People Recount Their Marvelous Revenge Stories

“About 6-7 years ago, I was a ministerial student at a conservative Christian college. I had attended the same ‘Bible-believing’ church since I was a small child. It was large, about 1,000 members, but not a megachurch.

This church had been an enormous part of my life for as long as I could remember. I played piano for youth choir, preached at the Children’s Church service (which was held in the church’s chapel at the same time as the adult service), drove the church bus to pick up ‘unchurched’ children, etc & ad infinitum.

I did all of this for free, not even getting reimbursed for expenses.

During my senior year in college, we got a new ‘Minister of Music, Education, And Youth’. This guy was as charming as an ice cream sundae with razor blades in it. I’ll call him Mr. Charming. All of the Deacons, and their wives, thought he walked on water.

He was an authoritarian jerk.

In his first meeting with the church Youth Group, he announced that he had been hired to ‘Straighten out the youth group’. One of his favorite sayings was, ‘When I tell my disciples jump, the only questions they get to ask are ‘How high’ and ‘How far’.’

The adults loved him and the youth hated him. Within a few weeks, half of the high school and college students, i.e., all of those without parents in the church, had quit coming to church.

Most Youth Directors would have gotten into trouble over this, but he had the audacity to proclaim, in front of the entire congregation in the Sunday morning worship service, that he had ‘eliminated all of the thorny ground from the Youth Group’ (a reference to the Parable of the Sower in the Bible), and the Pastor and all of the Deacons loved him for it.

He didn’t waste any time going after what he really wanted: the Pastor’s job. The pastor, whom I’ll call PastorT, was about 60 years old. Within a few weeks of Mr. Charming’s arrival, rumors started circulating about PastorT’s health (he was an avid runner and cyclist) and that he ‘just didn’t seem to be as mentally sharp as he used to be’ (he frequently quoted long Bible passages from the pulpit, entirely from memory without misstating a single word, sometimes in Greek or Hebrew).

Worst of all, however, was the accusation that PastorT was ‘really too liberal’ for the church. In my denomination, it is the kiss of death to even be suspected of being a ‘liberal’.

None of these accusations made any sense, but people kept talking about them. I have no idea why PastorT didn’t find out. Or maybe he did find out and was just too scared to do anything about it.

In some denominations, like Catholic or Methodist, the denomination assigns pastors/priests. Not my church’s denomination. Each church ‘calls’ the minister. This guarantees that every pastor always walks a razor’s edge – the slightest slip and you’re out. You don’t even have to slip. Maybe you even do the right thing and it still offends enough people (it doesn’t take many, just a handful if they hate you enough).

Then you’re out. Or maybe, like PastorT, some creep just lies about you and gets your job. And, since the church often owns your house (the ‘parsonage’ or ‘manse’), your entire family is suddenly homeless and destitute.

Then I became a target. I still don’t know why.

A couple of months after starting to work for my church, Mr. Charming called me and informed me that my ‘services were no longer needed’ at Youth Choir, Children’s Church, Bus ministry, anywhere.

In fact, he said, he did not even want me to participate in any of these functions at all. Not even go to the Sunday Morning Worship Service.

I later found out that members of his family had been hired by the church, at very nice rates of pay, to perform these functions that I’d been doing for free. His wife got paid more for playing a beat-up piano at the one-hour Youth Choir rehearsal than the main Organist/Pianist got paid for playing for adult choir rehearsal plus Sunday mornings and Sunday evenings when the Youth Choir sang.

(The wife could barely pick out the notes on a piano. This lady radiated bitterness, resentment, and repressed anger. But she rarely said anything. She just sat there and glared, which was somehow even creepier than when she spoke.)

I was very hurt, emotionally, so I dropped by PastorT’s office and tearfully asked him what I’d done wrong. I couldn’t get a straight answer, except he told me that ‘People are saying things’ about me and that if I wanted to get a good recommendation from him to our denomination’s Ministers School, I’d ‘better shut up and do what you’re told’.

So, I started asking all of my church friends what people were ‘saying’ about me. Everyone said, ‘Well, I didn’t want to tell you, and I don’t believe it, but here’s what I heard’. According to the rumor mill, I had gotten my partner pregnant and forced her to get rid of it (I hadn’t even had a partner since Junior High) and I’d been arrested for possession of substances and my dad had had to pay a lot to hush it up (I didn’t even know what substances looked like).

There were other rumors, but you get the idea.

