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A Cry For Justice | Awakening the Evangelical Church to Domestic Violence and Abuse in its Midst

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FAQNew UsersResourcesAboutWise as SerpentsInsightsScripturesTAGSDisclosure A Cry For Justice Awakening the Evangelical Church to Domestic Violence and Abuse in its Midst Discerning the difference between a victim and a liar: lessons from Pride and Prejudice

Barbara Roberts 26th October 2021 Leave a comment

Most abusers claim to be victims. This is one of the reasons why genuine victims are often disbelieved when they disclose the abuse.

When both spouses are claiming to be victims, church leaders often find it hard to tell who is lying. Its a dilemma for the church leaders, and its devastating for the genuine victim.

Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen, has a wonderful example of an abuser claiming to be a victim. In the story, Mr Wickham cunningly deceives the main character Lizzy (Miss Elizabeth Bennett) by telling her a distorted account of his dealings with Mr Darcy. Wickham employs many of the tactics that intimate partner abusers use to target, groom and brainwash their victims.

I have long wanted to write a post analysing Mr Wickhams tactics, but I have not found the time. So I was thrilled recently to find that someone had already done it!

The lying abusers who pose as victims: lessons from Mr Wickham by Christine Woolgar. Her blog is Light in grey places.

Here is the introduction to motivate you to read Christines whole post:

Having recently grown in admiration for Jane Austen as an author, my husband and I are rewatching the BBC’s 1995 six-hour adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. That’s the one where Colin Firth plays Mr Darcy. *swoon*
Anyway, we watched the scene where Mr Wickham (who later turns out to be the villain of the piece) introduces himself to Lizzy (the heroine).
We’re in a world where abuse victims are routinely disbelieved and it’s far too easy to say, ‘What about false accusations?’ What we have with Wickham though is an illustration of how an abuser can lie and claim to be a victim.

Christine Woolgar analyses Mr Wickhams first conversation with Lizzy. She then uses it to help us answer these questions:

How can we discern the difference between a victim and a liar?What can we do to spot the lie?

I encourage you to read The lying abusers who pose as victims: lessons from Mr Wickham.

***

Note: I have not looked at all the material on Christine Woolgars blog, so I cannot say whether I endorse all her theology and beliefs.

Further reading

Billy Graham was corrupt — This post presents evidence that Billy Graham was a 33rd Degree Freemason. It gives documentary evidence that Billy Graham was present when Jim Shaw was initiated into the 33rd Degree of Freemasonry. At those ceremonies, only men who being initiated or have already attained the 33rd Degree are allowed to be present. Jim Shaw later became a Christian and renounced all his Masonic vows.

Why is it so hard to get justice for abuse in the church? — In my Twitter thread on Billy Graham and Franklin Graham. I encourage all Christians to read the evidence which I present in this thread. You do not need your own Twitter account to read it.

Billy Graham, John MacArthur, R.C. Sproul are some of the “Untouchables” in the visible church

Articles on Naghmeh Abedini, who is bravely exposing the abusive behaviour of her husband, Pastor Saeed Abedini

Tillamook testimony concerning JeffCrippen

Barbara Roberts 8th September 2021 54 Comments

Tillamook Speaks presents witness / survivor testimony from someone who used to belong to Jeff Crippens church in Tillamook. It is published by Sister, who is a regular commenter here.

The Tillamook survivor, Chris (a pseudonym), contacted Sister and myself. Sister and I know Chriss real name but at Chriss request we are not disclosing it. Chris told us another side of the Christ Reformation Church story (CRC Tillamook, formerly Idaville Bible Church). Chriss testimony rings true to me in a similar way to many other testimonies I have heard from survivors of abuse.

If you read no more of what I am going to say here, I urge you to read Tillamook Speaks. But if you intend to read the rest of my post, I urge you to read Tillamook Speaks first.

In 2012, the year the ACFJ blog began, Jeff Crippen wrote an Open Letter to Pastors, preaching to pastors how they could confess mishandling a case of abuse. He wrote:

“What would happen in your church if you went before your people, after some genuine self-examination, and confessed to them that you have not done well in this matter. If you stated that you have created an oppressive environment for women. State that by God’s grace you are resolved to set about making it right? What if you went to any specific woman in a particular case you have handled, and confessed these things to her? And then set out to re-tool the culture of your church?”

