Despicable.

With “representatives” like these in leadership no wonder people want to have nothing to do with Christianity.

It likely won’t happen, but it would be nice if they were made an example of and both had a nice long stay in a one room hotel courtesy of the government.

He claimed he was waiting for a written description of the molestation from the victim, and the victim reportedly did not give him the account.

Shouldn’t that be JUICY descripton?
With these guys, I would not be surprised if he used it for wank material.
“Porn for the Pious” and all that.

McMartin stepped down as pastor of Inspire Church and appointed his son (!) to take his place.
Again, Not Surprised. The Throne is passed from Father to Son.
These churches could give the Saudi Royal Family lessons in nepotism.

Have you heard the one about How to Become a Millionaire Megapastor?
Be Born the Son of a Millionaire Megapastor with a name ending in “Junior”.

Afterburne: With “representatives” like these in leadership no wonder people want to have nothing to do with Christianity.

It’s certainly a contributing factor…

“If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.” CS Lewis

IMO, a genuine preacher should make it very uncomfortable for the comfortable in his sermons. Christianity Lite, which represents much of the American church, is just too darn comfortable in its sin and rebellion.

Is it too much to ask for a man of the cloth to keep his pants on? Too much to expect the pulpit to be pure and holy? Too much to hope that every pastor would stay focused on preaching Jesus and Him crucified, and less on himself?

dee,

Yeah, I mean anecdotally at least, it seems obvious that there’s a connection. I’m trying to sort out, as a person trying to get up the nerve to look for a new church, whether I think the presence of multiple family members on staff should be a red flag or not. I’m sure there’s instances where family members work together in healthy organizations. How to tell the difference?

CMT: I assume you’re talking about Tullian Tjichvidian

Franklin Graham has had some controversy as well (more financial, with amount of salary).

CMT: I’m trying to sort out, as a person trying to get up the nerve to look for a new church, whether I think the presence of multiple family members on staff should be a red flag or not. I’m sure there’s instances where family members work together in healthy organizations. How to tell the difference?

It sounds like it’s actually a red flag in the sense of a warning for you! Rightly, IMO. But difficult to know and you can’t ask other church members because they’re likely to be friendly with the family.
Perhaps treat it as a red flag but if the church has other things which attract you attend a few times and see what it feels like?

Max: should make it very uncomfortable for the comfortable

Another POV.

For those who have suffered, they may need all the comfort our God can give.

Jesus carefully differentiated re: about whom He said “Woe to you.”

“Gotta make you squirm” can come off as privileged.

By and large, pastors don’t get this. They comfort the predators with sermons/false theology about healing from preying (a predator’s decision, NOT helpless) on vulnerables (who ARE/WERE truly helpless in some way) while blaming the suffering with, “Where did you sin?”

Ava Aaronson: For those who have suffered, they may need all the comfort our God can give.

Certainly. Vance Havner, an evangelist of former years, used to say that his mission was to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

My dinosaur scales are showing, lol. I remember when the goal of the preacher was to make sure a person was headed to heaven. True in our choices available, which were pre United but Methodist, and Southern Baptist. DH says that was the goal in his RCC upbringing.

When did the church shift its focus from that to either being the bad cop telling us how lousy we run our lives or the good cop accepting and affirming the rankest of sin?

dee,

Sure has. There’s actually a lot of folks I know who still consider themselves Christian but no longer attend church.

I’ve said this before but it bears repeating – it’s great if you have Jesus in your heart/soul/spleen/wherever he fits but how do you convince others to follow?

In spite of what you might see in your own church – most churches that are growing are really recycled christians from other denominations. I don’t think there’s a lot of people from other religions converting en masse. Christianity in North America and maybe Western Europe is a leaking bucket – with every transfer of water a lot is dribbling down the side.

So how are christians going to combat secularization? People will not magically come to Jesus.

Unfortunately, rather than embrace the plurality of our society, many seem to double down on fundamentalism and ratchet up authority.

