When Bill Hybels resigned from Willow Creek Community Church in 2018 following allegations of sexual misconduct, Steve Carter was Willow’s lead pastor. It was Carter’s dream job—one he had never planned to leave. But when more allegations emerged, Carter publicly announced his resignation, feeling betrayed by those he had trusted for leadership. The trauma of that experience, and the years that followed, produced a period of grief that changed Carter as a man, as a pastor, and as a leader.
Carter, who is now lead pastor at Christ Church of Oak Brook in Oak Brook, Illinois, explored that grief and the ways it shaped him in Grieve, Breathe, Receive: Finding a Faith Strong Enough to Hold Us (Thomas Nelson, April 2024). Here, he shares with Outreach the ministry and spiritual wisdom he gleaned from the process.
Your experience leaving Willow Creek was traumatic for you and left you reeling with grief. What was it like to walk through that?
I realized I didn’t know how to grieve. Willow was so much of my life, and then that was gone overnight, and I couldn’t stop thinking that I wasn’t going to get anywhere or speak to bigger rooms. All of these thoughts built up. Then I just realized I had been looking at this wrong. I started asking, What do you want to build within me, Lord?
I didn’t have glimmers of what the future was, and that was so uncomfortable. Add COVID-19, and everything was so uncertain. I read Psalms pretty much every day, and I just kept saying, Teach me how to find healing.
When you talk about the desert, it’s more than a metaphor. You literally moved to the Arizona desert following your resignation. The same geography where the Israelites wandered lost for 40 years before God led them to the promised land.
Eugene Peterson said, “All theology is rooted in geography.” I started reading the desert mothers and fathers from centuries ago who found themselves in this monastic lifestyle and dealing with their own brokenness, their own ambition, or their own patterns of sin, in order to find healing. And the desert is where recovery happens. It’s why most substance abuse recovery facilities are in the desert. There’s some sense that in death, resurrection is possible.
It’s not uncommon for church leaders to link much of their identity, value and meaning to their ministry. When something goes sideways, and suddenly your identity changes or is called into question, how do you cope with that?
When you love your job and get the privilege to pastor, it’s hard not to be excited about what you get to do. Without you even really knowing it, it can become this slow drift away from, God is entrusting me with this to This is my identity. I think what happened was I was in Willow for Christ, not in Christ for Willow. In one sense, you have to reckon with being complicit in mission drift. Nobody did that to me. I let that happen in me.
Amid allegations of abuse, you start thinking, How did I not see this? This is what betrayal trauma does: It messes with your ability to trust, not just someone else, but your own judgement. How can I trust myself? How can I trust God’s voice if I willingly stepped into this context? What did I [internalize] from a leader that I believed was gospel that wasn’t true?