My times in the church as an adult seemed to revolve around youth ministry, and falling in love with fellow youth warriors. The next guy was a fellow youth leader as well. We will call him Andy (short for Andrew. His mom HATED when we didn’t use his given name. Though this isn’t his real name, I did have to come up with one that I could shorten into a common nickname for people named Andrew).
The church that I left my childhood church for was part of the SBC denomination. I wasn’t originally going to actually go to this church because I was burned out, and just wanted to enjoy being in my early 20s with my friends, doing life together, and finding God together. My best friends and I had started going to the young adults group that the pastor was holding. It wasn’t actually part of the church, but we used one of the basement rooms for our group. I’m not going to go into details about my time in that hell hole of a place after I became a member, and was fully involved. What is relevant? Eventually, I jumped back into the youth ministry a year, give or take a few months, after I started actually going to that church.
I got on board in a November.
Fast forward a couple of months, and our youth group was going through “Crazy Love” by Francis Chan. We were meeting in the upstairs apartment above the church. I walked in for our study that night, and there was this super cute new guy. He was immediately on my radar. He was from the IFB church across the street, and was checking out the youth group to potentially become a new leader. He was like one of my ideal types: blonde hair, gorgeous blue eyes, kind of stocky and thick in the right places, was super nice, funny, and had this charm about him. Within the next month he joined the youth leader ranks.
The point people for our youth ministry was a couple who had just gotten married, were allowed to live in the apartment above the church in exchange for their leadership of the youth ministry. It became too much, and reasonably so, y’all. They were the first casualties in this crazy-ass ministry and church. The things expected of them were ridiculous. So they moved on, and the pastor had agreed to let Andy take over as the main youth leader. Me and my friend were the leaders who had been around the kids the longest though.
God, it’s hard to leave the church happenings out of this because they are all so intertwined with this fucked up thing that I had with Andy.
Antyway, during these couple-few months, Andy and I were becoming fast friends. I thought this was going to definitely turn into a relationship because we had the same life plans: youth ministry, and starting a therapeutic horse riding program. Y’all. Seriously that had been my dream since I was 13 years old, and to find someone else with the exact same life dream?! Um, hello! Meant. To. Be. Like he said this was his dream, the therapeutic riding thing, one night, and I went home to write it down in my journal and pray over it. I couldn’t believe this shit. He showed me the attention that I craved, and I ate it up. He was younger than me by like 4 years, but I’m not afraid of no age gap...obviously; the guy before Andy was fucking 17 years older than me.
I remember deferring to his authority in the first few months of this “relationship” because I knew that if we were to be together this was something I would be required to do. Might as well start then! It completely pissed my friends off because they saw right through this dude, and knew that he was completely leading me on. Because, see, he knew that I liked him a lot, and LOVED that he knew he had me, but wouldn’t have an actual defined relationship that would lead to marriage with me.
The church installed him as the youth pastor. My fellow youth leader, and best friend, stepped down from the ministry because she recognized him for the toxic person he was, and his toxic beliefs about damn near everything related to Christianity and ministry. My other friend confronted him about his fucked up relationship with me, and him leading me on. I told her to back off because this was going to happen (she was dead on btw). The friend who was in youth ministry with us, and left, accused me of only being in the ministry because of him.
I had isolated myself from my friends (who were also my roommates) because of some house drama, and I just felt like they were leaving me out of so much stuff. I was also avoiding them though. I started spending all of my time with Andy, a few of our students, and a couple of our 20-something friends. I was using them to avoid my actual best friends. My grandma was sick and died that summer. Andy was there all the gahtdamb time through her stay in the hospital before the surgery, and then when she passed. I leaned on him, and didn’t really let my other friends in.
When the other youth leader/best friend stepped down, it was just Andy and I. We were, “separate but equal” leaders according to the pastor. Andy had the title and the money, and I didn’t because I was a woman (Y’all. I know). The pastor spun this in such a way that he assured me that this was only to give incentive to having a leader stay committed to the ministry for more than a few months. I believed him, and plugged away at my responsibility as the second in command of the YG. Because we were the only two though, Andy and I were together constantly. So my feelings only grew. He showed me special attention not only because I was the other youth leader, but also because he loved the non-relationship relationship that we had. I did too. It was my ideal thing, but he just would not actually commit to me, and move us forward.
As things were getting more and more strained with my best friends/roommates it just drove me to spend more time at the church building. I was there almost every day for either a youth thing, to just hang out with Andy and a couple of my other friends, worship practice, our young adults group that managed to not die off (even though it should have...), to study, and to just escape the reality of my other relationships. They were really suffering because of other drama, and all of this shit. I was extremely avoidant, and Andy offered me the escape that I thought that I needed.
In the meantime, I was a bomb-ass youth leader. I LOVED my kids. Loved them to pieces. To clarify, I was actually not in youth ministry for Andy. I was in it for my kids. However, I took advantage of the time and relationship we had as leaders. Again, I thought it was this dream of what I wanted my life to look like being fulfilled. God was finally blessing me with the future husband I had been begging for since I was little.
But it wasn’t.
During all of this time, I was asking the pastor who labeled himself as the “doctor of love” and also happened to be my counselor so he heard EVERYTHING about this fucked up relationship I had with Andy, to please convince Andy to make a move. The pastor had influence, but he refused to use it here. Side note: he did try to use it with another relationship he wanted me to get into, and I will write about that soon. Because that is also SUPER fucked up.
This is bringing up so many feelings, and I know I’m going to have some emotional whiplash for the next few days because this was a really, really ugly time in my life. This church, the lead pastor, and Andy were the spiritual abuse perpetrators. Again, it’s so hard to separate out the tale of this unavailable dude relationship because all of this is just so intertwined.
