Every month or so, dozens of people gather north of Chicago to fellowship with other believers, share encouragement from Scripture, pray for each other, talk about their struggles, and build community.

It’s not a church, but it was inspired by one.

Each person at the gatherings has been negatively impacted by their experiences at The Chapel, a multi-site megachurch that spans the northern Chicago suburbs and southern Wisconsin. Instead of strengthening their faith, they say the behavior they witnessed from the executive leadership team and elder board left them feeling marginalized, gaslighted, and scarred.

Some left the church more than a decade ago; others stepped away this year. Some have found a new place to worship. But many haven’t been able to step foot in a traditional church again.

“(This gathering) is coming out of a desperate need to find a healing salve for their wounds. It helps to talk about it, and it helps to talk to people who have gone through it before you,” said Renee Mies, a co-founder of the group and former employee of The Chapel from 2006 to 2008. “But what I was unprepared for was the depth and the level of the pain and the men who were crying, sobbing like babies. I just wasn’t prepared for that.”

Renee Mies and her husband, Kirk Mies, a former elder at The Chapel, were among the first she is aware of who left the church, traumatized by their experience with Senior Pastor Scott Chapman and the elders. In the 10 years since, she’s been regularly contacted by other former Chapel employees and volunteers, who found themselves on Chapman’s bad side and were fired or pushed out.

Steve Pugh, who worked as a campus pastor for The Chapel from 2007 to 2017, said the church was a blessing to his family before he joined staff. Although he had many positive experiences leading the now closed Barrington campus, he found the overall experience to be “disorienting.”

“Am I in, or am I out? Am I moving forward, or am I stuck? Am I on the way out or am I in favor?” Pugh said. “There was real damage caused to people in that season. There were some very deep wounds that were cut.”

Chapman did not respond to an interview request from The Roys Report (TRR). Elder Jeff One requested a list of questions, which TRR supplied, and issued a statement in response.

“We strive to take every concern brought to our attention seriously and continue to offer an invitation for conversation and reconciliation to take place,” One stated. “We want to reiterate our unwavering commitment to transparent and Jesus-centered shepherding of our congregation and staff. This commitment is a cornerstone of our operations, ensuring, with integrity, that our community is informed of the health and life of their church home.

“Although we will not comment on statements allegedly made by or about our senior pastor or other staff members, we have repeatedly seen the heart and actions of our church’s leadership consistently demonstrate humble commitment and devotion to the vision we share with God for our church, helping people encounter Him.”

A forced sabbatical

Chapman founded The Chapel in 1994 with Jeff Griffin, whom he met while both were students at Trinity International University in Deerfield, Illinois. As the church grew in numbers and campuses, so too did tensions between the two founders.

TRR spoke with several people who witnessed the issues between the pastors in the early days—former elder Kirk Mies, former elder John Toner, and a former high-level staff member who asked not to be named.

They say that in 2011, multiple high-level staff members asked the elders to confront Chapman, who they said had become difficult to work with because of his controlling nature, constant dissatisfaction, and self-protective posture, among other things.

So, the elders held meetings with the high-level staff members who had expressed concerns about Chapman. As a result of their investigation, the elders required Chapman and Griffin to go on sabbatical, seek counseling, and work toward reconciliation with those who had been hurt, according to Mies, Toner and the former high-level staff member. The church also brought in a professional mediator.

Church attendees were not informed of the reason for the sabbatical.

“What they told the congregation was basically that Jeff and Scott had put in so much time and effort, and we’re thankful for everything that they do for the church, and we needed to honor them with a sabbatical,” Renee Mies told TRR. “It was messaged in a way that nobody would know there was anything wrong.”

Griffin declined to comment for this story.

According to Kirk Mies and Toner, who were both assigned to work with Chapman during the sabbatical, the elders restored Griffin to ministry after a few months. But Chapman was not permitted to return at that point.

Kirk Mies said Chapman, who was also a member of the elder board, demanded to be restored, despite not meeting all the benchmarks set in place. He said Chapman threatened to quit and lead another church, which prompted the elder board to allow him to return.

“It was not a unanimous decision of the elders to reinstate Scott, although in the end we were told it had to be unanimous,” Kirk Mies said. “In other words, even if you don’t think he met the terms of the sabbatical and should not be reinstated, as an elder, you will toe the line and publicly support his reinstatement to the staff and to the members.”

Kirk Mies said Chapman viewed the sabbatical as a punishment and refused to engage the process, villainizing those working to hold him accountable.

“Unfortunately, I was one of those people, and so I became an enemy in Scott’s eyes,” Kirk Mies said. “It was very disappointing. I truly cared for and wanted Scott to come out of that sabbatical process healthier and better able to lead. But he chose a different course of action.”

