Tony Jones on Mark Driscoll: What came first, the thug or the theology?

ReliStuPhD, yes I meant a thank you to brad/futuristguy for the research he’s doing and what he’s writing about spiritual abuse. I have no idea who he is other than what I’ve read here, one of his last posts actually…I haven’t read all 400 or so posts. I’ve skimmed through and read a lot, but not all. The Brad I think I might have met, is Brad Sargent. I was understanding that brad/futuristguy was maybe the two Brads (Cecil and Sargent) working together? Have I got it all wrong?

I didn’t say it, but hanks also to David Hayward for allowing this to happen here.

Anyway, for my story: I was involved in working with church planters over seas for 20 years. I was the “wife”, at home, with 5 kids. But I was invested in all we did, every bit as much as my husband (Wolfgang Fernandez). We were with DAWN Ministries (which no longer exists as such).

He had an affair, long term. He was forced to stop all ministry and go with me through intensive counseling because I eventually kicked him out of the house. He was denying the affair at this point, and our colleagues at DAWN were giving him the benefit of the doubt. During the counseling was when he finally confessed to the affair. He said he wanted to save our marriage. I “forgave” him and continued on with counseling with him. He continued on with his affair, all the time claiming that he was not seeing the woman anymore. This was a lie, He never stopped seeing her. After 3 years of waiting, I finally figured it out that he had no intention of stopping this relationship. I filed for divorce. He refused to file, because it was not “biblical”. He insisted I had the right to file for divorce because he was committing the adultery, but he did not have the biblical right to file. Even then, I knew his reasoning behind this was so that he could later claim that I was the one who wanted a divorce, and he was really trying to save the marriage all along. But at this point, I didn’t care anymore. He had told me to my face that the only way for us to save our marriage, was for me to accept that his mistress was his best friend. He would not end his “friendship” with her. And IF he ever happened to “slip up” again and have sex with her, then I would just have to forgive him again and again, each time.

He was fired the moment the affair became public. The leadership at DAWN did their best with the situation they had. There were a lot of lies we were all trying to wade through, so mistakes were made, but intentions were good on the part of the DAWN leadership.

I’ve worked through forgiveness, for my own sake. But I don’t trust a single word he says. Those are two different things.

I’m not here to vent, or to look for validation. This happened 12 years ago. I am very happily remarried to a wonderful man. (I had never really understood before what marriage could be!)

I share my story here because of what I have watched happen since I walked away from that marriage. I love the Church. I spent the first 20 years of my adult life ministering to and with church planters and pastors. Miraculously, God has kept that fire burning in me. But it kills me to see this cancer still growing. I get so angry when I see men like this continue on in ministry. There was never any repentance in my story. I don’t see repentance in these other stories I’ve read here. And yet after a little time goes by, these men are “welcomed back into the fold” as if nothing ever happened. Of the hundreds of pastors and leaders we worked with, only two ever came to me afterwards to ask if I ever saw repentance. All the others just welcomed this liar back into their fellowship and let him resume teaching because they wanted to believe his lies about his “repentance”. All his “repentance” ever was, was to admit he had an affair (after the fact of being caught in it), and say the words that he was sorry. He never stopped, not once. I tried to tell them this, but I was labeled the unforgiving, unstable ex-wife seeking revenge. Not in so many words. Not many said this to my face (only one), but their actions of welcoming him back while holding me off at a distance, spoke loud enough. In their defense, he traveled the world, meeting with each one face to face to tell his story of repentance, while I was a single mom stuck at home raising the 5 kids he left behind. So many of them never got to hear my side of the story, only his. But it’s not much of a defense, since this all happened in the age of the internet, where any one of them could have contacted me to find out the truth. For a few years I tried to get the truth out there, but it’s exhausting to not be believed, again and again. I could never figure this out….why was I the one being labeled as the bad guy, when clearly (and everyone knew) he had been lying for years? Why were they believing him and not me?

What hurts the most now, is not the failed marriage. I got over that. It’s a pity I wasted so many years of my life on him, and I hate that my kids all suffered so much, but I am happy to be out of that toxic relationship. What hurts tremendously still, is watching all those good people out there, whom I considered my best friends (leaders in the Church, world wide), who are still under his deception. Or maybe I’m naive….maybe it is all a big cover up and they are purposefully protecting him? I honestly don’t think so. I think they just all believed him, because who doesn’t want to believe that God can change a life dramatically? After all, these are people who I walked alongside as we talked of love and forgiveness and reconciliation…But what kind of reconciliation is it to choose one side because they are more beneficial to you, having the skills you need to promote your own agenda, while leaving the person on the other side lying in the dirt? Oh wait, I was useful to them too I guess….I could stay at home and care for all his kids while he continues to travel the world. But none of them needed the relationship with me anymore.

My story is long and complicated, like Julie’s and all the rest. Yeah, I got the line about having a spiritual wife, and I was only the legal wife. I could tell of things that would make your toes curl. And I’ll answer any questions honestly. But my point here is not to bring up a lot of old dirt from that marriage. It just to say that it IS all dirt. It’s lies built upon lies, and those who do their thing of “forgiveness and grace”, without looking hard at the facts, are perpetuation this cancer. That’s what makes me sick to my stomach.

