#ChurchToo – Making Sense of Rick Blackwood’s Retirement & a Megachurch I Once Loved

“Anthony, could you come in this afternoon so we could meet?” said the pastor I trusted. Later that day I walked through the door of a place where God’s love should be displayed most clearly. After some small chit chat about how my precious wife, Lauren, was doing, this man got to the point. “We have decided to let you go,” he said. I responded, “Why? What did I do? Have I not hit the weekend attendance ‘numbers’ at my campus? Did I do anything wrong?” “No, no, no. You didn’t do anything wrong. We just know that you are eventually going to leave next summer for your wife’s education, so we decided to let you go in the next month because we have to do what’s best for us.” I replied, “But I trusted you. I told you, the pastors, in confidence that we were feeling called to pursue education for her and we wanted to plan for the next campus pastor. That’s why we told you all ahead of time.” I’ll never forget his response until the day I die. “You need to be careful who you trust, Anthony.”

This is just one of the painful memories I have about Christ Fellowship Miami. But, I also remember a week after being on my honeymoon, when my wife had to be rushed to the hospital right after we got off the plane because she had a very serious infection. The next day Rick Blackwood and Eric Geiger came to the hospital and prayed for her. We were considered a megachurch (2,000 or more attenders) at this point. They were both preaching and teaching every week. But they came by and prayed for my new bride. I also will not forget that until the day I die. That was seven years before I was let go.

When I heard that Rick Blackwood would be announcing his retirement this weekend, I wrestled with the public image of him versus the man I thought I knew. As you can imagine, I have struggled with this cognitive dissonance about this church I once loved. Shreena Desai states that ‘cognitive dissonance is the discomfort experienced when holding two or more conflicting (or inconsistent) cognitions, and these cognitions can be ideas, beliefs, values, or emotional reactions.’ I am not the only soul who has felt this way about CF Miami. Others have felt it worse. I’m talking about the ones who have not just rejected that church but every church because of their experience. I’m talking about the ones who have cursed God because of their exploitation and now want nothing to do with the faith. So I write this not out of vengeance or bitterness but out of lament and hope.

My family and I started attending First Baptist Church of Perrine in 2001. We would sit in the first pew on the second floor all the way on the right of the sanctuary and listen to Rick Blackwood teach verse by verse through the Book of Ephesians in the morning and the Book of Revelation at night. We never attended church before this. My parents went forward after a month or so of visiting and believed the Gospel. Tony Isaacs baptized my family shortly after that. My heart still didn’t believe. My parents started attending Rob and Maggie’s Bible Study who taught them about the faith. So many great and unknown servants who loved our family well. My parents started serving and eventually my mom became Eric Geiger’s Administrative Assistant. 

When I was 17 years old, right before my senior year of high school, my mom signed me up for a Christian camp with our church at Camp Kulaqua in northern Florida. Eric Geiger preached the Gospel every night. On the last night, I came forward weeping over my sin. He was the first person to pray over me as a new Christian. Every time I read 1 Corinthians 4:15, I can’t help but thank God for the man who ‘became my father in Christ Jesus through the Gospel.’ He prayed that God would use me and that my life wouldn’t be the same. God definitely heard his prayers that night because I had an instantaneous fire and love for Jesus. I not only loved my Savior, but I loved the church that shared this Gospel of grace with me. I really believed that the next best thing to sharing the Gospel with people was trying to get them to visit my church. I knew they would hear a powerful exposition of the Scriptures and be cared for if they joined this church. 

I very quickly started serving in the youth ministry under Jeff Borton. He took me under his wing and helped me grow as a new Christian. I graduated high school and eventually started interning in his ministry. The church changed its name to Christ Fellowship Miami at this point. After a couple of years, I got married to my precious wife and became the youth pastor at the Christ Fellowship West Kendall campus. My new campus pastor handed me ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’ by Dale Carnegie and told me this book will help me grow my student ministry. I started to read a bunch of business books and the student ministry started to grow. We eventually grew to 200 students in a movie theater, but it was never enough. My vocabulary as it related to the church now included words like strategy, growth, numbers, expansion, invite, success, etc. Not that any of these words in and of themselves are bad, but they became the primary ethos we breathed. We kept hearing about how we had exponential growth and we had to be good stewards as one of the fastest growing churches in America.  

