BETRAYED: A Story of Religious Abuse

This little clip from YouTube claims to be a story of fraud, betrayal and abuse of power. And ironically, it turned out that way after all. 

This trailer for a movie called BELONG is all that exists of that particular feature film. The pastor seen in this clip is one Modise Molefe, the minister of my former church in 2002. Though a new ministry was seen as a marvelous fresh start (and look, we hired a black minister!), it was only many months later we discovered he had been "dismissed" from his former ministry by the larger body of the church. No details were released in order to protect the privacy of the ex-clergy, and it worked. 

Within a couple of months of starting his ministry, things went alarmingly south. It wasn't just his questionable financial dealings, it was the way he shouted at committee members, somehow set them against each other so nothing could happen, and railed at us about our spiritual deficiencies on Sunday morning. Then there was that little matter of the young woman he took advantage of, claiming he was going to leave his wife and kids and start a great new ministry with her. (None of it happened, thank the Lord.)

The result of not knowing anything about his past is that we felt alone with the chaos, and (as he kept telling us) somehow responsible for it. We had to try to chop our way through the incredible wilderness of fraud, damage and shattered trust he had created in a stable, longstanding congregation in just a few months.
When the whole thing finally blew up and the larger body of the church investigated and then "dismissed" him (sound familiar?), the congregation floundered badly after that, and never did recover. 

His "movie" came years later, and I remember he hyped it very hard, making an announcement stating that it was to be shown at the Sundance Film Festival (except for one little detail: it didn't exist!) .
He made several trailers for it, with different titles according to what he saw as trendy at the time. As you can see from the clip, he had a ready explanation for the disaster of his ministry: his African culture had been cruelly rejected by a bunch of comfortable, well-off white people! We did, for the most part, fit that last description, but what dismays me even more is the fact that what happened to us is hardly rare. It's just that no one talks about it, seemingly embarrassed about the fact that they had been "taken". Or, are they protecting certain people, and not others?

But this sort of spiritual abuse is so common now that I seem to see it every day: religious corruption in one form or another. And it is particularly bruising when it happens, not on the stage of a massive megachurch, but within the walls of a very small church which was looking forward to a fresh start in their ministry, and instead were permanently disabled and never found their way back.