Assemblies of God Religious Trauma
The Assemblies of God (AG) is a large Pentecostal denomination whose official doctrine emphasizes salvation, baptism in the Holy Spirit, divine healing, and the second coming of Christ. Its Statement of Fundamental Truths presents Scripture as the authoritative rule of faith and conduct and affirms distinctive Pentecostal teachings concerning Spirit baptism and spiritual gifts.
Those official beliefs do not tell us what every AG congregation is like. Local churches, pastors, campus ministries, families, and regions vary substantially. Understanding harm in Assemblies of God settings requires two things at once: distinguishing official doctrine from local culture, and taking seriously the ways Pentecostal beliefs and authority structures can become psychologically powerful in practice.
On this page
Biblical authority and obedience
In some AG settings, Scripture is interpreted through a strong certainty framework in which doctrinal disagreement can become more than intellectual difference. Doubt may feel like rebellion, and leaving may be associated with spiritual danger or moral decline. For people raised inside the system, external authority can become internalized as a constant need to check whether thoughts, relationships, sexuality, entertainment, or life decisions are sufficiently "biblical."
This can contribute to perfectionism, fear of mistakes, difficulty trusting personal judgment, and a tendency to seek permission from religious authorities.
Membership in the Assemblies of God, or Pentecostal belief by itself, does not establish religious trauma. The relevant issue is whether particular teachings, relationships, or practices became linked with chronic fear, shame, coercion, betrayal, loss of agency, or pressure to distrust personal perceptions and needs. Messages about salvation, supernatural danger, sexuality, conscience, and belonging can remain psychologically active long after someone leaves a congregation. Recovery therefore involves understanding the particular AG environment that shaped the injury while restoring self-trust, choice, emotional safety, and a less coercive relationship to belief.
Holy Spirit experience, prophecy, and spiritual warfare
Assemblies of God Christianity belongs to classical Pentecostalism. Speaking in tongues, healing prayer, prophecy, spiritual gifts, and expectations of the Holy Spirit's activity can be central to religious life. Depending on the local culture, believers may also encounter intense teaching about demons, spiritual warfare, deliverance, or the end times.
These practices can become traumatic when people are pressured to display spiritual experiences, taught that ordinary psychological symptoms are demonic, or made to fear that doubt and disobedience expose them to spiritual attack. Children can be particularly affected by vivid teaching about hell, the rapture, demons, or end-times judgment because they do not yet have adult capacities for theological abstraction.
Spiritual leadership and institutional responsibility
The Assemblies of God has publicly acknowledged the category of spiritual abuse. Its 2025 position paper on misuse of spiritual leadership describes patterns of controlling behavior and notes that people harmed in spiritual contexts may experience fear, anger, shame, depression, isolation, and difficulty trusting religious community. That matters because the category is not being imposed solely by former members or outside critics; the denomination itself recognizes that spiritual authority can be misused.
The organization has also faced public scrutiny over abuse cases and institutional safeguarding, including controversies involving affiliated ministries. These matters should be discussed with precision rather than turned into sweeping claims about the denomination. The relevant clinical question for an individual survivor is what happened in their church, ministry, family, or leadership relationship and how the wider religious system shaped their ability to recognize, resist, disclose, or leave the harm.
That acknowledgment did not arrive in a vacuum. Beginning in 2025, NBC News published "Pastors and Prey," a yearlong investigation into sexual abuse allegations across the denomination. Its central report identified nearly 200 ministers, church employees, and volunteer leaders accused of sexually abusing more than 475 people, most of them children, over roughly half a century, and found that in dozens of cases churches returned accused offenders to ministry.
The series also examined abuse connected to the Chi Alpha campus ministry and the Royal Rangers youth program. NBC reported that the denomination has generally urged, rather than uniformly required, autonomous local churches to adopt specific child-safety measures. The Assemblies of God has disputed aspects of NBC's characterization and points to credentialing requirements, disciplinary provisions, and child-safety resources as evidence of its safeguarding efforts.
