Trigger warning. This podcast contains descriptions of various abusive situations.

Listener discretion is advised. You are listening to the Preacher Boys podcast, a podcast shedding

light on decades of mental, physical, and sexual abuse within the independent fundamental

Baptist movement. The testimonies shared on this podcast are told from the personal fundamental Baptist movement. The testimony shared on this podcast

are told from the personal experience and perspective of the survivors. Not all legal outcomes

are known or final. Any suspect is presumed innocent until proven guilty in the court of law.

Now, here is your host, Eric Skwarzinski.

It's August 28, 2022, and Matt Chandler, the pastor of Village Church, has announced that he's taking a leave of absence.

I'm going to dive into this a little bit in this episode.

Again, I'm only sharing what's been shared by the church itself, but this whole story is just pretty bizarre, and I think you'll see what I mean as I work my way through it. It's just a really

interesting discussion overall. This was not expected at all. I don't think anybody knew

this was coming. And I first came across this news from churchleaders.com, and they wrote a quick write-up on it.

I'll link to that in the show notes of this episode.

But then I went to the Village Church live stream from this morning where the announcement was made.

And I just have a lot of feelings about it.

It's a really weird story.

And again, I don't have any information beyond what's been

shared by the church. I'm going to do my best not to speculate. I just want to share the

information, allow you to draw your own conclusions, and I want to talk a little bit just

about the optics of how these kind of situations are handled and just some of the things that give me pause looking at this story.

In fact, a lot of it is going to be.

So this was after the main worship in the service.

...