Filed: June 10, 2015
Defendant: Pastor Carson Culp | Christ Community Church
Members of the jury, the cases before this court have examined predators, narcissists, and cowards. This case is about the last of those three – and why cowardice in a position of leadership is not a minor failing. It is a moral failure with real consequences for real people.
Pastor Carson Culp of Christ Community Church did not orchestrate a conspiracy against me. He did not fabricate an accusation or lie from a pulpit. What he did was simpler and, in some ways, harder to prosecute precisely because it looks so much like ordinary human weakness:
He knew what was right. He chose what was easier. And a man who had already survived more than most people will ever face paid the price for that choice.
This case is about what happens when a leader mistakes diplomacy for integrity, and discovers too late that they are not the same thing.
In 2014, Pastor Tim Albrecht of Open Arms Mission invited me to help launch Celebrate Recovery in Welland. I was already leading worship at Redeemed Lives – known locally as The Barn – and took on leadership in both ministries simultaneously. By 2015, both programs were growing. People were showing up, finding community, rebuilding their lives.
It was, without exaggeration, the most meaningful season of ministry I had ever experienced.
During this period, Pastor Carson Culp began attending Celebrate Recovery. He observed what I was doing and how I was doing it. And then he asked me to serve as interim worship leader at Christ Community Church while he went on sabbatical – a nine-week assignment.
I want the jury to note what this means: Carson Culp watched me lead, evaluated my character and my competence over a period of time, and then specifically chose me. He was not inheriting me from a previous leadership decision. He was making a deliberate, informed choice.
That matters for what comes later.
Christ Community Church had approximately fifteen people in attendance when I arrived.
By the end of the nine-week interim, attendance had tripled – forty-five people, drawn in from Celebrate Recovery and Redeemed Lives, families who had found something worth coming back for. Carson offered me the permanent position. We built a shared vision together: modernize the worship, grow the congregation, take some of the load off his shoulders.
I accepted. I committed. I invested.
The resistance came quickly.
Older members of the congregation pushed back against the direction of the worship. The specific complaint was musical – they wanted traditional hymns, the style they had always known. More significantly, Carson's wife became a weekly presence in the complaint cycle, objecting to song choices, musical keys, and stylistic decisions – while declining to engage with the Worship 101 training materials that had been prepared specifically to help the congregation navigate the transition.
I want to be precise about what this resistance was. It was not theological. It was not ethical. It was preferential. The people who were leaving – driven away by the old style – were real people, with real spiritual needs, who had found something at Christ Community that was working for them. The people who wanted to go back to the hymns were expressing a preference for their own comfort over the growth of the congregation.
Carson knew this. We had discussed it. He had agreed.
Carson caved.
He asked me to reintroduce traditional hymns. Families like Frank and Debbie Lapointe – who had specifically come to Christ Community because of what the worship had become – left in frustration. The attendance that had taken nine weeks to build began to erode.
I am not prosecuting Carson Culp for making a difficult pastoral call about worship style. That would be unreasonable. What I am prosecuting him for is the pattern that the hymn decision revealed: when presented with pressure from inside the congregation, Carson consistently chose the path of least resistance, regardless of what that path cost.
A leader who cannot hold a vision under internal pressure cannot lead. He can only manage – and management in the service of whoever complains loudest is not shepherding. It is appeasement.
This pattern would prove catastrophic when a more serious pressure arrived.
The jury will recall from Case #2 that Andrew Thompson of Wellspring Community Church had a documented pattern of following me into subsequent ministry contexts and conducting behind-the-scenes campaigns against my character. What happened at Christ Community Church is the clearest example of that pattern on record.
Andrew Thompson contacted Carson Culp out of nowhere. He requested a private meeting – without me present – to raise concerns about my conduct. Specifically: that I was favouring one ministry over another, and that I represented a confidentiality risk.
Carson agreed to the meeting.
Two weeks before that meeting, Andrew Thompson had stood in Redeemed Lives – in front of witnesses – and publicly described me as a man of integrity. Two weeks. The same man, the same mouth, the same words used publicly to praise me and privately to undermine me.
Carson knew this. I told him. I pointed out explicitly that agreeing to a private meeting about my conduct, without my knowledge or presence, violated basic ethical standards – the same Matthew 18 standard this trial has cited repeatedly, because it is the standard every one of these churches claimed to follow.
He met with Andrew anyway.
I asked Carson directly not to meet with Andrew Thompson a second time. The stress of the situation had already triggered severe PTSD flashbacks. I explained this to Carson. I asked him to hold the line.
He met with Andrew a second time.
