evangelicalism
- Penal Substitutionary Atonement (95% agree it is an “essential understanding”)
- Eternal security of the believer (94% agree)
- “Open but cautious” approach to the miraculous gifts (71%)
- Church membership is important (95%)
- Church leadership via corporate congregational discernment, led largely by a team of pastor/elders. (88%)
- Compassion and justice are not the gospel but a necessary outworking of it (70%)
- “Eternal conscious punishment” - very important (80%)
- Divorce/remarriage acceptable in cases of infidelity or desertion (93% affirm this or a more open position)
- “Much of what Ramsey teaches is sound, helpful advice, particularly for middle-class Americans struggling with mounting credit card bills.”
- Ramsey’s “views on poverty are neither informed nor biblical”.
- A recent piece on Ramsey’s website “confused correlation with causation here by suggesting that [certain] habits make people rich or poor”
- “Ramsey’s perceived “direct correlation” between faith and wealth should be more troubling than his other confused correlations, for it flirts with what Christians refer to as the prosperity gospel, the teaching that God rewards faithfulness with wealth.”
- Ramsey “glosses over the reality that economic injustice is not, in fact, limited to the developing world but plagues our own country as well.”
- “People are poor for a lot of reasons, and choice is certainly a factor, but categorically blaming poverty on lack of faith or lack of initiative is not only uninformed, it’s unbiblical.”
- Neither statement makes mention that the heart of this lawsuit is about a systematic church effort to discourage and eventually prevent the families of children who were allegedly (and repeatedly) sexually victimized by church officials from speaking out and reporting to law enforcement. A statement that fails to mention that this lawsuit is less about the abuse and more about an institution that took steps to protect itself and its reputation over the victimized souls and bodies of little ones. Omitting such fundamental facts from these statements speaks volumes about the inability of the authors to grasp the eternal significance about which they write.
- Neither statement mentions that CJ Mahaney was actually the Senior Pastor at one of these churches where all of this horrific abuse allegedly occurred AND where these families were discouraged from bringing this matter to the God ordained civil authorities? Including this would simply state a known fact without implicating Mr. Mahaney in any wrongdoing. Omitting such a fundamentally important fact from this statement is extremely disturbing to me and very disheartening to so many others.
- The statement by T4G fails to mention that this lawsuit was dismissed for one reason and one reason only…expiration of the statute of limitation. Isn’t it tragic that the reason why this suit was dismissed – taking too long to file – was the very objective of these church leaders allegedly had when they discouraged these individuals and families from stepping forward.
- The statement by the members of the Gospel Coalition says the following as it relates to the statute of limitations and the dismissal of the case: So the entire legal strategy was dependent on a conspiracy theory that was more hearsay than anything like reasonable demonstration of culpability. As to the specific matter of C. J. participating in some massive cover-up, the legal evidence was so paltry (more like non-existent) that the judge did not think a trial was even warranted. Does this sound like a statement that even appears to make an effort to be objective?
The Spiritual Pep Rally
Really good stuff on the Christian movie phenomenon, in the deliciously-titled “Do You Believe in Confirmation Bias?”
I do remain concerned, however, that when such anecdotal evidence [e.g. of Atheist professors persecuting Christian students] is amplified and looped in and through the echo chamber, it has a detrimental effect on God’s people. It promotes a culture of fear and a culture of antagonism. It reinforces the belief that those outside our circle are our enemies, to be battled, rather than our mission field, to be loved and evangelized.
To the extent it overstates our persecution, it pushes us to prioritize standing our ground and protecting our rights over being salt and light. To the extent it fixates on archetypal stories of our victimization, it makes us quick to assume evil intent when we face conflicts and slow to acknowledge our own roles in perpetuating them.
Perhaps—perhaps—it tempts us with the lie that those times and places where we have been wronged justify ignoring our teachers’ admonitions to treat those who question our beliefs with gentleness and respect.
Maybe the more pertinent question to ask in the face of Christian movies like God’s Not Dead and Do You Believe? is not whether they are accurate representations of the world we live in, but whether the way they respond—and invite us to respond—to that broken world will help us to remake it into something healthier, holier, and more reflective of kingdom principles.
Farewell, Episcopalians?
There have been some strong reactions across the internet the past couple days to some remarks that Southern Baptist Theological Seminary president Dr. Albert Mohler made on his daily podcast The Briefing. The provocative headline: “Controversies involving Episcopal leaders affirms liberalism and Christianity two rival religions”.
A little ways down in the piece it’s clear he’s not talking about political liberalism, but rather Protestant liberalism. And he says that Protestant liberalism (he singles out the Episcopal Church) and Christianity are “two rival religions”.
Why does he make this audacious claim? He points first to a recent tragedy where a female Episcopal bishop in Massachusetts was driving drunk and hit and killed a bicyclist. Mohler theorizes that the woman was appointed a bishop, even after one prior drunk driving conviction, because “the diocese was in a rush to elect a woman as bishop”. Secondly Mohler notes that the dean of a leading Episcopal seminary (also in Massachusetts) is stridently lesbian and pro-choice, and is stepping down from her job, Mohler conjectures, not because of those views, but because of financial mismanagement at the school.
Mohler says that these two examples demonstrate that the Episcopal church has a different “moral code”. (This seems fairly self-evident, albeit with the caveat that not everyone in those denominations may agree with those value norms.)
But then he audaciously claims that because of this different “moral code”, Episcopalians (and apparently, by extension, the rest of ‘liberal Protestantism’) are not actually Christians, but rather, “rival religions” to “orthodox Christianity” (by which, of course, Mohler doesn’t mean Orthodox orthodox, but rather those that agree more closely with his set of beliefs).
By their fruit you will recognize them
Now we shouldn’t be hasty to discount Mohler’s evaluation criteria. After all, in Matthew 7 Jesus says that we will know false teachers by their fruit. “A bad tree bears bad fruit.”
So, to summarize Mohler’s argument, these two Episcopal leaders are exemplars of a set of moral priorities that demonstrate that liberal Protestantism isn’t, in fact, Christian.
But is it really reasonable to go from observing two pieces of rotten fruit to concluding that the whole section of the orchard is bad?
Alrighty then…
First, I’m more than a little astounded that Mohler would suggest that a “moral code” is what delineates “real Christians” from “rival religions”. (Apparently we don’t need to worry about theology much? Odd coming from the head of a seminary…)
But if, from a couple highly-visible examples, it’s appropriate to conjecture the “moral code” and thus orthodoxy of an entire branch of Christianity, let’s use Mohler’s own Reformed Baptist Evangelicalism as an example.
Let’s consider the case of C. J. Mahaney, who while being fawned over at conferences for writing books on humility was also running roughshod over staff without any accountability, had a history that included blackmail of rival leaders in his denomination, and who was at the helm of a denomination that covered up multiple accounts of child abuse.
And then let’s consider the case of Mark Driscoll, who built a megachurch on his reputation as “the cussing pastor”, bought his way on to the NYT Bestseller list with church money, and finally resigned in disgrace and saw his church shut down after a plagiarism scandal was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
What should we conclude from the “moral code” demonstrated by these two leaders (certainly at least “bishops” if there were a formal hierarchy) in Mohler’s theological circles? Is it fair to suggest that Reformed Baptist Evangelicalism is some sort of rival religion to Christianity because Mohler and many with him embraced these men until their patterns of sin finally became too public to ignore?
Of course not.
Christians, of all people, and reformed, “total depravity”-believing Christians most of all, should be the first to line up to admit that we are all sinners, and that moral uprightness is (blessedly) not the criteria by which our faith is judged.
Yes, true faith will change how we live, how we calibrate our “moral codes”, how we allow God to make us more like Jesus every day of our lives. And by all means, let’s strive, vigorously, to champion righteousness within (and without!) the church.
But publicly dismissing an entire wing of Protestantism as a “rival religion” because their set of acceptable sins is different than your own is arrogant foolishness, and Albert Mohler’s listeners deserve better.
I have many friends and family in liberal Protestant denominations who I am happy to embrace as brothers and sisters in Christ, even when we disagree on moral priorities. I will continue to learn from them, and hopefully them from me. One day a perfect man will sort us out and open our eyes and show us how wrong we all were in various areas of belief and practice. Thank God that man’s name will be Jesus and not, well, anybody else.
