A Church Called Tov

Hey I was wondering if anyone had read or had thoughts on these books:

A Church Called Tov

When Narcissism Comes to Church

We’ve recently had some problems in our church (leading us to leave). Some of the problems seem to have been described well in these books (Well, I’ve read part of Tov, but not Narcissism).

There seems to be a pretty big problem in churches of elders/pastors who are pugnacious and will not be held accountable.

I found the description of “toxic church cultures” fairly apt, but the description of “Tov” or good cultures seem a little wrong-headed. But I’ve not finished it yet and wondered if anyone out there in Sanityville was familiar with these books/ideas.

On related note, does anyone have any tips for how to go about searching for a new church?

I can’t speak to the second book, but on the first book, I see Scot McKnight, I run away.

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This topic may be past its freshness date but I thought I would comment since I just stumbled on this topic and there hasn’t been much interaction here yet:

Scot McKnight was a major supporter of the Emergent Church in the 2000s. He still wants to be on the cutting edge of religion. Something worth tracking is a burgeoning movement that McKnight is spearheading that I fear will be quite deceptive and influential on many younger seminarians and pastors. It is called the “King Jesus Gospel” (based on his 2016 book of that title) and seems to be an attempt to find an ecumenical middle ground with all professing Christians by minimizing justification by faith. Where this is coming out is specifically through McKnight’s Christianity Today sponsored blog called Jesus Creed, where he is promoting these ideas.

The first time I noticed this was when I found a Jesus Creed post by Matthew Bates (a co-conspirator with McKnight) who wrote a critique of a Greg Gilbert sermon from the T4G conference. The title provocatively declared: “Why T4G/TGC Leaders Must Fix Their Gospel” (April 2020). In one sense, it may look like a trifling debate with some potential “Big Eva” wagon circling. But this was more than just a clickbait headline: the article is an assault on the importance of individual salvation and justification by faith. “Salvation is about a group of people first, individuals second,” Bates tells us. Like many who are leading the sheep away from the old paths toward some new fascination, his language is measured, conciliatory, and deceptive. But that does not keep his thinking from being made plain:

God’s purpose is to create a people for himself. After his enthronement as king, Jesus pours out the Spirit on a group, filling each individual. When each person initially enters salvation, she or he does not enter in isolation. The justified church always exists prior. As the Father and Son send the Spirit to the church, upon our declaration of allegiance (ordinarily at baptism) we are enveloped into the justified Spirit-filled community in such a way that we are justified and have the Spirit too. There is an objective/corporate dimension (the church exists as a justified community) and subjective/individual dimension (a person is not justified until they enter it).

As one of my friends noted, this sounds very much like N.T. Wright and the new perspective on Paul. In many ways, this is a fitting time to try and present an image of a less fractured and contentious church. The “King Jesus Gospel” plays well to the young crowd. It de-emphasizes doctrinal distinctives by removing any test for orthodoxy or considering that someone might be outside the fold. It emphasizes external allegiance to the visible church in baptism as the mark of the Christian—never to be questioned because the collective outweighs the individual. It is toward the end of the article that we get a peek at his end goals:

A gospel that emphasizes personal trust that God’s promises are true in Jesus the savior looks different on the ground than one that stresses the allegiance of the nations to a victorious king who bestows saving benefits. The true gospel leaves the Father, royal Son, and Spirit at the referential heart of the gospel and removes “me,” giving God more glory. Discipleship is better integrated. Moreover, if we mis-locate our personal justification by making it internal to the gospel rather than a benefit, justification can wrongly be weaponized to split the one true gospel-affirming church. This is nearly the reverse of justification’s actual purpose for the church. Properly locating it helps us make progress toward ecumenical reconciliation.

It sounds like he has found two things he wants: a justification of the social gospel in our day and the removal of judgment against error. It made me think of how Wesley Hill who assures us that he (a Side B “gay celibate Christian”) and Justin Lee (a Side A “affirming gay Christian”) can share the stage for dialogues on sexuality at Christian colleges without compromise because they are “family” who were “both baptized into the same Triune name” and “both confess the same creed.” And sure enough, the Matthew Bates article got a Twitter share from Nate Collins.

(The reason I bring up the Revoice connections is that Tish Harrison Warren—an Anglican priestess who wrote the foreword for A Church Called Tov—is on the advisory council for Revoice.)

So I say all that to say, I do not trust Scot McKnight and have no interest in what he has to say about the church.