Following that second meeting, Andrew Thompson donated a soundboard to Christ Community Church. The church already had excellent audio equipment. The donation served no practical need.
The jury is entitled to evaluate the timing. A man conducts two private meetings with a pastor, raising accusations against a ministry leader. Immediately afterward, he donates equipment to that pastor's church. The gift accomplished one thing clearly: it created a relationship of obligation between Andrew Thompson and Carson Culp that had not existed before.
In any other institutional context, this would be recognized immediately for what it is. In a church, it was accepted as generosity.
When I pressed Carson for transparency about what had been said in those meetings – what specifically had been alleged, what evidence had been presented, what conclusions he had drawn – it became clear that the accusations were serious in nature and that Carson had given them more weight than they deserved.
Carson did not have the courage to tell me directly what had been said. He did not have the courage to tell Andrew Thompson that his conduct was unethical and that his behind-the-scenes campaign was not welcome. He did not have the courage to stand by the vision we had built together, or by the man he had specifically chosen to help him build it.
What he had was diplomacy. The preference for keeping everyone at the table, for not making anyone uncomfortable, for finding the middle ground – even when the middle ground required abandoning the person who deserved his support.
I resigned. Plagued by flashbacks, disillusioned, and genuinely heartbroken – not by the loss of a ministry position, but by the confirmation that even a pastor who had witnessed my work firsthand, who had chosen me deliberately, who had shared a vision with me, would fold the moment it cost him something to stand by me.
"Carson was navigating a genuinely difficult situation between two conflicting parties."
There were not two equal parties. On one side: a worship leader Carson had personally recruited, whose work had tripled attendance, who had been with the church for over a year. On the other: a man from another church entirely, with no standing at Christ Community, who had publicly praised the worship leader two weeks earlier and was now conducting a private campaign against him. These are not equivalent parties requiring neutral mediation. One of them was Carson's responsibility. The other was an outside actor with a documented history of this exact behaviour. The choice of how to respond was not complicated. Carson made it complicated by refusing to make it.
"The soundboard donation was genuine generosity with no strings attached."
Generosity does not arrive in the immediate aftermath of two private meetings designed to undermine someone's position. The timing, the recipient, and the context all point to a single conclusion. Carson's willingness to accept the gift after those meetings is not evidence of his naivety. It is evidence of his willingness to allow the relationship of obligation to be established.
"Carson cannot be held responsible for Andrew Thompson's behaviour."
Correct. He is not on trial for Andrew Thompson's behaviour. He is on trial for his own – specifically, for agreeing to private meetings that violated ethical standards he knew applied, for accepting a donation whose timing and purpose were transparent, and for choosing diplomatic comfort over the transparent, courageous leadership that the situation required and that the person he had recruited deserved.
Members of the jury, by Case #3 the pattern of this trial is established. What changes from case to case is not the mechanism – the mechanism is always the same, an institution protecting itself at the expense of the individual – but the character of the failure.
Father Léger was a predator. Andrew Thompson was a manipulator. Pastor Mike Meinema was a man who chose optics over truth. Carson Culp was a man who simply could not find the courage to do what he already knew was right.
That last failure is perhaps the most common one. The church is full of Carson Culps – decent men with genuine intentions who discover, when the moment of decision arrives, that they value peace more than justice. Who tell themselves that keeping everyone at the table is the loving thing to do, when what it actually is, is the comfortable thing to do.
I came to Christ Community Church having already survived things that should have broken me permanently. I built something real there. And I watched it dismantled – not by a monster, not by a schemer, but by a man who simply would not stand up when standing up mattered.
The Bible Carson preached from has a word for that. It is found in Revelation 3:16:
"Because you are lukewarm – neither hot nor cold – I am about to spit you out of my mouth."
That standard belongs to Carson's tradition, not mine. But it fits.
Pastor Carson Culp: Guilty of capitulating to internal pressure at the expense of a shared vision and the people that vision served; of agreeing to private meetings that violated the ethical standards he claimed to hold; of accepting a donation whose provenance and timing were ethically compromised; and of choosing diplomatic comfort over the courageous, transparent leadership that his own deliberate choice of a worship leader had created an obligation to provide.
Christ Community Church: Guilty of allowing its leadership to be shaped by whoever complained loudest – whether from within the congregation or from outside it – and of failing to protect a ministry leader whose work had demonstrably served its growth and its people.
Carson Culp was not a villain. He was something the church produces in far greater quantities than villains, and with far less accountability:
A man who knew better, and chose easier.
In the end, that was enough to finish what the others had started.
This court has noted it. The record is complete.