves, they protect leadership, they protect power.

I was in a situation where I was an advocate for multiple victims in our church. And just by nature of my position—and Ann Maree knows this well as an advocate—you get shredded in the process.

MARY:
Yes.

JULIA:
And I spoke up and I said, because of what I’ve been doing and caring for these survivors, I have no pastor, I have no shepherd, I have no women’s ministry coordinator even—

MARY:
Mm-hmm.

JULIA:
All of the people who could be caring for me and protecting me left.

The answer I got was, “I am called to shepherd the pastor.” And another corrective which said, “And anyway, Jesus is your shepherd.”

Thanks for that. I feel really lonely right now, but… okay.

MARY:
That, and also that negates the body of Christ, and the whole purpose of the body of Christ is to be the hands and feet of Jesus to each other.

JULIA:
That’s right. Yeah. And this—so thank you for speaking about that.

MARY:
Totally. Totally. And another story I have is—and this is actually public knowledge—but our former pastor would only spend time—I mean, it’s a huge church, 20-something thousand—would only spend time with big donors.

And he says, like, he will surprise them with a lunch, and they’ll be like, “What’s this for?”

And of course anyone with brains knows it’s because he wants to get into your wallet. But they’re, like, so shocked, and he says, “It’s so fun to not tell them the why of the meeting because they get to have a once-in-a-lifetime experience with their celebrity pastor.”

He didn’t use the word celebrity, but “once-in-a-lifetime experience.”

And I’m sorry, but that’s not a shepherd. That is someone who is cultivating the financial viability and generosity of rich people.

JULIA:
Mm.

MARY:
And I think we need to read the rich young ruler story again and actually look at it as it exists on the page. And it says, “He went away sorrowful because he had much wealth.”

And I didn’t realize this as an American Christian until I had a friend in Ghana. We were talking one day, and he said, “Mary, what do you do when you are sick or one of your kids is sick?”

And I didn’t even realize that I did this. I was like, “Well, I make an appointment with the doctor.”

He said, “But I can’t do that. You have money, so you can go to the doctor.”

I said, “Well, what do you do?” Because then I was, like, completely confounded because I’m so American, and I have all the money in terms of financial ability to pay for healthcare.

He’s like, “We pray.”

JULIA:
Hmm.

MARY:
“The first thing we do when my kid is sick or I’m sick is we pray.”

And I’m like, wow, I run to idol of money all the time. And I was so convicted by that.

And yet the American church is enamored with financial wealth and fame, and I’m in that business. I am a literary agent and an author and a speaker. So as those three things, I am in the underbelly of it, and I’ve seen all the stuff, and it is, to be honest, very sickening.

ANN MAREE:
Wow, this is a great conversation. Oh my goodness, yes, Mary. I think we’ve both—Julia and I would agree—we’ve seen parts of the underbelly, probably not to the degree that you have. And I think God is actually giving those visions to us for a reason—

MARY:
Yeah.

ANN MAREE:
—and this being one of them, to be able to talk openly about what we’ve seen and the problems that we’re acknowledging and identifying.

And if we had more time, I’d get into more about how do we get the church that could be helping to see even. Julia and I were talking about this before we got on with you, Mary.

Anyway, we don’t have to go there, but I have a couple recordings from Elyse’s story where she brought up some really good points, and then I think Julia has some questions, so I’m just gonna play one of those clips. And I don’t mean to end our discussion. I just feel like we need more podcasts than this one to talk about everything we need to talk about.

Anyway, I’m going to play the one clip, and then, Julia, let you fill in with the question.

ELYSE — RECORDED CLIP:
So I was counseling this woman who actually I still correspond with all the time. We text each other.

And a series of events—she had been employed at the church. Leadership spins, obfuscates the reason why she’s not working there anymore. They’re not honest about it.

And I said, “Just be honest.” Just—this is another one of the sort of themes of my life, which is telling people, “Just be honest. Just be upfront.”

I find out that that church way, you know, the Southern—big Southern California church—they’ve got a Facebook group, and on the Facebook group, I find out that they’re saying that I’m an apostate.

