Last week Natalie Greenfield described how kirkers treat her in public when they happen to run into her:

“There are some really interesting tactics used by the Christ Church and Trinity Reformed Church leaders to try intimidating and dehumanizing me. I don’t know if they have interacted about it and are in agreement on how I am to be treated, but if I see any of them in public they act as though I literally do not exist. They even go so far as to look *almost* at me, but instead of looking directly at me they look just past my head — like they are looking through me in a deliberate effort to make me feel as though I do not matter to them and I do not exist. It’s really strange.”

If you doubt the truthfulness of Natalie’s account, then please consider how a pastor of Christ Church treated her father in YouTube’s combox, which I pasted below. To set the context, Natalie gave a video-taped interview to a student at UI, who also interviewed Mike Lawyer, “Pastor of Discipleship/Counseling” at Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho. We’ve already considered Mr. Lawyer’s apology to Natalie. Now notice how Mr. Lawyer treated Gary Greenfield:

Last week we considered Mike Lawyer’s comment on the YouTube video “Who to Trust?” wherein he repeated Doug Wilson’s talking points

Gary Greenfield, father of Natalie Greenfield, wrote the first comment on the YouTube video “Who to Trust?” Mike Lawyer wrote the second comment:

Gary Greenfield
Same ole, same ole, the tragedy of it all . . . blame the victim, shame the victim, intimidate the victim, don’t believe the victim. . . The horror of it all is that this guy is a pastor, a shepherd, a supposed representative of Jesus Christ . . . he is the face of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Christians. This guy is a wolf in sheep’s clothing and he is dangerous and there are many more like him in Christendom.

Center for Biblical Counseling
I tried to send this to Natalie privately, but she isn’t receiving messages from me right now. So, I thought I would post it here.

This note is in response to a letter from Natalie to me. She made some comments about a few things I said during an interview I gave to a UI student named Hunter. Here’s my note to Natalie:

Thank you Natalie. Your response helped me to think about what went on when Hunter came to visit me. She told me she was creating a 2 minute documentary for a class she was taking at UI. I let myself get caught up in the discussion without being reflective enough about what I was saying.

All this to say that I need to apologize to you for two things and to ask you to forgive me. First, for me to talk about you, with her, at all was wrong and sinful. This is true even if I had already talked with you, but especially since you and I have never talked before, about anything, let alone the things I talked about on the video. That was sinful and wrong. Please forgive me.

Second, the things I said about you assumed things that I simply don’t know. I can’t read your mind, I don’t know your motives. I don’t even know you. For me to say that you are doing all this in order to “become someone,” goes way beyond anything I actually know. I’m not a mind reader and I should have just kept my mouth shut. I shouldn’t be thinking along those lines anyway, at all. So, that was sinful on my part. I’m very sorry. Please forgive me.

And just in case you’re wondering, I intend to take this as a lesson to be very careful, first to remember that I can’t read minds and thus shouldn’t try to “figure” people out. And second, that I have no business talking about people who are not in the room. Even if they are “public” people.

My interview with Hunter would have gone just fine had I stuck to what I actually know, and not run off into speculation. So, thank you for writing to me.

Thank you for being gracious. And please forgive me for sinning against you in these ways. The last thing you need is someone piling on.

Sincerely,
Mike

Gary Greenfield
This is grievous . . . you have never counselled nor even talked to Natalie, yet you were confident enough to publicly verbalise such demeaning, condescending and harshly condemning comments about her and you were confident enough to say them with a camera running. Don’t you see how detached from true compassion you really are?

You should resign as the head of your counselling institute, avoid counselling all together and take a sabbatical with the intent of learning what true compassion really is . . . and if you are truly sorrowful and repentant for what you have done to my daughter and her family, you will apologise to your congregation and all of Christendom for the way you and the leadership of the CREC have handled this tragedy.

We’re going on twelve years now and all of the CREC leadership are still in a state of gross denial. Having said this, I can say there is a glimmer of hope in that you have made more of an apology than has ever been made in these twelve years of madness and coverups.

Mike Lawyer completely ignored Gary Greenfield, father of the victim, when he offered his apology. No “hello.” No words of concern. No expression of grief for the calamity that took place under his pastorate.

Natalie wrote, “they act as though I literally do not exist . . . in a deliberate effort to make me feel as though I do not matter to them. . .” And Mike Lawyer proved her point.

For more about Gary Greenfield, please read this.