Speaking the Truth About Toxic Leadership
“… it was one of the most amazing experiences that I have had in church planting, and I think the one I’m most proud of….”[1]
EPC Church Planting Coordinator, Tom Ricks, speaking at this year’s General Assembly about a multi-ethnic and urban church plant he helped coordinator.
A couple of months ago, I wrote about my own journey through spiritual abuse and how I have recovered (mostly) from that experience. At the time, I did not include names (like Tom Ricks and Greentree Church) because that piece of writing wasn’t about finding justice but healing for me and to help others find it as well. I knew many would be able to identify the individuals and institutions in the piece, but I nonetheless chose not to be explicit. Again, I refrained from naming names because it wasn’t about putting right things that were wrong, but helping people hurt in church settings find a way back to love the Bride of Christ. For that moment, that seemed like the extent of my responsibility as it related to Greentree and Tom Ricks.
After watching the panel on Church Health, I realized that perhaps I owed the people of God more. I owed them transparency. I owed them the truth. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis wrote in a 1913 Harper’s article “[S]unlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.” My hope is *not* that “people get what’s coming to them.” That would be folly indeed as we all deserve judgment. My hope is that by being explicit, people and institutions would do the hard work to become more healthy. My hope is that other institutions will stop platforming this kind of toxicity.
I worked with Tom at Greentree Community Church, first as Assistant Pastor for Care, then as Associate Pastor of Adult Ministries and at times I was unofficially given executive pastor responsibilities. It was in this expanded role that Tom spearheaded the effort to start an urban church plant in North St. Louis County. While it was not in my stated responsibilities, I was drawn into the organization of this project. I had a front seat in watching Tom Ricks promise things to a church planter he had no authority to promise, manipulate and intimidate his staff and session to support this project, and throw others “under the bus” to protect himself. Perhaps there is a bit of snark in this question but it is still an honest one: I wonder which of these behaviors made him so proud of this church planting project?[3]
When I first began working at Greentree, I felt I had found a good and stable place to work. The church was in process of building its first facility and we were on the cusp of some explosive growth. It was fun. Even still, I began to bump into Tom’s problem with truth telling from the start. I just didn’t recognize it as such. I dismissed it as miscommunication or misinterpretation or use of imprecise language. It wasn’t until the urban church plant planning started that I began to question things in earnest.
Tom had organized a group of local pastors that he dubbed the “St. Louis Urban Church Planting Network.” Greentree considered this a separate entity and as such did not fall under the governance of the session. Tom recruited a church planter (hereafter referred to as CP), an apprenticeship was established, and the “Network” hired the CP on a part-time basis (or so I thought). Tom asked Greentree to support the effort at $15,000 a year and the session agreed. Other churches agreed to support the church plant, some by paying the seminary tuition of the CP as he attended Covenant Seminary.
Church Planting Internship
It all seemed very tidy, until September of 2018. That's when a pastor of one of the “Network” churches mentioned to me that the CP would be an intern at Greentree. I tried to clarify that he would *not* be an employee of Greentree but of the “Network.” The pastor gently pushed back and claimed Tom had told the “Network” that the CP would be employed at Greentree. I asked if he had a written record of this and he did in the form of an email. At this point in my working relationship with Tom, I had experienced enough of his “loose relationship with the truth”[4] to ask for documentation of important communication. The pastor sent me a copy. My very next supervisory meeting with Tom, I asked if the CP would be employed at Greentree.
“No, he will work for the network.”
I countered: “______ said you told him CP would work for Greentree.”
“He is mistaken.”
“I have an email from you saying as much. Would you like me to show you?”
“Uh… no… no… yes, CP is an employee of Greentree.”
It turns out, the “Network” was not a legal entity. It was simply a group of pastors agreeing to have their churches give money to Greentree to support a new church plant. It had no more institutional standing than a book club. I strongly encouraged Tom to inform session about CP being an employee of our church and he said he would. He failed to do so and in fact never voluntarily informed session that Greentree was functioning as the financial agent for the CP’s internship.
My sense of obligation to Tom was still quite strong at this point. I wanted to see him succeed. But there was a growing tension within me. I wanted to believe Tom was sincere in his relationship with me but my gut was telling me I was being played. A wooden interpretation of 1 Cor. 13: 7 ("[Love] always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres....”) led me to endure and hope my gut was wrong.
Grant Letter and Blame Shifting
The CP continued his internship and was doing fine work through the rest of 2018 and into 2019. Then in late May 2019, I received a call from the CP, asking for help with a grant proposal from our regional church body, Mid-America Presbytery. Some discussions had already occurred with the presbytery church planting arm, The Church Development and Revival Committee (CDRC), leading to an informal agreement that presbytery would support this church plant at $20,000 for 2020. Still, a formal request for money was due on May 31st. I wondered why all involved had waited so long to finish the paperwork. I wondered more why the CP was calling me to help, as I had nothing to do with the church plant. So I asked him. His reply: “Tom told me to talk with you.”
