Hurt People Do Not
Just Hurt People.
They Find Places
Where Hurting People
Is Called Leadership.

The first three articles in this series have examined the wound, where it forms, how rejection and invisibility and powerlessness drive people toward positions of spiritual authority, how the need to be seen, to control, to be chosen, finds its most efficient expression in a room full of people who are theologically conditioned to follow, that examination is necessary. It is also incomplete, because the wounded leader did not arrive in a vacuum. He arrived in a system, and the system welcomed him, elevated him, protected him, and in many cases celebrated him. Right up until the moment the damage became impossible to ignore, and then, in too many cases, the system protected him some more.

This final article is not about the leader. It is about the institution that made the leader possible, that is a harder conversation, because pointing at an individual, even a harmful one. Is emotionally satisfying in a way that examining a system never quite is. Systems do not have faces. They do not make decisions in the way individuals do. They are not accountable in the way individuals can be held accountable, and yet the system is where the damage is actually produced, at scale, across decades, across denominations, across geography. Individual wounded leaders come and go, the system that welcomes them persists.

The Scale of What This Has Cost

40MAmericans have left houses of worship over the past 25 years, the largest religious exodus in the nation's history.Research consistently identifies relational harm, not theological doubt, as the primary driver, the wound did not stay in one church. It traveled. It replicated. It produced, across the American religious landscape, a generation of people who know exactly what it feels like to have been hurt in a building that told them the hurt was their fault.. Pew Research Center; Barna Group longitudinal data, 2024Share on

Forty million people, that number is not the result of forty million individual bad pastors making forty million individual bad choices. It is the result of a system that was built, largely without awareness of what it was building, to produce exactly this outcome, not the exodus. Nobody designed the exodus, but the conditions that made the exodus predictable, the structures that took a wounded person and handed them a pulpit and a congregation and told them, through every institutional signal available, that their authority was from God and their accountability was to themselves.

The Four Pillars of a System That Protects the Wound

DeGroat's clinical research identifies structure, shame, and control as the three core elements of narcissistic church systems. I want to name four specific structural features of American evangelical church culture that do not merely allow wounded leadership to persist. They actively reward it, protect it, and make it nearly impossible to confront until the damage has already become catastrophic.

1. 01The celebrity pastor modelSomewhere in the latter half of the twentieth century, the American evangelical church decided that the pastor was a brand, the sermons were a product, the church was, in many functional ways, an audience gathered around a personality. This was not entirely without precedent. Charismatic preaching has always drawn crowds, but the scale and the intentionality of what emerged was something different: a full institutional apparatus organized around making a single person as visible, as influential, and as culturally prominent as possible. Books, conferences, podcasts, social media platforms, campuses bearing a single name, the celebrity model does not select for holiness. It selects for charisma, for certainty, for the kind of confident self-presentation that wounded people are often extraordinarily good at producing, and it provides those people, once elevated, with a cultural position that is almost impossible to challenge without being framed as an enemy of the mission.
2. 02Numerical growth as spiritual validationThe church that is growing must be doing something right. This is one of the most dangerous assumptions in contemporary American Christianity, not because growth is bad, but because the equation of growth with godliness creates a system in which the very metric used to evaluate ministry health is one that wounded leaders are often exceptionally capable of producing in the short term. Narcissistic leadership is, in the early stages, often genuinely compelling, the charisma that draws a crowd, the certainty that gives people direction, the grand vision that makes followers feel part of something important. Attendance goes up. Buildings get built, the numbers confirm the anointing, and the institution looks at the numbers and decides that whatever is producing them must be protected, the wound gets baptized as fruitfulness, and the people who are beginning to experience the cost of that wound are told, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, that their concerns are less credible than the attendance figures.
3. 03Loyalty culture as a substitute for accountabilityThe research on narcissistic systems identifies the requirement of loyalty as one of the earliest and most reliable warning signs, in a healthy institution, loyalty and accountability coexist. You can be genuinely committed to the mission and the community and still raise a concern, still push back, still ask a hard question, in a wound-driven system, these things become mutually exclusive. Loyalty requires silence in the face of problems. Accountability becomes framed as betrayal, the language used to enforce this is almost always spiritual, the person who raises a concern is divisive, is being used by the enemy, is operating in a spirit of Absalom, is undermining the vision God has given the leader. These are not theological claims. They are the wound using theology as enforcement, and they work, reliably, because the people in the congregation genuinely love the community they have built and genuinely fear what raising a concern might cost them.
4. 04Structural absence of external accountabilityThis is the feature that turns all the others from serious problems into catastrophic ones, in many independent and nondenominational churches, and in a significant number of denominational ones. There is no meaningful external accountability structure for the senior leader. Elder boards appointed by the pastor and reporting to him. Financial oversight that exists on paper and functions as cover. Denominational structures that intervene only after the damage has become a legal matter or a public scandal, the wound that needs protection from scrutiny finds, in these structures, not merely a cultural environment that discourages challenge. It finds a legal and organizational environment that makes challenge almost structurally impossible. Nobody is required to check, the systems that would require checking were never built, and so the wound operates, year after year, with the full institutional weight of the church behind it and nothing meaningful in front of it.

