James' Story continues with Part Two:
cfctoo.com/stories/james-story-part-two
"This meeting was going to be different, I was sure of it. This meeting would solve things. This meeting would restore my trust in Rick Sinclair and CFC leadership. I imagined myself laughing at the fact that I ever thought he’d lied to me.
He would make sense of it all and I would apologize for ever THINKING such a thing and we could move forward with this, right?
We had one request, though: we wanted to have at least one person present who wasn’t part of the eldership: a neutral witness. We got two people, two of the people who Rick had lied about at the first meeting.
Two of the people who also wanted an explanation for why Rick Sinclair said that they said that they trusted Bob Dale when they had made it abundantly clear to him that they did not.
This was the day my eyes were opened to something that I didn’t want to see.
After a lot of confusing word salad, attempted gaslighting, and question-dodging I finally just said, “Pastor Rick, you promised me on the phone that you would make sense of how you didn’t lie to me. We still haven’t even talked about that. Can we please talk about that now?”
He said, “Oh yes, that…” and that was the moment where the scales fell from my eyes.
I watched as this man did mental gymnastics with both the effort and the elegance of a morbidly obese seal on a treadmill, to desperately try to make sense of how him telling me something that he knew wasn’t true, was not in fact lying.
As I pressed more and held his feet to the fire it became abundantly clear. Rick is just a man. He’s just a man with gifting and charisma and too much power who isn’t used to being questioned.
It came down to: “I wasn’t lying because I don’t lie and why would I lie about that?” and then finally he settled on “I never actually claimed that they trust him. You misunderstood me. You’re putting words in my mouth.”
At the end of the day, he asserted that whether or not he lied, the real problem was that we didn’t trust the leadership so we should just go to another church."