Who Does Your Church Protect in a Crisis?
"You're up next Sunday. I'm stepping down immediately due to addiction and I need to get help."
My husband got that email from our lead pastor on a Sunday afternoon. He was the executive pastor at our church at the time, and I was a key volunteer, essentially unpaid staff.
We were completely blindsided. Within the hour we'd switched into crisis management mode, and there was so much to do. Plans to put in place, decisions to make. And the whole time, the thing at the top of our minds was protecting the pastor and his family.
We were a church plant, so our mother church put a support team around them right away, people to help them process what they were going through. That also meant they had no contact with the staff or the congregation, other than a few planned and structured meetings, moderated by one or more members of their support team.
Which left the rest of us to pick up the pieces without much information. My husband and I were in our mid-thirties, and the rest of our staff were young adults. We didn't have answers for our church family. We couldn't give them clarity. The only thing we could really do was grieve alongside them.
I want to be clear that nobody was looking for gossip. We just didn't have any context, and there was never any real closure.
Looking back, the signs had been there for a while. Our staff, and especially my husband and I, had a habit of protecting our lead pastor, the way some families protect the patriarch. We didn't question him or push back, and we looked past things that didn't sit right. It all just seemed normal.
So when the crisis hit, we didn't suddenly start doing something new. We did what we'd always done, just at a much more intense level.
What happens when a whole church panics?
If you've been around therapy at all, you've probably heard of fight, flight, and freeze. There's also a fourth: fawn. These are the ways our nervous system reacts when it senses danger.
What I didn't understand back then is that churches do this too.
In fight mode, a congregation defends the leader and its reputation. Questions feel like attacks, and whoever asks them becomes the problem. Flight is the rush to move on. "Let's not dwell on this." A new sermon series arrives before anyone has had a chance to grieve.
Freeze is silence. Leaders go quiet, and the people in the pews are left to fill in the blanks. Fawn is appeasing. Keeping the leader okay becomes everyone's job, even when they aren't okay themselves.
That was me. I fawned.
I kept trying to make things easier for him. I left him voicemails and sent updates to keep him in the loop. It was a one-sided conversation, and I never heard back from him. I kept reaching out anyway. I held so much space for his feelings that I didn't leave any for my own. I didn't let myself admit how hard it was for our staff to walk a whole congregation through grief over something we didn't create.
Nobody decided any of this in a meeting. It was a reflex, the same way your body reacts before your mind has time to think.
That's why it's so hard to catch. From the inside, these reactions don't feel like panic. They feel like the responsible thing to do. Sometimes they even feel like love.
Why do good people protect the institution instead of the wounded?
For a long time, I thought what happened came down to individual choices: who knew what, who should have said something, who missed it. Family systems theory helped me see it differently.
Psychiatrist Murray Bowen noticed that a family behaves less like a group of separate people and more like one emotional unit. When one person gets anxious, everyone feels it. And when anxiety sticks around, the family starts caring about one thing above all else: getting back to calm.
Someone usually pays for that calm, and it's often whoever is easiest to quiet. The person asking hard questions. The one whose pain makes everyone uncomfortable.
Edwin Friedman, a rabbi and family therapist, saw congregations fall into the same patterns. A church can be just as quick as a family to protect its balance over its people.
That idea was a big shift for me. Harm doesn't need a villain. We didn't have one. We had good people doing what anxious systems do. We protected our leader and didn’t speak up for what we needed. In my case, I fawned, because it felt like keeping him okay would keep all of us okay.
So how do you notice this while it's happening?
What does institutional anxiety actually look like?
Anxious systems don't announce themselves. From the inside, they can look like loyalty or even spiritual maturity. If you're a pastor or a leader, here's what to watch for.
"Unity" starts ending conversations. Unity is a good thing. But if "we need to stay unified" is the answer to every concern, the concern is getting shut down, not resolved.
The person who raises a concern becomes the problem. Someone speaks up, and soon the conversation is about their tone or their loyalty instead of what they said. This is scapegoating. The system manages its anxiety by putting it on one person.
