Someone Suggested I Crosspost This Here

This is a story that I may have over complicated but I’m going to try to get through it succinctly but with the proper amount of details to warrant the advice I’m seeking.

I moved to the city that I now live in almost ten years ago. I looked for a church and never really found one that made me feel like I was “home.” I was a young, single guy without any close friends (proximity-wise). All the churches that I tried to join in with weren’t very active and didn’t really offer any inroads to be a real part of the church body.

After a couple of years, I was miserable and considering quitting my job moving home because I felt so isolated. As if by divine appointment, I got a flyer in my mail about a new church launching that week. I decided to go.

I instantly felt at home. I was able to get involved in everything. I made fast friends within the church. The pastor and I became very close and I came to consider him one of my best friends. He introduced me to the woman that would become my wife. We were great friends.

I served in every capacity I could at the church. I cleaned on every other Saturday for a while. I facilitated our prayer meetings. I played guitar week after week. I coordinated our small groups. I served in the parking lot. I did everything I could because I loved the church.

Then, my wife came on staff as the pastor’s administrative assistant. It was okay—at first. Then, she began working crazy hours. She’d be at the church from 9am-10pm nearly every day. There began to be nights where they’d be there alone until midnight or 1am. I voiced my concerns. I was treated like I was bringing baseless accusations.

I finally aired my grievances with the pastor about two years into my wife working for the church. He acted hurt that I would think that there could even be an inappropriate emotional relationship between the two of them. He told me that I needed to be careful with those kinds of thoughts because “they could hurt his family.”

Things slowly changed. My wife soon stopped working as crazy of hours (partly because we just had our firstborn child). But I still don’t feel the same level of trust in my pastor as what I used to.

These feeling have been amplified recently because I caught my pastor in a definitive lie (I discovered a social media profile of his that had a pseudonym as the display name and, after I asked him about it and he told me that it was his account but he had deleted it, the name changed to another pseudonym). My trust in him is completely broken. Now, I’m thinking back over the years and I’m realizing a lot of places where he did things that, deep down, I found questionable in the moment but I turned a blind eye to it because I valued our friendship. At this point, I just feel like he doesn’t have any integrity.

I haven’t been able to bring myself to sit through a sermon of his in weeks. I still go to church but it’s mainly to be around the congregation that I still love (and the church is JUST big enough and has enough going on that no one notices that I’m not sitting in the service). I’m still playing guitar on the worship team. But my heart just isn’t in being there anymore.

Honestly, if my wife weren’t still on staff, I’d leave and find another church. But I don’t feel like I can without creating (further) issues in my marriage. I just don’t want to go there anymore.

What would you do?

TL;DR: I don’t trust my pastor anymore and I’m thinking about leaving my church in search of a new one but I don’t feel like I can because my wife is on staff at the church.