No, I don’t have someone in particular in mind. But I do hate the preacher man. Hate him something fierce. And for a long time now.

I’d like to say it’s from long considered reasons, which are extensions of a long considered theology. While my reasons are long considered, the reasons are younger than the experiences. Without the experiences, there would be no reasons.

I want to say up front that I was never abused or molested. That’s not my story. To say I was spiritually abused, though, is close to the mark.

It’s also not the story of one bad preacher man who did this and did that. If that was the case, I should be further along getting over it than I am now.

My story runs in two streams, one a story of spiritual dysorientation, the other a story of five or ten bad preacher men over ten years. Let’s see how briefly I can tell them both.

Story one: My call. At summer camp at Oral Roberts University, I was told

• that being attracted even to the opposite sex was sinful
• that I needed to systematically excoriate myself for my sinfulness every day
• that I could maintain my manic “church camp high” by spending an hour or two every day in bible study and prayer
• that it was my job to trigger a global revival by starting a bible club in my school, and,
• most significantly, that I was called into the ministry, at the ripe old age of fourteen.

These are not the sorts of teachings that help a fourteen-year-old. They are the sorts of teachings that exacerbate a budding fourteen-year-old’s budding mental health issues. They might even be the sort of teachings that cause mental health issues.

I’ll let singer-songwriter Claire Holley sum it up for me and move on:

When I was a little child
The preacher told me lies
And I won’t forgive him now
I can’t forgive him now
Cause I was lost but now I can see
But love never came to me

Story two: A bad run. There was the preacher man who, through both ineptitude and guile, split our church, putting my mother’s church daycare director job in jeopardy, costing my father, a barber, well over a third of his business, and splitting my circle of friends. Then there was the district superintendent, a minister, who came into the crisis to standing up for the letter of denomination law instead of the spirit of reconciliation. And then the bishop who pushed the situation past where it was possible for the congregation to reconcile.

There was the university administrator, a minister, who threatened a friend’s scholarship because his youth director job kept him from making a Sunday sales call with him to another congregation. Then there was the minister who revoked my congregation’s support of my ordination candidacy because I was no longer a charismatic—and this is a mainline, non-charismatic denomination. There was the preacher who continually held my mother over the fire because he was ashamed her wildly successful church daycare brought more money into the church than his pledge drive. And then the much admired minister who—for the third time, it turned out—cheated on his wife with a parishioner.

Then, in seminary, there was the minister who confessed to me that he had trouble being nice to people and who accused me, in coffee hour, in front of a parishioner, of stealing his shirts. (I am two sizes bigger than him.)

A friend confronted me not too long ago about my bile toward clergy-types. I want to put all this out there as a way of explanation. This is where I’m coming from. I don’t trust any of you preacher men. I’ve just known too damn many of you.

But then there’s a third story.

Story three: The good eggs. There’s the children’s minister who did more than anyone to make my childhood congregation my extended family. There’s the minister who, though he split that congregation, let me swim in his pool every day of the summer and who treated my little brother and I like beloved nephews.

There’s the youth minister who knew me since I was eight and who chose to see past my adolescent foibles to bring the twenty-something me into the larger youth director fold. There was the minister I worked for who apologized to me when he was an ass. And there was the minister who trusted me to do my job even when he found out we had profound theological differences.

There was the campus minister who took me into his confidence and treated me like a colleague, who put up with my afternoon naps and snoring just outside his office, and who gave us all shit for idolizing the Indigo Girls. There was the seminary professor, a minister, who told me I didn’t have to get ordained or get a PhD unless I couldn’t keep from it. And the contextual education director, a minister, who, when I came to him to confess my sins of unorthodoxy, asked me, “Why do you have to be orthodox?”

From now on, I’ll try to listen to the third story more than the second. The first story is in my bones; I can’t leave it behind any more than I can leave behind my childhood. But I’m learning to claim what it gave me and how it gave me my greatest strengths and weaknesses. I hope to write more about that later.