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Yes, I wonder if the trend in the last forty years to preach “The Kingdom of God” (a la George Eldon Ladd) has had the side-effect of ‘kicking into touch’, many of the old debates about justification by faith, by subsuming them into the over-arching message of “the Kingdom”. Colossians 1:13-14 does tie the two things together, tho’ I doubt many of the current teachers would bother to make the point clear.

On the other side of the park, some Dispensationalists take St Paul’s reference to “my Gospel” to then completely separate out St Paul (and justification by faith), from the Gospels themselves. As usual: every Christian truth will generally be accompanied by two equal and opposite errors.

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It’s funny how God works. Ladd’s historic premillenialism along with Goldsworthy’s Gospel and Kingdom theology were my gateway drugs out of dispensationalism into reformed theology. Until I read The Marrow. It was all over then.

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I’ve always said my focus is more ethics than theology. It’s an exageration since I teach NGA students Buchanan’s “Justification” and see many theological errors such as has been pointed to above. Told Doug over fifteen years ago his F-V was sacramentalist and would lead men across the Tiber, which it was and did. No, formalism is not the answer, nor is corporate salvation—although I spend much time and capital saying at the very beginning of the book “Church Reformed” that there is normally no salvation found outside the Church, and those who reject the Church—Her authority and nurture and discipline—reject Jesus.

What I think we must not stop banging the drum on is ethics. When we move into abortion, the bloodshed of hormonal birth control, Revoice, the neutering of Scripture (by those holding theologically to inerrancy, mind you), the serial adultery of divorce, childlessness as a valid lifestyle option for Christians, greed, adulterous hearts, the utter denial and departure of even and especially complementarians from God’s order of creation (which establishes always and forever man’s authority over woman), and on we go… Judge a man by the Apostle Paul’s sin lists defining truth and falsehood. “Don’t be deceived,” these have no part in the Kingdom of God. Well then, McKnight and all his ilk are thoroughly undressed for all with eyes to see, aren’t they?

I think we must be careful to fight on the hills of New Testament declarations of those inside and those outside the Kingdom of God, and do so starting with their morals. They want us to let their gutter morals be, instead engaging them on their high principles, but that’s us allowing them to deceive us.

BTW, M.D., your writing is very helpful and I hope you will continue to draw these pictures and outlines for us. Love,

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How does the church today learn to see that ethics is a massive gap in the wall? I was talking to a seminary professor just a couple weeks ago, and when I mentioned that ethics is a significant blind spot for today’s pastors he was completely baffled. He responded that his seminary had just taught an ethics class. The idea that ethics is an outworking of our larger theology into everything that God’s word touches, in other works, absolutely everything we can encounter, didn’t seem to make a dent. To him, I think as to many Christians today, ethics is just the way we address specific issues. A sort of theological whack-a-mole rather than a systematic application of theology to practice.

Stated slightly differently, why can the sacramentalists produce Humanae Vitae while the best we can do is CBMW?

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Now that right there is perfect.

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I wrote this review of McKnight’s book on exegesis, The Blue Parakeet. In it he endorses the view that humans evolved from an initial population of around 10,000. He rejects biblical teaching on the roles of men and women based on an experience he had riding a bicycle next to a female professor from whose scholarship he had learned much. This passage from After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre is eerily similar:

Bertrand Russell has described how one day in 1902 while riding a bicycle he suddenly realized that he was no longer in love with his first wife–and from this realization there followed in time the break-up of that marriage. Kierkegaard would have said, and surely rightly, that any attitude whose absence can be discovered in a sudden flash while riding a bicycle is only an aesthetic reaction and that such experience has to be irrelevant to the commitment which genuine marriage involves, to the authority of the moral precepts which define marriage.

The authority of scripture is exactly the type of commitment that is lacking, and the bicycle ride was just such an aesthetic reaction.

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I think part of it has to do with our fierce American commitment to independent-mindedness. We are barely willing to hear our pastor preach what Scripture explicitly teaches, and since ethics builds on that foundation to reach out to further consequences we have no patience at all for that.

Then there is the prevailing disposition in the evangelical and reformed world which boils down to something like, “Ethics is pharisaism” or “Keep your ethics off my conscience.” There’s no application of ethics that doesn’t cause an explosion of cries of “Legalism!” “Pharasaism!” And maybe all the current attempts have failed and fallen into one of these pits.

For all their faults though, here is where engineerish minded men get something right: engineerish minded men intuit that an honest appraisal of how the commands and instruction of Scripture bear on our lives should result in us finding something, somewhere that follows from those explicit biblical commands by good and necessary consequence. But this only lands the engineerish ones a half-step ahead; because what, after all, are these things? What did our fathers in the faith say? Where do we need to repent and return to their guidance; what do we need to correct from the Scriptures; and where do we need to make new applications for today?

