Cradling her newborn son, Alissa Byrne Scibelli strode up to four women sitting around a Starbucks table. They had been among her closest friends — until a few weeks before.

That was when Scibelli, her parents, her then-husband and their three small children had left Greater Grace World Outreach, the evangelical megachurch that had been at the center of their lives for decades. Now, on this fall day, Scibelli was about to discover the enormity of her loss.

The women refused to meet her gaze, staring at their coffee cups, silent. Stunned, Scibelli hurried out of the coffee shop. She had often heard church leaders instruct members to shun those who left the church. But she never thought her dearest friends would abandon her.

Scibelli, 44, is one of dozens of former Greater Grace members who flooded The Baltimore Banner with messages seeking to share their experiences with the church, which is headquartered in East Baltimore. Ex-members said they were ostracized by friends and relatives still in the church. A few fell into despair and addiction. All were forced to reconsider nearly every facet of their lives as they broke free from the church’s unorthodox teachings, demanding schedule and all-consuming community.

“It was extremely isolating,” said Scibelli, who is married to the son of a senior pastor. “It was really hard to lose everybody.”

Learning to navigate the outside world and build a new belief system was challenging. “It took a while to separate what I actually believed and what I was taught to believe,” she said. “Greater Grace made you believe a certain thing, and you didn’t have a chance to think for yourself about it.”

The Banner chronicled a decadeslong history of sexual abuse at Greater Grace and some of its hundreds of offshoots around the world. Abuse survivors and their parents told The Banner that Greater Grace officials did little to hold accused abusers accountable or limit their access to other children.

The series centered around the work of The Millstones, a small group of former church members who spent years tracking down 32 people who said they had been sexually abused as children by the men of the church, including prominent leaders and volunteers.

Greater Grace officials declined to address specific claims and incidents, issuing a statement saying the church “fully cooperates with any investigations conducted by law enforcement or childcare agencies.” After the series was published in June, pastors vowed from the pulpit to hire an independent firm to investigate its response to abuse allegations and report the findings publicly.

Church leaders did not respond to questions for this story, including about the status of the independent investigation.

Abandoning Christian churches

Those who left Greater Grace are part of a broader movement of people abandoning Christian churches over the past several decades. Although 90% of Americans identified as Christian in the early 1990s, only about 64% do today.

Although evangelical churches have seen less of a decline in attendance than Catholic and mainline Protestant churches, those who leave go through a complex emotional, intellectual process because of the religion’s emphasis on a personal relationship with Jesus.

That process is called deconstruction, said Matthew D. Taylor, an expert on Protestantism with the Institute for Islamic, Christian and Jewish Studies.

“It’s a theological and psychological movement of trying to reevaluate the experiences and ideas they were exposed to,” Taylor said.

Nondenominational megachurches, like Greater Grace, often cultivate a sense that they are under attack by the broader American culture, Taylor said. This pushes some congregants away. Such churches are often prone to dysfunction, he said.

“There aren’t boundaries or accountability,” he said. “Megachurches tend to have more authoritarian leadership.”

Such churches also often have an insular mentality and promise an “exclusive access to truth,” which can make leaving more difficult, Taylor said.

‘I don’t feel like I belong anywhere’

That’s the case at Greater Grace, former members say. More than 80 former congregants contacted The Banner seeking to share their stories about the church — and the anguish they felt when they left. Many spoke of additional allegations of sexual abuse, controlling behavior or doctrine they later realized departed from mainstream evangelical Christian beliefs.

“It was devastating,” said Eileen Nace, 72. “It took me a good three years to untangle all the teachings from my brain. I didn’t know how to think. I didn’t know how to talk to people.”

A single mother, Nace joined the church in 1988, shortly after the congregation had relocated to Baltimore after losing a legal battle in Massachusetts. The church’s charismatic founder, Carl Stevens, took a special interest in her, Nace said, and at first she reveled in the close-knit community.

“I felt like I went to heaven,” she recalled.

In 2004, Stevens was pushed out of church leadership after substance abuse issues left him rambling incoherently from the pulpit. Congregants began posting stories of malfeasance — including alleged sexual abuse — in the forums of a now-defunct website, FactNet, which Nace read with a growing sense of horror.

“I would just sit there at my computer with my hand on my heart sobbing, ‘This cannot be true,’” Nace recalled. Rather than publicly exiting the Baltimore congregation, Nace moved to Maine.

Up north, Nace connected with another woman who had left a Greater Grace affiliate, and the two began reading the Bible and studying Christian theology on their own. “We realized that so much of what we had been taught was plain wrong, manipulated and taken out of context,” she said. “It was painful.”

Nace turned to alcohol to ease her pain. One evening, after reading a particularly upsetting post on FactNet, she drunkenly drove to a cliff and blacked out. After that incident, she stopped drinking and, in time, became a licensed drug and alcohol counselor.