And then there’s the RC church – the pope just apologized to indigenous peoples in Canada for the atrocities in the Indian residential school system.

Every month more unmarked graves are revealed and Frank is sorry that some Catholics acted badly – this wasn’t some rogue priests. It was a concerted effort to kill the “Indian” inside the child – and it’s doomed successive generation to a long battle.

And this was supposed to have been settled in 2005. The Anglicans apologized and paid reparations, so did the United Church and the Methodists (who are now part of the United Church) but the RC church pled poverty and was unable to “fundraise” the money ordered by the court.

They then proceeded to build a $25 million cathedral in Saskatoon.

Now there’s a commitment to “fundraise” $35 million dollars. So the parishioners are going to be hit up for Mother Church’s colonial sins. How about they melt down 1% of Vatican City’s gold. Frankie Boy can bring it along when we’re all blessed with his presence.

One residential school survivor put it best on CBC a couple of days ago when he asked why indigenous people had to travel to Rome – this is common sense – Frankie should have come here to apologize, bearing all the school records and gold.

And this has nothing to do with the RC belief system – this is the institution of the Church – the organization that cares about nothing but it’s own survival. The irony is that survival depends on the rank and file congregants! They go and Frank and the boys will have to melt down some altars to pay the bills – good thing they all that plunder from South America, Central America, Asia, Europe – pretty they’ve hit up Australia at some point. It’ll keep them in cute hats and gowns for quite a while.

And protestants shouldn’t be smug. I’ve run out of rant for now….

There just doesn’t seem to be any justice.

John,

Perhaps it is a yellow flag, haha. The irony is I did initially question the cozy arrangement at the last church we attended. In retrospect it was naive to accept the assurances that it was all fine, because the lead and associate pastors “worked closely with the elders.” We didn’t figure out till later that the five or six elders were hardly a check on the behavior of the lead pastor, since he was one of them, his brother-in-law the associate pastor was another, and the rest were hand picked yes men. Oops.

It would be easy to write it off as “fool me once” and move on, except we were lied to and people we cared about were hurt very badly in that church. But early on it felt so welcoming! That’s the scary part. As you say, it can be very hard to detect dysfunction at first. Hopefully my BS meter is better calibrated these days, but no matter how savvy you are there’s always the possibility of being taken in.

readingalong: Franklin Graham has had some controversy as well (more financial, with amount of salary).

Franklin Graham used the dodge of parachurch ministries to get Billy Graham Evangelistic Assn (BGEA) classified as a church and not required to file a Form 990. Samaritan’s Purse has filed a Form 990 as late as last year for 2020. Franklin Graham was paid $740K in 2020, with SP taking in $894 million in 2020. You can review the data here (Part VII addendum).

https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/display_990/581437002/download990pdf_09_2021_prefixes_52-64%2F581437002_202012_990_2021090318821170

Another thing I would note about the Form 990 is the many, many pages of grants outside the USA, which only identify the region and a terse description. Further down are the (much less in amount) grants to identified US organizations.

Finally we get down to Schedule L, Part IV, under Business Transactions Involving Interested Persons. There are 12 of them, they all look like compensation/benefits. *cough* nepotism *cough* Interested persons may want to review those names.

CMT,

I had a church where the pastor’s wife was on staff as the women’s ministry director. She was quite good at her job (speaking as a woman who generally struggles with women’s ministries), and the church was more on the healthy side of the spectrum than not. I generally wasn’t comfortable with family members being on staff (or in eldership positions) because of potential for conflict of interest, but in this case, it seemed to work.

We left the church for a few years, then returned after being burned elsewhere and now seeking somewhere we knew was “safe.” In the interim, the senior pastor had retired, and his wife moved on to a new role with a local nonprofit.

And it turned out they had set a precedent for massive conflict of interest.

