Her allegations brought down megachurch pastor Bruxy Cavey. Then the anonymous trolls came for her. Now she’s fleeing the church she’s worked at for 17 years.
Passionate, passionate, passionate. That was the first thing out of her mouth on the phone, and the first thing out of her mouth when we met.
But that wasn’t her first reaction when we met. Before our conversation started, she was sitting in a pew, still wearing her wedding ring and the blue dress she had worn for the last week, when I asked her if she believed in an afterlife.
“No,” she said immediately. “But I don’t think we have to try to find it, because I don’t think there is any,”
She has been working at Church on the Hill in Madison, Wisconsin, for 17 years, and has been married to a pastor longer before that. And yet, despite the church being well-liked and successful throughout Northern Wisconsin, the pastor she loves is persona non grata, and she’s leaving him.
This is the story of how the world became, against her wishes, a place where it was OK to fire her and dump her in a church basement, where she had worked for years. It’s the story of how Bruxy was forced to leave his job. And it’s the story of how the church she loved became a place where she, a woman of color, was the subject of racial harassment. It’s the story of how a white pastor made it OK to question a woman’s worth.
We spoke to her, in the church basement, where she found out, that night, there were no friends or family, no one to meet her car or even let her in it. The next morning she did get on a plane, back to Wisconsin.
And then we interviewed more people she interviewed, and I spoke to some pastors, and a few other church leaders, about the story, who are now taking action to protect their own. We spoke to these leaders to find out how this story of a church being on a list of white supremacy sites on Twitter happened, and why they believe that it likely was a plot — a deliberate plot designed to put a black woman in an uncomfortable place, where she couldn’t do her job and that made her a target, and where that made