Reflections on Death of the Pastor’s Wife

The morning after receiving word that his wife, Mica, had died by a gunshot wound to the head, pastor John-Paul Miller declared with excitement to his congregation, “I wrote a new parody for you all today!” Cheers erupted as Miller announced that his “best friend” Mark Kaufman was going to sing it after 25 years of Miller begging him to take the mic.

Although Kaufman’s role in the Netflix series Death of the Pastor’s Wife tends to stay in the background, he occasionally pops up as Miller’s right-hand man.

In Episode 1, Kaufman serves as Miller’s best man for JP’s wedding to Mica. Kaufman jokes, “I’ve known John-Paul unfortunately for quite a while. He forced me to be his friend, forced me to be his best man.”

In Episode 2, Pam Muise, one of the other pastors of Solid Rock Church, says her church phone began blowing up one Saturday with text messages from Miller intended for Kaufman. She says, “Mark was being asked to pick up a young woman from the airport who was supposedly coming in to see JP.” Muise understood the request to be sexual. But she soon discovered the elders didn’t have the authority to hold Miller accountable.

After Mica left JP to stay with an elderly woman she trusted in the weeks leading up to her death, witnesses say JP became relentless in calling her, sending her flowers, chasing her and trying to mess with her mind. Then Kaufman called Mica and said, “I’m not calling on John-Paul’s behalf. I’m calling on both of y’all’s behalf.”

The night Mica died, Erica Rahr, a former member of Solid Rock Church, said, “Mark Kaufman had texted me and very bluntly said, ‘Mica killed herself.’” That same night, JP texted Mica’s friend Charlotte and her husband, “I thought u 2 should know. Mica killed herself earlier today. She needed her lithium because she has been having a 3-month psychotic episode.”

Miller and Kaufman were describing her death as a suicide before police had publicly classified it that way.

So the morning after learning Mica’s body had just been found with a bullet wound to the head in a river, Miller smirked as his fingers flew enthusiastically across the piano, while Kaufman stood on the church stage with his hat on backward. With Miller pounding the keys, Kaufman began singing a jazz rendition of “The River of Dreams.”

It’s one thing to play and sing this enthusiastically the morning after your wife died such a violent death. It’s another thing to do it to a parody you wrote. But to choose a song called “The River of Dreams” after your wife was found dead in a river is unconscionable.

As the song closed, JP showed off his jazz piano skills to the cheers of the congregation as Kaufman smiled and pointed at him.

With the release of the new Netflix series, there are likely to be many reflections on the abusive dynamics of male headship and female submission in JP and Mica Miller’s marriage. By recognizing those connections, hopefully many women will begin to notice the way theology gets used as a weapon to abuse them in their marriages. But there’s also a story here about music and how the culture of church worship ministries gives predators extraordinary access to vulnerable people.

Becoming the worship leader

“I was 13 years old when I met John-Paul Miller as my pastor,” Mica wrote in her diary about the man who would become her future husband. Her family had just moved to Myrtle Beach, S.C., from Wichita, Kan.

Her sister Abigail Francis said, “Moving to a place where you’ve never been and you have no idea who anybody is, finding a church is one way to start.”

Anna Francis, Mica’s other sister, countered, “I think finding a church is almost why we’re in this chair.”

But to the young Mica, the opportunity to be a part of the worship team was a fun way to point people to Jesus. Her sister Destinnee Barrientos said Mica would say, “I’m gonna be in the ministry, and I’m gonna help people. And everyone’s gonna know about Jesus.”

Abigail added, “The choir needed people in it. So yeah, ‘We can sing. Let’s go.’ It was something fun. It was something we enjoyed doing.”

Within a year, Anna said, “Mica’s talents were being used on stage.”

“My whole family is very musically talented,” Mica’s brother Nate said. “But Mica has the best voice. She loved singing. She was just extremely talented.”

But Mica’s parents would soon divorce, which Anna said led Mica to focus on the church worship ministry even more. And by age 16, Mica was named the worship leader. Although JP was married to another woman at the time, he regularly played the piano and interacted with Mica on stage. Eventually, that led to him having an affair with Mica, after which both Mica and JP went through their own divorces and married one another.