I did what PastorT told me to. I never darkened the door of that church again (except once, months later). It hurt so much. I’d devoted my life to that church since I was a little kid. But I had to have PastorT’s recommendation to get into the Minister’s School I wanted to go to, and the pain was unbearable just driving by there.

So I decided to keep my distance.

But I started thinking about Mr. Charming. Anyone who was that evil had to have a past, and it probably wasn’t a good one. I knew that, just before working for my church, he had worked at a large church, in the same denomination, in a small town about 50 miles away. That church was actually about twice the size of my church.

So he had moved from a big church to the same job at a smaller church. A bad career move? Running away from something? Ahhh… there was something rotten in Denmark. And it smelled like an opportunity for me.

As luck would have it, one of my uncles, and his family, lived in that same small town, although none of my family attended Mr. Charming’s former church.

So I called one of my cousins, told her my story, and enlisted her as a co-conspirator. I’ll call her Ann.

The next Sunday morning, Ann and I attended Sunday School and Morning Worship at Mr. Charming’s old church. Although Ann had never been a member of that church, it was a small town where everyone knew everyone, so she knew most of the people there.

She started asking about Mr. Charming and got an earful.

Every one of her friends said that Mr. Charming was a world-class creep. He would flirt with, and even make suggestive comments to, all of the girls in the Youth Group. (He was 40+ years old and had a wife and 3 children of his own.)

But, just like at my former church, the adults loved him because he ‘kept the youth in line.’

Our investigation went on for several weeks. I kept a low profile so as not to arouse suspicion. Mostly, I just stood around, ate donuts, drank coffee, and talked about football.

Ann did most of the work because she knew so many people and it was perfectly natural for her to attend this church in her hometown, even if it was not the church she usually attended. After church was over, we would go to her house, have a delicious Sunday Lunch cooked by my aunt, and then write down everything we had learned. By then, Ann’s whole family was in on my investigation.

They were as angry as I was about the way I’d been treated, and our weekly report made an interesting lunchtime conversation.

Within a few weeks, I was sure that all I had to do was drive a few of these young ladies, and their parents (friends of my aunt & uncle), down to my old church, let them tell their stories to the parents of a few girls in the Youth Group, and Mr. Charming would become Mr. Unemployed.

But it kept getting better and better, so Ann & I kept digging. And I really wanted to keep a low profile if I could, because I didn’t want to mess with PastorT any more than I had to. He knew a lot of people in the denomination, and he could easily ruin my ministerial career before it even started.

Finally, after a month or so, Ann grabbed me by the sleeve and said, ‘You’ve GOT to hear this’.

She introduced me to a well-dressed, very large guy, maybe 30-35 years old. I’ll call him Fred. We slipped off into a Sunday school room where we would not be overheard.

It turned out that Mr. Charming had had a multi-year affair with Fred’s wife. Fred had kept his cool when he found out, talked with a lawyer, and had spent months gathering evidence. Text messages, voice mails, emails, even photos and videos with Fred’s wife and Mr. Charming in them.

Mr. Charming would send the videos to Fred’s wife and they both would have a good time on screen while texting each other. Later, they would hook up the old-fashioned way and make more videos.

Finally, Fred confronted his wife. She denied everything, but the evidence was just too much. Fred told her he wanted a divorce, full custody of the children, their house, his retirement money, his business, her engagement & wedding rings, everything, even the dog.

She hired a lawyer, but laws and courts being what they are in this rural Bible Belt county, her lawyer told her that if the judge saw the videos, she’d be lucky if she ended up in a homeless shelter with all of her worldly possessions under her bunk in a garbage sack.

Then Fred turned his attention to Mr. Charming. Fred still sincerely loved his wife, and he was convinced that Mr. Charming had deliberately ruined his marriage.

Taking Mr. Charming to court, suing him for ‘loss of consortium’ and otherwise making him legally miserable would take too long.

This is the rural Deep South. Many people around here prefer a more direct approach. In rural counties, the police and any ”jury of your peers’ will probably include people who have known you since kindergarten. So, if you have good reasons for your actions and you aren’t too stupid about it, there are things that you can do…

Fred scheduled an appointment with Mr. Charming in his church office, who did not suspect a thing because Fred was a Deacon and his children were in the church Youth Group. Remember that I said Fred was big? 6 foot 6 inches at least, 300 pounds, and if there was an inch of fat on him, he hid it well. Looked like he could pull up a 100-foot oak tree by the roots without breaking a sweat.

Fred told me that he brought several friends with him, and, of course, the videos. One friend blocked the door. Another unplugged the phone. A third one stood behind Mr. Charming and ‘encouraged’ him to stay seated in his chair.

