Hi, my name is Maritza, but people who know me from the Stone call me Ritz.
I attended The Austin Stone as a university student from about 2005-2008, participating in various volunteer roles and “missions trips”. After graduating, I was in various intern/staff positions from 2008-2012.
I came on staff in 2008 as a Kidstuff intern, stayed for another year in the same position, and completed my last year of interning as the Childcare Ministry Intern.
During my last intern year, and my first year of grad school for Professional Counseling, I was offered a position as a pastoral counselor (over children) at the Austin Stone Counseling Center. That offer was later rescinded the day after my contract was supposed to have started, and in it’s place I was given a conditional opportunity. Only upon my completing and being approved from a character assessment would the elders allow the counseling center to hire me.
To be clear, this was not a competence or character issue. This was a few people throwing a fit because they did not like me or appreciate my personal confidence and freedom, as it was not a good culture fit for the cult I did not yet realize I was in. I was told over and over “no one doubts your work ethic, and it’s obvious you love Jesus. But there’s just something else we want to see. And we won’t tell you what it is because we want to see it organically develop, rather than you accidentally pretend you have it.”
Thinking back on it now, I’m amazed I fell for this. I had plenty of job offers. I was affirmed by my professors and classmates, and I had an outside community. I had most of the things that a person needs to be able to leave. What I didn’t have was the self-possession to believe I was worth caring for outside of the greater church community. I didn’t have the awareness that I was worth anything other than god’s love.
Still under the impression that only “christians” were ethical and accountable, I was still afraid of life without rules. So, even though it didn’t make sense to me, I did what was asked of me. I abandoned my own logic and submitted to a system that promised me god had ordained this path and to deviate from it was to prove my own unworthiness.
I completed and passed the assessment. It was laughably easy for me. I am autistic. I say what I mean. I mean what I say. I do what I say I will and it is not difficult for me to say “I’m sorry,” or come up with a plan to do better next time. I think they thought it would beat me into submission. Instead, it built me up into someone who could confidently say “I’ve been weighed, measured, and found worthy.” At the end of the evaluation, I loved Jesus just the same but I loved myself WAY more. Which as you can imagine, was a problem for staying in any version of TASCC.
Because in the time I was being evaluated, I was also evaluating.
I saw the racism, classism, ableism, and various violences chronic to the culture of leadership as they trickled down, drowning the most vulnerable amongst us.
I saw how people who had never even attended, much less studied, professional counseling were seen as qualified to lead and supervise the team of counseling staff just because they had penises and pastoral positions.
No longer under the undue influence of them, I saw the financial exploitation inherent to the intern and residency programs.
And after 3+ years as the favorite babysitter of staff and elders, I was able to reflect on how all these issues harming the people of the church were intentionally created as part of the church culture.
When elders and deacons parroted the line that “here, we’re family,” like a bad Olive Garden parody, they meant the kind of families they all came from and preached against. They were remembering the homes they all came from, places where they did not respect and were variously abused by their own parents. They told me so in the stories they told at their pulpit orations and kitchen table bawdy jokes.
In their haughtiness and self-described praise idols, they made their own families and homes into little versions of the heaven they dreamed of — a place where people who looked and talked and acted like them were in power over everyone else. Then they projected their paltry paradises as beacons of truth in staff meetings, demanding we all take their tiny, terrible ideas of the kingdom and run with it in our respective areas.
I reflected on the stories of physical, emotional, and verbal abuse I had heard from so many wives of elders, survivors forced to sit pretty and make nice and pretend it never happened to them.
I was horrified by the clear, established patterns of abuse and oppression that played out in the languages and practices around me. In the midst of all this, when one prospective elder came forth to his mentor with the truth of his infidelity during his own character assessment, he was comforted for his “human mistake” and his wife told she could find comfort only in god and her counselor, as it would be a far greater betrayal of her husband to say what he’d done than it was a betrayal of her and their marriage for him to do it.
I remembered the fellow intern I briefly dated, who was so clearly a ticking timebomb that I broke up with him and emailed half the male staff asking them to work with him to fix whatever was going on, “so he doesn’t up beating whoever he does end up married to,” only to be told that it was God that boy sinned against, and God I should trust to handle it. I wondered how it was so clear to them God wasn’t using me to help.
I felt safe and secure with who I was revealed to be through my character assessment. And so deeply uncomfortable with what was revealed about the system I was in.
I was horrified by the writing on the wall, but I also still loved the beautiful humans I’d worked alongside. So I left, but I stayed close. I said what I had to say but I said it in a way that people could shake their heads at, rather than pick up their pitchforks for.
Until, one day not long after I’d established my life post-stone, my best friend found bruises on her dog. I knew that I would tell her to rehome the dog to save it and to escape her husband to save herself. And, I knew the church would tell her to get rid of the dog to save the marriage, the only important part of the equation.
She rehomed the dog, of course (who lived a long and lovely life with her parents). Yet when that husband later assaulted and then further attempted to end his wife’s life, I had to pull every string I had access to to get her out and get her safe not from that man, but from the church that would rather see her dead than divorced.
So it was that finally, I admitted to myself: there was nothing in this church left that could be redeemed while those in power clung so tightly to the structures that created the problems at hand.
Lucky for me, I come from a family of brokenness exceeded by love. I exist in communities of grace and authenticity and celebrated neurodivergence. I had seen the big bad world they warned me of. And, finally secure in my own self, I could see how much good there is in the world, versus how much evil there was in the church that purported to love their neighbor while wrecking tax evals of the poorest and most in need and pushing them out of their own homes.
I left and I was truly fine. I mean, I still ended up married to my own abusive evangelical. But I divorced him. I bought a home. I made a lovely life of all the things I believe in without anyone telling me I had to die to self. I learned that taking care of myself made me more able to love others. I got into a lot of good trouble and I haven’t stopped.
All that trauma and drama were more than a dozen years ago. None of this comes up in my life anymore.
Except, a few weeks ago, some podcasts came out. And then the stories started to bleed out of the battered hearts of the faithfully departed former partners. And so many of them landed in my inbox with nowhere to go.
So with some help from storytellers and friends, I grabbed this site, wrote my story, and came here to tell you:
You’re not alone.
There is hope.
Leaving might be hard. But having left can be so much greater than you can possibly imagine in the thick of the bad.
So many people have reached out to me to tell me their stories. Horrors so diverse but echoing the same themes such that they blend into a terrible noise of church abuse and betrayal. Here, I hope to give them a place to go and find each other and any help we can gather.
Xx,
A survivor of Austin Stone Abuse
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