A few thoughts on Mark Driscoll's Resignation
Mark Driscoll resigned today from the pastorate of Mars Hill Church in Seattle. Driscoll has been embattled in several controversies over the past year including allegations of plagiarism, verbal abuse of staff. For the past several weeks he had been on a leave of absence while a small group of Mars Hill leaders investigated a long list of charges brought against him by many former church pastors, elders, members, and staff.
Driscoll’s resignation is he latest blow to a church already staggering under the recent closure of several campuses and the resignations of many other pastors and staff.
I will continue to pray for Driscoll, his family, and the many people who have been hurt by his words and actions over the past years. I hope this can be the first step in a process of healing and reconciliation for all concerned.
That might be a good place to stop this post, and yet there is more I think it’s worth saying. Perhaps you may think it uncharitable to say any more, but I think not. I get no pleasure out of Driscoll’s resignation, and want to hope that this is really his first step on the road to repentance. And yet to be as wise as serpents we should consider what he said as well as his actions.
Driscoll’s resignation letter is addressed to the Mars Hill board of investigation, but was clearly written with a broader audience in mind. In the letter Driscoll didn’t confess to anything that hadn’t been addressed before.
I readily acknowledge I am an imperfect messenger of the gospel of Jesus Christ. There are many things I have confessed and repented of, privately and publicly, as you are well aware. Specifically, I have confessed to past pride, anger and a domineering spirit.
A couple of thoughts here: first, that we are all imperfect messengers of the gospel. Which makes this a very non-specific confession of something that he doesn’t even identify as sin. Yes, he reiterates confession of ‘past’ pride, anger and a domineering spirit, but doesn’t address any of the multitude of very specific charges that have been levied against him. Second, he doesn’t address the plagiarism or the use of a quarter million dollars of church money to get his book on the NYT Bestseller List.
Driscoll still seems to be blaming others a lot for the situation:
many of those making charges against me declined to meet with you or participate in the review process at all.
And later:
Recent months have proven unhealthy for our family—even physically unsafe at times…
While these statements may be true, they seem to be deflecting attention from his faults and calling attention to his accusers. This hardly seems like a contrite spirit of repentance.
In addition, he says his resignation is not because he did anything wrong, but because “aspects of [his] personality and leadership style have proven to be divisive within the Mars Hill context” and it would be best “for the health of [his] family, and for the Mars Hill family, that we step aside”.
He also emphasizes that there haven’t been any charges of anything criminal, [sexually] immoral, or heretical, which would disqualify him from ministry. The Mars Hill board who investigated him also state that he is still qualified for pastoral ministry. My question here is how the scope of qualification has been narrowed so far that only crime, sexual immorality, or heresy will disqualify you. Consider 1 Timothy 3:
Here is a trustworthy saying: Whoever aspires to be an overseer desires a noble task. Now the overseer is to be above reproach, faithful to his wife, temperate, self-controlled, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not given to drunkenness, not violent but gentle, not quarrelsome, not a lover of money. He must manage his own family well and see that his children obey him, and he must do so in a manner worthy of full respect. (If anyone does not know how to manage his own family, how can he take care of God’s church?) He must not be a recent convert, or he may become conceited and fall under the same judgment as the devil. He must also have a good reputation with outsiders, so that he will not fall into disgrace and into the devil’s trap.
This is a sobering text for anyone considering a call as an elder. But if we truly believe these are the qualifications for the office, Driscoll, by his own admission in many cases, is disqualified.
As a friend of mine noted, this move by Driscoll also allows him to leave on his own terms, and to suddenly place himself outside of any structure that could hold him accountable. (This, too, seems to have been a pattern of Driscoll’s over the years.)
It will be interesting to see what becomes of this situation over the coming months. This isn’t the end of difficulties at Mars Hill; there are still the Global Fund shenanigans to deal with that may yet bring additional charges. Will the neo-Reformed types who once championed but more recently distanced themselves from Driscoll take this opportunity to now declare him again fit for ministry and bring him back into the regular rotation of conferences and book deals? Or will there be a longer-term awareness that there is confession, repentance, healing, and reconciliation that needs to occur?
If you’ve read this far and think I’ve been unfair to Mark, take a few minutes and go read some of the other statements of confession that have come from Mars Hill pastors: Lief Moi, Jeff Bettger, Kyle Firstenberg… Then compare them in detail and tone to what Driscoll is saying. One of them is not like the others, and we should not be afraid to ask ourselves why.
Let’s continue to pray for the Mark Driscoll and his family, for Mars Hill Church, and for all those who have been affected, both positively and negatively, by Driscoll over the years. God’s heart is for grace, healing, and reconciliation. Ours should be, too.
Paul Tripp on the inadequacy of external accountability
Pastor, author, and counselor Paul Tripp recently resigned from the Mars Hill Church (Seattle) Board of Advisors & Accountability. There was a lot of speculation at that time as to why Tripp was resigning, and in what capacity he might stick around as a consultant and counselor. Tripp cleared that up today with a statement on his website wherein he describes the inadequacy of that sort of external accountability.
It’s because of this love [for the church] that I accepted the position on Mars Hill Church’s BoAA. But it became clear to me that a distant, external accountability board can never work well because it isn’t a firsthand witness to the ongoing life and ministry of the church. Such a board at best can provide financial accountability, but it will find it very difficult to provide the kind of hands-on spiritual direction and protection that every Christian pastor needs. Unwittingly what happens is that the external accountability board becomes an inadequate replacement for a biblically functioning internal elder board that is the way God designed his church to be lead and pastors to be guided and protected. So, since I knew that I could not be the kind of help that I would like to be through the vehicle of the BoAA, I resigned from that position.
(Emphasis mine.)
I think Tripp’s point here is key - that healthy, functional leadership comes about by having a local group of elders who can support, protect, and guide the pastor(s). There is no substitute for “firsthand witness” to what’s going on at the church.
All of us involved in church leadership, whether pastors, elders, or other, should be reminded that mutual, humble accountability to people right there within the local church is the best way to stay on track.
Looking back at my thoughts on the Acts 29 Leadership Change
My post from March 2012 about Matt Chandler taking over the reins of Acts 29 has seen some renewed activity this past week with the news that Acts 29 booted Mark Driscoll and Mars Hill Church from membership in the church planting network.
Last week’s move is a significant one, seeing (as Wenatchee the Hatchet has documented) that for most of its existence, Acts 29 was, both by leadership and funding, nearly indistinguishable from Mars Hill.
In 2012 I had four key thoughts:
Chandler was a strong enough personality to bring about change.
This seems to have borne itself out; it can’t have been easy for Chandler and company to call on Driscoll to resign, but under Chandler’s leadership Acts 29 has done exactly that.
Chandler could help change A29 culture
Not sure that this has really happened, but I’m hopeful that it will start to as days go by. For too long the A29 church planter model appears to have encouraged not just the Mars Hill church style but the Mark Driscoll leadership style - brash, vulgar, MMA-loving, trash-talking, in-your-face “leadership”. One good that could come out of Driscoll’s current woes is for some of his acolytes to recognize the folly of emulating that persona.
Acts 29 could start to get some distance from Driscoll’s controversies
Well, that one clearly hasn’t happened yet.
Driscoll could have some room to rest and grow
I was hopeful that with A29 leadership off his plate, Driscoll might have time to relax, refresh, and recharge. Perhaps I was a little bit optimistic.
Regardless of where you stand on Acts 29 and Mark Driscoll, this is no time for gloating. I continue to pray that Driscoll will come to real repentance and seek reconciliation with those he has harmed, and that the Acts 29 network will be strengthened, not damaged, from Driscoll’s ouster.
They Took the Post Down
As a follow-up to my last post: Leadership Journal last night took down the controversial post, replacing it with this note:
A note from the editors of Leadership Journal: We should not have published this post, and we deeply regret the decision to do so. The post, told from the perspective of a sex offender, withheld from readers until the very end a crucial piece of information: that the sexual misconduct being described involved a minor under the youth pastor’s care. Among other failings, this post used language that implied consent and mutuality when in fact there can be no question that in situations of such disproportionate power there is no such thing as consent or mutuality.
The post, intended to dissuade future perpetrators, dwelt at length on the losses this criminal sin caused the author, while displaying little or no empathic engagement with the far greater losses caused to the victim of the crime and the wider community around the author. The post adopted a tone that was not appropriate given its failure to document complete repentance and restoration. There is no way to remove the piece altogether from the Internet, and we do not want to make it seem that we are trying to make it disappear. That is not journalistically honest. The fact that we published it; its deficiencies; and the way its deficiencies illuminate our own lack of insight and foresight, is a matter of record at The Internet Archive. Any advertising revenues derived from hits to this post will be donated to Christian organizations that work with survivors of sexual abuse. We will be working to regain our readers' trust and to give greater voice to victims of abuse. We apologize unreservedly for the hurt we clearly have caused.