The new senior pastor’s assistant was married to an elder. The children’s director was married to another elder. One associate pastor was cousins with another, and one of their wives was also on staff. Within less than a year of the hiring of the new senior, the other two associate pastors had left (one told us later it was a toxic environment under the new senior pastor), I caught the senior pastor in a pattern of lies, and the church instituted church discipline that included harassing at least one person (that I know of) who had left.

When the pastor questioned my character after confronting him about one of the black-and-white, well-documented lies, my husband emailed the entire elder board. It was crickets from most of them. One followed up with a phone call to my husband, *acknowledging that he saw the problem, too,* but wasn’t sure what he could do about it.

So, yeah, family on staff would be a big red flag for me, too.

And post-traumatic-church disorder is a real thing. It’s ok to take your time, if you feel you need it.

Wild Honey,

“speaking as a woman who generally struggles with women’s ministries” heh. Now why might that be 😉

Pastors spouses are tricky, imo. I’d rather see a church pay them for what they contribute than treat them as free labor (another issue I had with the church I mentioned above). But elders being married to people who draw salaries from the church, that has conflict of interest written all over it. Of course it probably suited that lying pastor just fine.

Muslin, fka Dee Holmes: *cough* nepotism *cough*

Falwells
Grahams
Houstons…

The Kim family (Jong-il, Jong-un, etc.) has the nepotism thing going…

Autocrats, nepotism… with lifestyles of greed, vice, and might-is-right bullying misuse of power.

Churches empowering autocrats are not the Body of Christ, obviously.

My two cents (and with inflation not worth much, huh?):

The Church is doing just fine. The Church is composed only of those who have been born again. (OK, now that I ticked off a bunch of people, remember even Adrian Rogers said two men might leave Miami headed to Atlanta. The one who drove would likely know exactly when he entered Georgia. The one who flew commercially likely would not. But both would be in Georgia when in Atlanta. Same with being born again.)

That Church of born again people is strong in its faith in Jesus, and is serving, winning people to Jesus Christ, in general doing what it is to do.

But here is what it isn’t: it isn’t the 501c3 groups meeting around the world. Those groups are full of members of the Church sometimes, or just have a few of the Church, and these days no matter the denomination or lack of it, may have NONE of the Church in it. We have to understand that. Those 501c3 groups may do a lot of good, or a lot of harm, but they are NOT THE CHURCH!

These groups have become wedded to the issues of the day, and will either seek to woo you with feel good meetings sans repentance or will try to use rules and laws and pain to make you behave. They may try to run around fixing all the ills sin brings on society without addressing the sin that is the root cause. Or they may blame “the lost” for all the evil we see and try to stamp them out (the lost themselves) by trying to take over the government and rule.

No matter how much they claim to be doing church they are NOT.

I personally wish every church goer would just stop for a moment, and really listen to the service rather than “have an experience.” If it isn’t populating heaven why go back? Now that can happen in a variety of styles and formats and even theologies, but if that is not what the church is about I would say it is not part of The Church. Real Church does not exist so you can have an “experience of worship” or find fellowship or feed the hungry or change the world. Real Church may indeed be where all those things happen as a RESULT of doing Real Church, and are good things, but are not the purpose of the meeting.

Real Church is about seeing people saved, meaning repenting of their sin and believing in Jesus as their Savior, trusting Him for forgiveness. (As told to me by Billy Graham, by a Catholic priest in ND, and by pastors in denoms as varied as CotN and UMC and PCUSA and ELCA and LCMS.)

YMMV

Max: IMO, a genuine preacher should make it very uncomfortable for the comfortable in his sermons. Christianity Lite, which represents much of the American church, is just too darn comfortable in its sin and rebellion.

What about those of us who came on-scene already Afflicted, already beaten down and worthless?

“Afflicting the comfortable”/”Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” sermons just make it worse, i.e. God becomes just a Cosmic-level Abuser, like all the others who beat us down except with Infinite POWER.

Headless Unicorn Guy,

Agree. Jesus differentiated.