A short note about the former Campus Pastor who became the Executive Pastor after Eric left to Lifeway. This man met with me at least three times a week for almost four years. He gave me tons of advice professionally and personally. He helped us financially when we couldn’t afford to live off of $15,000 a year as a youth pastor. He paid for my accommodation on our honeymoon as a gift. He also screamed at me when he was angry that we weren’t reaching our goals. He also threatened to fire me on multiple occasions if I didn’t do exactly what he said. He also liked to shame me in front of my peers as his way to try and motivate me as a cog in the machine. He also talked bad about me to my own family. He also yelled at my father-in-law the first time they met at Johnny Rockets in the Falls when he found out I was marrying Lauren at 19 years old (thank you Pablo for not yelling back and modeling how a godly man should respond). This was one of my pastors who was eventually ordained by this church I loved so much. If I didn’t obey him, I was told I was disobeying God and as a result would lose my job.” This man really was a parable of this church – on the one hand so kind and generous but on the other hand so vindictive and intimidating if you didn’t get in line. It was so confusing going from Eric to this man because Eric is a good man. 

Pastoral abuse is horrific. It is the exact opposite of God’s love for his sheep. It is manipulative and controlling. It is unhealthy. It is sin. It is abusive. The reason it isn’t just abuse, but spiritual abuse, is because God’s name is being tied to it through the under-shepherd(s) doing it in the name of Christ for the sake of reaching people. It is a terrible representation of how God treats his children because it isn’t true. It is one of the things that Jesus saw in his own day and denounced the Pharisees for it in Matthew 23. It is something that I eventually committed myself. Jesus taught ‘a disciple is not above his teacher, but everyone when he is fully trained will be like his teacher.’ So I want to state publicly that I became the very thing I hated. Eric and Julie Isaac, I want to apologize to you for treating you as if you existed to serve me and ‘my ministry.’ You didn’t deserve that and I am sorry for the example that I set. Please forgive me. Alex and Nelly Gonzalez, please forgive me for not caring for you two and getting mad when you left ‘my ministry’ and this church. Rosa Blanco, please forgive me for firing you for placing unrealistic expectations on you. I was trained to use spiritual language to try and control you when I wanted you to obey me. You were not the problem. Please forgive me. And to the others that I hurt as a pastor while I was there, please forgive me for my sin and the pain I caused you. 

Eventually the Executive Pastor’s actions started to be a lot more noticeable. I would meet with Rick Blackwood, the man who I respected so much, at least once a month for lunch and tell him about all that was going on since he never went to any of the meetings and would really only hear about the great things that were going on from that one man. He learned about the abuse I was receiving in the ‘name of God’ but also how it was happening to others. He heard about the unjust firings when you confronted your superior for being a bully, the meetings where certain campus pastors would cry because of the yelling, the manipulative ‘voting’ where all the musicians are told they need to raise their hands at the weekend services when significant decisions needed to be enacted because of the by-laws, the misleading weekend announcements of where money was going even after we didn’t have certain partnerships anymore, the big financial gifts to certain pastors, the threatening text messages, the backhanded comments about the churches of pastors who left but were still ministering in the city, the bad references from senior leadership when you were looking for a job because you told them why you were leaving if you weren’t fired, the coercive push on pastors to sign a non-compete that as a pastor we would not serve or plant a church within a certain number of miles of a Christ Fellowship campus, the cover up of sexual sin in the staff including a youth pastor sleeping with a minor at one of the campuses with no mention to the parents of the youth ministry of what had happened, the senior pastor being able to appoint and replace whoever he wants when he wants on his personnel committee or other boards, and no true accountability for senior leadership. This is why over 50% of the staff have left this church in the last few years. 

The word that ultimately comes to mind when describing this church culture is toxic. That is the word you will hear from staff and volunteers who were close enough to actually see what was going on and chose to speak out. It seemed as if the men and women who were enforcing this toxic culture were being rewarded with more power which has led to the current leadership structure to this day. This is why in order to have true change the current leadership needs to be honest with what took place. Instead of staying quiet and enforcing this toxic culture so that they might move into senior leadership positions (which has happened), they need to confess and repent from their participation and enforcement. In order to stay in a place that covers a bunch of stuff up you have to have people who are willing to protect the institution at all cost. It’s as if Caiaphas illustrates this on a greater level when prophetically talking about the death of Jesus. John 11:50 states, ‘It is better for you that one man should die for the people, not that the whole nation should perish.’ The Message states it this way, ‘Can’t you see that it’s to our advantage that one man dies for the people rather than the whole nation be destroyed?’ It is better for you that one sheep should suffer for the institution so that the institution should be preserved at their expense. The culture was distinctly different from what you heard in the sermons on the weekend. It wasn’t until you were all in and you committed to leading that you would really see it. The saddest thing is most don’t realize it until they have been let go for ‘not producing’ or leave out of exhaustion and disillusionment. Then they realize how much this church was using them to meet their goals and wonder where all the friendships went once they left this church. It puts the people who are there in an awkward situation because they will start to hear ‘oh that person wasn’t a good employee’ or ‘the problem was them’ and because you trust your pastors you believe them until you are the next sheep to be slaughtered. 