/signed/ Marshall Shelley, editor, Leadership Journal Harold B. Smith, president and CEO, Christianity Today International
I offer my thanks to the editors for making this decision, and encourage them to examine the processes that led them to publish it in the first place, in hopes that they won’t make a similar decision next time.
Take down that post?
As if it had been too long since the last evangelical church sex abuse scandal, Leadership Journal (an imprint of Christianity Today) posted a long online article this month titled “My Easy Trip from Youth Minister to Felon”. Tagged as an article on topics including “adultery”, “failure”, “sex”, and “temptation”, it’s a long-ish first-person account of a youth pastor describing his progression into what sounds like an extramarital affair. Then on the last page you find out the “other woman” in question was a teenager in his church. Suddenly a cautionary tale about temptation turns out to be a story about a pastor grooming and abusing an underaged girl in his congregation. Disgusting.
My intent here isn’t to provide a full summary or address the article - RawStory.com reported on it and many Christian bloggers have chimed in. The Twitter hashtag #TakeDownThatPost quickly sprang up, and I found myself sympathetic.
But then my friend Randy chimed in with a slightly different approach. And that led me to a different, more interesting question. Rather than calling for the editors of the publication to reconsider and take down the post, might it be more appropriate to simply raise awareness that the publication has chosen to post such content, and then let people form their own opinions of the publication and its editors?
Now that’s a conundrum.
What’s the right approach?
Because on one hand Randy’s proposed approach seems pretty attractive. It allows me to just state the facts. If anything, the factual headline (RawStory.com: “Ex-Youth Pastor describes felony sex crimes as extramarital friendship in Christian Journal”) draws far more attention than a “#TakeDownThatPost” hashtag. And let’s face it, if some organization with which I didn’t expect to align did something like this I wouldn’t be campaigning for them to self-censor - I’d just point out where I thought they went wrong and leave it at that.
But this is Christianity Today we’re talking about. I typically respect them quite a bit. Only two weeks ago I recommended their editor Mark Galli’s recent piece on sanctification. Their executive editor Andy Crouch wrote one of my favorite books from last year. I’d like to think there’s some restorative action I could encourage rather than just throwing them under the bus. And to simply draw attention to their unwise action and let others draw conclusions seems an awful lot like I’m trying to drag Christians' names through the mud, which also doesn’t seem like a good idea.
If you can’t say something nice…
I suppose there’s another option: just don’t say anything. It’s not like the world is looking to me for comment on every issue, right? I was starting to feel that way and then I saw the story going around Facebook and local friends personally looking into it. Now I feel some amount of compulsion to comment, if only to let them know that they’re not alone in being upset about CT posting this article.
So where does that leave me?
I’m not a CT subscriber, so I can’t vote with my feet by cancelling a subscription. I sent an email to the editor of Leadership Journal this morning expressing my concern. I don’t feel like there’s a lot of value in actively joining the Twitter crowd and propagating the hashtag. So what else do I do? (Do I need to do anything?) Pray for the situation, sure - for the victim, the jailed man, the countless other victims out there. But other than that I’m not sure there’s much to do, or much more to say that others aren’t saying more eloquently than I would.
If the abuse scandals of the Catholic church, Sovereign Grace Ministries, Bill Gothard, Vision Forum, and others haven’t yet made it clear enough to us in the evangelical church: covering up, weasling around the topic, addressing it as only sin/repentance and not as a crime, characterizing pastor/youth sex as ‘relationships’ rather than predation - this has got to stop. Let’s not bring even more disrepute to the church than the abusers already have. Let’s again call our elders to be above reproach, and hold them to it.
While we may all personally want to shy away from casting the first stone, God is not mocked. As a church body it’s well past time that we find the pile of millstones and remind ourselves how Jesus advised they might be used.
Some thoughts on the recent EFCA doctrinal survey
I was fascinated to last week stumble upon the results of a 2013 doctrinal survey of more than 1000 credentialed Evangelical Free Church of America (EFCA) pastors. I’ve been a member of an EFCA church for just more than 5 years, and while I have a reasonable feel for where my own congregation stands on many doctrinal issues, it’s very interesting to get a feel for where the denomination is as a greater whole.
Some thoughts on various survey topics:
Creation / Evolution
Q8: “Which of these best characterizes your view on the creation account in Genesis 1?"
I was a little bit surprised that almost 60% of respondents held the “six literal days” view. (I would’ve expected that view to be predominant, but maybe not quite so high.) Another 20% opted for some older-earth view, with the remaining 20% responding ‘unsettled’ or ‘other’.
The results of Q9, then, come as no surprise: “How important is your view of the age of the earth to your theological framework?" 65% answered either very or somewhat important. My guess is that the overlap between the “six literal days” folks and the very or somewhat important folks is very great, and that they also largely overlap with the 57% who either disagreed or strongly disagreed with the Q10 proposition that “some forms of theistic evolution are compatible with biblical teaching”.
Science
I was very disappointed with the wording of Q13; its wording seems to bias the respondent toward a specific answer. “The Bible is not authoritative in matters in which it touches on history or science." More than 90% of responses disagreed with this statement.
Surely the phrase “not authoritative” set off immediate red flags for most survey-takers. If the EFCA leadership was trying to ascertain the view of their pastors in regard to issues of science and history as addressed, say, in Peter Enns' recent Inspiration and Incarnation, they could’ve worded the question more neutrally.
Eternal Subordination of the Son
This topic, on its own, is perhaps more esoteric than most on the survey; we don’t typically argue it as an individual doctrine. Where we do see its impact, though, is in the subordination / complementarian view of men’s and women’s roles in the church. Nearly 70% of all respondents agreed with the Q11 statement that “The Son is eternally subordinate to the Father in the eternal relations in the Trinity."
I did a little additional reading for my own benefit and quickly ran across a summary of a debate on this topic held at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School (which is associated with the EFCA) back in 2008. Interestingly enough, a professor of systematic theology at Trinity was arguing against the eternal subordination position in that debate. Former Trinity professors Wayne Grudem and Bruce Ware argued the affirmative side. My guess is that the immense popularity of Grudem’s Systematic Theology has helped bring about this majority on the side of eternal subordination.
Aligning with this was the 85% affirming the complementarian position on the topic of women in ministry (Q21).
The Bible
The answer to Q20 interests me a bit, if only because it runs very contrary to a lot of the Reformed blog chatter from the past several months. “Should we expect to hear the Spirit speak to us apart from illuminating our understanding and application of the Scripture?" 60% said yes.
Eschatology
This one is curious to me. Q35 asked “What would best desrcibe your eschatological position?", and the four options were three varieties of premillennial and then “other”. 84% of respondents went with some sort of pre-mil position, and 75% of respondents said that premillennialism is somewhat or very important in their theological framework (Q36). However, when asked whether “premillennialism” should be retained in a future revision to the EFCA statement of faith, the response was nearly 50/50, with a slim majority (45%) actually saying it should not be retained.
Topics that didn’t surprise me so much:
The Significance of Silence
Question 45 asked whether or not the EFCA commitment to live and minister within the “significance of silence” framework is a strength. 94% of respondents agreed that it was. I have some more thoughts about this “significance of silence” that I’ll save for a future post.
Conclusion
On the whole, I was very encouraged to see the broad responses from my denomination, and I think they line up pretty well with the positions of our local congregation. I’m encouraged by what I see here, and look forward, as the Lord wills, to many more years of being a part of this church.
Why I'm Leaving the Evangelical Theology blog wars
I’ve had my adventures growing up in the church. In 35 years of church attendance I’ve been a part of a C&MA church, a fundie homeschooling church, two independent Bible churches, two Conservative Baptist churches, and now an EFCA congregation. My family has also been highly influenced by Mennonite and Bretheren folks along the way. We’re an interesting crew.
Let me tell a little bit of my story in order to set things up.
In my mid 20s I was getting involved in leadership at the first church I joined as an adult. Somewhere along the line I got acquainted with Mark Driscoll and started listening through every sermon of his I could find. This led me into what has since been termed the neo-Reformed camp.
