Thanks to Blog on the Lillypad I’ve learned a great deal about the wrong kind of fundamentalism. I questioned some of the things I read at first because Jeri’s experience is so cult like and the Independent Fundamentalist Baptists are incredibly abusive toward her.
It is one thing to read “The Subtle Power of Spiritual Abuse” it is quite another to read the blogs of people who have been through it.

Jumping off the Lillypad I found an online book by a minister who came out of the same spiritually abusive background as Jeri. James Spurgeon is a minister who spend formative years in an abusive school. He has a blog and an online book entitiled Tales From The Temple.

The Grace Pages has a post to a former abusive pastor.

Throughout my whole time there I never once felt you thought you were a sinner like me, imperfect like me, weak like me, a human like me. You probably have never realized it, but your sermons and exhortations always came down to how passionate and on fire you were, and how inferior we were, how much more we needed to pray, to attend church, to be committed, to jump through the hoops you set up between yourself and God. Your private knowledge of where God wanted us to be as a church, and how things should be was never open to challenge. You consistently claimed that as pastor you had been chosen to hear from God about the “vision” for the Church, and I know that others challenged you whether you were truly hearing and doing the right thing, but again the result was defiance.