People talk about each other instead of to each other. Tension between two people gets pulled toward a third. Bowen called this triangulation. It relieves pressure for a while, but the real issue never gets dealt with.
A few people are quietly carrying everything. Staff and volunteers keep smoothing things over for the leader. That often comes from real dedication. But when a church depends on a few people over-functioning, something usually isn't being named.
Secrecy gets labeled as protection. Some things should stay confidential. But protecting someone's dignity is different from keeping a whole congregation in the dark.
Every church does some of this some of the time. What matters is whether it has become the pattern, because then the anxiety has to go somewhere.
Where does the anxiety go when leaders don't deal with it?
Anxiety in a system doesn't disappear. It moves downhill, toward the people with the least power and the least information.
For us, that was a mostly young staff who had to face the congregation week after week without answers, and a congregation trying to grieve something nobody could really explain to them.
The people at the top were protected. The people further down took the hit.
Psychologist Jennifer Freyd's work helped me with the question I've struggled with most: how did we miss the signs?
She calls it betrayal blindness. When seeing a problem would put something we rely on at risk, whether that's a relationship, a job, or a community, part of us learns not to see it. It's a form of self-protection.
That made a lot of sense to me. We loved our church, and we loved our pastor. Our jobs, our friendships, and our faith were all tied up in that place. Of course part of us didn't want to see what was happening.
Freyd's research also shows that when an institution lets down the people who depend on it, the hurt often goes deeper than the original event. People are hurt again by how the system responds. That's where leaders have the most power to help.
What does a less anxious church look like?
Bowen called the opposite of all this differentiation. It means staying close to people without getting swallowed up by their anxiety. You can care about someone deeply and still know where they end and you begin.
When I look back, that's what I was missing. When I was fawning, I lost myself in his feelings. A more differentiated version of me could have cared for him and still said, "This is really hard for us too."
Friedman called leaders like this a non-anxious presence. They're steady enough that others can borrow some of that steadiness.
In a crisis, that starts with telling the truth you're able to tell. When there are things you can't share, say so, and say why. "We can't discuss the details out of respect for his family's privacy" feels very different than silence. People can live with limits. What's hard is being left to guess.
You don't have to choose between caring for your leader and caring for your people. Make it safe to ask questions, even the ones you can't answer yet. And notice who's carrying the weight. Ask how they're really doing, and mean it.
If you're a pastor or elder and you see your own church in this, getting caught in an anxious system doesn't make you a bad leader. It happens to almost everyone. Noticing it now is where change starts.
What would I tell us now?
"You're up next Sunday."
I still think about that line. I think about my husband reading it that Sunday afternoon, and about everything that came after.
If I could go back, I'd ask for a system steady enough to hold more than one person's pain at a time. Our pastor and his family needed care. So did the rest of us.
Our staff was confused and exhausted, and we felt alone in it. We needed a professional therapist to help us work through our own grief; someone who could look at us and say, "You didn't cause this. Your hurt matters too. You don't have to carry this by yourselves."
Our whole church was reeling, too. Everyone was hurting and trying to find their way through it as a church family, and honestly, we could have used outside help. I'd want our congregation to hear, "Here's what we can tell you, and here's what we can't and why. Your questions are welcome here, and so is your grief." And I'd want them to have someone trained to walk them through the loss together.
And I'd want to gently tell myself that caring for our pastor and caring for myself were never opposites. I was allowed to feel all of it.
We didn't have the language for any of this back then. I do now, and I've seen that anxious systems really can change. Usually it starts with one leader who is willing to stay steady, honest, and connected when everyone in the room wants to panic.
By Cindy Park, LPC
Cindy is a Licensed Professional Counselor who helps adults better understand themselves and the patterns that shape the way they think, feel, and relate to others. She enjoys helping people connect the dots between their past experiences and present struggles so they can respond to themselves and others in healthier ways.
When she’s not counseling or writing, Cindy enjoys good coffee, sharing good food with her family, and making handmade cards.
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