The broad swathes of:

“The Good Ole’ Days”

“Christianity’s purpose is to make you uncomfortable (or it’s not Christian),” a la CS Lewis quote…

…deny/silence the experiences of people outside the demographic of the (possibly well-intentioned, privileged?) speakers.

Move forward, upward, better together with keen awareness of history and reality outside oneself.

linda: But here is what it isn’t: it isn’t the 501c3 groups meeting around the world.

Re: church and the Body of Christ. True.

We keep seeing the fake, via Hillsong, Willow Creek, SBC, Grahams, Fallwells, ARC, etc.

Real church visibly lives the fruit and gifts of the HS and has the look, feel, and lifestyle of Jesus.

Ava Aaronson,

Perhaps “challenging” is a better descriptor than “uncomfortable?”

I understand what people are getting at with the “afflict the comfortable” language. What I’ve seen, though, is that it’s often used as a dodge by people who don’t know how to or don’t care to motivate others by means other than shame or fear. “Well, the gospel is supposed to be uncomfortable, so if what I said bothers you, maybe you need to listen to the prompting of the Holy Spirit!”

Telling people the truth should hurt is a dangerous thing to do. How then can they trust the comfort Christ promises?

Headless Unicorn Guy: What about those of us who came on-scene already Afflicted, already beaten down and worthless?

Any preacher worth a grain of salt needs to proclaim God’s Word in a way that will comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable (as Havner used to say). Comforting the afflicted requires a God-called pastor to have boots on the ground through the week, rather than preaching to folks only on Sundays. That’s a rare and endangered species in the American church. You won’t find a pastor like that in mega-mania … smaller churches tend to be have a more loving pulpit and pew to reach out to hurting folks.

Max: Any preacher worth a grain of salt needs to proclaim God’s Word in a way that will comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable (as Havner used to say).

There’s a back-and-forth right now about Pastor Wade Burleson and his dealings with men convicted of domestic violence. We saw he had such men on stage in his church, testifying.

The question is always Matthew 3.8 and Acts 3.8 – did they DO/PAY the fruit of repentance like Zacchaeus did x 4, or even x 1?

We know Pastor Andy Savage did not, according to Jules Woodson. He got up before the congregation and they applauded. Nothing to/for the victim.

Repentance with fruit is neither timid, nor “healing” for a predator, nor words, nor a glossing over by pastors and congregations.

Ask the victims. There’s the answer.

Predators prey, groom, gloss over, talk about their own “healing” instead of their evil actions, bully, fake, talk cheap, manipulate… what’s that you always say, Max… , they manipulate, then something, and in the end, they dominate. Predators are slick. Cons.

Domestic violence predators con a woman into marrying them. Then pounce. Sometimes worse.

Dobson (PhD) asked women, “What did you do to make him act that way?” (IOW, assault you). PhD Dobson didn’t get it.

It’s easy to write off all US churches as mere 501(c)(3) organizations, but what is the alternative? Should they have their tax-exempt status taken away? Should churches be closed? Hmm, that would leave the field open for every religion but Christianity to have a building and operate as a charity. I’m not sure how to deal with that part.

Much as I trust Jesus, I don’t think there will be much left of Christianity in the US in a few years, if every Christian abandons congregational life, with its buildings and so on.

We have to fix the human, institutional part of religion. Doing this is optional, of course. Nobody should be forced to go to church. But churches should not be eliminated, either.

CMT: What I’ve seen, though, is that it’s often used as a dodge by people who don’t know how to or don’t care to motivate others by means other than shame or fear.

Just like the Soviet System in HBO’s Chernobyl.
Where the only way to motivate is by FEAR and THREATS.
(Like the scene where Shcherbina threatens to have Legasov thrown out of the helicopter at altitude. When in doubt, THREATEN. There’s been comments that this scene was unrealistic – “This is 1986, not 1936!” – but it shows how making threats had become a go-to solution for everything.)