The Roman Catholics believe ethics is worth pursuing, and their work has borne fruit. It’s work we’ve long left undone and it’s time for us to return to this difficult and important work. Not like the engineerish men (making applications blindly because all the light they have is that there must be some application); but like the puritans–after all, weren’t they constantly making applications, and weren’t they unbelievably helpful because of that?

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I have been thinking recently about this same question. I think it has more to do with Rome’s respect for tradition over against Protestants’ tendency to reason everything over again from first principles every generation. Having respect for tradition means that you can build on a structure that’s already there, leading to some pretty impressive, towering stuff over time.

But like the actual buildings that the Romans build, while they look pretty from a distance, when you get closer the blasphemy gets clearer, and the respect for tradition leads to an inability to unwind mistakes that were made centuries ago.

It’s a sword that cuts both ways.

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Let me also offer a comment on Chuck DeGroat:

Chuck DeGroat is currently the “Professor of Pastoral Care and Christian Spirituality” at Western Seminary in Holland, MI. Before his time at Western Seminary, he was a pastor at City Church San Francisco (2008–2013) under Fred Harrell. I expect many people here will recognize the name Fred Harrell—the “for the city” church planter RTS grad who took a bunch of money to San Francisco to plant a Keller-styled PCA church in the late-90s that left the PCA in 2007 to join the RCA and then quickly moved to be fully affirming. Here is the 2015 Tim Bayly piece “City Church Pastor Fred Harrell: the man the PCA refused to discipline…” from Baylyblog for some additional context on Harrell and City Church.

DeGroat, with his “PhD in Psychology with a special emphasis in the psychology and theology of soul care and spiritual formation” helped City Church establish a counseling center. He further helped them start the Newbigin House in San Francisco, an “ecumenical study center developing leaders through theological education” where he is listed as a Senior Fellow. Newbigin is funded by City Church, Western Seminary, Fuller Theological Seminary, Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, and Austin Theological Seminary.

DeGroat still loves City Church and their rebellion. He preached a worthless, soothing sermon via Zoom at City Church in August 2021 called “Shame, Shalom, and a Story We Find Ourselves In” where he wants “to invite you to see yourself in the story…How does a character evoke wonder for you?” He managed to only mention his book once.

He has certainly carved out a platform for himself as the expert on narcissism. Ironically, he retweets plenty of pictures of his book that people tweet at him. It’s pretty standard Twitter-author behavior, but then again Twitter is a breeding ground and public stage for narcissism. Also, so many Thomas Merton and Henri Nouwen quotes.

A couple of notes about Western Seminary: James V. Brownson is still listed on the website as James and Jean Cook Professor of New Testament but retired in the summer of 2021. His major contribution to the world was his book Bible, Gender, Sexuality: Reframing the Church’s Debate on Same-Sex Relationships (Eerdmans, 2013). This is one of the major scholarly attempts to ease the conscience of anyone justifying sodomy and same-sex relationships from scripture. His scholarship was repurposed by Matthew Vines in the more popular book God and the Gay Christian (Convergent Books, 2015), endorsed by Brownson.

Now Wesley Hill, gay celibate professor and chief architect of the Side B/Revoice movement, has joined the staff of Western as “Associate Professor of New Testament.” Hill wrote a limp-wristed review of Brownson’s book in 2013 where he ends by giving a standard Side B take: “Until the Church can answer clearly [what good news the church has for gay people], no degree of exegetical and theological defense of the ‘orthodox’ position will finally prove persuasive or life-giving.”

Coming back to DeGroat, his website boasts: “For more than 25 years, I’ve guided many on a more spacious journey toward a life of wholeheartedness.” This is exactly the kind of language I would expect from anything he writes or says. His website says this about his writing:

My writing has always been about what is deepest within us – the liberation of it, the revelation of God through it. The profound tragedy is that many are somehow cut off from the deep wellspring of the heart, the ever-present intimacy of Love.

My life’s commitment is to this reconnection, and it’s grounded in the Augustinian truth that God never, ever leaves us – it’s we that leave. God’s always up for your return, ready to welcome, eager to engage the hard work of dying and rising into freedom.

My books, each in their own way, point to this. I hope my books can be helpful guides on your journey.

BONUS:
A glowing Chuck DeGroat review of U2’s album How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb in ByFaith was the subject of a Balylyblog in January 2005.