Although she has immersed herself in rediscovering life outside of Greater Grace, she still feels marked by her time in the church.

“I’ve been out for 20 years, and I still feel like I’m catching up socially,” she said. “I don’t feel like I belong anywhere.”

‘Ask me about the cult I was raised in’

As a child, Stephen Taylor used to cry himself to sleep thinking about the millions of people around the world who would burn in hell because they weren’t Christian.

Taylor, 35, was born into a prominent Greater Grace family in Baltimore and attended church-affiliated schools from preschool through high school. He was taught that only those who accepted Jesus would be saved.

From an early age, he questioned church teachings, which often landed him in trouble. A teacher called him a “mouthpiece for the devil” when he asked about evolution in elementary school, he recalled.

At the church-affiliated high school, teachers chastised Taylor for what they saw as rebellious behavior, criticism that he internalized. “I ask a lot of questions. I was not a very desirable cult member,” he said.

His disillusionment with the church increased after his parents divorced and his cousin died in a car accident en route to a church youth event. A school administrator called him arrogant for questioning God’s plan amid the suffering, Taylor recalled.

After graduating from the church high school, Taylor moved to Arizona and began the difficult work of figuring out what he actually believed.

“Every night, I would sit out on the back patio, chain smoke and have panic attacks,” he said. “I would root through my belief system and try to purge the things that weren’t me, that had been downloaded into me.”

Were pastors always right? No. Were same-sex relationships wrong? No. What about abortion?

Taylor would listen to podcasts as a sort of crash course in normal life and mainstream beliefs. He created a profile on a dating app that said, “Ask me about the cult I was raised in.”

Like Nace, Taylor began drinking to quell the panic attacks and sense of loss.

Now sober for five years and engaged to a woman who has stood by him through his struggles, Taylor feels healthier than ever. Yet the pain remains.

“There’s still this gaping void that, if I even glance into, I’m a mess,” he said.

Such feelings are common for survivors of religious trauma, said Kayla Felten, a therapist who has led support groups for former Greater Grace members — including Taylor.

“You don’t trust yourself, but you don’t trust anyone else either,” Felten said. Many evangelical churches, including Greater Grace, instruct congregants not to trust their feelings but to follow God’s will — as interpreted by a pastor.

Felten, a cofounder of The Reclamation Collective, guides clients to heed their inner voices, a process that can be painful.

“It might get worse before it gets better,” she said.

The outside world

As a child, Alissa Byrne Scibelli moved with her family to Denver, Budapest and Moscow as her father, a Greater Grace pastor, worked at churches around the world.

But the time her family spent in Baltimore when she was around 8 sticks out in her memory. That was when the father of a friend, a prominent Greater Grace pastor, molested her, she said. She didn’t tell her parents at the time and tried to bury the memory.

When her family moved back to Baltimore when she was a teen, pastors and teachers cast her as a sort of Jezebel, because she and her boyfriend, a fellow student, had kissed. Still, the church was all she knew.

“The outside world didn’t matter,” she said. “You knew people on the outside, but they were not your friends.”

She got married soon after graduation to a young man she had met in the church. By the time she turned 23, she had given birth to their third child.

That was around the time her parents, dismayed by Stevens’ actions and other leaders’ hypocrisy, decided to leave the church.

Initially, Scibelli and her then-husband continued to attend Greater Grace. But they felt increasingly uncomfortable. The first time they brought their newborn third child to church, a security guard asked why they were there, Scibelli recalled.

Soon after, Scibelli’s mother learned that several young people had made allegations of sexual molestation by prominent church members. Recalling her own childhood experiences, Scibelli decided never to return to Greater Grace.

That’s when Scibelli was shunned by her old friends at Starbucks.

“I can’t explain how lonely it was,” said Scibelli, recalling the first tumultuous years after she left the church. She had been taught that the outside world was rife with sin and danger, yet she could not stay at Greater Grace.

“I knew that the church was not a safe place for my children,” she said.

Scibelli was diagnosed with depression and began the slow process of building a new life outside the church.

Even getting to know other mothers at her children’s preschool was difficult, Scibelli recalled. “I didn’t know how to interact with people,” she said. “I had no common ground.”

It was also a struggle to develop her own value system. “I almost wanted someone to tell me what to believe,” she said.

Scibelli and her first husband divorced in 2013, and she began dating another former Greater Grace member, Peter Scibelli, the son of Pastor Steven Scibelli, a powerful church leader. The two have spent many hours dissecting the dogma they were taught in the church.

“It’s helpful to be married to someone who has a similar background, someone I didn’t have to explain my life to,” she said.

It’s helped that many friends have left Greater Grace too — including the four women who were sitting around the Starbucks table on that painful day two decades ago. Scibelli is now on friendly terms with them once more.

When Greater Grace’s troubles surfaced in The Banner, she said, “It brought back a lot of pain, but there was something in me that was so happy that this was being brought to light.”