Swept Under the Rug
The Conspirators' Table?
Joseph & Christine Lucketta
My Story — What Really Happened at Verity
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I’m sharing our story not to get revenge — but because silence is the breeding ground for spiritual abuse. Everything here is my sincere memory, my perspective, and truthful, told so others can see the pattern for what it is — and know they’re not alone.
The Early Years — All In
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From 2019 to 2021, Verity Baptist Church was like spiritual boot camp for our family. We were all in. Saved, sold out, soul-winning. Three (services a week) to thrive. We served, sacrificed, and grew in faith. I joined the orchestra and helped upgrade the microphone system. I built a multi-camera livestream system with advance equipment that's still in use today. After the bombing of First Works Baptist Church, I designed and installed a state-of-the-art security system that most companies would dream of having. I helped lead the safety team when the church was located at one of the most unsafe areas of all of Sacramento. Our family gave ourselves fully — because we believed the mission to save souls mattered more than anything. Ecc 9:10 - "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might;" We made dear friendships with our brothers and sisters in Christ over those years. We celebrated with them, mourned loss with them, strived together for God's glory.
A Glimpse Behind the Curtain - the Unseen Red Flags
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If you’d asked me back then, I would’ve said I trusted Roger Jimenez completely. A few small moments in hindsight — the controlling meeting about the audio panel, the shifting tone in sermons — should have made me pause. But loyalty has a way of silencing your inner voice.
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Looking back, there were certainly red flags. For Christine, it was the Mother's Day sermon in 2021 - a message that compared working moms to an ostrich who abandons her eggs in the sand (Job 39:13-17). We were already aware of the church's position on women working outside the home, and while we may not have agreed with every interpretation, we respected the right of the pastor to preach his convictions. But on a day meant to honor and uplift mothers, this felt like a targeted attack. Instead of receiving encouragement for the love and sacrifice she pours into our home - including working a job that comfortably provides for our family, Christine was left feeling worthless and ashamed. She left the service in tears. To this day, she remembers that sermon not as an exhortation, but as a public shaming.
"She left the service in tears. To this day, she remembers that sermon not as an exhortation, but as a public shaming."
For me, it was harder to see through the FOG (fear, obligation, and guilt) tactics used to control someone (or many people). Once, I adjusted the audio panel to fix the sound for a Sunday service - and was called into the Pastor's office along with a leader in the orchestra ministry to be reprimanded for making the adjustment without permission. Pastor Jimenez alluded to the possibility that I could sabotage the service (because a previous member had allegedly done this), so any adjustments were to be made either Sunday or Wednesday evening. I didn't exactly like the reprimand. It's a weird thing to hear that you might hijack the audio system after spending months learning how to use it, and many hours dialing in adjustments to make it the best quality possible. However, I brushed it off as the pastor being overprotective. I even brushed my wife off when she tried to convince me that Pastor Jimenez was preaching against me on the subject in a later sermon. The blinders we'll put on for someone we trust can be mind-boggling sometimes.
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Then there was the day I discovered that an individual previously accused in the church of serious misconduct involving children was still allowed in the church after a second major incident involving inappropriate behavior reported by neighbors. Many witnesses took to the public Facebook group Neighborhood Watch of North Natomas to express their fear of someone walking through their complex in the middle of the night, attempting to open doors. In a post dated 27 Jul 2022, neighbors talked about this person doing this for months. The police had been called several times, to no avail. When I discovered the post, I brought it to Pastor Jimenez and asked how he intended to proceed; this was a second major incident involving extremely inappropriate behavior. He stated that he had no plans on ejecting the family because they were long-standing members that would have nowhere to go, and since the incident didn't occur on church property, there was no requirement for him to call the police or exercise church discipline. In a follow-up meeting, I recall Pastor Jimenez informing me that the church would be taking over discipline and counseling for the individual. Initially, the person was seeking help through professional counseling. But once the counselor began to suspect the pastor/church as a cause for concern, from what I was told, the family eventually stopped seeing the counselor, and that the pastor and deacon had stepped in to oversee the situation directly. Once Pastor had a plan in place for the family, he brought in the entire safety team to brief everyone on how to execute it. Rather than solely focus on external threats, the team had now been tasked to screen for internal ones as well. This didn't sit right with me. It still doesn't.
"It's a weird thing to hear that you might hijack the audio system after spending months learning how to use it, and many hours dialing in adjustments to make it the best quality possible."