One year I went with my pastor to a Desiring God pastor’s conference and heard John Piper, Mark Driscoll, Don Carson, Justin Taylor, and Voddie Baucham. I listened intently as Piper encouraged me to not waste my life, and I still have my Moleskine notebook wherein I hurriedly scribbled Driscoll’s 14 non-negotiable points of the faith. I read C. J. Mahaney’s book on living a cross-centered life and heard his friends tout his credentials to write on humility. I was young, still learning my theology (I’m an engineer, not a pastor!) but had found a place I liked.
But then somewhere along the line things started to change for me.
I read N. T. Wright’s Surprised By Hope and came to realize that the dispensational, Left Behind view of the end times didn’t make as much sense as I had once thought. I read Peter Enns Inspiration and Incarnation and realized that the “literal” reading of the Biblical text wasn’t always the right way to read it. My book pile got overwhelmingly Catholic and Anglican, and the Calvinist I found most winsome ended up being an Iowa essayist named Marilynne Robinson.
I resigned from the church plant I was helping lead because I was completely burned out and had no other way to find rest. I eventually saw that church plant transition to leadership of a young pastor who turned it into a real Acts 29 church plant.
Over the past couple of years I’ve seen a lot of other bits of the system that I once idolized come crumbling down.
I saw Mark Driscoll systematically run out the folks at Mars Hill that disagreed with him, and then spend more money than some of my churches have spent in an entire year’s budget just so he could get “New York Times Bestselling Author” added to his resume.
I saw C. J. Mahaney resign from his denomination over allegations that they covered up child abuse and that he was, ironically, one of the least-qualified people to write a book on humility.
I saw Justin Taylor warn authors against interviewing with a Christian radio host who accused Driscoll of plagiarism, with no word of repentance or apology when her accusations turned out to be correct.
I saw Doug Phillips, the head of Vision Forum (a fundie pro-homeschooling organization) and ministry partner of Voddie Baucham, resign from his ministry after confessing to having an inappropriate relationship with a girl young enough to be his daughter.
What I didn’t see was a lot of public acknowledgment of sin or calls to repentance from those folks surrounding my one-time heroes. The talk was all on the “watch blogs”, where people wrote from perspective somewhere along the spectrum between “godly concern” and “reckless rabble-rousing”. What I did see was a lot of wagons circling, and defensive statements that were factually incorrect and either closed to comment or removed when the comments got loud.
I saw Gospel Coalition teachers define the Gospel in such a way that anyone outside of their little group was probably on the outside looking in. One of Driscoll’s 14 non-negotiables I wrote down that day was penal substitutionary atonement. Al Mohler says that Young Earth Creationism is key. For Wayne Grudem, Owen Strachan, and others in the CBMW, complementarianism is up there at the Gospel level.
What I didn’t see was any acknowledgment that there have historically been various understandings of atonement theory, the age of the universe, the role of women, etc, within the accepted bounds of the church. What I didn’t hear was an acknowledgment that there was a lot of room for negotiables within the bounds of the Apostle’s and Nicene Creeds.
And I’ll be honest: it made me angry.
I’ve spent too much of the last couple years being worked up about these topics. I’ve written angry posts about neo-Reformed Calvinism, young-earth creationism, Biblicism, and gay marriage. And what have I learned? Primarily this:
It’s not worth it.
These online debates have perhaps won me a few cheers but also caused me a few headaches with people within my own church who didn’t understand my attitude or thought I was just trying to cause trouble. They’ve given me a feeling of righteous outrage and truth-telling, but have also helped cultivate in me an attitude of adversarial cynicism that infected my relationship with my own local church.
What it’s taken me a decade to work through and realize is that an awful lot of it is just noise, just hot air. Yes, there are injustices that need to be addressed, but is my blogging actually doing anything productive there? Not really. Does anyone at my church outside of a few of the pastoral staff care about most of these topics or find them worth arguing about? Probably not.
So while it may be exciting to jump on the bandwagon du jour, I’m not sure it’s all that profitable, at least for me right now. There are a lot of other things I can write about and very positive ways to do so. It’s also more peaceful.
So, there are folks I’m unfollowing on Twitter. There are blogs I’m unsubscribing from. There are debates I’m just going to stay out of. And that’s OK.
It’s not that I’m getting less opinionated; I’ll just be sharing my opinions less, and hopefully in more meaningful ways and circumstances. It’s not that I’ll be less upset by injustice and misconduct by church leaders, but instead I’ll stop thinking that my blogging is doing more good for the situation than my praying would be.
Not having the ability to magically make peace for all of America’s evangelical theological battles, I’ll content myself with striving to blessedly make peace and demonstrate love in ways that are meaningful to the people around me. That, for me, is choosing the better part.
To those of you who have been hurt or offended by these posts of mine over the years, my sincere apologies. Let’s talk over coffee sometime soon. I’m buying.
And to those of you who do feel called to continue that sort of blogging, please continue. Go and shout from the rooftops. But also try, as much as it depends on you, to live at peace with all men. Give the benefit of the doubt. Quote accurately instead of selectively.
Loving and defending the innocent and helpless doesn’t mean you always have to be an ass to the oppressor.
We need more neighbors
There’s been a lot of virtual ink spilled in the Christian blogosphere on the gay marriage topic the past couple of weeks after the World Vision U-turn. One of the benefits of not saying anything about it myself is that eventually someone comes along who says things a lot better than I would. Today that person is Jen Hatmaker. (All the emphasis in the quotes below is hers.)
First, she says,
…the reason I’ve always held this conviction [about where she stands on homosexuality] close, inviting only my real friends and family and community in, is because I am loathe to be a pawn in a hateful public war. I refuse to be a point in some win column, used for my influence and lumped into ancillary groupthink I don’t share. I’ve said before that this conversation best belongs in true relationships, around dinner tables, over coffee, in real life, and I still believe that.
And yet for the sake of those following her as a leader, she is willing to lay her cards on the table:
I want you to know that I land on the side of traditional marriage as God’s first and clear design. I believe God’s original creation is how we were crafted to thrive: in marriage, in family, and in community, which has borne out for millennia in Scripture, interpretation, practice, and society (within and without the church).
But wait, she’s not done, and her follow-up point is important.
However, I remain disturbed and pierced at how many Christians have handled the gay community publicly. It is a source of extreme grief. We may share theology, but the application of that truth remains a disconnecting point. While Scripture does command us to “speak the truth in love” (and surely Facebook is the dead worst place to exercise that practice), that is not the end of our biblical responsibility.
She then recounts Jesus' summing up all the law and the prophets as “love God and love your neighbor”. Powerful stuff. And the man wanted to know “who is my neighbor”? What’s my out? And Jesus tells the parable of the Good Samaritan.
Here’s Jen’s words again:
As I lay in bed, it was instantly and perfectly clear that the gay community has been spiritually beaten, stripped of dignity, robbed of humanity, and left for dead by much of the church. You need only look at the suicide rates, prevalence of self-harm, and the devastating pleas from ostracized gay people and those who love them to see what has plainly transpired. Laying next to them, bloodied and bruised, are believers whose theology affirms homosexuality and allows them to stand alongside their gay friends. (Again, you don’t have to agree with this, but there are tens of thousands of thinking, studied people who hold this conviction.) The spiritual gutting of these brothers and sisters is nothing short of shameful. The mockery and dismissal and vitriol leveled at these folks is disgraceful. Also wounded on the side of the road are Christians who sincerely love God and people and believe homosexuality is a sin, but they’ve been lumped in with the Big Loud Mean Voices unfairly. Painted as hateful intolerants, they are actually kind and loving and are simply trying to be faithful. The paintbrush is too wide, the indictments unfounded.
And then she brings it home:
We don’t get to abandon the theology of love toward people; the end does not justify the means. That is not Christ-like and it is certainly not biblical. As a faith community, it is time we relearn what “speaking the truth in love” means. Something that actually feels like love is a start. If the beginning and end of love is simply pointing out sin, then we are doomed. … I am convinced we need no more soldiers in this war. We need more neighbors.
Thanks, Jen, for a powerful word.
A couple thoughts about Christian celebrity
There’s been a lot of talk about Christian celebrity the past several days, but Richard Beck hits on something important this morning by making the distinction between being popular and being a celebrity.