Toner, who also worked with Chapman during the sabbatical, said he felt the senior pastor took the process seriously, met the benchmarks and initially seemed to improve his behavior. But he said Chapman spoke very negatively of Kirk Mies during and after the sabbatical. Toner said this continued even after Kirk Mies stopped coming to elder meetings and officially resigned from the board several months later.

It was a process Toner saw play out again years later, when another elder questioned Chapman’s behavior.

An environment ripe for abuse

Like the Mieses, Kevin and Cathy Woodside served at The Chapel as an elder and staff member respectively. In 2021, Cathy Woodside, who had worked on staff from 2008 to 2019, was terminated from a contracted position. Woodside told TRR she believed her firing stemmed from her raising concerns about the leadership styles of The Chapel Associate Senior Pastor Jamie Wamsley and Executive Pastor Ryan Chevrier, both members of the executive team.

As Kevin Woodside worked to help his wife pursue reconciliation with others involved in the situation, he said Chapman created a false narrative about him. He said Chapman falsely accused him of having an outburst of anger at a church meeting and calling for the firing of a church employee.

The situation escalated so much that the elders agreed at a spring 2022 meeting to consider hiring a third party to conduct an assessment of church leadership. But when the topic came up again at the next elder meeting, Kevin Woodside and Toner were the only ones still in favor of it.

Woodside and Toner said that during this time, Chapman claimed to be the church’s only legitimate elder. Chapman threatened to replace the rest of the board, Woodside said.

“Ultimately, I believe the elders blinked at bringing somebody in from the outside because of the threat of them being removed as elders,” Woodside said. “There was going to be a big fight, and Scott was not up for having somebody come in and do the same things that happened with the last forced sabbatical and that outside scrutiny.”

At that point, Woodside resigned from the elder board, and he and his wife left the church soon afterwards.

Toner resigned from the elder board several months later when he moved out of state. He said that Chapman’s treatment of the Woodsides is what convinced him the senior pastor was “disqualified from ministry.”

“The way he handled himself in that was so disgusting and it lasted for so long, and he had so many opportunities (to fix it),” Toner said.

Renee Mies said the elder board’s unwillingness to hold Chapel leaders accountable is more concerning to her than Chapman’s behavior.

“They are enabling and creating an environment that is ripe for abuses of all kinds. They have heard the same stories, almost verbatim, from multiple people for over a decade at least, probably longer,” she said. “They are guilty of spreading the same false narratives and maybe even creating some of them. They are complicit at best and downright to blame at worst.”

Pugh described Chapman as a man of great vision and integrity who, like everyone, has weaknesses. Like Mies, he believes the elders are culpable for much of the damage that has been done for refusing to hold top church leaders accountable.

“Their ineptitude or inability to correct bad behavior from senior leaders has created a very sloppy executive leadership team that really does not function in a way the church and the people of The Chapel deserve,” Pugh said.

Wisconsin worship pastor: ‘They jumped on us because we were weak’

Several attendees at the monthly gatherings are former employees of The Chapel’s three campuses in Wisconsin, who described their May 2021 adoption by the Illinois megachurch as a “bait and switch.”

In September 2020, Russ Walker—who was serving as an overseer at the former Crosspointe Community Church in Jefferson, Milton, and Whitewater, Wisconsin—admitted to naked counseling sessions with clients at Crosspointe and elsewhere. After learning of the admission, Crosspointe removed Walker, who at one time had been Crosspointe senior pastor.

According to former Whitewater Campus Pastor Kevin Tranel, Chapman helped Crosspointe navigate through the crisis and offered the church “a fresh start, without the baggage of the past.”

Tranel said he and other Crosspointe leaders were so impressed by Chapman’s handling of the situation that they supported merging with The Chapel. Chapman described it as an “adoption,” saying the new campuses would become like family and both parties would need to make changes to adapt to each other. Crosspointe’s members overwhelmingly approved the merger.

Jaime Ganz, then the worship pastor at Crosspointe’s Jefferson campus, initially supported the merger. She said during the adoption process, Chapman acknowledged that those at Crosspointe might find it challenging to trust any church leadership after what they had just been through. He committed to working hard to build trust between the two congregations, she said.

But almost as soon as the adoption was complete, Ganz, who said she experienced “love bombing” from two staff members from The Chapel during the adoption process, said she felt her input was no longer valued by the megachurch. She said the former Crosspointe campuses lost nearly all autonomy and were required to conform to The Chapel’s systems, schedules, color schemes, and more—no matter how disruptive they were to the Wisconsin team.

For example, pastors from The Chapel would frequently make the 90-minute drive to the Wisconsin campuses for meetings during the adoption process. But once it was complete, the Illinois pastors rarely made appearances there, Ganz said. Instead, The Chapel required the Wisconsin employees to drive to the Grayslake, Illinois, campus multiple times per month and refused to consider moving any meetings to a more central location.

