Off to Lunch: What Caused the ‘Death of a Pastor’s Wife?’

 

In late April 2024, Mica Miller was found dead in Lumbar River State Park in North Carolina. Her death, ruled a suicide, is the subject of the new and wildly popular Netflix documentary, Death of the Pastor’s Wife.

There is no surprise ending. It’s in the title. But there’s something more subtle in the title. The suspicion that Mica was not responsible for her own death.

The documentary isn’t Death of the Worship Leader; it’s “Pastor’s Wife.” Suicide or not, this pastor is not-so-subtly being held responsible for his wife’s death. 

Over three episodes, the documentary presents a young woman who fell in love with Jesus and her church. It also reveals a woman suffering under the manipulation and control of a pastor whom she and hundreds of others had given their lives to.

Mica married at 19, then had an affair with her pastor, John-Paul (JP) Miller, who was also married. Both divorced their spouses, and then later married each other. Their church survived.

In her marriage to JP, Mica reported being mentally, sexually, spiritually, and emotionally abused. As he had done with Mica, JP had another affair.

To save you from spoilers, Mica eventually left JP, filed for divorce, and later died. JP, after Mica’s death, married the woman he had an affair with, a woman whose wheelchair bound husband also just happened to die under mysterious circumstances.

Death of the Pastor’s Wife has all the hallmarks of what audiences want from a documentary: a talented, charismatic, and beautiful young bride, multiple mysterious deaths, tales of sexual deviance, and more. But what’s most important for people of faith is how and why so many churches are so cruelly cavalier about allowing, and sometimes even promoting, toxic and abusive senior pastors.

The most crazed moment in Death of the Pastor’s Wife is the church service the day after Mica’s death. JP leads a three-hour worship gathering, complete with him giving a two-hour sermon before announcing Mica’s death. In his announcement, he makes an anchoring reminder to the congregation that she suffered mental and emotional distress.

JP then walks off the back of the stage, and the rest of the congregation simply goes out to lunch.

Why so cavalier?

Because an increasing number of churches are willing to allow their senior pastor to do whatever the senior pastor wants to do. Asking questions of them is tantamount to questioning an apostle of God, or indicative of the questioner’s inability to be understanding and gracious. 

With more data points over the past decade that we can quickly recount, American Christians must deal with the reality that some church leaders are evil, toxic, vile, and abusive men (and they are typically men) who take their toxicity to the church, not because of their love for Jesus, but because they can abuse inside churches with near-zero accountability. So, how does this continue to happen? Four theological fallacies are at work.

The Four Fallacies

The Man of God Fallacy

Here, the senior pastor has some special access to the work, will and word of God that other people don’t. Because of the preaching role, they experience God on a deeper level. This means questioning them is equivalent to questioning God.

Under this fallacy, the church’s role is to support the senior pastor. They say, “he knows things we don’t know. He is closer to God.” 

What they never imagine—shock of all shocks—is that being a pastor is a job. It has technical skills that determine whether you’re good or bad, successful or not, that have almost nothing to do with knowing and loving God.

Writing and delivering a sermon, forming discipleship groups, raising money for a good cause, posting a picture of yourself with immigrants or the homeless, and more are all technical acts. You don’t have to be Christian to do any of them. You just have to be good at them.

That’s what makes this a fallacy. Being a pastor doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with being a Christian. There have been plenty of adulterers, abusers and murderers who have also carried the title “Lead Pastor.” Plenty still do.

The Grace Fallacy

Extending grace is what the Catholic Church was trying to do in the midst of a worldwide pedophilia scandal. Misdiagnosing the problem, they believed quietly moving priests to less “tempting” parishes allowed pedophile priests time to restore themselves.

Evangelical churches do the same. After abuse, countless people say—of the abuser, mind you—that “we should be people of grace.”

They are right. We should be people of grace.

Galatians 6 urges us to restore one another with gentleness. But Galatians is about restoring people, not restoring people to positions. The fallacy lies in the misguided belief that restoring the person and restoring the person to the position are the same thing.

A leader can be restored, prayed for and warmly received, while, at the same time, permanently denied the trust of ever leading a church again. There are other jobs; help him find one. 

The Fruit Fallacy

The average lay leader looks around at their congregation and worries, “If we hold our leaders accountable, then the church will suffer. Look at how many people are coming.”

In my experience, this is a fallacy filled with faithlessness and cowardice. It keeps a bad man in place the longest, and it refuses to trust in God. The imagination is that the man is the reason for the church, not God.

Yes, Jesus says that disciples will be “known by their fruit” (Matthew 7:16). Yet the fruit fallacy only looks at Sunday morning fruit. Its practitioners don’t look at the good staff who resigned or were railroaded out. 

It doesn’t look at the rest of the fruit—the wreckage of a leader’s personal life, their friendships, marriage, children, spiritual practices, and the rest. It sees seats filled on Sunday morning, but asks no questions about why the same man they praise for filling those seats can’t seem to sustain any other relationships.

They ask no questions about the trail of bodies left in their leader’s wake and why there seems to be a tower of non-disclosure agreements large enough to light the Taj Mahal on fire behind him.

The Support Fallacy

The Support Fallacy upholds all the others. This one lies with church boards and elderships who believe their calling is to support the pastor rather than their real vocation of supporting the church, which is the people.

Recently, my wife talked to the chair of a local church board. The woman told my wife that even as chairwoman, she did not know why she was asked to be on the board, nor did she know what she was doing. Her appointment, it turns out, was not a bug but a feature.

Toxic pastors enlist ignorant boards and teach them that their role is to “support” the pastor. That makes holding the pastor accountable nearly impossible.

The error—support the pastor rather than the church—is built into the system. This allows pastors like John-Paul Miller to remain abusive and never grow or change, because the church’s lay leaders have come to believe that accountability is not their job.

Yet a board that refuses to tell their pastor “no” is not supporting him. They are abandoning him to his worst demons and all the parts of him that are unformed or malformed. So he marries and divorces, he abuses his staff, he harasses and demeans, just like John-Paul Miller.

Here, church boards need to understand that they are complicit in the abuse of human souls, for which God will hold them accountable. 

Theological Solutions to Theological Problems

Notice what these four fallacies have in common. Each of them is a belief, a theology. 

That’s why our toxic, abusive pastorate cannot be fixed with changes to church bylaws. Because the fallacies are theological, the fix also has to be theological.

Toxic leaders expect that they can sing songs on Sunday, preach a sermon, and then tell us the most disqualifying realities of their lives and be able to walk out, question-free, and the rest of us will just go to lunch. This has to stop, or we are all complicit.

Mica Miller told her friends that if they ever found her with a bullet in her head, it wasn’t her that pulled the trigger; it was John-Paul. She may have been right.

Either way, it wasn’t just John Paul who pulled the trigger. It was everyone at Solid Rock Church who was fine, Sunday after Sunday, believing theological fallacies, walking out after worship, and going to lunch.