In short, the diagnostic test that you are dealing with a Christian celebrity isn’t the fact that the person is in a spotlight speaking to thousands. Because that might just be a talented and popular person up there. And there’s no shame or elitism in that. What makes the person a celebrity or not isn’t the size of the crowd. What makes the person a celebrity is where the person is before and after the talk. Let me repeat that. The test of Christian celebrity is where the person is before and after the talk. If the person giving the talk is in the audience before and/or after the talk then that’s not a Christian celebrity. That’s just a talented and popular speaker. By coming “down from the stage” to be with the crowd–it’s an Incarnational move here–the speaker is erasing any elite distance or distinction between themselves and their audience. Connecting with the crowd before and after is an act of solidarity, hospitality, humility and service. The speaker is making themselves available. And that availability is the exact opposite of celebrity.
This is a very helpful distinction. I remember attending a Desiring God pastors conference probably a decade ago and seeing Mark Driscoll ushered in by security after everyone else had already been seated, and quickly ushered out after he had spoken and before anyone else could get up to leave. That gives one sort of impression.
On the other hand, two years ago I went to Nashville to a small event where N. T. Wright was speaking. Dr. (Bishop? Rev.? not sure what title he prefers) Wright had just flown in from England that day. While clearly the focus of the event, he spent the first hour of the evening sitting in the crowd enjoying the local musicians who were there to sing, then after speaking for an hour spent at least another 90 minutes patiently signing books, taking pictures, and talking to a long line of folks. Popular? Yeah. Celebrity? Not that day.
The discussion also reminds me of this picture which I saw recently in the news:
Here’s the Pope, on a Lenten retreat, just another priest in a pew. Now, granted, Pope Francis is a celebrity by about any definition; but it seems clear to me that he’s trying as hard as he can to not be a celebrity; to be personal, real, accessible, and pastoral even in the most visible religious role in the world.
Even us non-celebrity (and even non-popular) folks could learn a lesson or two from the good Bishops of Durham and Rome..
The last word on Mark Driscoll for a while
I can’t imagine anybody saying things much better than Jared Wilson did today over on The Gospel Coalition. Bits and pieces:
There are lots of people who want Mark Driscoll to fail and fall. I am not one of them. I love and respect Pastor Mark… I want to repeat: I do not want Pastor Mark to fail and fall. I just want him to walk in step with the truth of the gospel. … I would “confront” him to his face if I could. Even though this is not a Matthew 18 situation, and Pastor Mark has not sinned against me personally, last week I tried to contact him privately through the two avenues available to me, but I received no response. I did not demand or even expect one. … But I have an obligation to Pastor Mark… I feel as though I owe it to him to speak thusly to him. Or about him, as the case may be, since I do not want to presume he would read this. … And I feel I have an obligation to the young men coming up into ministry, exploring the gospel-centered paradigm, learning and studying and practicing missional ministry wherever God has called them. I don’t want them to think the way to lead is to insulate from critique, ignore challenges, and adapt to some echo chamber of mutual admiration. I don’t want young men looking up to men like Mark or listening to lesser voices like my own to think gospel-centered ministry means passivity and silence in the face of obvious needs or, worse, aggression in the area of reputation, dominance and swagger in leadership.
I really appreciate Jared’s point here. I know several men who have come up admiring and imitating Mark Driscoll, and while their gospel proclamation is great, they need to have other voices telling them that “aggression in the area of reputation, dominance and swagger” is not something desirable to imitate.
This is not merely about lazing writing… It’s about what this one latest incident in the accumulating evidence of Pastor Mark’s empire-building says to us, his brothers and his customers… This latest episode is just the latest example indicating an evident lack of accountability and personal responsibility. All along, I’ve trusted that Pastor Mark had the right people around him, speaking the hard truths to him. I assumed those voices were there and authorized by him to keep him honest. I no longer believe this.
Pastor Mark, if you’re reading this — you are losing us. Forget about the “haters.” We ain’t them. We are the ones who love you, who want to see you succeed and prevail. And we won’t stop, no matter what tribe you’re in or which conference stage you take. But we want you to take responsibility for your actions and your attitude. It does not commend grace. We want you to walk in repentance. We want you to seek the way of Christ in more humility, to drop the image and the posturing, and remind us of what drew us to you in the first place: the fame of Christ’s name, not the protection of your own. What would the truth of the gospel have you do? What would adorn the gospel? What would make Jesus look big? I believe it would a reversal of the trajectory of pride you have been on. I’m asking you to turn around and show us why we were so drawn to you in the beginning. I’m asking you to show us Jesus. He has become lost in your shadow.
Jared provides a great example and challenge to me and others who appreciate the gospel-centered history of Mark Driscoll’s preaching but who are concerned by his recent direction. It’s worth reading the whole thing.
Fitch on Driscoll: why doesn't he just repent?
Professor and pastor David Fitch has some powerful words on the Driscoll plagiarism topic today, and more broadly on celebrity leadership in evangelical churches.
And so the question really is NOT did Driscoll plagiarize or not (he did). It is, why doesn’t Mark Driscoll simply repent? Why doesn’t he just go before his congregation, lie prostate [sic] on the ‘stage’ and confess his sins of plagiarism, greed, trying to do too much publishing too fast, and what he will do to rectify and make the situation whole. It’s what us Christians do? Of course this too could be used ideologically. But at least this would be the actual practice of the Christian faith (Matt 18:15-20, James 5:16) one step removed from managing the ideological factors (his public image, his sales etc.).
Instead Driscoll’s silence in this regard reveals that there is ideology at work. His clear avoidance of one of the most basic practices of the Christian life and the continuing charades surrounding him, the publishers and the lawyers to avoid dealing with the lies, illustrate how far the Driscoll’s book and leadership has been removed above the actual practice of on-the-ground Christian life in the form of a celebrity pastor, and has become a product to be sold, an image to be upheld. This is not Christianity, this is ideology, and (for all the reasons mentioned above) I believe cannot lead our churches anywhere.
Ouch.
Then Fitch expands the discussion to the broader evangelical church.
My observation is simple. Once Christianity/church devolves into an ideology it ceases being an authentic embodiment of God’s Triune work in the world. It becomes a product. It works off antagonism (or lack) as opposed to being the overflowing of abundance of God’s work into the world…
Celebrity leadership is the death knell of the evangelical church in America. It’s killing us. And so I believe it’s of utmost importance that everyone under the age of 35 reject celebrity leadership. Realize that once beliefs, products, preaching, leadership is extracted from the local life of the local concretely engaged church, it tends to quickly devolve into ideology. And we then are just a short period away from the death of that church in a swirl of inevitable contradictions, hypocrisy and moral failures that inevitably attend celebrity leadership.
Fitch nails it in that last paragraph. Keep things local and engaged. As I said last week: we are called to be faithful, not famous.
Called to be faithful, not famous
Wenatchee the Hatchet pointed me this morning to a devotional post written by Jeff Bettger, who up until recently was Arts Pastor at Mars Hill Church in Seattle.
It begins with a good meditation on Ephesians 5, where Paul says that works of darkness should be brought to light.
Walk as children of light 9 (for the fruit of light is found in all that is good and right and true), 10 and try to discern what is pleasing to the Lord. 11 Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them. 12 For it is shameful even to speak of the things that they do in secret. 13 But when anything is exposed by the light, it becomes visible, 14 for anything that becomes visible is light. Therefore it says,
“Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.”
Ephesians 5:8 - 14 (ESV)
Bettger then goes on to hint at practices going on at Mars Hill that he believes should be brought to light. More of a personal confessional than an accusation and calling to account, it still raises some serious issues. Some bits and pieces:
Having a mega church background for the last 16 years I have witnessed first hand the tyranny of injustice done in the name of God. Layoffs during Christmas, weeks after new children are born and first homes purchased. The use of tithe money to purchase books at retail cost in order to build a mans platform and make the NY times best seller lists. All with the name of God stamped on it, and self justified because the rest of the business world has those kinds of practices.
What I see Paul telling us here in this passage is to expose injustice, worldly thinking, business pragmatism, immorality… These shady mega church practices are all impure and covetous, and are hidden in the darkness by people calling themselves “Christian professionals” or pastors. They say that it would be unhelpful for the body to know such information. They say it would be gossip and if you haven’t experienced it directly but only heard second hand than it is hearsay and gossip to bring into the light. That is a lie from the pits of hell that gives justification to keep the truth hidden and the ones committing the injustice from true repentance.
We get so amped up on fighting sexual immorality we forget all that Paul is actually saying in this section of scripture. Any part of our life that needs to be hidden for whatever reason is not in the light, and should be exposed. Human politics and cunning are not an out-flowing of the Gospel but rather a system built by human hands for human ends.
Ouch.