“(Before the adoption), I was like, ‘OK, we are lost and orphaned, and here is a group of people wanting to come and adopt us and help us, to support us, to bring some stability in this mess we’ve just walked through,’” Ganz said. “Looking back, I see it much more as we were kind of like a battered woman getting out of an abusive relationship. And instead of them standing up and saying, ‘Hey, you need time to heal and to figure things out,’ they just jumped on us because we were weak.”

Tranel described the first six months after the adoption as a honeymoon period. But soon he began to realize that “everything was very much just dictated from the top,” and The Chapel leadership rarely sought his input.

“Scott treated me as a peer when we were just both senior pastors. And as soon as we got adopted, I got plopped into an org chart,” said Tranel, who had been a pastor for more than a decade at that point. “I was just a subordinate to this massive machine.”

But more concerning, Tranel said, was Chapman’s use of a “mole system” to gather information about the Wisconsin campuses. Multiple times, he said Chapman called him to a meeting in Grayslake to discuss what the moles had reported, which often turned into “gossip” and “triangulation,” according to Tranel.

“The executive team uses this to their advantage to control people,” Tranel said. “They say things like, ‘I had multiple people tell me that people shared this with us,’ but they won’t tell you who it is, and you have no idea how many people. It’s meant to keep you paranoid and to shut you up.”

Approximately a year into the adoption, two men told Tranel that Steven Ostrander, an associate pastor at The Chapel, had interactions with them that were sexually inappropriate. Tranel reported the concerns to leadership at The Chapel and felt the church covered up the scandal, as previously reported by TRR.

After questioning how The Chapel handled the allegations and pushing back on other cultural decisions made by Chapman, Tranel said he and fellow Wisconsin campus pastor Joe Reeves were investigated by church leadership. After three months, the investigation cleared the pastors.

However, Tranel said the process was grueling, and he realized he could not continue to work in The Chapel’s “fear-based, controlling, micromanaging, top-down leadership” environment. He said the church’s leadership blamed him for the conflict, and used his wife’s recent breast cancer diagnosis, within weeks of having their fifth child, against him.

“They pinned it on, ‘You’re not healthy right now. You’re going through a lot. . . . You’re mostly raw because of what’s going on with your wife and your young family,’” Tranel said. “They kept on blaming me, like I was the problem for bringing this up to them with the Ostrander stuff or other cultural things.”

Reeves said the investigation process was the worst treatment he’d received in his life. Once it was over, he said he received confirmation from Freddy Villarreal, associate senior pastor at The Chapel, that the commitments made by Chapman during the adoption process were never likely to occur.

“Freddy said, ‘I’ve seen Scott do this before, where he overpromised and underdelivered,’ and as he was saying it, I knew (Chapman) wouldn’t be able to deliver on that. But he gets to maintain his integrity, because he meant it at the time he said it,’” Reeves said. Tranel, who was also in the meeting, confirmed Reeves’ account.

However, Villarreal told TRR that Tranel and Reeves’ account “is not an accurate representation” of his statements.

The toxic culture led Reeves to resign in early 2024. He said he remains heartbroken that he is no longer shepherding the congregation at The Chapel’s Jefferson campus, where he worked for 10 years.

Ganz resigned in late 2023. She said she had some concerns about the church before the adoption, after reading some “scathing” reviews from former employees on the Glass Door website. Chapman told her they were posts from a couple of disgruntled employees, she said, which she initially believed.

Now, she sees things differently and wants to share her story to help others avoid her fate.

“There were so many people who had these stories, but there was no way for me or for us to find them,” she said. “So, I want there to be information out there that if there’s another church who’s considering being adopted by The Chapel, and they do a simple Google search, they’re going to find a lot of information that could potentially give them people they could reach out to, to hear stories of what’s going on and hopefully prevent any church from being adopted.”

‘A growing group that will not be silenced’

Now, thanks to the monthly gatherings and an online group organized by Mies and Cathy Woodside, more than 50 people who have been hurt by their experiences at The Chapel have found each other. Mies expects that total to keep growing.

“No one came to this place lightly,” Mies said. “Each person (who spoke to TRR) has exhausted all efforts by engaging in lengthy processes with senior leadership and the elder board. In all of those cases, the trauma and damage got worse, and still no meaningful change or accountability. The stakes keep getting higher, and the traumas are getting worse. There is a growing group that will not be silenced.”

Cathy Woodside said she doesn’t feel safe in a traditional church anymore. But she and her husband have started attending one of multiple house churches launched by people who previously had ties to The Chapel.

“We’ve gone once or twice to other churches, but this was so damaging to us,” she said. “I look at people who are preaching, and I say, ‘I don’t know that I can believe you.’ My faith and trust in the institution is burned and gone.”

For her and others, the monthly gatherings have provided what The Chapel did not.

“One of the people said after we met one time, ‘This felt like church to me.’” Cathy Woodside said. “It was such a sacred space.”

Ann Marie Shambaugh has reported as a print journalist in multiple states, including currently in Carmel, Indiana.