Mica’s biblical counselor would later recall: “JP was in her life from a very early age. She was on the worship team as a very young girl. So he had a position of influence over her when she was young. She just listened to his voice — a voice of a pastor, a voice of a mentor, and then a voice of a husband.”

‘The church was JPM’s sexual playground’

In the wake of Mica’s death, other women have come forward with their own allegations against Miller.

In the Netflix podcast “Allegedly,” journalist Ellison Barber speaks with attorney Misty Marris about Mica’s death and the ongoing cases and civil lawsuits against JP Miller “alleging abuse going back decades.” Marris said, “Reading those lawsuits, what I thought was interesting is that they’re, of course, about allegations of sexual abuse. But they’re also about allegations of control and power and manipulation.”

According to one of the civil lawsuits, Jane Doe No. 1 attended church around July 19, 1998, with her grandparents. After initially wanting to attend Sunday school with her grandmother, the plaintiff changed her mind and decided to attend her grandfather’s Sunday school class, which was in another building. But when she found the classroom, the door was shut and the class already had started.

That’s when she heard the sound of music coming from the main church sanctuary. Being drawn by the music, she walked in to discover JP Miller playing the piano and another person playing the guitar.

The lawsuit alleges, “Upon noticing Plaintiff, JPM engaged her in conversation.” After a while, Jane Doe No. 1 left the sanctuary to use the restroom. But when she exited the restroom, JPM called out to her in the hallway.

After a short conversation, the lawsuit says: “Without warning, JPM forced plaintiff inside his father’s office, shutting the door behind him. JPM immediately became aggressive, physically overpowering plaintiff and forcing her against the wall. Despite plaintiff’s struggles and verbal pleas for him to stop, JPM ignored her and forcibly moved her out of the office, down the hallway, and to a door that led outside to a grassy side yard of the church where JPM’s truck was parked. JPM then forced Jane Doe No. 1 into his truck and that is where he raped her.”

In a separate case involving Jane Doe No. 2, another civil lawsuit says, “One morning in 1999, after a chapel service … she found herself alone with John-Paul Miller, who was seated at the piano, playing softly. JPM then asked Jane Doe No. 2 if she wanted to play the piano. At 14, Jane Doe No. 2 was trusting and saw no reason to decline. As Jane Doe No. 2 turned to leave, JPM pulled her into a hug. She barely had time to react before JPM’s hands moved down her back, past her waist, and under her clothing and touched her bare butt.”

The lawsuit says Jane Doe No. 2 alleges when she was in ninth grade, JPM “cornered her alone in a classroom,” sat her down in a chair near the piano, and sexually assaulted her again.

In a 2024 affidavit, JP’s ex-wife prior to Mica said, “JP told me that in addition to his affair with Mica, he had employed prostitutes and had been sexually inappropriate with several underage female members of our church.” She claims JP “disclosed to me the identity of these girls.” But when she asked the girls to come forward, she says, “Although they each shared with me detailed accounts of what J did to them, they were too scared of JP to make a police report or testify in court.”

With pastor Pam Muise’s discovery that Miller was texting Kaufman about bringing him a young woman from the airport, these additional allegations raise an unsettling question: How many young girls might have stories to tell but have been too afraid to come forward?

As Jane Doe No. 1’s lawsuit says, “This church was JPM’s sexual playground. … This was the proverbial fox guarding the henhouse.”

How worship culture makes women vulnerable

The patterns are clear. In the stories of Mica, Jane Doe No. 1, and Jane Doe No. 2, underage girls were drawn by a worship leader sitting down at a piano playing softly.

As someone who used to lead worship at summer camps and youth groups, I know full well how teenage girls look up to guys in their 20s at the piano. They think you’re a rock star. But even better, you’re a godly rock star worth looking up to. That combination of admiration, trust and spiritual authority can make young people particularly vulnerable to someone who knows how to exploit it.

In worship ministries, many of these encounters take place behind the scenes in dimly lit auditoriums and classrooms when hardly anyone else is around. Toss in the vulnerability of being a teenage girl living in a new area with your parents recently getting divorced, and a predator at the piano has everything he needs to use his position of power “to manipulate and exploit vulnerable victims while concealing their actions from the public.”