I quickly got up to speed on the process and the key parties involved. I saw that the request needed to come from the sponsoring agency (a church or some other non-profit). I contacted Tom and told him that this letter requesting funds couldn’t come from him but from our session. Tom asked me to write up the letter and send it to session for approval. I did just that. This is when things began to spiral out of control.
The session collectively choked when they saw the letter because they realized the implications. They would not simply support the work at $15,000. They would be taking on the financial responsibility of the entire church plant, a project that could cost up to $250,000 (though supported financially by other churches). The next session meeting (May 2019) was a bit contentious, but the elders wanted to support their pastor. The session asked for an extension to submit a request to presbytery (which I handled behalf of session) and asked for Tom to make a presentation about the church plant to session (how much it would cost, where was the money coming from, etc.) at our next meeting.
Shortly after the May meeting, a couple of elders went to Tom to talk to him about his overreach and his tendency to get out ahead of session.
“Give me an example!” he replied.
“The letter requesting funds from presbytery, for instance.”
“I didn’t write that letter, Daryl did.”
Of course, this was technically true, but when I learned of this a couple of months later (July 2019), I considered it a profound betrayal and the most childish attempt at misdirection. I should have tendered my resignation immediately but concern for my family and a hesitancy to blow a hole in the ministry at Greentree and the church plant led me to continue in my role.
After this revelation, I decided to speak more honestly with leadership about my concerns. If I could appeal to those who loved Tom the most, perhaps we could make some progress in addressing his behavior and help him. This proved to be a tactical mistake as I simply revealed my heart to Tom’s enablers who then marginalize me and my concerns.
The Manipulation of Session
Tom asked an outside consultant, and former Greentree staff to make the presentation about the church plant to session at our next meeting. Many were inclined to support the work, including me, but the session needed to know the details and understand the true financial burden we were about to assume. Various churches of the “Network” were named, the amount they had pledged revealed and when they would start giving. One of the churches on the list was a large EPC church in the St. Louis area and I had served on their staff some years before. The consultant said this church would give $12,000 a year starting September 1, 2019.
This sounded odd to me as I knew the budgeting process of this church and when the new fiscal year would start. No support of this scale would start in September. So, I questioned it at the meeting. I received some heavy push-back from Tom, and he said with some force: “I guarantee that money will be in our account on September 1!” I backed off that issue and even helped make a case to support this project, regardless of the questions I had. Session voted to approve the grant request and with it, took on the role as financial agent for the church plant.
But I did follow up with the senior pastor of the church in question, who was an old friend. I asked:
“Is your church supporting the church plant at $12,000 a year starting September 1?”
“We are supportive of the work and a request is working its way through the missions committee, but, no… we haven’t agreed or even settled on an amount.”
“When would the support start?”
“The earliest would be January 1, 2020, but more likely March 1, 2020.”
I went back to Tom privately and told him what the pastor had said to me. I repeated what I heard him say at the meeting:
“What I heard you say was that this church would support the church plant at $12,000 a year starting September 1.”
“Oh, I never meant to communicate that.”
I was dumbstruck for a moment, but then politely encouraged him to clarify this with session. Instead, he continued to mislead me and session about the commitment from this church.
I really began to struggle in my role at Greentree as I tried to reconcile Tom’s behavior with my desire to see him as a man seeking God. Was this all miscommunication? Despite catching him in a bald-faced lie on multiple occassions, I still couldn’t bring myself to see the obvious nature of the situation. This was starting to wear on my mind and soul.
On-boarding the CP and Health Insurance
Having settled the larger issues, Greentree proceeded with taking the CP on full-time as a church planter apprentice in August of 2019. As stated before, my official role was as Pastor of Adult Ministries, so I was surprised to receive a phone call from Tom asking me to help onboard the CP to full-time staff. In addition, Tom would be out of town for this process. This might normally be done by an executive administrator but ours had recently left staff and we had another staff member serving as the interim executive administrator (she was later confirmed in that role). The CP was scheduled to start in a week’s time, so I had to quickly bring myself up to speed on the particulars: salary, benefits, direct deposit, etc.
I looked for an official agreement on a compensation package, but session hadn’t voted on one. I went to the “Network” to see if they had discussed it. They had not. As far as I could tell, there were only informal conversations between the CP and Tom. Among the things Tom promised the CP was full health insurance for him and his family. This did not adhere to church policy. If the CP was ordained in our denomination, full family coverage would be mandatory, but he wasn’t yet ordained. Church policy stated non-ordained employees would get full health insurance coverage but pay only half for families.
As I tried to sort through this “misunderstanding,” I could sense frustration in the CP and Tom’s absence didn’t make things easier. I began to feel the cultural weight of this moment as this was Greentree’s first foray in multicultural ministry. CP would be our first full-time black staff member. What were we communicating to him and his wife about working in the White Evangelical world? Was he just a cog in the machine of a white church parading its virtue by sponsoring an urban church? I was determined to do right by him and his family.