You know what? Listen, if your whole credo is speak the truth, then speak the truth, right?

JULIA:
One of the things that’s so striking in, I think, Elyse’s story is—and for many of us, we can relate to this so deeply—she keeps repeating that phrase: “Just tell me the truth. Just tell me the truth. Just tell me the truth.”

It seems like survivors can live almost with the pain of the truth more easily than they can—

MARY:
Mm-hmm.

JULIA:
—with these half-truths or these shifting narratives or distortions. And it’s, I think, one of the most disorienting and painful parts of the process, is to not be anchored in the truth or not to have the truth come to light.

So I’m wondering, just in your experience and what you’ve heard, what do you do when the truth that we’re really longing for never comes, or when we notice that the church that we had to leave or the organization that we had to leave continues to deny and rewrite and refuse to even acknowledge reality?

What do we do with that?

MARY:
Well, for me, I have to find good friends who feel the same way that I do so that I don’t feel alone anymore. Otherwise, I will feel like, “Am I crazy?”

JULIA:
Yes.

MARY:
“Why is this this way?”

But if I have a good group of friends around me who are like, “Yeah, that’s weird,” it really helps me.

But also reading through the prophets, I think, is really helpful. It’s been really helpful for me. I’m currently reading Isaiah for Pray Every Day, and, you know, there’s so much written there about how God is the God who made everything. He sees everything. He is a God of justice.

And I just got a text today from a friend who’s just lamenting a celebrity pastor and how all of her friends are—she’s been deeply wounded by it, like completely flattened by this man, and all of her friends from all over the nation, not just in the locale, are platforming this guy.

And I just have to go back and say it is a house of cards. It will fall. This cannot be sustained. But we have to be patient and wait for it.

And we also—sometimes the Lord calls us, and I’ve done this, I’ve talked openly about this church—He calls us to stand up. But oftentimes, you know, it is women who are doing it.

JULIA:
Mm.

MARY:
I don’t know what that is all about. Maybe it’s just that we are used to getting hit, and we’re like, “Well, this is the right thing to do, so I’m gonna do it, come what may.”

I have regretted my “come what may” so many times. When I’m like, nope, this is the right thing to do, come what may. And then come what may comes, and I am in a little ball somewhere.

JULIA:
Hm.

MARY:
But yes, friends who understand you, and Scripture, and also, like, the end of Revelation, where we see everything being made right, wiping all the tears away, no more discord.

And I think that part of the pain for women is that men haven’t—not all men, of course. I love my husband, and he’s not this way—so a lot of men have forfeited their duty to do what’s right.

And it’s been women who have been rising up and saying, “That’s wrong, and you can’t run a church that way.”

And I’m sorry, but running over people with a bus is not a good metaphor for—

JULIA:
Hmm.

MARY:
—pastoral leadership and shepherding.

JULIA:
Thank you so much for bringing up the prophets. For me, that’s been a huge part of my healing journey, and I think a part where, just as Christians, we’re not as literate as maybe we should be.

And I love that the prophets just describe that actually the opposite of truth isn’t lying.

MARY:
Mm.

JULIA:
Because what you see are shepherds and leaders saying, “But look, the temple is still running—”

MARY:
Hm.

JULIA:
“—and things are still going, and we’re still making sacrifices. And look, there’s peace over here.”

So there’s—when you read the prophets, you can’t read it without seeing that gaslighting and seeing people—

MARY:
Mm-hmm.

JULIA:
—wearing masks and believing and assuming that they’re doing the Lord’s work when—

MARY:
Yes.

JULIA:
—underneath it, the prophets are given a vision of the spirit that’s at work underneath all of those behaviors. So that’s been very, very comforting to me, so thank you for bringing up the prophets.

MARY:
Yes. Another really great thing to read is Ezekiel chapter 34 in specific.

JULIA:
Yeah.

MARY:
So I can’t tell you, I mean, I exegeted that passage so many times because it’s just so—like, God is saying, “I don’t like my shepherds. They’re not shepherding.”