What's the Point? Hindsight really is 20/20 when you're reflecting on a situation and how you could have done better. I'm not sharing these red flags to call others out, to make myself the victim. I'm sharing this to call myself out - For years, I normalized bad behavior from a pastor, convinced that his actions were in the interest of my family and the interest of the church body. My skewed vision allowed me to prop up another person rather than stand up for biblical boundaries. The point is that this section highlights that there were subtle signs of behavior that I could have picked up on and responded to.
The Pivot Point — Stonewalling & the Silent Discard
In the summer of 2023, we considered moving our family to Georgia — partly for housing, partly for a fresh start. I sat down with Pastor Jimenez, hoping for counsel. What I got instead was cold distance. Sermons started landing like coded messages: if you’re planning to leave, get out now. If you’re not loyal enough, you’re dead weight. When I reached out privately to ask if we’d offended him, I didn’t get pastoral care — I got an accusation that we were “talking crap” and turning people against California. The warmth was gone. The pulpit became a weapon. And yet, after praying, weighing the pros and cons, and doing our best to honor what we though God wanted, we chose to stay in California and at Verity. Ironically, it was after this decision to remain that the relationship deteriorated the most. The very loyalty we tried to offer was met not with grace, but with growing hostility and silence - the "discard."
The "stonewall" is a common tactic used by a manipulator to get something they want by going virtually no-contact with someone. Besides the cursory handshake as we left the building, we received no fellowship from our shepherd. There's a certain indescribable pain that hits you when your pastor ghosts you in plain sight. This is when I really started to feel the psychological damage occurring - many restless, sleepless nights wondering whether my pastor hated me or not. One particular moment that stuck out was the ladies' basketball game at the November harvest party. I was sitting, watching Christine shoot hoops with her friends and Pastor Jimenez was standing near me. In an unfortunate event, Christine jumped up and landed awkwardly on her ankle, severely spraining it. She immediately came next to me to nurse her swelling injury. Pastor Jimenez silently stood next to us, never asking how Christine was doing or offering any sign of condolence. Even after this, we thought the idea of leaving was ridiculous! Only wicked, weak families did that! It's only in retrospection that I can look on this fondly and remember that God carried us through the fire and flames. This stonewall period lasted up until the day we left. We had resolved ourselves to be faithful through the good times and the bad - the Christian life is measured in decades, right? But everything came to a head in the spring of 2024.
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What's the Point? The point is that this provides the real context leading up to what happens next in the story. In our eyes, we weren't done with Verity - we recognized that there were problems, but once again, instead of holding anyone accountable we diminished ourselves in the hope that things would get better. So while we were recommitting to California, to Verity, to our homeschool group, we were also being silently discarded. Some may even say that there was a "reverse discard" - this is where someone mistreats you in order to get you to walk away.
"Pastor Jimenez silently stood next to us, never asking how Christine was doing or offering any sign of condolence."
The Safety Team Incident — When the Mask Slipped
On March 10, 2024, during the evening service, a fellow safety team member came up to me and reported seeing a longstanding member of the church behaving indecently in the front row. I was the safety team lead that night, located in the front foyer while the team member was located on the right side of the sanctuary looking directly across the front row. I reviewed the footage myself — and what I saw backed him up. The video was choppy but very clear. It was choppy because when we built the system one of the problems we frequently ran into was that the hard drives would run out of space too quickly. The reason this occurred was because the cameras were set to trigger whenever there was movement within the camera's field of view. This motion trigger would keep the sanctuary cameras recording nearly all the time due to all the heavy traffic throughout. The solution was to turn the sensitivity way down so only large amounts of movement would trigger the sanctuary cameras to record. In this particular case, the cameras didn't get a continuous stream of the incident, but the footage was clear enough. To my eyes, and based on my understanding of the footage, it looked like repeated suspicious hand movements followed by zipping up of pants at the end of service, the behavior lasting nearly the whole service.
