Farewell, AssemblyBoard

Most former members of the Assemblies of George Geftakys are familiar with the AssemblyBoard, a website where former members discussed their experiences in the Assemblies and the life adjustments they experienced after leaving the Assemblies. The AssemblyBoard was a very popular site during the first few years after the revelation in 2003 of the corruption of the Geftakys “ministry”. I found out a few weeks ago that the AssemblyBoard site has basically come to an end – that is, as of April of this year the board has been closed to new comments, although older posts are still being maintained for viewing. The board administrator stated that this was because “usage has tapered off dramatically and spam management was becoming more difficult.”

This is not surprising, and I saw it coming a long time ago. On a certain level it would have been inevitable, as a majority of former members moved on from their experiences in an abusive, corrupt church. But in my opinion, there were some things that hastened the AssemblyBoard's demise. Or at least they contributed to my disengagement from the board after a little while.

One of the hardest things to swallow was that there were certain contributors to the Board who were still acting out the “leader” or “honcho” roles they had enjoyed in the Assemblies. I think of one person in particular who assumed a role of “expert survivor and guide to the spiritually wounded,” who seemed to pride himself on being the “voice of reason,” and who therefore tended to disbelieve many of the stories of abusive leaders which were posted by former members from 2003 to 2005. Don't get me wrong – he was convinced that George Geftakys himself was a rotten egg, but he was not willing to believe that some of George's lieutenants were as rotten as they were being made out to be via the stories of our interactions with them. His message was thus: “After all, I knew these men. They always seemed to be reasonable to me. I never experienced the things that some posters are claiming.” This message was an invalidation of the experiences of many people who were severely jacked by the Assemblies. Further, it was an invalidation of the pain these people suffered, and therefore of the anger they felt.

There is an important point to be made about this anger. Anger is a very normal response to the experiences of betrayal, of violation, and especially of abuse of power by people in positions of authority. The Geftakys Assemblies were a violation of many lives, many souls who had been duped into believing that they were part of a God-ordained ministry that was selflessly pursuing the good and the right, and whose leaders were selfless defenders of the good and the right. In 2002 and 2003 we found out that we had actually been involved in one man's narcissistic empire of personal gratification, and that many of this man's deputies and lieutenants had taken on the same capricious, narcissistic characteristics of their head honcho. This explained the treatment we received from them.

So we got mad. What to do with that anger? After all, there was a “whole lotta anger out there.” Yet when we tried to express that anger on the AssemblyBoard, there were “reasonable” and “spiritual” posters who rose up and attacked our anger, describing it as “unspiritual” and telling us about the need to “forgive.” Their intentions may have been good, but their message was, “Your experiences weren't bad enough to justify all this anger.” In other words, their message was an invalidation of our experiences and of the pain of those experiences, the sense of violation that arose from those experiences. That was the wrong way to address this kind of anger.

Having gone through the abusive church experience, I believe that there is a process of working through the anger of being jacked by trusted authorities, of being jacked by power abusers. This process can't be rushed. Those who attempt to rush it run the risk of sending a message to an abuse survivor that his (or her!) experiences are not valid, and that his grievances are not valid. Or, in other words, that no wrong was committed by those who abused him. This is a terrible message.

A better approach for those who want to help power abuse victims would be to allow survivors to be angry (safely), watching to make sure that the anger does not express itself in destructive ways while acknowledging fully the awareness that people have been violated. This phase might take a long time to run its course, but that's okay. Let it run its course. The landing of the Space Shuttles provides an apt metaphor for this process. During landing, the avionics aboard the Shuttles get very hot, because the radiators that normally dissipate waste heat are unavailable. Once a Shuttle lands, ground-based carts must come alongside, hook up hoses and blow coolant into the Shuttle to cool off its avionics. If this doesn't happen, tens of thousands of dollars of computer hardware can get quickly fried. The heat can't be denied or swept under the rug – it must be allowed to dissipate. And it takes time. Similarly, survivors of spiritual abuse must be allowed to vent their anger until they can cool off. Don't put them into a Thermos bottle just because you think a little heat is unspiritual. As time passes, survivors can be steered toward activities designed to help them rebuild their lives. As the rebuilding proceeds, the sense of injury (hopefully) begins to fade, and the anger begins to resolve.

This safe venting of anger was what I was looking for when I was participating in the AssemblyBoard, along with help and suggestions for rebuilding my life from those who were a little farther along on the journey than I was. Unfortunately, I was disappointed by the advice of some of the self-styled “experts.” I think my disappointment was typical of many people who left the Assemblies around the same time I did, in early 2003.

Now I'm figuring out for myself how to rebuild my life. (Yes, the rebuilding is ongoing.) I don't get angry nearly as often as I did in the first several months after I left. Anymore, when I experience something that reminds me of the Assemblies, or I have a dream about some meeting or “seminar” or something like that, I tend to laugh a little to myself and remind myself that, like the Bob Dylan song, all that garbage is “one too many mornings, and a thousand miles away.” But I hope these words I have written serve as a warning and a bit of advice for others who are either running or participating in online discussions for survivors of spiritual abuse, or who are seeking to provide places of refuge for the victims of the American evangelical wasteland.

P.S. I want to commend Margaret Irons and her Reflections website. When it comes to ministering to the needs of survivors of spiritual abuse, I believe she nails it.

P.P.S. Some may notice that I take potshots at American evangelicalism, even though I have identified myself as an evangelical. I'm not sure that the term “evangelical” really describes me anymore. I do consider myself a fundamentalist – radically so. I believe that the Bible is the literal inspired Word of God, and that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and Lord of all. I can recite the Apostles' Creed and mean every word.

But my fundamentalism has led me to a hard Left turn politically regarding social, environmental and economic issues. Thus I am 180 degrees out of phase with many prominent figures in American evangelicalism and the American political Right. So watch out for that Bible – it's a dangerous book. Reading it might actually cause people to stop worshipping money and start doing good to their neighbors! ;)