JULIA:
Mm.

MARY:
And in fact, these shepherds are not only not shepherding, they’re eating their sheep.

Now that’s, like, the opposite. That is a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

And then also to realize, you know, before all this happened to me, in several different situations where I began to see wolves in sheep’s clothing, I always was kind of perplexed by Jesus talking about it.

He’s like, you know, “Beware of the wolves, wolves in sheep’s clothing.”

I’m like, yeah, yeah, yeah, this is for the new church, you know, the Acts church. And you see it in the epistles too: beware of the wolves in sheep’s clothing, beware of false teachers and all of that.

And I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, that was restoring the church.

Well, no, no, no. It is for us today.

JULIA:
Mm-hmm.

MARY:
And it is very diabolical, and it is a very powerful tool of the enemy of our souls to abscond a Christ follower who started well and shift them and shape-shift them into a wolf.

And the hard thing is that wolves have Christian vocabulary, and they know exactly—I mean, you would think by the words that they said that they were Christ followers.

And we’re very convinced by words. We are a word-loving culture. And so we have to look at the fruit. We cannot look at the gifting.

The gifting will put a man on a stage. The fruit—the lack of fruit—will take him off that stage.

And we’re seeing it in huge terms. All these pastors—every week on the Roys Report, there’s one more pastor—

JULIA:
Mm-hmm.

MARY:
—that has, you know, gone down the hill.

And so we have to not only read Ezekiel 34, but we also need to look at Jesus’s warnings and the epistle warnings, the Pauline warnings of, yes, this exists.

We have to be aware of confidence men and confidence women who are in the pulpit right now because they are there to fleece the flock.

And then think about just the carnage that happens, not only just in reputation, but then all of the people that thought, “I thought that person was a Christ follower. What kind of a Christian—what am I in? What is Christianity if this is what this produces?”

And then it causes the deconstruction crisis because you’re like, “Well, that’s the leader. I trusted him. I trusted her.”

And now I see behind the curtain in The Wizard of Oz when Toto pulls it over. It’s a little guy standing on a box pulling on levers.

It’s not what you thought it was, and it can—if your foundation of your faith is on that person, which is that pyramidic structure again, it will take you out. It will take out your faith.

Your faith has to rest on the person of Jesus Christ alone. Not to say we don’t have friends and all of that, but your faith has to rest on His perfection.

And I’m sad that there’s so many people that are hurting because of what these wolves have done.

JULIA:
Mm-hmm. Yes, and it’s not just an individual sin. It’s a systemic sin.

MARY:
Oh.

JULIA:
You know, that you’ve seen in big church movements and in denominations, that the wolves also influence those larger entities because we can very easily see an individual pastor who is a wolf or has fallen, but then we still put our hope in a church or in a denomination.

MARY:
Hmm. Hmm. And I think we’re seeing people beginning to wake up to more of the organizational structures, for sure.

JULIA:
Mm-hmm.

MARY:
Because the structure supports—the structure—and that’s where we’re really kind of—I think the Lord is doing a dismantling of that, flattening that structure, because it’s supposed to be like even an elder board.

You’re supposed to be one of many. You’re one of equals. You all should be able to speak into each other’s lives, and the pastor is not above that. He’s in that equal.

We saw that with Hybels, right? Like, nobody did anything for so long. And yeah, it’s important.

I keep hearing Lance Ford—I think he said it on a podcast with Julie Roys—”It’s the system, dummy.”

JULIA:
Mm-hmm.

MARY:
“It’s the systems.”

ANN MAREE:
Yeah. So I have one more clip before I think you’re gonna probably have to get going, and I just wanna play that.

And again, Julia has a question. I think this was profound, again, from Elyse about one of her desires about belonging to a community, belonging to a church community.

Let me play that one.

ELYSE — RECORDED CLIP:
And so I became a Christian. God saved me.

And part of what I was longing for in Christianity was to be part of a family.

And as I have thought back, particularly most recently as I’m in counseling myself, as I have thought back about what motivated me—really a lot of what I wanted my whole life—what was motivating me was really this desire to be part of a family, which, I mean, it’s not a bad thing.