So why am I posting this here? Partly because I have friends and family who are involved in Acts 29 churches and who I hope could at least become aware of some of the tactics that get used with the excuse that everybody’s doing it and that the ends justify the means.
But also because we all need to be keenly aware in our own hearts, in our own lives, in our own churches, how these attitudes can sneak in. We are called to be peaceable and humble, not defensive and self-justifying. To be faithful, not famous. To make disciples, not empires.
True Gospel success is demonstrated in the tender, repentant heart, not in the size of our Sunday congregation or the success of our latest book.
If we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive us, and His grace abounds to us. If we try to hide them and justify them in the name of building the church and spreading the Gospel, we are only deceiving ourselves and setting ourselves up for a bigger fall, whether that’s in a megachurch in Seattle or a little church in Iowa.
Pastor Jeff showed humility and leadership with yesterday’s post, and we should commend his humility and repentance as an example to be followed.
Dave Ramsey, Sacred Cow
Earlier this week I posted a link on my Facebook feed: “What Dave Ramsey Gets Wrong about Poverty” - an opinion column by Rachel Held Evans. Little did I know the intensity of response it would receive.
Rachel is a polarizing figure among the evangelical blogging public these days. A progressive woman who isn’t afraid to speak her piece, she’s gained a significant audience in the past year or two. (This is not the first time she’s had a guest piece on CNN.com.) At the risk of over-simplifying her piece (which I recommend reading in its entirety), her main points were these:
Now maybe it’s just me, but these points seem fairly obvious and valid. So I was more than a little surprised at the vehemence of negative responses to my link and on the subsequent re-sharings of a few of my friends. It would appear that, among American evangelical circles these days, criticizing Dave Ramsey on anything is nearly as dangerous as commending President Obama for anything.
What is more striking, though, is the common thread I saw in the negative responses. The assertions were all along the lines of “I think she misquoted Dave” (though no one provided any specifics), and “Dave’s system worked for me, so people shouldn’t criticize him.”
And here we see a scary bit of illogic that is far too common these days - the immediate defense of the person under critique without seemingly no consideration of the points that were actually made. No one tried to argue that Ramsey’s views of poverty were biblical, or that his correlations of faith and wealth were incorrect, or that systemic economic injustice is not an issue. All they said was “it worked for me!”, which, incidentally, was the first thing Ms. Evans acknowledged in her column.
Now, I’ve been guilty of this tendency myself often enough. A critique of something or someone I generally support feels like an attack on that person, which in turn I take as an attack on me, and my first response isn’t a thoughtful, reasoned response, but instead a knee-jerk reaction.
This has got to stop.
We as American evangelicals have no hope of actually solving some of the systemic problems in our church and our country if we’re unwilling to examine, critique, and correct even our most popular sacred cows.
We must have wise awareness of the motivations of those who are teaching and selling to us, even when that message is clothed in the “safe” garb of evangelical Christian vocabulary.
We must understand that, outside of Jesus, no teacher is always right, and almost no teacher is always wrong. This will free us to wrestle with uncomfortable truths. When we do we will find surprising agreement with those whom we previously considered adversaries. We will also have the (very healthy) realization that even our most revered evangelical heroes are fallible humans just like us.
We must embrace God’s truth through whatever channels it comes to us. (Yes, that means I’m likely to write another post with quotes from the Pope’s latest exhortation.) We similarly need to be willing to discard error wherever we find it, even when we find it in those who we like and have found helpful.
Learn. Think. Act. Grow. Learn more. Think more. Humbly turn. Grow more.
This is our calling as followers of Jesus Christ.
It's Not a Long Leap
In my last post I touched just briefly on the evangelical “modesty culture”, wherein the church burdens women by telling them that they are responsible, based on how they dress, for causing their Christian brothers to lust. Today I’d like to look at it in a little more detail and the short leap from there to a culture that minimizes and encourages covering-up of abuse, as allegedly existed in Sovereign Grace Ministries churches for many years.
Here’s the tweet and link that kicked off my thought process.
The post links in an audio excerpt from a sermon, which the blog author says is a “powerful wake up call for women. If we care about our brothers in Christ”, she says, “we will… think about what we are wearing.”
Here’s a transcript of the key portions of the audio:
Listen carefully, ladies. This is not an aberration. This is not an unusual testimony. This is the norm.
“Each and every day on campus is a battle, a battle against my sin, a battle against temptation, a battle against my depraved mind. Every morning I have to cry out for mercy, strength and a renewed conviction to flee youthful lusts. The Spirit is faithful to bring me the renewal I need to prepare me to do war against my sin. Yet the temptation still exists. I am thankful God has created me to be attracted to women. However, campus is a loaded minefield. There are girls everywhere and it is guaranteed that I will pass some attractive girls as I walk in between classes. I either have to be actively engaging my mind and my spirit to praying, quoting Scripture, listening to worship musicor simply looking at the sidewalk to make it through unscathed. Many days it takes all four to be safe.
“The thing that women do not seem to fully grasp is that the temptation towards lust does not stop for us as men. It is continual. It is aggressive. It does all it can to lead men down to death.
“They have a choice to help or deter its goal.”
Heavy stuff. The guy who gave this testimony apparently can’t walk past an attractive woman without lusting after her unless he is “actively” works to ignore or avoid her. And because of that, this pastor tells the women of his congregation that their choice of immodest clothing will help “lead men down to death”. (A booklet with practical modesty tips was reportedly handed out to all the women after the sermon.)
Some of the comments on the post are tragic. One wife reported that “we actually changed churches because my husband didn’t feel like he could open his eyes in the church building without seeing cleavage and lot of legs.”
Really?
Now, I’m a 30-something man who has to deal with all the common temptations. I’m also the father of three young daughters. So I’m about as invested in this particular topic as I possibly could be. And you know what? My first reaction isn’t “yeah, let’s make sure these girls get covered up”. My first reaction is that these men need to grow up and learn some self-control.
You know what, bro? If you can’t walk down the street, through the mall, or across campus without lusting over every cute girl you walk past, you need to get some help. Talk to a godly older man who can disciple you. The apostle Paul didn’t tell Timothy to avoid ministering to all the young women in order to protect himself from lust - instead he says to treat them as sisters, with absolute purity. (1 Tim 5:2) Heck, I’ve got a cute younger sister, and I don’t walk past her on the other side of the street with my head down. If you want to be a mature man and to be a useful servant in the church, you need to learn to deal with women as mothers and sisters. Avoidance is not the answer.
Now, back to the video. About the time I was getting saddened by the blog comments, I took a look at where this sermon audio came from, and it turns out that it’s from a sermon preached by none other than C. J. Mahaney, one of the founders of Sovereign Grace Ministries and the senior pastor of the lead SGM church. C. J. has been accused of conspiring to cover up multiple claims of sexual abuse occurring within the church.
So here’s what strikes me: it’s not a long leap to go from “women carry great responsibility for causing men to lust” to “let’s not ruin some men’s lives by going to the police with abuse allegations”. Because, after all, if the women are at least somewhat at fault for the lust, then aren’t they somewhat at fault for the men choosing to abuse?
Now, I don’t think for an instant that Mahaney or any of the other leaders in his church would say, if asked, that abuse is the victim’s fault. But the culture that encourages placing responsibility on the women for the men’s lust will also subtly place responsibility on the women for the abuse. And that has to stop.
Brothers: if you need help, get help. The answer is not to avoid every woman other than your wife for the rest of your life. Take responsibility for your heart, mind, and actions. Love and cherish the women in the church as mothers and sisters [update: and as friends and equals (thanks @Knepherbird for the suggestion)], with all purity.
God has not given us a Spirit of Fear
The evangelical blogosphere has been an interesting place lately. There have been voices talking about the abuse lawsuit against Sovereign Grace Ministries, the statements supporting CJM from T4G and TGC. Jamie the VWM and others have been addressing the evangelical church’s “purity culture” and focus on “modesty”, both of which have the effect of objectifying women while claiming to try to do the opposite. Zach Hoag has hosted his “smokin' hot conversations” series, calling the evangelical church (especially the men) to greater responsibility. Bill Kinnon has written a good string of posts on the celebrity-driven culture of the evangelical church and the opportunities it provides for spiritual leadership abuse. And I think it’s also important to pull in Dan Brennan, whose book Sacred Unions, Sacred Passions calls the evangelical church to honor and encourage cross-gender friendships.