Ava Aaronson: what’s that you always say, Max… , they manipulate, then something, and in the end, they dominate

“manipulate, intimidate and dominate” … there’s been an outbreak of that in the American pulpit

Friend: We have to fix the human, institutional part of religion.

Jesus came to redeem individuals, not institutions. The institution we call “church” is OK if it is reaching lost individuals for Christ, equipping them in the Word, and releasing them with their unique gifts to fulfill the Great Commission together as the Body of Christ. Anything less than that is doing church without God.

Headless Unicorn Guy: What about those of us who came on-scene already Afflicted, already beaten down and worthless?
“Afflicting the comfortable”/”Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” sermons just make it worse, i.e. God becomes just a Cosmic-level Abuser, like all the others who beat us down except with Infinite POWER.

Jonathan Edwards and CS Lewis are not the bad guys here (neither is Hal Lindsay or Jack Chick, for that matter). Anthony Burgess points to the real problem in ‘Christ’s Prayer before His Passion, sermon 93’,- “Lastly, this Truth (God’s Word), though precious, yet because it is opposite to a corrupt heart, is very bitter, and makes most men enemies to it. It is a truth requiring holiness, hatred of sin, mortification of lusts; and because it is so, therefore the vain, corrupt hearts of men love errors and lies, or deceits by the devil and sin, rather than the truth of Scripture. Thus Christ told the Pharisees, they thought to kill Him, because He told them the truth (John 8:40). And Paul, “Am I therefore your enemy, because I tell you the truth” (Gal 4:16). The ministers of this truth are compared to light that is offensive to sore eyes, and salt that does grieve and vex the wounded man. Indeed truth, if rightly considered, is not grievous, but to do otherwise than obey truth. It is not the threatening of hell and damnation that should be so grievous, but the punishments themselves. They cried out of our Saviour, saying, it was a hard speech, of what He had spoken, but it is a harder thing to lie roaring in hell flames to all eternity.”
Nor do they want to beat you down with infinite power, because Christ makes it plain, as do they, that He comes to heal the broken-hearted.

Friend: The Bible makes several references to the wickedness of cities.

How are rural nomads going to keep their sons at the sheep dip instead of running off to the city?
Paint the cities as Sodom & Gomorrah hotbeds of Wickedness, how else?

CMT,

““Well, the gospel is supposed to be uncomfortable, so if what I said bothers you, maybe you need to listen to the prompting of the Holy Spirit!”
++++++++++++++++++

clearly the speaker is quite comfortable, and ‘whatever I said’ has little bearing on him/her.

even as a kid i was struck by how this religion of mine turned off imagination, intelligence, the ability to recognize flaws in one’s reasoning over what one believes (let alone admit it’s even possible)…

Friend,

Some people had suggested churches should be made to fill in their “990s” as a good first step. Is it really compulsory to declare oneself of some “race” in the U.S., and if so, ought it to be? Does the U.S. need an Electoral College? (Not intended to lead to replies outside Dee’s requirements.) Why don’t public or politicians posit middle courses between “having it all” and “throwing toys out of prams”? Would churches lead the way in setting an example with presenting accounts?

Headless Unicorn Guy,

Given that Abraham, Mamre, Aner and Eshcol and at least 318 others had just rescued the WHOLE populace of Sodom – EXCEPT its king who had somewhere convenient to slope off to – from having the Assyrians do things to them, which . . .

Max: a genuine preacher should make it very uncomfortable for the comfortable in his sermons. Christianity Lite, which represents much of the American church, is just too darn comfortable in its sin and rebellion

Headless Unicorn Guy,

H.U.G., I don’t think Max and Lowlandseer have in mind to excuse abusive dealings. I think the target should be the would-be groupies.

My old vicar who hadn’t long retrained from another profession, kept saying “wasn’t that anointed” every time the “amplifying ministry” had blasted us for the compulsory 50 minutes, destroying fine piano playing; he imported bumptious, bossy and ignorant evangelisers from a Pacific island; he showed Bethel Redding films; he let the young be sent to New Wine (Scripture-distorting Zacharias associates). This was because the people who trained him told him “that was what people wanted”.