The People Who Enabled It, and Why They Are Part of This Too

Research Finding

"Whole church systems and programs evolve within the waters of narcissism, and when it is the water you swim in, it is hard to see and even harder to confront, a narcissistic church system will not automatically be fixed by removing a single person."

Chuck DeGroat, When Narcissism Comes to Church, Western Theological Seminary, 2020.Share on

The elders who knew and said nothing, the staff members who saw and stayed quiet, the board that received complaints and managed them rather than investigating them, the denominational leaders who got the calls and chose institutional protection over congregational care. These are not villains in any simple sense. They are people who were operating inside the same system, who had been formed by the same loyalty culture, who faced the same implicit threats for raising concerns, who genuinely believed, in many cases, that protecting the institution was protecting the people inside it.

But they are part of the system, and the reckoning the church needs, if it is actually going to stop producing this outcome. Has to include them, not to assign blame in a way that produces more shame and more defensiveness, but because the wound never operates alone. It requires protectors. It requires people who will absorb the discomfort of what they are seeing rather than act on it. It requires an institutional culture that makes the cost of speaking up feel higher than the cost of staying silent, and wherever that culture exists, the wound will find it and use it.

"The wound never operates alone. It requires a system willing to protect it, and a culture that makes the cost of speaking up feel higher than the cost of watching people get hurt."

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What Genuine Kingdom Authority Actually Requires of the System

The Genesis framework I work from is clear that authority in any domain. Including the church. Is always downward-facing and always accountable, the image-bearer exercises dominion as a steward, not as a sovereign. Stewardship requires accounting. It requires the ability to be questioned about what is being done with what has been entrusted, a leader who cannot be questioned is not exercising Kingdom authority. They are exercising something the Kingdom framework does not recognize, regardless of the theological language being used to describe it.

This means that the reform the church needs is not primarily a matter of finding better individual leaders, though individual leaders matter enormously. It is a matter of building the structural conditions in which wounded leaders cannot operate unchecked, in which the people who raise concerns are protected rather than punished, in which numerical growth is one data point among many rather than the primary evidence of divine favor, and in which the question "how is this leadership affecting the people in its care?" is asked regularly, independently, and with genuine authority to act on the answer.

The framework I explore in my book argues that genuine connection across difference requires both parties to be genuinely other to each other, to have distinct identities, distinct perspectives, and the freedom to bring both into relationship without one collapsing into the other. Healthy church community is built on exactly this, the leader who is genuinely other to the congregation, who is accountable to structures that exist independently of their own approval. Is the leader who can actually serve the people in their care rather than using them, the congregation that is genuinely other to the leader, that has the freedom to disagree, to question, to hold the leader accountable without losing their place in the community. Is the congregation that can actually flourish rather than simply survive.

"The system that hurt you was not inevitable. It was built, and what is built can be unbuilt, redesigned, and replaced with something that actually serves the people it claims to be for, that work belongs to everyone who was inside it, the ones who led, the ones who followed, and the ones who knew and said nothing."

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What This Means for You

If you are the person who was hurt, who walked into a building looking for God and found a system organized around protecting a wound. This series has tried to give you something specific: not a reason to excuse what happened, but a framework for understanding it fully enough to stop carrying it as evidence of your own failure.

You were not too trusting. You were not naive. You were not spiritually immature for missing what was happening until it had already cost you something significant. You were inside a system that was designed, at multiple levels, to make the wound invisible until the damage was already done, the leader's wound was real, the institutional structures that protected it were real, and the harm you experienced inside both of them was also real.

If you are a leader inside a system like this. An elder, a board member, a staff person who has seen things and stayed quiet. This series is also for you, the question is not whether you participated in the system. You did, because you were inside it, the question is what you are willing to do now with what you have seen. Accountability is not the enemy of the church, the absence of accountability is, and the people who were hurt inside the systems you were part of deserve more than your private regret. They deserve a public and institutional reckoning that actually changes what gets built next.

The church that God designed is not the system this series has described. It is something the wounded leader's system was always promising and never quite delivering, a community where people are genuinely known and genuinely safe, where authority serves rather than consumes, where the measure of health is not how many people are in the seats but how fully the people in the seats are becoming who they were made to be.

That church is possible. It has existed in fragments and seasons throughout history. It exists in places right now where people decided that the cost of genuine accountability was worth paying, and building it, or finding it, or rebuilding what was lost. Is the most important work available to anyone who has made it through the series you just finished reading.