Those are journalistic findings rather than court verdicts, and the difference matters. Some matters have moved through legal channels: Joseph Lyle Campbell, a former Tulsa youth pastor featured in the reporting, was indicted in Oklahoma in December 2025 on charges related to alleged abuse decades earlier; in a separate civil suit, a Texas judge rebuked the denomination's national office for failing to comply with discovery orders. Other accounts remain allegations, and the denomination has defended its record.
The denomination states that it has a zero-tolerance policy barring credentialed ministers found guilty of sexual misconduct with minors from holding credentials. At the August 2025 General Council in Orlando, General Secretary Donna Barrett delivered an executive report that included updates related to Chi Alpha. Separately, immediately before the General Council, the General Presbytery met in Orlando on August 4-5 and approved the new position paper on misuse of spiritual leadership.
None of this establishes that Assemblies of God congregations are uniformly unsafe, and it should not be read that way. What it does establish is that the questions survivors often raise are documented ones about this denomination, not private grievances: who held credentials, who was required to report, what happened after a disclosure, and whether someone removed from one church later appeared in another.
For a person who was told their experience was isolated, or that raising it was disloyal, that distinction is not academic.
The relevant clinical question for an individual survivor remains what happened in their own church, ministry, family, or leadership relationship, and how the wider religious system shaped their ability to recognize, resist, disclose, or leave the harm.
Sexuality, gender, and purity culture
Many AG communities have participated in the wider evangelical purity-culture ecosystem. People may have been taught abstinence before heterosexual marriage, strict gender expectations, modesty rules, or the idea that sexual thoughts require confession and control. These teachings can leave lasting sexual shame or conflict even after beliefs change.
The impact may be especially intense when sexual behavior is linked not only to morality but to salvation, spiritual worth, leadership eligibility, or family belonging.
Leaving the Assemblies of God
Leaving can involve more than changing denominations. For someone raised in AG culture, it may mean losing a spiritual language, family expectations, community, music, ministry identity, a sense of divine calling, and certainty about how God communicates. Former missionaries, pastors' children, ministry students, and people who built their future around "the call of God" may face a profound vocational and identity crisis.
Recovery can involve learning how to make decisions without seeking supernatural confirmation, revisiting frightening beliefs about demons or judgment, processing spiritual-abuse experiences, rebuilding sexuality and boundaries, and deciding what—if anything—from Pentecostal spirituality remains meaningful.
The work is not an exercise in proving every Assemblies of God belief wrong. Its purpose is to restore enough psychological room for those beliefs to be evaluated without fear, coercion, or compulsory loyalty deciding the answer in advance.
Getting help after Assemblies of God experiences
Recovery may require more than deciding whether particular Assemblies of God doctrines are true. A person can leave the denomination and still feel watched by God, frightened of the end times, ashamed of sexuality, responsible for supernatural outcomes, or unable to trust decisions that are not externally validated. Therapy can work directly with those lingering patterns while respecting the complexity of family, church, and spiritual loss.
About Andrew Jasko
Andrew Jasko, MDiv, MPhil, MA
Registered Associate Marriage and Family Therapist (AMFT 146397)
Q Psychology Group ยท Supervised by a licensed psychologist
Andrew is a former minister and missionary who left Evangelical Christianity after his own crisis of faith. He holds a Master of Divinity from Princeton Seminary, an MPhil from Oxford in Indian contemplative studies, and an MA in Counseling Psychology.
He works with people recovering from religious trauma, spiritual abuse, high-control groups, and faith deconstruction – as a therapist for clients in California, and as a coach internationally.
Selected Research
Assemblies of God USA. Statement of Fundamental Truths. Official denominational statement of doctrine, including Scripture, Spirit baptism, divine healing, and the second coming.
Assemblies of God USA (2025). Position Paper on Misuse of Spiritual Leadership. Adopted by the General Presbytery, August 4-5, 2025.
Vigdel, H. E. (2026). The Ambivalence of Loss and Gain: Searching for Significance after Leaving a Context of Perceived Spiritual Abuse. Pastoral Psychology. DOI: 10.1007/s11089-026-01352-5. Qualitative study of 16 participants from Pentecostal fellowships in Norway.