Matthew Murray was angry.  Matthew Murray had been angry for a long time.  On Sunday, Matthew Murray was so angry and so unbendably focused on exacting revenge that he packed up his guns and his ammo and let his anger fly in the direction of 2 Youth with a Mission staffers and two sisters, age 16 and 18, who were unfortunate enough to be in his sights at New Life Church.

His anger didn’t come on suddenly.  It smoldered over a very long time, and began to erupt into flame when he began participating in online forums at the Ex-Pentecostals.org message boards.  Some general observations about these boards:  The regular members seem to be pretty even-keeled, but definitely healing from a childhood of toxic religion in tightly-controlled family environments.  They are not shy about criticizing the groups they escaped from, but in general, they seem to be dealing with their individual pasts in a forgiving and mature way.  Matthew Murray, posting as “nghtmrchld26″, burst onto the boards on Christmas Eve, 2006, posting on a thread about “child abuse in Pentecostal families“.  According to CNN, his family is involved in ministry and has ties to New Life Church.

Murray was absolutely depressed and disturbed.  He wrote about it sporadically on the ex-Pentecostal “Azusa Street Survivors” forum, intensifying the frequency and voraciousness of his posts beginning in August and leading up to Sunday’s tragedies.  His spiralling mental health is well-documented in his posts and despite the best efforts of members to guide him to qualified therapists (with one even making a personal appeal to him), the spiral continued.  Today, those members are heartbroken that despite their best efforts, they could not reach him.  Here was a typical response from him:

I’ve already been working with counselors. I have a point to make with all this talk about psychologists and counselors “helping people with their pain”…….

it’s so funny how many people want to help you and love you and counsel you and “work with you through your pain” when there’s money involved……

One of the limitations and dangers of communities like this is that there will be that one person who is determined not to get help and is actually triggered by participation in discussions about their past experiences, bitterness, and even abuse.  Matthew was one of these.  Although he was angry at “the church”, he was most angry at YWAM for rejecting him in 2002.  Here are some of his remarks:

Well, ok, I haven’t met every single last christian on earth, but during my whole time with my parents church, YWAM Denver, Kings Kids, and the Mike Bickle/Peter Wagner/Charismatic type conferences, YES, those behaviors and attitudes were always observed and I was treated that way. I honestly cannot remember when I was not treated in those groups as one of the “horrible people”(as opposed to one of the “Beautiful People.”)

After I left/was kicked out(depending on the group,) I was somewhat openly considered an “official outcast,” someone not worth their time and “not of God” and “certainly not truly spiritual.” (Link)

Sounds like the same kind of crap that goes on in YWAM and went on in The Family…..
Unthinking youth and young adults who go in without asking questions and without bothering to question all the “feel good spiritual elitism” experiences. (Link)

The fact is, in YWAM, and christianity, it’s all about the Beautiful People. No, it’s not just “one group of bad christians” but rather….almost every group of christians except for a few open minded non-evangelical churches. (Link)

Jesus also never said that I had to follow and believe in people like Peter Wagner, Cindy Jacobs, Rod Parsely, Mike Bickle, Joyce Meyers, Ted Haggard, YWAM or any other so-called “annointed teacher” or “prophet” or self-proclaimed “holy spirit filled” group. (Link)

There are many more posts documenting his deteriorating mental state. I considered quoting them, but I’m going to just link to the search results and his final postings on December 9th if you want to read them. I’m concerned that reposting them, even small excerpts, might be triggers for others who land here as a result of a search.  By mid-summer, he was admitting to cutting himself and his poetry was growing darker, with one particularly dark post quoting Marilyn Manson lyrics on Halloween.

Without question, his posts were painting a picture of someone contemplating a dark and violent end, and I’m certain that the leadership of this forum had done everything they knew how to do to help him.  Still, even as he felt free to express himself in the safety of online interaction, the members were limited by the barriers erected by that same free space.  Some members, trying to be kind and engage him, complimented him on his poetry, which encouraged him to write much more, and the more he wrote, the darker it became.

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen situations like this online, but it is the first time that I’ve seen it come to this kind of an end.  I hope it’s the last, but I am getting concerned about the possibility that participating (and venting) in a venue like the one Matthew used actually inadvertently contributed and gave him the outlet he needed to NOT seek help.  There is a chilling thread on 12/1/07 entitled “Considering Suicide?” where he writes about the six steps one should take if they actually call a suicide helpline to avoid being personally contacted by a Suicide Hotline worker.  It’s unclear to me whether the thread starter is addressing those hotlines manned by church workers, but here is Murray’s advice:

A word of advice if you do call and want to talk to someone……remember some things:

1. You do not have a plan. You do not actually intend to kill yourself. Admit to no more than suicidal thoughts.
2. You do not have the means to kill yourself available
3. You have never attempted suicide before. Nobody in your family has either.
4. You don’t have any recent life stressors
5. You don’t use alcohol/drugs
6. You are under the treatment of a mental health professional who you are seeing weekly.

Remember that they are able to get pass Caller ID blocking and WILL call local mental health authorities.

The responses are what concerned me.  While one person steps up and disagrees with him, other members are handing out applause. 

What a formula.  Rejected by YWAM and still bitter five years later, and as that bitterness is expressed in a ’safe’, anonymous online environment, acceptance comes.  Compliments come.  He is one of the ‘beautiful people’ at last. 

He seems horribly damaged by the religious zealotry of his youth, and his rejection by YWAM also seems devastating.  There’s value in escaping that and finding a safe place to start a healing process.  But what happens when the ‘healing’ becomes a trigger?  And what, if anything, could the moderators or managers at the ex-Pentecostal forums do?  Upon hearing the news of the shootings, they knew almost immediately that one of their own had likely been responsible.  Could they have done anything else, preventatively?  I don’t know.

They were in a no-win situation.  He wasn’t breaking the rules, and despite the encouragement, he was also receiving gentle suggestions to seek help, which he was rejecting.  One possibility is to change the forum rules just a bit so that in situations where a member is clearly posting ongoing negative triggers, they are forced into a time-out.  The problem with that, though, is that in Murray’s case, it would have felt like another rejection, similar to the one he received so painfully in the past. 

My heart goes out to the parents of the sisters who died at the church and the families of the two staff members at YWAM.  I know a little bit about the unspeakable pain that comes with such a random and inexplicable tragedy.  I hope that we, as online denizens, can find a way to prevent another one from happening by learning ways to intervene before the end of the spiral.

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Tags: MatthewMurray, YWAM, ex-Pentecostal, Azusa Street Survivors, forums, community, online, depression, rejection