Woman sues John MacArthur’s church for publicly shaming her for wanting to leave an abusive marriage

Grace Community Church allegedly shared private counseling details with its congregation after she resigned her membership

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Update: John MacArthur died on Monday night.

He was a racist, sexist, conspiracy theorist who protected abusers.

That's it. That's the obit.

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In a stunning new lawsuit, a woman says she trusted her former church leaders with personal information, only to have them blab everything to the congregation when she didn’t agree with their advice. The situation is all the more damning when you realize the power of this particular church and the explosive information she entrusted them with.

According to the lawsuit, which was filed earlier this month in Los Angeles County Superior Court, Lorraine Zielinski was a longtime member of Grace Community Church in California, headed up by fundamentalist Pastor John MacArthur. (More on him later.)

Zielinski says that, beginning in 2022, she began meeting with GCC’s counselors because she was thinking about getting a separation from her husband (who was also a member of the church). He was physically and emotionally abusive toward her and her daughter, she told them. The stress was causing her to have health issues and she genuinely worried that he would “smother her in her sleep with a pillow.” Her daughter was also fearful, telling Zielinski, “Mom, I’m afraid to go to bed. I’m afraid. I’m afraid of dad. I’m afraid.”

A normal counselor would have told her to protect herself and her daughter and get the separation.

GCC’s counselors told her to stay put because divorce was apparently a far worse sin than remaining unhappily married and further victimized. Not only that, they told her she needed to “submit” to her husband. It became clear to her that none of these people gave a damn about her own well-being. She was unable to change counselors and eventually felt that the only way out of this situation was to resign from the church altogether so that she could obtain the legal separation. In fact, that’s what one pastor suggested she do, and so she even wrote a formal letter announcing her resignation from the church.

But the church wouldn’t allow her to leave. They said the unresolved marital problems needed to be fixed before she could escape. Then they threatened her:

The GCC pastor told Plaintiff she was required to attend a meeting with GCC leadership to discuss her marriage, and if she did not attend, GCC would publicly share the private information she had shared during counseling with the entire GCC membership. The purpose of this meeting was to ensure she remained with her husband—even though GCC knew about Plaintiff’s reports of physical abuse.

She didn’t go to that meeting. And then GCC did indeed share her personal information with the congregation in an effort to use peer pressure to convince her to submit to the counselors and stay with her husband. To make matters worse, they acted like she was at fault in this marriage, never mentioning that her husband also wanted to end the relationship.

According to a letter she sent the elders last year, long before this lawsuit, she said she only wanted a separation; her husband actually filed for divorce and made plans to remarry.

She went on to say that, at this church, "men were believed and their statements were accepted as true, women were often disbelieved or ignored or dismissed as less discerning and more gullible, and there was never any meaningful accountability for the men."

The lawsuit claims that, among other things, the church violated her right to privacy and her right to free association under the state’s Bane Act, and it breached confidentiality by revealing publicly what she told them privately in what she believed was a counselor/client relationship. She also is suing them for emotional distress, maligning her in front of the congregation, and interfering in her divorce by sharing her personal details with her husband to give him “an advantage” in court.

It’s very likely this lawsuit will go nowhere because secular courts don’t generally get involved with church-specific issues. If she was a member of GCC and signed paperwork agreeing to their rules, only to realize later that those rules are batshit crazy, judges don’t typically get involved unless a secular law was potentially violated.

And GCC’s rules are absolutely batshit crazy. Their website says the only acceptable grounds for divorce are sexual infidelity or your spouse becoming an atheist and deserting you. Not in love anymore? Too bad, you’re stuck. Husband is physically abusing you? This church doesn’t care.

Another section of their website regarding “Church Discipline” lays out the four steps involved when someone needs to be fixed but refuses to comply with leadership: “(1) tell him his sin alone; (2) take some witnesses; (3) tell the church; and (4) treat him as an outsider.”

They say they won’t take the nuclear approach—steps three and four—unless the person refuses to change:

The elders at Grace Community Church avoid carrying out the third or fourth stage of church discipline until they are absolutely certain that the erring believer has truly sinned, or is continuing to sin, and that he has refused to repent when appropriately confronted. The elders will routinely send a letter by registered mail warning the individual that the third (or fourth) step of discipline will be taken if they have not received word of repentance by a specific date. When this date has passed, the person’s sin and refusal to repent are made known publicly, either before the entire assembly during a Communion service or through a fellowship group in which the person is known.

If you sign a contract like this, it’s because you chose not to read the fine print, because you don’t think it’ll ever apply to you, or because you seriously believe emotional blackmail is an effective tool to use against people with very little power. It’s cult-like behavior by a church that insists it’s not a cult (while using the term to describe other Christian denominations).

While GCC hasn’t said anything about this lawsuit, the fact that this is happening at MacArthur’s church shouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with it. That’s because he’s (in)famous for having ridiculous beliefs about damn near everything.

John MacArthur (screenshot via YouTube)

This is a guy who condemned a Christian ministry for honoring Martin Luther King, Jr. in 2018 and told his audience that MLK was “not a Christian at all” and that the late civil rights leader was “a nonbeliever who misrepresented everything about Christ and the gospel.”

MacArthur also has a long history of lying in the name of Jesus to gullible Christians who just accept it as truth. He has previously denied climate change, saying “God intended us to use this planet” and that “it is a disposable planet.” He openly celebrated the lack of social distancing and face masks in his congregation during the height of COVID, once telling a packed house, “the good news is you’re here, you’re not distancing, and you’re not wearing masks.” In August of 2020, he falsely claimed, “There is no pandemic.” (That October, there was an outbreak at his church.) He has also said “no one is gay.” He’s nothing more than a conspiracy theorist who regurgitates lies while telling ignorant people they are actually facts.

Earlier this year, the 86-year-old MacArthur was in the hospital for a variety of health issues, including the need for a heart-valve replacement, which was news to those of us who didn’t think he had one of those. On Sunday, his church announced that he was hospitalized with pneumonia and will probably be dead soon. As this health crisis grew progressively worse, his church announced budget cuts.

This controversy involving a woman’s marriage to an abusive husband isn’t new for the church either. In 2004, after a former staffer was charged with aggravated child molestation, child abuse, and corporal injury to a child—he’s currently in jail as part of a 21-year-long sentence—the church expressed their support of him. They also blamed his wife, who had separated from him in 2002, for spreading the allegations. In fact, during a sermon in 2002, MacArthur himself told the congregation they should treat the woman “as an unbeliever—for all we know, she may be.” He didn’t care about her reasons for leaving. He just told everyone she wanted “to leave her husband, to grant no grace at all, to take the children, to go away, to forsake him.”

In 2022, when a church elder asked his colleagues to issue a formal apology and admit their mistake in that particular situation, he was basically told to shut the hell up. He soon resigned and urged the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors to remove GCC as an approved training center due to the church’s “unethical counseling practices.” The ACBC didn’t do that, but they did remove GCC Pastor Bill Shannon from their list of approved counselors.

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