Jeff Crippen did not do what he advised other pastors to do. He had vilely persecuted an abuse victim and spiritually abused many other people in the Tillamook congregation. Despite publishing his Open Letter to Pastors, Jeff has not gone to the former congregants that he spiritually and emotionally abused. He has not apologised to them, let alone asked for their forgiveness.

Jeff does not practise what he preaches. Jeff has rebuked Wayne Grudem because Grudem has not apologised for spiritually abusing those who have suffered spousal abuse . Here is an excerpt of what Jeff said:

I want to point out that Wayne Grudem offers no apology nor shows any remorse for or confession of the damage his erroneous teaching has caused for countless victims of abuse. He and his crowd (and its a big crowd) have for years refused to acknowledge that abuse is grounds for divorce. They have thereby put guilt and shame and condemnation on countless Christians who have gotten free from their abuser in spite of what the no divorce for abuse crowd said.
Where is Grudem’s repentance of this? Where is his godly sorrow for what he has done? I sure don’t see it.

Jeff has not apologised to the people he spiritually abused in Tillamook, yet he admonishes Grudem for not apologising! I have concluded that Jeff is the kind of man he warns others to have nothing to do with: a hypocrite of the highest order. Therefore I cannot shirk my duty to warn people about Jeff.

I thank Chris for having the courage to reach out to me. I thank Sister for compiling Chriss story and publishing it in Tillamook Speaks . I thank both Chris and Sister for being patient with me while I was procrastinating on writing this post because I was ploughing through heavy emotions — fear, anxiety, self-accusation and shame.

Think about the warnings the apostles gave about power-mongers in congregations who were lording it over the flock. For example, the apostle John denounced Diotrephes for always wanting to be first and lording it over the congregation. Perhaps Diotrephes was verbally teaching sound doctrines, but his conduct was inconsistent with sound doctrine because he was bullying the congregation (3 John 9-11). I think you would agree with me that Jeff has written good articles about how to identify abusers. I have seen Jeff write good doctrinal articles. But now I know that Jeffs pattern of conduct is the very opposite of what he preaches.

How Chris made contact with us

In 2019, Sister published her first article Jeff Crippen is Unsafe. It got very little traction. At some stage, Chris found that article and contacted Sister. Then Chris contacted me. Chris told us another side of the CRC Tillamook Church story.

In private correspondence to Sister and myself, Chris named the names of people I met in the Tillamook congregation. As well as knowing their names, Chris knows what happened to those people under Jeffs leadership. Chriss accounts matched what Jeff had told me about the people and events in the CRC Tillamook saga, the only difference being that in Jeffs accounts he always depicted (and still depicts) himself as the victim, but in Chriss accounts Jeff is the controlling, spiritually abusive, and cruel bully.

Chris told me:

When Jeff started writing about abuse, we hoped he would reach out and apologize to all those he had abused, but he didnt. He just started writing about how we had abused him. It was…something. But when we thought about it, not shocking. Then people kept leaving, with similar stories.
[While we were in the church] he even organized book burnings, because we couldnt read things he didnt sanction.
I remember him laughing over an account of one of the Puritans beating a child because he had it coming to him. The child had refused to recite the Lords prayer to the preacher — a stranger.
When I first read his Open Letter to Pastors, I had so much hope. If I didnt know, I would have been taken in by that open letter.
Jeff taught logic to some of the older kids. And he used it to presume to know what was in peoples hearts. You did such and such a thing, therefore logic says you must be thinking. He misappropriated so many evil motives that simply werent there.
Jeff has never been balanced on the whole counsel of God. He spent years preaching Romans. He preached so many sermons that went something like you might not be saved if. He basically taught that you cant have assurance [of salvation].

There were many children in that congregation and I would expect there are still some children there. Can you imagine how terrifying it would be growing up in a church while being told You might not be saved if from the pulpit every Sunday?

Many of the stories and names Chris disclosed privately to Sister and me cannot be disclosed publicly because the information is not in the public domain and we want to protect Chris from further abuse from Jeff and his loyal remnant. We also want to protect other current or former members of the Tillamook congregation whose stories of suffering mistreatment are only for them to tell, not us.

In my view, Chris demonstrated his / her veracity beyond reasonable doubt. I will now explain in more detail why I have come to that believe that.

Chris hesitantly reached out to me. I could see Chriss fear and trepidation when Chris wrote to me. It was obvious that Chris was testing the waters to see how I would respond. That is one mark of a genuine victim of abuse.

