News of Matt Chandler’s leave of absence from preaching and teaching due to inappropriate online direct messaging with a woman who is not his wife was shocking and heartbreaking to many who first heard about it on Sunday. For some abuse survivors, it is “triggering.”
On Monday, an SBC abuse survivor, who goes by the name Lori K. on Twitter, posted a thread sharing how news of Chandler’s moral failure could trigger a survivor’s memory of being groomed by an adult clergy sexual abuser.
Lori K. made it clear that she isn’t accusing Chandler of grooming the woman he was messaging. Rather, she wanted to explain to others not familiar with situations like hers that “his actions look identical to our abusers.”
“Want to know why survivors are being triggered by this #mattchandler news? Because THIS is how it happens,” she wrote. “Pastors groom victims and one way they do it is through frequency and familiarity. They text relentlessly, they bring you fully into their world, they normalize abnormal behavior. They involve the spouses to make everything seem harmless.”
The survivor recounted her own story, saying, “One day, the secretary of the church plopped down a HUGE pile of papers on my desk and accuse me of having an affair with the pastor because all of those papers were records of texts between us.”
“An affair was the very last thing on my mind,” she said, sharing that she was “appalled she would accuse me of something like that. My pastor did text with me all the time. But a lot of those texts were group text with spouses. He’d become our friend, he saw potential in me and was mentoring me.”
Similar to Chandler’s admission, Lori shared, “Yeah, sure there was some crass joking, but that’s because we’re friends and the pastor has to have SOMEone to be able to just be human with. But, an affair??? That was insane. He would never do anything like that. He was a man of God. He was safe.”
“In the next two months the texting increased, the crass joking became sexual comments directed to me, inappropriate comments about me, and then ‘the line’ was crossed and the sexual abuse began,” she said.
“This is how they do it,” she continued. “They don’t have access to physically BE with the target all the time.”
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Lori went on to say, “A LOT (most in my case) of the grooming took place over text and DM’s. When those papers were plopped in front of me, I did not know that I was neck deep in the grooming process. In fact I blamed myself. But, I was. She may have not known I was being groomed. but she knew something was not right and was disturbed enough to say something.”