What I saw was deeply troubling and raised serious concerns about decency and appropriateness; I did everything according to the training I received — the other safety team member and I entered the safety team room and asked the existing money-counters to leave for a moment so we could review the footage. They immediately went to the Deacon who promptly knocked on the door to ask what was happening. I asked him to wait while I confirmed that the footage matched the testimony of the safety team member. Once I had confirmation, we brought in the Deacon to further review the recording. He agreed that it looked suspicious and agreed to take it to Pastor Jimenez. The Pastor’s response? Shut it down. When I texted him to ask if we’d investigate or at least inform the primary team leader before the next service on Wednesday, he pushed it back to the Deacon. The Deacon told me during a call approximately 30 minutes later that there was to be no immediate action by the safety team — the man in question had been at Verity too long, had a possible mental handicap, and that there wasn’t a second witness. The footage, according to the pastor, didn’t count.
I pushed back gently — when Deacon asked if I had any questions or concerns, I stated that my concern is that it looks like the leadership is sweeping this under the rug. And for that, the Pastor called me himself. Not to thank me. Not to ask what I’d seen. But to accuse me of lying, to call me stupid, to say he couldn’t trust me anymore. All for doing the job of protecting the flock. Once he questioned my integrity, I stood up to him, telling him that like him, I'm another saved believer and that it's inappropriate to treat a brother in such a way. His anger seemed more rooted in perceived personal offense than in the actual content of our conversation. I had to be the one to calm him down. I had to be the one to apologize for saying "sweeping under the rug" first before he would reciprocate. I had to stop holding him accountable to be the leader that's supposed to say no to that kind of behavior in church. That was the moment the mask fell. If your spiritual leader can’t handle truth without rage and name-calling, he isn’t a shepherd — he’s a tyrant. Ezekiel 34 speaks of shepherds who "feed not the flock," who rule "with force and cruelty." That chapter suddenly felt personal.
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What's the Point? ​My intent here is to show that the actual safety team incident had very little to do with why we left Verity Baptist Church. It was merely the catalyst to the conversation that prompted me to finally stand up for myself. My current pastor has a saying - "Everyone love being a servant until they are treated like one." Truer words can't be spoken here. I gave everything I could to this church through the ups and downs. We left not because the pastor didn't share my same opinion on what to do about the incident, but because he truly failed to treat me with the dignity and respect that any fellow sinner saved by grace deserves.
"I pushed back gently - when Deacon asked if I had any questions or concerns, I stated that my concern is that it looks like the leadership is sweeping this under the rug."
Leaving — The Last Conversation
I met with him one final time the following Sunday evening, March 17. I told him tearfully that my family could no longer sit under his leadership after being treated so poorly. He pressed me to discuss other factors that could be at play besides the fallout from the safety team incident. I mentioned his reaction to our potential move to Georgia. He firmly denied any stonewalling and accused us of being the ones to turn our backs on him. He asked about Christine and her being a working mother being a factor, and I assured him that that had nothing to do with why we were leaving. He blamed me, and then blamed the Deacon for not regurgitating his words to me properly. This felt like something called DARVO when studying clinical narcissism. It means Deny, Attack, Reverse the Victim and Offender. It looks like this - "I didn't stonewall you (deny)! You turned your back on me (attack)! I'm the victim of your attacks (Reverse Victim-Offender).
And then the conversation took another weird turn. After numerous sermons on not giving unsolicited advice, the pastor felt the need to advise me of my inability to take criticism. He brought up the meeting in his office between me, him, and Andrew, highlighting that Andrew took the criticism very well while I sat there with a scowl on my face. By this point, I just wanted to leave, and so I agreed that perhaps I didn't take that criticism well. But I then took the time to remind him of how much time and effort I had committed to becoming a subject-matter expert on the audio board, and that after all my loyalty, it was so weird he still thought there was a possibility I'd sabotage the livestream. I also reminded him that while I may not have carried a pleasant face, I did not waver in my dedication to the Lord or His church. Once we moved past this, we discussed the administrative side of leaving Verity. He warned me never to speak of these incidents publicly or he would have to call me out publicly and put me under church discipline. He also recommended that I not fellowship with church families. Out of respect, I stayed quiet. For a time.
The Aftermath — The Smear Machine
He didn’t stay quiet. Sermon after sermon painted my family as conspirators — hosting secret dinners, plotting to pull people away, telling lies about the “safety team incident.” We later heard that we were being painted as slanderers and advised to be cut off. I can't help but think of Diotrephes in 3 John 9-10 "[...] who loveth to have the preeminence among them [...], prating against us with malicious words: and not content therewith, neither doth he himself receive the brethren, and forbiddeth them that would [...]." While I can't speak to every conversation behind closed doors, that was certainly the impression left by several public sermons. The truth? We wanted to stay true to our word about improper fellowship with members of Verity, and so we only invited a family into our home for dinner AFTER they had decided to leave Verity. Here, I will admit to a major mistake. I did invite a family into my home that fell under church discipline because of an incident at the teen conference. I truly believed that that family was done with VBC, so I shared our story with them not knowing they would eventually return to Verity to retell this later. We had relative peace for the first several months after leaving.
