Confessions from the Inner Circle
“To get to the worship team you needed to be part of the “in” group. You needed to be approved and accepted. I wrote myself a note to sign my children up for music lessons, ASAP.”
In my role as an advocate and fellow survivor, I bear witness to many stories from people who left CFC, and almost every one includes an element of being excluded. Survivors tell how they worked to be accepted, how they longed to be in the inner circle, of how they were beset by constant feelings of unworthiness.
It’s easy to dismiss these kinds of stories as sour grapes. Were people really excluded? Are Darlene and her daughters really “aloof and unfriendly”?
I was born in 1986. My parents, Paul and Susan Brown, have been close friends and colleagues with CFC leadership since their college days. I was dedicated at CFC and homeschooled from kindergarten through twelfth grade. I was one of the overachievers who memorized an entire book of the bible for my Bible Smuggler badge in Friendship Clubhouse. I had lead roles in CFA musicals and was granted plenty of special privileges because of my family’s status.
Second from the right, ca. 1993.
I share these things to validate what survivors already know. You’ve experienced it, but I’m going to say it explicitly. CFC operates with a class system. There’s an inner circle reserved for just a few families. I know this because my family is one of them.
I never experienced the aloof and unfriendly version of Darlene Sinclair. To me, Darlene was warm and bubbly. She gushed over me and bought me clothes my parents could never afford. Danica gave me piano lessons and her hand-me-down teal silk dress. Brietta mentored me. Louissa and I innocently giggled about crushes that we knew would never go anywhere.
I didn’t recognize this class system until long after I left CFC to go to college out of state. For a while, I thought it was just in my head. Then I attended a wedding in 2014 and chatted with Carina Gilchrist briefly before the ceremony started. I forget exactly what I said, but I believe that I asked about how things were going at CFC. Carina’s answer made my jaw drop. “Things are going fine,” she said, “but it’s always a struggle to get the farmers on board, because they’re just in a different class from us.” I was stunned that she actually had said that out loud. Did she feel safe saying that to me, because I was a member of the inner circle? Would she have said that to others?
Looking back, I can imagine other interpretations of the favor that my family experienced. It was a kind gesture for Darlene to buy my mom new maternity dresses for her eighth child, but it also benefited the church for my mom to look the part of an ideal wife.
When Darlene stopped by and said “Oh, I was just at TJ Maxx and saw these clothes and thought of you!”—how much of that was to make sure that we stayed loyal?
When Rick and other CFC leaders praised my dad and called him Dr. Brown, was it because his credentials lent legitimacy to their heretical theology?
Fiddler on the Roof, 2004
My family was held up as a model family. We sat in the front row of the sanctuary, and no one dared to take our seats. People praised my parents for raising such a godly daughter who cared for her younger siblings, but they didn’t know that I employed the effective tactics of shame and pain to keep the kids in line. “Keep still,” I’d warn, squeezing the knee of a sibling until they yelped. “Don’t you dare make Dad look bad.”
People outside the inner circle didn’t know that my family relied on food stamps and food pantries to keep food on the table. Our inability to pay for health care was easily disguised in a church culture that disdained traditional medicine. Almost everything that we wore was handed down from the Sinclairs or taken from the Blessing Shop. The model family was an illusion.
We were always on display. I didn’t realize the intentionality of it when I was a child, but it really hit me when I heard Ryan Dunphey crassly talk about the downside of buying a house in the middle of nowhere:“The only bummer is that like we wouldn't be visible and the Christian life ought to be on display for everybody.”
Everyone at CFC is being watched, to a certain extent, but Ryan’s description of an inner circle family is chilling: “Your neighbors are watching you. They're watching the choices you make and choices you don't make and how you live your life and the comings and goings and the 17 cars that are out front of your house during some sort of mother's gathering or whatever.”
The North Country folks may be watching, but outside the CFC bubble, families like the Sinclairs and the Browns are just moderately talented people without the education or experience needed to succeed in the real world. My family lived in Wisconsin from 2005-2018, and it was eye-opening to see the stark difference in how people treated us. People appreciated my family’s impulse to be involved 1000% in church, but they also quietly came to me for advice about how to understand my parents’ strange and controlling behavior.
“I realized that there are two groups of people at CFC who are members. There are members who are part of the inner circle, and there are all the rest of us who serve them and that's what it is: you are part of the inner circle or you're outside the inner circle and you're serving the in circle in an attempt to somehow get in the in circle.”
- Sarah Diederich
So how do you get into this inner circle? If you try hard enough, do you finally get in? Sadly, that’s not how it works. Unless you have a time machine to take you back to the early 1980s so you can attend SUNY Potsdam or Clarkson and befriend Rick and Darlene, your only options are to be born into an inner circle family or to marry into one. This is why someone who spends decades working on CFA musicals can be passed over if Darlene wants one of my siblings to direct a musical.
You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, 2023
They have a vested interest in not telling you this, though. CFC is only able to operate because the church has hundreds of people working hard to be accepted. Once congregants realize that their efforts are futile, CFC won’t be able to exploit people’s desire for love and community.
This dynamic will play out as soon as I hit publish on this piece. It’s highly unlikely that anyone inside CFC’s inner circle will publicly respond; they’ll let the wanna-be inner circle assure everyone that I’m a liar. The inner circle won’t even have to ask church members to do this; people will do it willingly and think that it’s their own idea. The people who want to be accepted will loudly defend Rick and his cronies while people like my family will keep their hands clean and stay above the fray.
I can’t go back and alter the past. I can’t change the fact that my family believed that they were the only ones who could do things the correct way. I can’t go back and start communicating in a way that isn’t condescending.
I can’t undo the harm that I caused as a member of the inner circle, but I can tell you this: the inner circle is real, but the perfect families inside are an illusion.
Abbi Nye is an archivist in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She attended CFC from 1986 to 2005.