I left that church nine months before the vicar got suspended (reportedly it wasn’t money and it wasn’t their young lady lodger) because I could see most of the congregation were winding him up (making him and his wife manic). The new vicar has reportedly dropped Bethel from their portfolio of “accessories” but evidently wants to go rather slow in inducting them into calmer ways. I think there isn’t a prayer culture there so I’m not sure how he, or they, will survive.

If I was invited to preach there I would preach from Amos ch 5 vv 23-24, “stop that din”. I would preach that the worship of God according to Old and New Testaments is to not stunt the growth of our fellow adopted widows and orphans in Father’s firm.

This is in Is 55, 58, 61, it is in the Parables, the feedings of the thousands (us) through small gifts (after which we will have “food” over to evangelise outsiders), James, the meaning of Paul’s crown. Proverbs 31 depicts Father’s firm (it doesn’t depict what the personages in the panel on the right say it does).

I believe in the true charismatic and not the fake charismatic. My preaching would be alleged to be “afflicting” according to the designer outlet religion consumers.

Max: “manipulate, intimidate and dominate” …

That’s it. Thx, Max.

Michael in UK: churches should be made to fill in their “990s” as a good first step.

I would certainly favor that, since I belong to a couple of tiny groups that manage to file a 990. From what I’ve heard, the greater abuse comes from defining a host of affiliated things as the church: schools, coffee shops, housing, bookstores, conference space, aircraft, and on and on.

“I’m also not a fan of Christianity Lite and its comfortable seeker-friendly approach of doing church, where pewsitters are never challenged to move into deeper faith with Christ. If the pulpit won’t wake them up, nothing will … but, you must tell them the Truth in love.”

MAX,
the problem with ‘Truth in love’ becomes one of discernment among believers . . .
so much of modern Christian ‘light’ does seem to come from shallowness.
And in asking what ‘truth’ is, we find these Christians far more comfortable with ‘the pointing of the finger’ than examining their own painfully broken souls which are in need of Christ’s healing. . .

It may be too much to expect for change to come as quickly as we might like, but two thousand years ago, the ‘Truth in love’ played out on Calvary and on the realization that WE were the ‘sinners’ for whom Our Lord suffered and YES, it was done out of love for us, the kind of love that doesn’t ‘point the finger at that OTHER sinner’, the kind of love that calls us to kneel before the Cross and mourn for Him with broken hearts at what was done FOR us by God Himself out of love. . .

As for the other,
the pointing of the finger and the throwing of stones???

we see Our Lord coming with challenges to the ‘norms’ of His day on Earth, like pushing a ‘reset’ button affecting the pharisees and the those who profited from the poor’s offerings at the temple, but something ‘more’ was given than we humans could comfortably handle even then, and so began the ‘pushback’ against the teachings of Christ that demanded ‘too much’ of a broken people . . . . to examine one’s own sin before throwing that stone; to ‘forgive’ slights and ‘acting out’ by those who were ‘troubled’ as though in seeing them from a long-way-off, there comes a deeper understanding of their own wretchedness and in seeing this, compassion trumps anger . . . . . .

was it not in the difficulty to come to terms with paradoxes that challenged our comfort levels, that we failed to continue to ‘become’ transformed and returned to that which offered some temporal comfort and familiarity instead????

AND WHEN DID OUR CONTEMPT OF ‘THAT OTHER SINNER’ BECOME A STANDARD IN CONSERVATIVE RIGHT WING CHRISTIANITY ???;

AND WHEN DID ‘INCLUSION’ OF THOSE WHO LIVE ON THE MARGINS, THE MODERN LEPERS, BECOME TOO PROGRESSIVE FOR PEOPLE OF FAITH???

elastigirl: i, too, have been working on peeling back the blockhead-dead layers that come with losing youth to years.

With me, the question is “Who can restore the years the End Times Prophecy locusts have eaten?”