It’s Not One Pastor. It’s the System.
- Indhira Udofia
- Apr 16
- 6 min read
Untangling the Knot is where the web’s structure gets named. After mapping where it is and reading what is vibrating in it, the work here is to ask what that vibration means — not just for the individual thread, but for the whole. Anancy doesn’t diagnose people. She diagnoses systems.
Every few months, another one falls.
Another pastor, another scandal. Another megachurch, another cover-up. Another survivor who spent years being told to be quiet, to forgive, to protect the ministry — and finally, finally, couldn’t anymore. And every time, the Christian internet sorts itself into two camps: the people who say he was always problematic, I never trusted him, and the people who say we don’t know the full story, let’s not rush to judgment. Both camps are talking about the man. Neither is talking about the institution.
This is what the system is designed to produce: a conversation about individual failure that never becomes a conversation about structural design.
I want to have the other conversation.
What Governance Formation Means
Anancy Webwork uses the term governance formation to describe the process by which an institution teaches its members how to be governed — what to permit, what to suppress, who to believe, what to do with doubt. It is not a conspiracy. It does not require a bad actor at the center. A governance system can produce harm with entirely well-meaning people at every node, because the harm is baked into the logic, not into the intentions.
The Black Church has a governance formation. Every institution does. The question is not whether the formation exists. The question is what it teaches, what it forecloses, and who bears the cost of its operation.
Here is what the traditional Black Church governance formation teaches, in many of its iterations: The pastor is anointed. The anointing is not just skill or charisma — it is divine authority delegated from God through the laying on of hands. To question the pastor is to question the anointing. To question the anointing is to invite spiritual danger to yourself and your household. The congregation’s job is to receive, support, and submit. Dissent is a spiritual problem before it is anything else.
This formation does not require a predatory pastor to function. It functions with good pastors and bad pastors alike. It just produces different outcomes depending on the character of the person at the center.
When the person at the center is principled and restrained, the formation works around them, mostly. When the person at the center has unchecked needs — for money, for sex, for control, for admiration — the formation feeds those needs and punishes anyone who tries to interrupt the feeding.
The formation is the problem. The pastor is the weather vane.
What the Web Produces
In 2012, I was twenty-three years old, writing a research proposal about intimate partner violence in the Black community, and I kept running into a wall. The feminist literature kept treating the Church as an obstacle — a repository of backward gender theology that needed to be secularized, rationalized, gotten around. The Church literature, such as it was, kept treating violence as a failure of individual faith — pray harder, forgive faster, submit better.
Neither framework could see what I was seeing, which was this: the Black Church was not incidentally related to the problem of intimate partner violence in Black communities. It was structurally related. The same governance formation that taught women to receive male spiritual authority without question taught them to receive male domestic authority without question. The same logic that silenced congregational dissent silenced victims. The same hierarchy that protected pastors protected abusers. Not because everyone was in on it. Because the formation was doing what it was designed to do.
Toinette Eugene wrote in 1995 that the Black Church functions as a regulatory site within community — a place where community norms are not just preached but enforced, where what it means to be a good Black Christian woman, a good Black Christian family, a good Black community is made and re-made in the practices of the institution. The Church’s regulatory power is enormous. It is also, historically, one of the only institutions Black communities have owned.
That dual reality is the knot. The Church regulates because it has power. The Church has power because it has been, for a very long time, one of the few places where Black people could exercise any at all. Pulling that thread has consequences that ripple across the whole web.
This is not a reason to leave the knot in place. It is a reason to understand it before you start pulling.
The System Protects Itself
When survivors come forward, a specific institutional response pattern appears with enough regularity that it has to be understood as systemic. It goes like this:
First, the claim is questioned. The survivor’s character, motives, timing, and consistency are examined. Second, the pastor’s contributions are enumerated — how much he has done for the community, how many people he has helped, what the ministry means. Third, the survivor is encouraged toward reconciliation or forgiveness, framed as spiritual health for the survivor rather than accountability for the institution. Fourth, if the claim becomes undeniable, the pastor is rehabilitated on a short timeline, because the institution needs the formation to remain credible, and the formation requires that the center hold.
None of this requires a conspiracy. Every step of it is legible within the governance formation. You believe the pastor because the formation teaches you to. You protect the ministry because the formation teaches you that the ministry is the vessel God is using. You push the survivor toward forgiveness because the formation teaches that healing is a spiritual process that runs through forgiveness. You rehabilitate quickly because the formation cannot sustain the idea that God would place broken vessels at the center of holy work.
The system is not protecting the pastor. The system is protecting itself. The pastor happens to be at the center.
What the Knot Looks Like From Inside
I am writing from inside this web.
I grew up in the Church. I was formed by the governance formation before I had language for it. I know what it is to sit in a pew and feel something wrong and have the formation offer me an explanation: your flesh is speaking, not the Spirit; you are in rebellion; you need to pray through this. I know what it is to watch a congregation protect a pastor they knew was harming people because the alternative — that the anointing could be wrong, that God could have allowed or even sent a broken vessel — was more theologically disorienting than the harm was.
I also know what it is to love the Church. To need what it offers. To understand that for many Black people, the Church is not just a spiritual home — it is the institution that buried their grandparents, that organized their political resistance, that gave their children a framework for dignity in a world that denied it at every other turn.
This is the knot. You cannot pull one thread without feeling what it is attached to.
Anancy doesn’t ask you to stop loving the web. She asks you to stop pretending the knot isn’t there.
What Systems Analysis Requires
To diagnose a system rather than an individual, you have to ask different questions.
Not: was this pastor evil? But: what conditions made this possible, what structures sustained it, and what formation prevented the congregation from interrupting it?
Not: why didn’t she just leave? But: what did the governance formation teach her about staying, about loyalty, about what it means to be a woman of faith — and how many years did that teaching operate in her before the harm?
Not: how do we find better pastors? But: what governance structures would make pastoral power accountable regardless of the character of the person holding it?
The last question is the one institutions resist most, because it is the one that would actually change things. Finding a better pastor preserves the formation. Restructuring the formation changes the power. And power, in every institution, resists the reorganization of itself.
This is not a counsel of despair. It is a map.
The web can be rewoven. But not while we are telling ourselves that the problem was one man and the solution is to find a better one.
— Church Gworl Maroon
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