Reuniting with families who had left and also seen under the rug was truly a blessing. Even though the "rumors" seemed to suggest that we were pulling existing members from Verity and using the fellowship to bad-mouth Jimenez, nothing could be further from the truth. We were all finding healing by sharing our stories with one another and finding out that there was a clear pattern of behavior from the man we once called Pastor. But none of the fellowship was meant to demean or vilify Pastor Jimenez. We recognized that something was different about the preaching. We weren't part of the church anymore, but we all hoped for better days and that things would turn around. We prayed for him, and for our brothers and sisters who were still there like Luke 6:28 calls us to "bless them that curse you, and pray for them which despitefully use you." And while this continued in our house, the smear campaign continued at Verity. I continued to receive calls and texts from friends telling me that the man we were praying for continued to preach sermons that seemingly targeted us. After review, we felt like those sermons projected onto us the very things we had experienced from him, as if he was flipping the narrative.
He taught his people to pray imprecatory prayers — the biblical term for asking God to stop, harm, or kill an enemy. I asked him twice via text to stop preaching lies about my family. In December 2024 I texted: “I hope that if you plan on preaching about my family in the future, you are more truthful about it… I have never lied about that [security] situation… I will continue to pray for you.” He didn't respond and he didn’t stop. So in June 2025 I drew a final boundary: “If you preach lies or slander again, you’ll be responsible for the consequences. This is not up for discussion.” He responded by deflecting blame and spinning it as my guilty conscience. This felt like a classic DARVO pattern once again — where a person denies wrongdoing, attacks the accuser, and casts themselves as the victim.
What's the Point? This should show a clear disconnect from what one may see on the surface and what actually happens within this system. Up to this point, someone looking at this from the outside might only see a family who disappeared suddenly, without explanation. They may be too afraid to reach out and ask what happened because they're not entirely sure whether that family left on their own or they were kicked out. And rather than receive a true recollection of facts, they're given the narrative that they were abandoned without explanation and that it's very strange that these leaving families don't fellowship anymore. And if these families left, they are likely wicked, backslidden, far from God. I challenge you to seek the truth yourself here.
"We left because he truly failed to treat me with the dignity and respect that any fellow sinner saved by grace deserves."
Healing from the Pattern — From a Cult of One
When my family began to heal, I started reading and watching numerous authorities on spiritual abuse and narcissism. I saw it clearly for the first time: a narcissistic leader in a spiritual setting can be devastating. When a church becomes a personality cult — one man controlling the narrative, punishing dissent, demanding loyalty — the people become hostages without realizing it. But we got out. We found a new church community. We found truth, peace, and real grace. Our faith didn’t die — it got stronger when we stepped away from the control.
Why I’m Speaking Now
I didn’t want to share any of this publicly. I stayed silent while my family’s name was dragged through the mud from the pulpit. But spiritual abuse thrives in darkness. When good people stay quiet, more good families get trapped. Prov 31:9 states: "Open thy mouth, judge righteously, And plead the cause of the poor and needy." So I’m telling my story now — because maybe you see yourself in it. Maybe you’re being told there’s nowhere else to go. Maybe you feel alone, confused, and afraid to speak. You’re not alone. There is hope, there are other churches, and there is life outside the rug you’re told to stay under. If my story gives you the courage to look closer — then this pain has a purpose. Everything here is my honest recollection, my perspective, and my right to tell.
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Jeremiah 23:1-5 - "Woe be unto the pastors that destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture! saith the LORD. Therefore thus saith the LORD God of Israel against the pastors that feed my people; Ye have scattered my flock, and driven them away, and have not visited them: behold, I will visit upon you the evil of your doings, saith the LORD. And I will gather the remnant of my flock out of all countries whither I have driven them, and will bring them again to their folds; and they shall be fruitful and increase. And I will set up shepherds over them which shall feed them: and they shall fear no more, nor be dismayed, neither shall they be lacking, saith the LORD." Amen, and AMEN!