There’s a common thread that we can find through all of these topics: fear. In some areas it’s personal fear; in other areas the personal fear has become institutionalized into a culture of fear. But fear it is. And identifying and understanding fear is the key to defeating it.
Now when I start discussing these fears, some of you will object “but the boundaries are there for a reason! There are real sins that we could fall into that we should be afraid of!”. And to be fair, you have a point. But let’s recall the Pharisees of Jesus' day. They didn’t write all their rules just to be mean - they were afraid of committing specific sins that God defined (e.g. “don’t work on the Sabbath”), and to make sure they stayed away from those sins, they put fences far outside of them. When Jesus came, he didn’t approve those laws; instead he demolished them, saying that God was more concerned with the heart.
We need some similar demolishing today.
CJ Mahaney, Sovereign Grace Ministries, T4G, and TGC
I’ve written previously about the multitude of abuse allegations currently surrounding SGM, including allegations that Mahaney and other leaders conspired to cover things up. I’ve written about the leaders of Together for the Gospel (T4G) and The Gospel Coalition (TGC) circling the wagons with posts of tenuous veracity and exasperating one-sidedness.
What are they afraid of?
They’re afraid of losing control. They believe, at some level, that God is better served if they enforce their flavor of doctrine and maintain a specific code of conduct (via church discipline and a strong emphasis on confession of sin) than if they relax and allow for Spirit-led variation. More damningly, they apparently believe at some level that God is better served by their church power structures staying intact than by working with civil authorities to bring justice to abusers.
How do we demolish this spirit of fear?
Go read what Bill Kinnon has written about the celebrity-driven church culture. Resist the appeal of this sort of fame. Look for and listen to pastors who are faithfully, humbly, and accountably shepherding small flocks. Trust that the Jesus will be found by those who wholeheartedly seek Him.
The Evangelical Purity Culture and the call for Modesty
There has been plenty of good stuff to read on the blogs lately addressing the evangelical focus on “purity” - the proliferation of ‘True Love Waits’ pledges, purity rings, the assertion that any premarital sex inavoidably makes one “damaged goods”. Here I’d recommend reading Alistair Roberts' post The New Purity Ethic (an essay that will make this post seem short!) and, in a totally different flavor, Jamie Wright’s Why Wait?.
What are we afraid of?
This purity culture is based around a fear of shame, of uncleanness, of being perceived as being “damaged” in some way. It reflects a belief that the highest priority is an external sexual purity. Hence, a sort of virginity test, especially with regard to women. Men prey on that fear by driving the focus on modesty, which improperly tries to place responsibility for men’s sexual behavior (especially in their thought life) on women and how they dress. (This ironically ends up objectifying women’s bodies in just the way it claims to want to avoid!)
How do we demolish this spirit of fear?
If you’re a man: take responsibility for your own thoughts and actions. If you’re a woman: stop accepting the shame that irresponsible men will try to put on you. Glorify God with your body, which is His. For anyone dealing with hurt and shame: go watch Matt Chandler’s Jesus Wants the Rose.
Fear of Cross-Gender Friendships
How many times have you heard it? Men and women can’t be friends without sex becoming an issue, right? And with the church’s purity culture (see previous point), men are taught that it’s “safer” (and hence better) to avoid women altogether, if necessary, in order to avoid any sort of attraction. If you’re married, any sort of friendship with a person of the opposite gender is popularly labeled “emotional infidelity” in a disastrous attempt to draw a parallel with Jesus' equating a lustful heart with adultery in Matthew 5.
What are we afraid of?
We’re afraid of violating the evangelical cultural attitude that cross-gender friendships are just step one in an inevitable path to fornication or adultery, and the seemingly inevitable gossip and shame that such a relationship would attract.
How do we demolish this spirit of fear?
Here I have to recommend you start with Dan J. Brennan’s Sacred Unions, Sacred Passions. Dan has both written and set a personal example for what beautiful, God-honoring cross-gender friendships can look like. I’ll be honest here - I’m uneasy at times with Dan’s position. But piercing my discomfort is a ray of truth that I can’t deny, so I will keep wrestling with it and looking for opportunities for real friendships with people of both genders.
Conclusions
As I try to reach an end to this post, in addition to fear, I see the word shame has showed up over and over again. Shame is a powerful motivator, one that will restrain behavior in ways alternately appropriate and horrifying. If somehow you find yourself reading my blog and are not yet familiar with Dr. Richard Beck’s blog Experimental Theology, go start reading Beck and thank me later. His post Elizabeth Smart and the Psychology of the Christian Purity Culture is an excellent place to start.
God has not given us a spirit of fear…
So says Paul in 2 Timothy 1:7. What has He given us instead? A spirit of power, of love, and of a sound mind. So, friends: demolish the fear. The Spirit provides power to change, love to show God in all situations, and a sound mind to wrestle with these things.
With every one of these topics there is a legitimate “yes, but” conversation to be had. But in each of these cases the “yes, but” has been institutionalized to the point that it has instead become a “no”. It’s my hope that we start demolishing the “no” so we can have room for the “yes, but” conversations.
Finally
The antidote for these fearful attitudes and activities can also be found in the words of the prophet Micah. What does God require of us? Act justly. Love mercy. Walk humbly. And those words spoken over and over by God and His messengers to His people:
Do not be afraid.
Is this Calvinism's Default Position?
I’m sitting in a hotel room tonight enjoying a family weekend and catching up on twitter while trying to get the kids to go to sleep, and in doing so I run across this from Pastor Steve McCoy this afternoon:
“I’m not clear on most things about God, but Calvinists anger me.”
- An Absurd Number of People
(@SteveKMcCoy, June 7, 2013, at 2:36 PM)
Steve (pastor of an SBC church in the Chicago area) and Bill Kinnon went back and forth a bit on Twitter after that tweet, Bill suggesting that it was a bit judgmental to suggest that people who aren’t Calvinists “aren’t clear on most things about God”, and Steve saying that he didn’t mean that everyone who hates Calvinism is unclear, but that “an absurd number” are. Their conversation trailed off before they came to any resolution.
Then there was this stunning quote from the Founders.org website, for which SBC pastor Tom Ascol is a primary leader:
In the first place, Calvinistic Christianity is nothing more and nothing less than biblical Christianity. It follows, then, that the future of Christianity itself is bound up in the fortunes of Calvinism….
…For whoever believes in God’s redemption through Christ and recognizes his own utter dependence on God, whoever recognizes that salvation is of the Lord, whoever seeks to glorify God in his worship and life, that person is already implicitly a Calvinist, no matter what he calls himself. In such circumstances, to make the person an explicit Calvinist, all we are required to do (humanly speaking) is to show the believer the natural implications of these already-held fundamental principles, which underlie all true Christianity, and trust God to do his work, that is, trust God to reveal these implications to the person.
Did you get that? Calvinism is “nothing more and nothing less than biblical Christianity”. And if anyone recognizes salvation from the Lord, and seeks to glorify God, then that person is implicitly a Calvinist! And all the Calvinists need to do is explain it in a way that the unknowing Calvinist might understand.
Now, I’m not suggesting that all proponents of Calvinism would make such presumptuous, arrogant claims, and I won’t claim for an instant that there aren’t some really God-ignorant Calvinism haters like Steve is talking about. I’m sure I don’t speak for the group of progressive bloggers who have been very vocal in recent weeks about their concerns with Calvinism and certain highly visible Calvinist groups. But I can speak for myself.
I’m not particularly progressive. I accept the Bible as God’s authoritative, inspired Word, but I don’t think that means I have to read the first bits of Genesis literally. I believe, based on what I read in the Bible, that homosexual behavior is wrong, but I’m in favor of the state sanctioning same-sex marriages and I believe Christians have done a pretty poor job of loving homosexuals over the last several decades. I voted for Bush twice and then Obama twice. I try to not post about politics on Facebook.
I also don’t think I’d fit into Steve McCoy’s category of being “not clear on most things about God”. I grew up in a very conservative Christian home, did 12 years of AWANA, attended a Christian university that required a bunch of Bible classes, have served as a deacon and an elder in a Conservative Baptist church and helped plant another CBA church that eventually became an Acts 29 church. I read widely in theology; my last couple years of reading includes Baptists, Anglicans, Catholics, Lutherans, Arminians and Calvinists alike.
And here’s the thing: (well, two things:) I’m not a Calvinist. And some of what I’m seeing out of some of these key Calvinists does anger me.