Unfortunately, when these girls grow up to serve on worship teams as adults, the vulnerability doesn’t disappear. In many evangelical worship cultures, women who once learned to see the worship leader as a spiritual authority can grow into women who are themselves placed on the stage — and then become objects of scrutiny and sexualization, often in ways they have no idea about.

As I detail in my forthcoming book Weapons of Worship, when I led worship, we would regularly receive complaints about the way women on the worship team dressed, moved or sang. We’d hear about the holes in their jeans, the way they waved their arms, how they closed their eyes or held the microphone up to their mouths. We never fielded any criticisms like this about the men on stage.

Women singing Christian music have to walk a tightrope of temptation and virtue where they attract men as marriage material without turning them on too much. Actor Jessica Simpson recalls her time singing in Southern Baptist churches and says she often was scolded for “eliciting lust from the congregation.” So Simpson said, “Any time I sang (in church), I covered myself.”

Similarly, when Nikki Leonti began singing in church, she said, “Married Christian men would call me ‘eye candy’ — I was 14 or 15 years old.”

And ironically, even if evangelical men in the congregation aren’t staring at the women’s bodies or imagining how their microphone holding skills might transfer to the bedroom, they often end up equating intimacy with God to intimacy with the woman singing.

As Christianity Today worship correspondent Kelsey Kramer McGinnis told me, “In contemporary worship music, if you want to sell a ballad, you have a woman sing it, and preferably an attractive white woman. There is a way of thinking about the marketing of music, especially using women, to kind of use that desirability to create the impression of intimacy with God. Certain faces are better for marketing certain kinds of music. And female faces and bodies are better for marketing intimacy. … It may make it more palatable to a male audience or congregation if there’s a little bit of turning toward a female figure.”

Bending beneath the weight of his wind

There are many moments in Death of the Pastor’s Wife where Mica looks like she’s really enjoying the collective effervescence of connecting with God and the congregation. Her joy was contagious.

But at other times, you notice the toll the abuse was taking on her.

“Sometimes it feels like, for me, my voice is struggling,” Mica says during one clip on stage. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed. I’m not leading any songs. I took about a month off. My hair’s falling out. I’m gaining weight. I’m on this med. It’s like, I’m going through a lot. And sometimes I justify it. Maybe God doesn’t want it if it’s not my best. If I’m not singing my best, maybe God doesn’t want it. And then I’m learning, though, that’s not true. He just wants my all. He just wants it all.”

And that’s where this gets tricky. In an evangelical worldview, it makes sense to sing about God wanting our all, about God wanting it all.

But so did her abusive husband.

During one clip of her leading worship, she sang the song “How He Loves.” It begins with the line, “He is jealous for me.”

Of course, that line is in the Bible talking about God. But how might it feel being sung by a woman whose husband controls her in a jealous rage?

The song goes on to identify the singer as a tree in the middle of a hurricane. So with a heaviness in her soul, Mica sang, “Bending beneath the weight of his wind.”

Again, on the surface it may seem like an encouraging song about God’s love. But when a woman whose husband is jealously abusing her sings about God being jealous and bending her like a hurricane, there’s a lot going on beneath the surface that many of us never would be aware of.

So as we reflect on the tragedy of Mica Miller’s story, let’s examine the way power and authority in male headship paradigms shape marriages. But we also need to have hard conversations about the ways abuse can slip through the doors of our churches, hide behind spiritual authority and find access to vulnerable people.

Sometimes abuse doesn’t announce itself with a shout, a broken door hinge or a hole in the wall. Sometimes it draws us in through the soft sounds of a predator at the piano.

 

Rick Pidcock is a 2004 graduate of Bob Jones University, with a bachelor of arts degree in Bible. He’s a freelance writer based in South Carolina and a former Clemons Fellow with BNG. He completed a master of arts degree in worship from Northern Seminary. He is a stay-at-home father of five children and is the author of a forthcoming book, Weapons of Worship: How the Songs of Evangelicalism Form the Soundtrack of Extremism. Follow his blog at www.rickpidcock.com.

 

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A pastor’s wife’s questionable suicide sparks suspicion and highlights the fruit of abusive theologies | Analysis by Rick Pidcock

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