Something that complicated this negotiation was the discovery that Greentree had *already* been reimbursing the CP for health insurance for his whole family. When Tom was asked how this happened, he claimed he didn’t know and would "check" with our interim executive administrator. This was yet another childish attempt to deflect blame and yet it worked as no one held Tom accountable for this overreach. I couldn’t help feeling this might also be a subtle attempt to shift blame to our interim administrator for this breach in policy and unauthorized use of funds. Despite the mess Tom had made, I argued to a reluctant Personnel Committee that we should do our best to keep the promises made to the CP, even if we weren’t the ones who made the promises.
The process was stressful. It was hurtful. The church planting project wasn't the only circumstance that frustrated leadership with Tom's behavior. These other frustrations included interference and manipulation in staff hiring, difficulty in maintaining accountability in use of funds, and abuse of power. Having Greentree serve as the financial agent for a project the size of this church plant without session approval or even awareness proved to them that something needed to be done. It was time to reign in the senior leader that they loved. Shortly thereafter, session voted to hire an outside consultant to advise session about how to move forward productively with Tom.
Aftermath
There is much more to say about the hiring of a consultant and how those consultants processed our situation. However, this would move us beyond the church planting project. The COVID lock-downs further complicated things (the consultants did their evaluation in February of 2020 and delivered their report in early April via Zoom). In the end, the consultants framed the problems at Greentree as much my fault as Tom’s. Tom was asked to take some time off (it ended up being about 3 weeks) and participate in a week of intensive counseling. After that, Tom led the staff in a study on being emotionally healthy so he could share how much he had learned and how much he had changed. I couldn’t imagine a greater mockery of the efforts to address Tom’s toxic behavior than to reaffirm his leadership by leading the staff team in this study. I decided to leave staff (as did several people during this period). Tom later claimed he had gone to every person he had hurt and apologized. I hadn’t directly spoken Tom since before the lock-down started and still haven’t to this day. The consultants, whatever their good intentions and expertise, ultimately provided cover for a toxic leader.
I would like to think Tom has grown but I have no direct evidence of it. I wish I could say that the person I watched on the panel on Church Health seemed different than the person I knew.... but I can't. It was common for the person I knew to take the credit for others’ successes, attribute the ideas of other to himself, and blame those around him for his bad behavior while having little regard for the pain he inflicts on others.
I realize that many people maybe upset and even angry with me for being so explicit. It is not my intent to hurt people though it is a likely outcome that some will feel that way. I suppose this could hurt Tom’s livelihood and I have no desire to bring financial hardship to Tom or his family. I suppose this might complicate some projects in church planting. Some might even accuse me of treating Tom poorly, perhaps in an effort to discredit my criticisms of him. I would be willing to engage in that conversation but it doesn't change the things that Tom said and did. It doesn't change the fact that Tom should not be in Gospel ministry let alone training others in it.
Why have I not taken it to presbytery or General Assembly? I did. That is another frustrating and complicated story of watching institutions enable toxic leadership. So, I am not hopeful that this article will result in any meaningful change in the EPC. However, I believe we all need to take a stand against this kind of behavior, whatever the outcome. We need to stop admiring the short-term results toxic leaders often give us. We need to have the courage to lovingly but firmly root it out of our institutions as well as lovingly confront those who behave this way. Otherwise, we implicitly tell our congregants, church planters and those that aspire to be church planters that short-term institutional success is valued over against character.
I don’t write this in anger or seeking my “pound of flesh” as I was accused of at a presbytery council meeting when seeking to expose this behavior at the presbytery level. We must all pursue the path of forgiveness just as we have been forgiven. So, I must pursue it as well. Yet we cannot let such behavior and character lead the way. What is my hope in writing all this down? I hope more will speak the truth in whatever difficult circumstances they face. I hope more will seek righteousness over institutional success. I hope we will stop platforming toxic leadership.
I am no longer in the EPC, but I still pray and hope for good things for those in the denomination. I felt that I had exhausted every ecclesiastical avenue I had before me. I was resolved that I had done what I could and was beginning to move on. After watching the panel discussion on “church health” with one of the most toxic leaders I have ever worked with, I realized I could do one more thing. I should do one more thing. I should tell the truth.
[1] Church Health Panel Discussion | Wednesday, June 19, 2024, around the 10:50 mark, https://youtu.be/Q3_uBS7n374?si=GknBpTKP8noQTRJ3
[2] You can find the recordings of the 2024 EPC General Assembly here: https://epc.org/ga/ga2023recordings/
[3] I want to make this absolutely clear; I have always been supportive of this urban church plant and its church planter. In fact, I was often seeking to fix problems created by Tom Ricks overreaching or flat out lying to involved parties so the project would succeed.
[4] This is how one lay minister at Greentree described Tom very early in my tenure there. At the time, I dismissed as friendly ribbing about how Tom could be imprecise in his language.