Antyway, the longer I was there, the more frustrated and hurt I was getting because I really thought I could see how perfect we were for each other. Why did he not see this? Why was he still showing me all of this attention? Why did we have the benefits of the emotional relationship, and the space in each other’s lives, but not the actual relationship? I just couldn’t understand. I had changed myself so much. I had replaced my friends and family with him and this church. What was wrong with me? I wasn’t changing enough. So I tried to change more to become the woman I thought he would want me to be.
Until one day I ran smack into the wall of his misogyny. Short story: Andy asked his grandpa to lead our youth group during the week he was taking a short class at a Bible college. It was a disaster. At this point I had been in the kids’ lives for about two years. I knew them, I knew my Bible shit, I knew how to lead the shit of that group, I knew they loved learning by discussion (which I was best at), and I knew the things going on in their lives. However, he didn’t let me do my job. (BTW, y’all, all of this was volunteer work for me). Because I was a woman. This was the beginning of the end. I was devastated, and so, so incredibly angry. It was a slap in the face: “Well because you’re a woman. In the Bible, boys were considered men at age 12.” I couldn’t have ANY authority over the boys in our group. Because woman.
This was the beginning of the end, both with my relationship with him, and my time at that godforsaken church.
I started studying everything I could about women in ministry, drew on what I knew from my previous denomination (AG. Women could be pastors), and started reading Rachel Held Evans and Nadia Bolz-Weber. They were my lifelines at that point in time. Following them led me to the Progressive side of Christianity. I started getting more and more rebellious as I was pulling away from Andy, and trying to navigate what was going on with the youth group. Remember how I was supposed to be a “separate but equal” leader? Well, because I was getting more and more “rebellious,” they brought in another youth leader, who was extremely problematic, without even telling me. She was taking my place in the ministry, but the kids and their parents HATED her. She was also taking my space in Andy’s life. He started showing her the attention he had previously showed me. It was like a double slap in the face.
One day, not so long after all of this went down, he and I had a meeting. Since I had started to rebel, act out, and stopped submitting to his authority he thought he needed to have a talk with me to reign me back in. At one point he asked me, “Do you even want to get married?” I was pissed, indignant, and incredulous. Uh, yeah, at one point I wanted to marry his ass. I said, “Um, of course.” He quoted Ephesians, wives submit to your husbands. I brought up the second part of that, husbands love your wives as Christ loves the church. As someone who hated taking things out of context, Andy sure didn’t like it when I brought up the whole gahtdamb passage. Essentially pushing back against him, and showing him I wasn’t going to put up with that shit anymore.
That was one of the last straws. I stayed at that church way longer than I should have, and still held onto the hope that somehow Andy would change his mind. We continued to gradually grow apart. The damage was done, and I was waking up to just how fucking toxic that “relationship” was. How toxic the church was. How fucking toxic the pastor was, and his unwavering support for Andy.
I was getting more and more progressive, and wanted less and less to do with his dictatorship that was the youth ministry. The kids had stopped coming because he was fucking them up, and spiritually abusing them. He was spiritually and emotionally abusing/manipulating me, and I was being physically threatened/abused by my brother at home after I had to move back in with him and my mom. I didn’t want to expose the kids to my new Progressive, subversive beliefs. They needed to figure out their relationship with God themselves, and I just didn’t need the push-back I would have gotten, the ousting I would have gotten, if I started teaching them what I was learning about a new way of believing in God. It was a super rough time, and I was losing the support and closeness Andy had offered me for the last two years.
The final straw? Telling Andy and the pastor about my brother’s abuse. The pastor basically said I was SOL, and to move even though I didn’t have the money to do so. The apartment above the church was empty, but they wouldn’t let me stay there. Andy told me to serve my brother more, and submit more. In that, he would see Christ, and probably stop abusing me.
I was a fucked up mess. I left the church in February of 2014, and severed ties with Andy not long after that.
Andy decided to go to school down in the Christian capital of the US, where a lot of denoms have their world headquarters, and their main colleges (you know the city I’m talking about. It’s in the state just to the east of mine). His major? Nouthetic counseling. He was off to fuck up more people.
He stopped talking to just about damn near everyone back here in KS.
Until a year and a half ago when I saw his parents at Walmart one Sunday afternoon. I KNEW his asshole mom was going to mention that she ran into me. Sho nuff. A couple of weeks later, he messaged me on Facebook. He was trying to just waltz back into my life like nothing had happened, and we hadn’t talked in a couple of years. After a terse reply to his, “Hey how are you?” He asked, “Are you mad at me?”
This is what I told him:
“No, I really can't say that I am mad at you. At one point, I was, and I'm not really willing to go into details about that, but I've moved on. Two years is a long time, and in those two years I have completely had to deconstruct everything about myself, and build myself back up. I have worked SO hard, in the last two years, to become the Deandra I am right now. I love who I am now, and I will fight for who I am now.
Which means: You are not welcome in my life. Andy, you were a very unhealthy part of my past, and not really welcome in my present or future.”
I haven’t heard from him since. I hope I never do. This “relationship” fucked me up good, and it has taken me a few years to heal.
But. I am healing. I also recognize that I am drawn to people like this Andy and Scot. I am addicted to relationships like this.
I have one more story in this series. This one about my most recent attempt—the actual “relationship” that brought all of this unhealthy unavailable men series to life. Because I finally recognized this pattern, and need to do something about it.
Also, I did end up telling more about my time at that church than originally planned. But oh well. It’s just all so entwined anyway.
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