The big fuel on the fire lately has been the recent statements about CJ Mahaney and the sexual abuse lawsuits brewing against several folks from Sovereign Grace Ministries churches. Calvinist leaders like Albert Mohler, Mark Dever, Don Carson, and Justin Taylor have put out statements supporting Mahaney, and erroneously claiming that Mahaney was accused of no crime (he was accused of conspiring to keep the abuse claims quiet).
That men of such intellect and reputation would publish a statement with such obvious mistruths in it angers me. That after posting it on Facebook and getting dozens of disapproving comments, they deleted the statement and the comments frustrates me a lot. That then they, without comment, revised it to remove the claim that Mahaney was never accused, and posted it on their organization’s website while disallowing comments infuriates me.
That Justin Taylor would claim, on twitter, that continuing discussion with divisive folks is a sin (a not-so-subtle explanation, one would assume, for why he was keeping comments closed), only to delete the tweet a couple days later once people called him on it, makes me want to bang my head against the nearest immovable object.
I don’t hate these guys. I have, in the past, respected them a lot. Which is why it’s all the more infuriating and disappointing when I see them taking indefensible positions like these.
I don’t want to assume that this circling of the wagons and declaration of Calvinism as nothing more or less than true Christianity is the default Calvinist position. I want to believe that there are Calvinist brothers and sisters out there who are as horrified by the alleged abuse and cover-up, and by the ridiculous arrogance of the Founders.org statement as I am.
But where are they? Why are they quiet?
Where is the Calvinist brother who is willing to publicly suggest that it would be wiser to not have CJ Mahaney still regularly preaching and on the conference circuit while allegations about the cover-up remain unresolved?
Where is the Southern Seminary graduate who is willing to say that while he personally believes Calvinism to be the truest expression of Christianity, he would never dream of asserting that every Christian would claim Calvinism if only they understood it better?
Without those voices many of us are left with few options but to believe that these are the default Calvinist positions. I beg you, my brothers, speak out and give us more options. God’s church deserves better.
Where are the voices? Boz Tchividjian has strong words on the SGM mess.
Boz Tchividjian (grandson of Billy Graham, law professor at Liberty University, and former state prosecutor in Florida) weighs in on the SGM abuse allegations and this week’s troubling statements on that topic from The Gospel Coalition and Together for the Gospel.
The allegations, Tchividjian says, are horrifying, and based on his experience carry the hallmarks of truth and seem highly credible. So, he went searching the internet to see if Christian leaders were saying anything.
I searched online hoping to find statements by Christian “leaders” speaking out about this case or at the very least expressing grave concerns regarding the very disturbing facts alleged in the lawsuit. I was never looking for, or wanting, anyone to throw CJ Mahaney under the proverbial bus. I was simply hoping to hear statements that expressed horrors about child sexual abuse and with institutions that are not transparent about such offenses. Initially, all I found was silence from these leaders.
As some of us have been noting for several weeks, the silence has been deafening. So, what did he actually find?
What I did find was a lot of statements by Christians claiming that all of these individuals were innocent until “proven guilty by a jury”. Sadly, that is not the only time I have heard such a response from the Christian community when allegations of child sexual victimization are brought forward. What is ironic, or better yet, down right disturbing is that these same individuals don’t approach any other sinful crime in such a distorted manner…
I have personally gotten similar reactions when the topic has come up on Twitter, and I’ve seen many others get that reaction as well. Few “leaders” are saying much about the horror of the crime; what they’re saying is “nobody’s proven anything yet”.
He then makes four observations about the TGC and T4G statements:
The whole piece is worth a read. I hope and pray that more Christian leaders will make their voices heard.
T4G and TGC break their silence on Mahaney
One of the great frustrations of those trying to bring the allegations of rampant child abuse and cover-up in Sovereign Grace Ministries (SGM) churches to light has been the silence of those who have long been founder CJ Mahaney’s greatest supporters - Al Mohler, Mark Dever, and Ligon Duncan of Together For The Gospel (T4G) and Don Carson, Justin Taylor, and the rest at The Gospel Coalition (TGC).
In the past 24 hours, in light of the dismissal of the majority of the civil suit against SGM folks (due to the statute of limitations), and in what appears to be a coordinated move, both those groups have issued statements of their continued support for Mahaney.
Together for the Gospel
The T4G statement came out last night on Facebook [Update: statement has been deleted from FB; It is also on the T4G website, which doesn’t allow comments.] and is troubling. They first seek to cloud the water about the civil lawsuit:
Claims presented in a civil lawsuit seeking financial compensation are beyond the ability of the public to render judgment. Often, such claims are even beyond the ability of a court to deliberate.
So if even the courts don’t have the ability to render judgment in these sort of issues, who can? Paul seems pretty clear in Romans 13 that God has established the civil authorities to bring punishment to wrongdoers.
They go on:
If a Christian leader is accused of any wrongdoing, those to whom he is accountable must investigate the charges and then deal responsibly with the evidence. If a criminal accusation is made, Christians have a fundamental duty to inform law enforcement officials. This does not, however, preclude or mitigate the church’s responsibility for biblical church discipline.
This is a key point. To whom was CJ Mahaney responsible? It has been made abundantly clear from the brouhaha around Mahaney and SGM polity over the past couple years that Mahaney was essentially accountable to no one. When it was deemed best that he step down from leadership, he didn’t stay at his home church, under discipline; instead he left to attend Dever’s church in Washington, DC, then went to start another church in Mohler’s backyard in Louisville. If anyone was in position to hold Mahaney accountable, it was Dever, Mohler, and Duncan, but to all appearances they have completely failed to do so.
A Christian leader, charged with any credible, serious, and direct wrongdoing, would usually be well advised to step down from public ministry. No such accusation of direct wrongdoing was ever made against C. J. Mahaney.
This almost defies belief. Mahaney was accused, in the lawsuit, of conspiring to keep the abuse covered up. At a bare minimum, he failed to report the abuse accusations to the authorities, even though he was in a position where he was legally required to do so. So are those charges not credible? Not serious? Or not direct? It would appear that Mohler, Duncan, and Dever are saying either that (1) the charges against SGM aren’t credible, or (2) that failure to mandatorily report child abuse is not a serious or direct charge. Really?
Those who minister in the name of the Lord Christ bear an inescapable duty to live and to minister in a way that is above reproach.
Finally, we get to a place where we agree. What I’m led to wonder is if the term “above reproach” means something significantly different to Pastors Mohler, Dever, and Duncan than it means to me.
The Gospel Coalition
TGC’s statement (“Why We Have Been Silent about the SGM Lawsuit”) was published this morning as a statement from Don Carson, Justin Taylor, and Kevin DeYoung. It’s slightly less troubling than the T4G statement… but only slightly.
They acknowledge up front that their silence could indeed feel like a betrayal to those who suffered abuse, and that pastors hold a responsibility to obey all civil mandatory reporting laws in addition to overseeing church discipline. (This is a lesson that, by all accounts, SGM badly needed to learn.)
However, then TGC turns on the alleged victims, claiming that the conspiracy charges against Mahaney were underhandedly and unfairly manufactured, and praising the statute of limitations as “an important feature of our legal system”.
My question is this: why should church leaders be so happy to escape due to the statute of limitations? Regardless of the legal limitations, shouldn’t the charges be fully investigated by the church, and discipline enacted accordingly? God is not restrained by any statute of limitations.
TGC goes on to encourage us to let the litigation to play out, to hear both sides, to not assume all allegations or false, and to not assume that all defendants are guilty. Good stuff. I could’ve almost been happy with their statement until this final paragraph:
Reports on the lawsuit from Christianity Today and World Magazine (among others) explicitly and repeatedly drew attention to C. J., connecting the suit to recent changes within SGM. He has also been the object of libel and even a Javert-like obsession by some.
And there we are. “Javert-like obsession.” TGC has now turned the tables. The victims of abuse are now the accusers, and Mahaney, the head of an organization that allegedly let the abuse run rampant, is the victim.
For shame.
“Be on your guard against the yeast of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy. There is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, or hidden that will not be made known. What you have said in the dark will be heard in the daylight, and what you have whispered in the ear in the inner rooms will be proclaimed from the roofs." Luke 12:1-3
“If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea." Matthew 18:6
"…the truth will set you free.” John 8:32
[Update at 9:30 Friday morning]
The T4G statement has been removed from Facebook in its entirety. I’ll link to a copy of it if I can find one.
[Update at 10:06 Friday morning]
The T4G statement is available on their website. Commenting is not allowed.