As the conversations between Chris and I — and Chris and Sister — developed, we did not ask leading questions of Chris. Chris told us accounts of people and events that had happened at Tillamook. How Jeff spiritually abused Chriss family, and what was done to and in other families who belonged to the church. Chris sent photos of diary entries which Chris had written at the time Jeff was perpetrating particular instances of spiritual abuse. A victims diary entries are pretty good corroborative evidence. Diary entries are often accepted as corroborative evidence in secular courts or public investigations of alleged malfeasance.

While Jeff and I were co-leading the ACFJ blog, I visited Tillamook twice, making the trip all the way from Australia at my own expense. I met the then members of the Tillamook congregation, went to church with them, hung out with them. During those times, in many face to face conversations, and before and after in emails and video calls, Jeff told me about things that had happened in the Tillamook congregation. He always painted himself as the victim of others. He named to me men who had been elders whom he had told to leave, and men who had resigned from eldership, leaving the church because they did not see eye to eye with Jeff. He described in detail what had happened in certain families. He expelled another elder while I was there on my second visit.

The names and stories Jeff told me matched the accounts Chris has told us, but Jeffs accounts were deceptive because Jeff is the bully, not the victim.

You may be reluctant to accept Chriss testimony. After all, Moses told the people of Ancient Israel that one persons testimony is not enough to establish wrongdoing:

A single witness shall not suffice against a person for any crime or for any wrong in connection with any offense that he has committed. Only on the evidence of two witnesses or of three witnesses shall a charge be established. (Deut 19:15)

But Chriss testimony is not the only one.

My own experience of Jeffs bullying

In 2018, Jeff bullied and vilified me. What he did is detailed in Sisters article Jeff Crippen Is Unsafe which Sister wrote on her own initiative (I did not prompt or ask her to write it).

I published one blog post about Jeffs bullying: Response to my detractors and apology to ACFJ followers I’ve hurt. I have done my best since to reform my communication style and my character so that I am less likely to say things in ways that come across as unfairly harsh or blunt. Some people still find me abrasive; that may or may not be a good thing. Jesus was abrasive to the wicked, warned the foolish, and was kind to the oppressed; my aim is to be more and more like him. But in contrast to Jeff, I did not go on and on about Jeffs bullying of me. Unlike Jeff, I did not feature a message in the sidebar of this blog telling victims that I thought Jeff was unsafe. I did not constantly blazon to the world that Jeff had done wrong by me. No other advocates stood with me. Some of them reviled me publicly. Many other advocates have shunned me.

When the ACFJ blog went suddenly off-line in 2019, I did not tell the world that all the evidence pointed to Jeff having engineered that with his assistant TWBTC The Woman Behind The Curtain. (TWBTC had promised me she would hand over to me the ability to pay the domain name renewal fee before it next became due. After leaving ACFJ she betrayed me — she did not keep that promise. That story is detailed in Jeff Crippen Is Unsafe.) When the ACFJ blog went offline, I did not say publicly that they were trying to destroy the ACFJ blog. I kept my mouth shut. I had only three close cyber friends who helped me through that; those three people are pretty much nobodies in the advocacy world. I managed to get a new domain (web address) for the blog and my assistant Reaching Out manually transferred every post and page on the blog over to the new address and fixed every broken link. By the skin of our teeth we kept the blog alive … so that every post and comment made at the blog is still online for readers to view and comment on.

The advocates who have shunned and reviled me — let God be their judge. If they have clubbed together to shun me, will not their judgement be even more severe? Let few be teachers, for teachers will be receive a stricter judgement (James 3:1).

Its fine for advocates to expose abusers in churches, but when an advocate turns out to be an abuser, what happens? Advocates did not remain silent when so-called advocate Jon Uhler (Church Protect) lorded it over victims and betrayed Jimmy Hinton. Advocates did not remain silent when so-called advocate Jennifer Michelle Greenberg threatened Dee Parsons who runs The Wartburg Watch. But when Jeff bullied and betrayed me, advocates went silent, or they joined with Jeff in vilifying me.

Despite Jeffs prophecy that I would go off the rails and be teaching weird heresy, I have not. No one has presented solid evidence to show that I am teaching heresy. Instead of presenting reasoned arguments that challenge my teachings, they just slander me and shun me. Ironically, the only person who challenged something I have written and caused me to revise what wrote has been Sister! (see here)

Sister published her first article Jeff Crippen is Unsafe in 2019. Although I agreed with most of it when it was published, Sister had labelled Jeff as a wolf in that article and I was reluctant to accept that as an appropriate label.