After I was let go from this church that I loved so much, I was an emotional mess. Even in my own life, I started to struggle with sexual sin and hurt those I love. I became obsessed with this church. I wanted to be validated. I was disillusioned. I was jaded. I was bitter. I was angry. I wanted repentance. I wanted justice. I sent an email to Rick Blackwood privately and then to the five men on the leadership team that Rick was ‘accountable’ to. It went nowhere. Next thing I knew my email was blocked along with others who voiced their issues with covering up the toxic culture. It was blamed on the executive pastor who I believe walked away with a very nice severance package where each party was not allowed to discuss one another publicly lest they be sued. Tony Isaacs, a very godly man, told me he tried to persuade Rick to not cover this mess up. Nothing happened. People suffered and didn’t understand why Rick wouldn’t take responsibility as the Senior Pastor since he kept this man there for so long even when he knew the pain everybody was going through. One person told me privately that the reason they couldn’t connect their wounds to Rick’s leadership is because he was such a nice guy. This is hard for most to accept because they think they know somebody because they have heard them preach for hours and hours and years and years so it’s the illusion of thinking you really know someone when you don’t. 

It took me a while to connect the dots. This man taught me how to preach. He preached at my ordination service and was one of the pastors who laid hands on me. He was the one I ran to when I was being spiritually abused by the Executive Pastor he hired, he invited me on multiple occasions to just get away and stay at his house in South Carolina, he led my parents to the Lord, etc. God used him in my life in so many ways. This is why it was so confusing. One person who experienced a lot of abuse as a child said it reminded her of when her father would beat her and she would tell her mom what happened and her mom would say you just need some ice cream to feel better but her mom wouldn’t fix the problem. She allowed the abuse to occur for way too long and would downplay the pain. Not to make light of physical abuse in any way but that is a somewhat helpful analogy to explain the emotional and spiritual misconduct many have felt. 

I have always been afraid to speak out. I’ve been afraid to share my story because of the potential repercussions. I was afraid of hurting the name of Christ but I realized this is actually a call to heal the body of Christ. I needed distance though. I needed growth in my own life. I needed compassion for them. I needed grace. God started to work in my life and show me I was no better. I needed grace too. God needed to break me and humble me. For ten years I was basically told I was great because I was a charismatic speaker and I could draw a crowd. I found validation in that. I found recognition in that. But God needed to crucify my ambition before I wrote this so that there would be no pride or arrogance in my own heart lest that get in the way of this lament. How can one hate the very men who helped save their soul from hell by sharing the Gospel with them?   

My call is for honesty and responsibility. I pray that when the pastors and leaders of this church read this they will not shake their heads in disgust but examine their hearts to see if there are past sheep they need to confess and repent to. I pray that they would not see this as a denunciation of all that they do for Christ but rather a reorientation of their ambition, since one’s ambition for success can suppress Christ’s call to care for the sheep. I pray that in this time of transition they would care more about the fame of Jesus than their legacies. I pray they would care more about their loyalty to Christ than to any man. I pray they would sit down individually and corporately to ask God who they have overlooked and hurt so that they might humble themselves and seek reconciliation. I pray that you would not ignore this but see the compassion behind this letter. You could either see this letter as a spiritual attack from the enemy or as a grace from a concerned former pastor who once loved this church with his whole heart.

I have prayed for this church I once loved so much. God brought back to mind many memories, some good and some not so good. But this isn’t the end of the story. The best really is yet to come with confession and repentance. May this be a season of repentance and humility and joy and peace. Rick, I pray that the Lord would give you many more years on this earth and I am grateful for you. 

In Christ,

The Wounded