God made family, and God made us to be in close, intimate relationships, and so that’s not a bad thing. It’s not a wrong thing.

I may have wanted it in some ways too much, which I think that’s part of my story. But I wanted very much to be part of a family.

JULIA:
So Elyse is recognizing that this longing to belong and to be a part of a family helped her make sense of her journey, and this idea comes up so much with each of our storytellers and more storytellers to come in our season.

Certainly, our histories and our wounds can shape how we relate to churches and how deeply we invest, and I think even most poignantly how we experience betrayal when it comes.

MARY:
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

JULIA:
But every one of us, whether we have experienced spiritual abuse or not, comes into a church with these God-given longings for love and connection and family.

Sometimes, though, I wonder if survivors come away believing that those longings themselves were the problem, that if they hadn’t wanted it so much that they wouldn’t have been so hurt or wouldn’t have stayed so long.

But I think the tragedy is that in abusive systems, they exploit that longing and that vulnerability that God has placed within us.

So is there a way that you help people hold on to that goodness of longing and the desire for connection without maybe cutting it off or assuming that it was their idolatry and their sin—

MARY:
Hmm.

JULIA:
—that made it the problem?

MARY:
Yeah, I really resonated with what Elyse said because I think that made my church hurt harder.

Because I don’t have a supportive extended family from growing-up years, and so literally church did become my family. And so when that was cut off or that was abusive, I was like, “Where else can I go? This is the only place.”

And I just hold that in tension because I just wanna say you’re normal for feeling that way, and it’s a good desire.

We should have high expectations for the church of Jesus. Because of how He treated people, we should also expect and hope that other people would walk in that way.

Now, when they don’t, then that becomes a problem. In a healthy environment, you can have a conversation about it and say, “Hey, that really hurt my feelings,” and, “Can we talk about this?”

JULIA:
Mm-hmm.

MARY:
In an unhealthy system, that can never happen because the highest value in an unhealthy system is only loyalty.

And any sort of discord that you bring up or any sort of pain becomes your problem. You’re just not loyal, and you become demonized, and that’s where a lot of the pain comes from.

You’re hoping, “This is supposed to be my family, but my family’s abusing me, and then they’re marginalizing me, and then they’re assigning nefarious motives to me.”

And that is probably one of the hardest things that Christ followers walk through in terms of relational pain, is when someone assigns a bad motive to you, because there’s no recourse for it.

You can say, “No, that’s not my motivation,” but if they believe it and they have, like, blind tunnel vision of anything you do, positive or negative, is going to be the confirmation bias that they need to keep you in that place, then, you know, there’s nothing you can do.

And that’s very painful, and I just wanna say it’s normal to be upset about that. And it’s a long wound to recover from.

ANN MAREE:
Yeah. I truly appreciate this. I know we gave you some questions, and we were trying to talk somewhat about a story, but also you filled in, in just beautiful ways, other thoughts, other topics related even.

It’s like you filled in things that we weren’t even thinking about asking, so I appreciate that. Thank you very much.

MARY:
My pleasure.

ANN MAREE:
Yep. And so for our audience, can you repeat the name of the book that’s coming out and when?

MARY:
Yeah, it should come out in early 2027, and it’s called Church Bewilderment. And it’s by me, Mary DeMuth.

ANN MAREE:
Wow. If you were around, available, willing, we would love to have you back and talk about your book. We like to do that with our expert contributors and just hear more of their story through their book.

We’ll be in touch, but we’ll also put that in our show notes, even though it’s not quite out yet, just as a reminder to keep looking for it beginning of next year.

And thank you for, again, being willing. For also, even what Elyse mentioned, for helping her, for being that friend that you’re speaking of and even being that family.

I was thinking about how, after the church betrayals, I feel like it’s time to start handpicking my family, so instead of taking chances.

But anyway, thank you for that as well, just being her friend and being her friend by being here as well.

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Safe to Hope is a production of Help[H]er. Our executive producer is Ann Maree Goudzwaard.