I did not publicise Jeff Crippen is Unsafe in 2019, because I knew that some people (especially those who ganged up against me) would assume I was giving Sisters article publicity in order to get revenge on Jeff for what he had done to me. I was afraid of being publicly persecuted again. I was afraid of being sneered at by all the people who had ganged up against me on the ACFJ Facebook page when Jeff reviled me there in Sept 2018 (link).

More than a year has passed since then. When Chris contacted me, what he / she told me intensified my belief that Jeff Crippen is unsafe. Before Chris contacted me I had known that Jeff had been a duplicitous bully towards me but Id been making allowances for him and praying that his treatment of me was a somewhat isolated incident. Furthermore, I was aware that some survivors of abuse get help from the blogs which he started after resigning from the ACFJ blog. I was doing my best to wish his followers and him and TWBTC well and striving to keep my hurt feelings to myself.

Over the years, some survivors of intimate partner abuse (both male and female) had told me they felt hurt and gravely mistreated by Jeff. I did not discount their testimony — I was keeping it in mind — but I was still reluctant to call Jeff a definite wolf. Perhaps I was being too nice. I was still struggling with my own hurt feelings about Jeff, and my hurt feelings from being maligned and shunned by so many other advocates.

Sister and Chris conversed a lot, and Sister drafted her article Tillamook Speaks. I have been privy to some of that process. When Sister shared with me more of Chriss story, with some screen shots of Chriss diary entries, I became REALLY angry at Jeff for how he has treated the people of Tillamook. Chriss story removed that last vestige of reluctance I had to call Jeff a wolf.

I ask all the people of Tillamook who have been mistreated by Jeff to forgive me. Please forgive me for not being a person you might have wanted to reach out to for support. Please forgive me for promoting Jeff for so long. Please forgive me for having been deceived by Jeff.

I also apologise to the individuals who told me they felt hurt and mistreated by Jeff. One of them was a male survivor of intimate partner abuse; he told me a very credible account of how Jeff had treated him as a probable abuser. I am pretty sure I responded by email to each of those peoples disclosures, but I did not publicly do anything about it. I let it sit on the back burner. Please forgive me.

My shame

I have had to work through feelings of shame that I was ever a colleague and co-worker with Jeff. Shame that I felt so thrilled when he first contacted me asking for permission to quote a paragraph of my book Not Under Bondage in his book A Cry For Justice. Shame that I felt like a Deborah who had found her Barak. Shame that I was deceived by (yet another) abuser! Shame that I helped edit and publicise the written work of a spiritual abuser. Shame that he managed to publicly persecute me in the end. And shame that I felt such deep shame — I could not slough it off. Parts of me still cannot.

Those feelings of shame were a bit like the shame a woman feels when she discovers that her ex-husband has been sexually abusing their daughter on visitation. I know a woman whom that happened to. She told me she felt deep shame thinking about the fact that for years she had shared a bed (been one flesh) with a child molester. Even though the man only became a child molester after they had separated, she felt contaminated by his evil perversion.

I intend to write a short caveat about Jeff Crippen to put at the top of every post by Jeff Crippen on this blog. That is the least I can do to make amends.

Suffering and the Heart of God by Diane Langberg — Review by BarbaraRoberts

Barbara Roberts 5th September 2021 19 Comments

Diane Langberg doesnt seem to believe there are people whose father is the devil — so she doesnt seem to understand the mind of the sociopath. In her book Suffering and the Heart of God: How Trauma Destroys and Christ Restores (New Growth Press, 2015), she writes as if all people have active consciences and every person feels bad when their conscience pricks them.

She depicts the abuser as self-deceived, rather than as an intentional liar. In my opinion she lets the abuser off the hook too easily, describing him as a victim of his own self-deception:

… the narcotic of self-deception has become so powerful in his life that he not only cannot stop lying; he does not even know when he is [lying] and has lost his capacity to tell truth from lies, good from evil. (p 225)

She comes across as something of a bleeding heart who thinks she has to have unlimited compassion for everybody, even predators.