Fred made Mr. Charming watch about 10 minutes of one of the videos. Then calmly said, ‘I’m going to stand here and watch you pack up your stuff, then you’re going to walk out of this building and never show your face in this town again.

Or we’ll be back.’

Mr. Charming did as he was told. A month later, he had a new job at another church, my old church, and started ruining another whole set of lives, including mine.

Fred actually did not know where Mr. Charming had gone. He had been led to believe that Mr. Charming had moved out of state. He was surprised, gratified and angered, to learn that this scumbag was only 50 miles away.

This had all happened just a few months before. Fred was still deeply in love with his wife. They were getting counseling and he hoped that they could save his marriage.

But his hatred of Mr. Charming was still fulminating and had been re-ignited by my telling him that Mr. Charming was living & working less than an hour away from his wife. Like Mount Saint Helens a few minutes before the explosion.

He presented such a face of restrained rage and vindictiveness that it scared me, and I wasn’t even the one he was mad at.

The next day, Monday, I drove back up there and gave him a copy of the directory of my old church. It had home addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses for pretty much every member of the church. I showed him the pages that listed all of the Deacons and other church leaders.

And I marked some of the church’s major financial donors.

I explained my situation to PastorT and asked that my name not be mentioned. ‘No problem’, he said.

The next Sunday, I could not resist visiting my old church to see how things were going. Mr. Charming was nowhere to be seen, nor was any explanation given about what had happened to him.

One weird thing, though, PastorT looked super scared. His voice, usually resonant, loud, and almost musically baritone, trembled during the whole sermon.

I slipped in just before the service started and made a point of sitting in the very front row, center pew. The look on his face when he saw me was worth all of my trouble.

I didn’t know it at the time, but Fred had gotten right to work and done a very thorough job. The whole church had gotten multiple ‘anonymous’ emails with photos and videos of Mr. Charming and Fred’s wife in various… well… compromising positions and states of undress.

Deacons and major donors got emails plus Express Mail packages just for good measure. Mr. Charming and PastorT had been left out – they didn’t know anything until the phone calls started pouring in.

After the worship service, it did not take long for my church friends to figure out why I was there. It was very gratifying. I was something of a hero, although I kept swearing that I had no idea what they were talking about.

Things continued to blow up in my former church for months afterward. Both PastorT and the pastor of Mr. Charming’s old church almost lost their jobs, because they had lied to my old church’s committee of Deacons, who had recommended hiring Mr. Charming, about why Mr. Charming had left his old job. But somehow they managed to stay in the pulpits at their churches, although a lot of church members left my former church, which caused some financial problems.

There was talk of legal action for sending unsolicited adult videos to little old ladies and other people in the church. But nobody ever was able to prove that Fred did it. I don’t think they tried very hard. After all, his wife was in the videos and photos. Both churches really REALLY did NOT want this to become a court case, because of Mr. Charming’s trysts, and the fact that he had spent years hooking up with a Deacon’s wife while he had unlimited, unsupervised access to dozens of church youth, would then become a matter of public record.

So they hushed it up.

I never saw PastorT again. I had lost all of the love, trust, and respect that I had had for him, and I was sure that he had figured out that I was somehow connected to the whole fiasco. So my chances of having a preaching career in my denomination were precisely zero. By that time, being a pastor, like PastorT, was the last thing I wanted anyway.

I withdrew my application to minister’s school and eventually completed a Doctorate in Archaeology at a different grad school, Graduated With Honors, at a large, widely respected State University. I’ve been teaching at a large, public university in the Midwest of the USA, with summer gigs on archaeological digs in Europe (except this summer).

And I am very happy.

I had no idea what happened to Mr. Charming after he left my former church.

But it didn’t matter because I’d moved on to a new, happier, more meaningful, more enlightened life.

One last, very gratifying, event, THE REASON FOR THIS POST:

All that happened 6-7 years ago. Fast forward to last March. I went to pick up a friend at a large downtown urban bus station in the US. Everyone hates this place. Not only is it crowded, but it is also poorly maintained and filthy.

It smells like spoiled garbage mixed with diesel exhaust and seldom-cleaned public restrooms.

My friend’s bus was late. I stopped by the newsstand to get myself a soda and candy bar.

Who do you think was re-stocking the shelves?

Mr. Charming.

I just sat across from the newsstand and enjoyed my drink and snack.

He recognized me, then turned away. I just sat and watched him, re-stocking shelves full of adult magazines and junk food.”