I think that’s you, for one, Andrew Jones (perpetuating this cancer). I applaud you that you have had the guts to apologize to Julie here. And it must have been hard to cut off relationship with Doug Pagitt….but I can’t help but wonder, why do you do all that, yet it’s okay to keep up the buddy buddy status with Wolfgang Fernandez? Okay, forgive him for the past, but he’s always been a liar, still is. Is that really the kind of guy you want to hang out with and promote? Do you think that I’m the one lying when I say he never, not once, cut off the relationship with Vivien? Do you believe I would make up a story about him telling me that I would basically need to accept Vivien as his mistress in order for me to save our marriage? Do you honestly think he repented from any of that? The only “apology” I ever got from him was once as I was crying. He said he was “sorry”, and it was good for him “to see me cry”. I should “do it more often because it would help to heal”. (He never saw me cry agin. I made sure of that.) That happened just a few days after his big “deliverance” session in Spain with Wolfgang Simson and his friends. He had comeback to “re-build our marriage” but what no one knew at the time, was that he still had no intention of stopping the relationship with Vivien, he was just going through the motions for all of you and me. He was calling her again, the moment the plane hit the ground in Colorado.

So, why can’t you see that you are helping to spread this cancer by protecting people like this and presenting them as repentant and reformed? Why do you want to believe the liar, rather than the angry wife? Is anger in a situation like this wrong? I don’t think so. I freely admit that I’m angry that he gets away with lying to you all, and I am left with a pile of dead and defunct relationships. I’ve forgiven you for that (and all the others) but it doesn’t mean that the situation is okay. I’m also angry at you Andrew, that you went behind my back a couple of years ago, to make the arrangements to take my daughter on a gypsy trip across Europe, even after I found out and I pleaded with you to encourage her to stay at home for a few more months to get her stable on her new medication. Instead, you believed Wolfgang over me, again, (though he’s never the one who takes any of his kids to ANY doctor appointments), that there was nothing wrong with her, it was all just in my head. I’m also angry at you because I offered a place for your family to stay the last time you were in the states, weeks before you were going to be in my area. I told you to just let me know when. I never heard back from you…that is, until the morning of the day you wanted to come and crash….the SAME morning, it so happened, that I got out of the hospital; And when I told you it would be better if you continued on to Denver with your other friends, because I was just back from the hospital and not feeling too well yet, I never even heard back from you. No “thanks for the offer, even though it didn’t work out”. No concern for my health or what had happened. Maybe none of this is outright “abuse”, but I have defiantly been marginalized by you (and many others), because I’m obviously not as useful to you anymore. I keep holding out, I keep waiting, hoping that one day everything will come to light, and maybe you and some of these other people will realize what you’ve done and apologize. I don’t hate you. But I don’t trust you either. I know you’ve just had the wool pulled over your eyes….but I’m sure that if I was someone else, (other than “the angry ex-wife”) I wouldn’t have been treated so badly. And I have a hard time believing you can be so blind to it all. It’s time to wake up Andrew….wake up to ALL of it!

I am willing to answer your questions Andrew (privately if you want). That is, if you are ready to wake up and hear the truth.

Brad Cecil,

I went through each and every email from that time. I never called you first of all, that was a lie. I do not have one email from you. Not one. I emailed you leaders to tell you this thing was off rails. And, do you care? Your partner is off rails? You did not respond. No one responded but Mark saying I was “paranoid.” “Shouting into the hurricane.” The response? Mark Scandrette walking into my bedroom while I napping with my 3 year old, and in only a robe directing me to “pack a bag.”

ReliStuPhD, Lost Voice,

We will support you no matter how much or how little information you wish to reveal. (And there are quieter places to share with understanding people, if you want to share non-publicly.)

This is another human dignity often trampled by the church: the right to disclose as much or as little as you wish, and still be welcomed, encouraged, supported.

I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve looked back and thought “I wish I’d said: ‘No, you don’t need to know that.’”

Many people ask out of cluelessness or curiosity. Or a mistaken idea it will help.

But it’s so easy for excess information to be turned into a rod to beat people with…

Julie, in a post I now can’t find, you asked me if I was a member of AXXESS. No, the church I was with was not in the emergent movement,* just flirting with it (apparently quite literally for some). Tony came to speak to us and, as I said above, came across as an arrogant prick. (It’s actually a funny story because he was swinging his academic bona fides around, trying to impress, apparently unaware that the group he was speaking had an unusually high ratio of M.Div/Th.M./PhD members (over 50%)). He basically shot himself in the foot at the time, though some continued to flirt with the man’s ideas (in Perry’s case, with the actual man). The church is now “emergent.” :P

I hope you don’t mind that I’m not actually revealing the name of the church. I don’t think we were close enough to the movement to actually have had a part in this beyond simply being another place for Jones and Perry to have mingled, and I need to maintain some anonymity since I occasionally encounter those folks.

For clarity, because it has been asked of me to do so. Not sure what it proves…

1. I was at Christanity 21. I attended. First thing I attended that was connected to the other group of people known as Emergent. I had no clue of what Julie shared. There was no way for me to have known. I was there on my own. Did not know a lot of people. A handful would not even be accurate. All the people there, with the exception of 2 guys I know from The OOZE were there. Not sure what this proves??? But it was asked and since I was asked, here it is.

2. Yes, Tony and I had a major run in. Not giving details because the fact is, he did apologize. It seemed sincere. It helped me heal and moved on from it. Not sure what this has to do with anything either. I have not said any to slight him because I do not have a personal bone with him. My bone is with covering up abuses that have been done. I have not mentioned the persons responsible because I’m sure it is documented some where on the web. I could not say where but I know for a long while I did publicly say what happened. I am not using their names not mine because I have that right and the right to relate to others who have similar experiences.

So….there it is.