Failure to love his [God’s] people, even his predatory shepherds, is a failure in my love for him. (p 310)

In my experience as a recipient of abuse (sexual, spousal, social and spiritual), I have spent a lot of time scrutinising my heart to see whether I have failed to sufficiently love the people who predated on me and the ones who favoured and cheered on my abusers. I have asked myself whether by failing to feel loving feelings for my abusers, I am a crummy Christian who does not love and revere God. That self-scrutiny drove me into morbid introspection, downwardly spiralling into a morass of confusion and self-condemnation.

The way to love predators is to expose their evildoing, confront it, resist it, call them to repentance (a call which the vast majority of predators will ignore), and exclude them fellowship. Cast them out. Avoid them. Report their crimes to the secular justice system if you feel safe to do so.

Let us read Langbergs assertion again:

Failure to love his [God’s] people, even his predatory shepherds, is a failure in my love for him. (p 310)

Its the kind of stuff the abuser will jump all over because it enables him to accuse those who confront him with his sins — (trigger warning): — You are not being loving! You are confronting me in an unloving manner! You are being judgemental!

Langberg appears to be writing primarily for an audience of professional counselors in this book. What she doesn’t seem to take into account is that victims may also be reading her book and will almost certainly be taking her sweeping statements personally. In my view, she has thereby failed in her duty of care for the abused.

Here are a couple more of her sweeping statements that would certainly sting victims of abuse:

Understanding one’s own production of sewage and the ensuing damage is vital. (p.45)
As I bow before God and allow him to produce his viewpoint in me, several things will result: First, I will know without question that evil is not just out there; it is also in here. I will never see the world as divided between “them and “us.” There is no “them because we are all “them. (p 95)

Langbergs phraseology is sin-levelling. She implies that the victim, the counselor, and the predator are all producing the same quantity of sewage, and all causing the same degree of damage to other people.

She asserts that an abusers bad behavior can be explained because he was probably victimized as a child (p. 51). This plays right into the myths that

the abuser isnt responsible for his own choicesthe abuser needs therapy because his problem is in his emotions (rather than his beliefs distorted thinking)

These myths, especially when they are articulated by respected Christian professionals, contribute to why victims stay so long in abuse. The victim is urged to think, I need to be more compassionate towards my husband. He must have suffered awfully in his childhood.

Furthermore, it seems to me that Langberg has a similarly muddled theology of shame to the one articulated by Justin and Lindsey Holcomb. She confuses shame and sin, and thus insufficiently distinguishes between false guilt and true guilt. On pp 138-9 she writes:

Jesus says, “I hid not my face from shame and spitting.” Hiding our faces is exactly what we want to do when we feel shame. Children know this instinctively. They run, hide in the closet, or they cover their faces when they feel shame. He did not hide; he despised it, hated it. Jesus spit on shame, considered it worthless, it carried no weight, no value. Jesus spit on being spit on. He scorned scorn. He diminished shame itself, one of the most diminishing agents of human beings. He shamed shame. He did not hide; he did not cover; he did not shrink. He hated shame and stared it straight in the face. And then he sat down at the right hand of the throne of God full of glory.
He despised shame and sat in glory. We are shamed and glory disappears. He faced shame and transformed it into glory. On the cross Jesus spits back, not on shameful humans, those warped, ruined, and twisted but still created in his image. No, he spits on the shame they spilled all over him, and he refused to let it define him, diminish him, or destroy his work and purpose. And what was that work and purpose? To change our shame into glory.
We are there with him, all of us bearing the shame of our sin and of the sins of others against us. …

Note: Where Diane Langberg wrote, Jesus says, “I hid not my face from shame and spitting.”, she seems to be quoting the KJV rendering of Isaiah 50:6 I hid not my face from shame and spitting. She did not state that she was quoting from the KJV there. The words Jesus said are Dianes, not Isaiahs. Her failure to tell her readers which Bible version she was using there has caused perplexity for at least one of my blog readers. See the comments thread. (This note was added by Barb on 6 Sept 2021.)

Note: I have not given this post the tag bad books, because we reserve that tag for books that we think are out-and-out bad. If I were to review Suffering and the Heart of God on Amazon, I would probably give it a three star rating because there are quite a number of good things in it. But because the ACFJ blog prioritizes the viewpoint and well-being of victims, I cannot include this book in our recommended resources. However, if you are a Christian counselor and you were to read the book with discretion, especially if you kept in the front of your mind the concerns I have raised here, you might gain quite a lot from the book.

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN TO MAKE A COMMENT. I love receiving comments at this blog. Even if you only write a few words, that will encourage me, because it will show me that you read my post.

***

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