The fifth installment of the Reformatorisch Dagblad’s 2020 series on The Door turns from the pattern of silenced abuse documented in Deel 4 to the everyday mechanics of pastoral control, told through one Dutch man’s account of the years he spent inside a The Door congregation in the 1990s. His name in the report is a pseudonym, John van der Weide, and what he describes did not end with a scandal. It ended with his marriage.
Won over on the street
John joined a Dutch The Door congregation after being approached by a group of young men on the street he remembers simply as nice guys, warm and understanding, talking about a loving God. The first service he attended, he stepped forward, confessed his sins publicly, and felt an immediate burden lift from him. What he did not yet understand was the structure he had just stepped into: a hierarchy of leaders and those being groomed to lead, with a specific person assigned to walk alongside every newcomer.
An informant disguised as a mentor
The person assigned to John’s spiritual care, he later learned, reported everything he said back to the pastor, including his private struggles and feelings, and when the pastor then referenced those exact themes from the pulpit, John took it as evidence of divine insight rather than what it was. His mentor soon suggested that if John’s family and friends would not join the church themselves, the healthier course was to cut ties with them before they pulled him back into the world, a warning he found repeated in a newcomer’s handbook. Signing a loyalty contract sealed the arrangement, and the message reinforced from the pulpit was blunt: attending only on Sundays did not really count, and taking more than a brief vacation amounted to abandoning the congregation.
Conferences and the ladder of honor at The Door
John attended the network’s large conferences faithfully, pompous multinational gatherings heavy with flags and testimonies of growth, where speakers stressed loyalty to pastors above all and described the path to becoming one yourself. His own summary of the purpose behind it was blunt: stimulating people’s ambition. Each conference ended with newly commissioned leaders sent out to plant churches elsewhere, to loud applause, framed as the fellowship’s ultimate purpose for its men. John wanted that path for himself and gave the church his mornings, evenings, and weekends for years, practicing with the band, doing odd jobs, evangelizing, and eventually running Sunday school. He noticed early that children were praised only for flawless results and left empty-handed for mistakes, and it distressed him to watch some leave services in tears. He came to see it as the same reward-and-punishment logic running through the adult congregation in miniature: total loyalty bought access to the pastor’s inner circle, and anything less bought nothing.
A cut wire, and a lesson in surveillance
Despite years of faithful service, the recognition John hoped for never arrived, and he began to doubt himself rather than the system, wondering aloud what was wrong with him and whether he simply wasn’t loyal enough. When he finally raised his doubts and his private struggles directly with his pastor, the response focused on making sure he tithed consistently and attended without fail, since he served as a model for new converts. The pastor also proposed bringing John’s wife into a joint counseling conversation, on the theory that whatever was confessed there, God would cover, and the devil could never use a sin once it had been spoken aloud. John recalls feeling rejected by everyone, God included, since it was God, he had been taught, who spoke through the pastor’s mouth, and he described the isolation plainly: he had rarely felt so alone.
One Sunday he discovered the cables of the overhead projector he needed for Sunday school had been deliberately cut, which he read as a deliberate attempt to damage his reputation. Reporting on fellow members to the pastor, he adds, was not merely tolerated in the congregation but actively encouraged. As a member of the church’s order team, he was assigned to listen for exactly that: who was seeing whom, who smoked or drank, and above all, who was voicing criticism and might pose a danger to the leadership.
“It’s freezing in there”
John’s own summary of the entire system reduces it to a single instruction, repeated across preaching, Bible study, and private conversation alike: be loyal to the pastor, and never be a rebel, with hellfire promised to anyone who did. He came to see the pastor’s role in a married couple’s life as displacing the husband’s own, since it was typically the wife who brought every private matter to the pastor rather than working it out with her spouse, a dynamic he calls pastoral adultery. Depending on which partner showed greater loyalty, he says, the pastor would take that side, and a wedge would be driven straight through a marriage. His own ended in divorce, one of many relationships he says buckled under the church’s pressure. He recalls sermons fixated on sexual purity and public confession of sexual sin specifically, with those who confessed barred from services for a time, a practice that left him uneasy, since he watched the same handful of people singled out and publicly humiliated while others in leadership, no different in private conduct, were never called forward. John is careful to add nuance rather than blanket condemnation: he believes many genuine Christians worship inside The Door, people he still calls family, whose motives he does not doubt; his real quarrel is with its leadership. His closing assessment of what happens to the people who do not survive the system is arithmetic rather than emotional: not every newcomer stays, The Door has only a small enduring core, and everyone else is used up and replaced by the next convert, “it’s freezing in there.”
Sources and further reading
- Eunice Hoekman-van Stuijvenberg, “Wees loyaal aan de pastor, wees geen rebel” (published in English as “Be Loyal to the Pastor, Don’t Be a Rebel”), Reformatorisch Dagblad, September 30, 2020; translated and published with the author’s permission
- On the same series, see the abuse pattern documented in Deel 4