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That’s what Church Reformed started out as, with a working title of “Choosing a Church.” As for Mouw and company, I’d not trust him to do anything more than Julie Roys does every day, which is to tell her readers the latest gossip about this or that unfaithful leader, inculcating in her audience a fear of abuse of authority that is even worse than what they brought to her site, but completely grounded in diagnoses promulgated by the social sciences.

Yes, there are elders on power trips. This is dealt with a lot in “Elders Reformed.” Yes, some of the elders and pastors who abuse the authority of their office are what are today called “narcissists.” This is bad and they are bad. But…

Usually, narcissists in church office demonstrate no love for their sheep. They don’t feed them. Encourage them. Have them into their homes. Admonish them. Exhort them. Discipline them. That is what we must be on guard against in choosing a church for ourselves and our families.

By far the worst and most common abuse of authority is the very opposite of what guys like McKnight, Mouw, Enroth warn about. It is the absence of any effort at guarding their sheep. Sadly, though, the absence of guarding and the abdication of authority intrinsic to that absence of guarding are the sweet spots for being appointed and elected pastors and elders today. The warnings of Acts 2 and Ezekiel, let alone the examples of letters like Galatians, seem to roll off us as water off the back of a duck. We today do not want our government to have authority, so of course we do not want our pastors and elders to have authority. We don’t need any protection from Covid or our besetting sin and doctrinal errors we have imbibed. We are self-affirming, self-reliant, and the last thing on our minds is any need of any church officer. We can do it ourselves, thank you very much.

I note this all the time when I warn against guys like Keller or Ortund. The warnings never travel further than the secret readers (of whom there are many). Even those of us on this forum think of ourselves as independent of any need of the officers God has placed over us. We consume warnings as secret private delicacies which promote us (along with our small group) to the ranks of the cognoscenti.

Warnings about Revoice, Keller, and Ortlund are interesting, but that they should be spread widely in order to keep us from having blood on our hands we consider ludicrous.

When I wrote that piece on Ortlund, I had no idea it was a best-seller. None. It was just that I know Dane’s dad and knew of his grandfather, and I know Lane Dennis and a number of the men Crossway sells, so I was disgusted by the sheer flattery and harm his abuse of the doctrine of God’s perfections might cause souls. Then I found out how many people in Evangel and our own congregation had or were about to read the book, and started talking (on top of what I’d already written) working to put out the fire.

Nathan, I don’t know why you left your church, but it’s my guess that thinking about your pastors and elders after reading Church Reformed and Elders Reformed would have WOKE you to the real abuse of authority being no authority and no discipline, and therefore no love. (And no, I’m not including jealous guarding of perquisites of offices as authority or discipline.)

At the time of the Reformation, the absence of instruction, exhortation, admonition, and warnings of the sheep about anything at all was foundational to the Reformers’ road map for reformation. Read Bucer, Calvin’s dear brother, and note how sheep without a shepherd was his most intense concern, and righting it his most intense commitment. Doctrinal controversy and correction were the natural results of Calvin, Luther, Bucer, etc. grieving over, and determining to address, the sheep across medieval Europe who were entirely lacking in shepherds. I can’t talk enough about Calvin spending so many hours each week taking part in the most common and (often) vulgar church discipline cases. Why on earth waste his time on such work?

What the Church needs today is a restoration of the offices of pastor and elder which is in any way authoritative in its love, and therefore in any way Biblical. The real problem today isn’t control freaks and egotists using their office to build their reputation or prey on children sexually. Those are problems and they are rife in the church, for sure. But the prior and most urgent problem is that we have no expectation of anyone needing to be guarded, pastorally–least of all, ourselves, our wives, and our children.

As I said, we are self-sufficient, self-contained, self-affirming, self-reliant bright boys who need no leadership or authority ourselves to keep us safely on the road to Heaven. Just a little teaching once or twice a week will do fine. So of course, the only rebukes and disciplines we give are for adultery, pornography, and maybe embezzlement. And we read about Calvin’s weekly work and think to ourselves, “what a dirty church he had, but then everyone had to go to church back then, didn’t they? No wonder there were such needy people taking up the pastors’ and elders’ time and energy there in Geneva. BACK THEN.”

Well, I’ll stop. I can’t thank God often enough for our elders and pastors and congregation here at TPC. They listen and take heed for their souls and the souls of their flock. Love,

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This is long and no one should feel obligated to read it, but if interested it recounts what motivated my original question about these books. I knew nothing of these authors when I first came across them.

Elders Reformed was very helpful to me. I have read it and CR multiple times.

The part of this post between the dashes is admittedly long and is our church story in a nutshell. Feel free to read or not. I have some comments at the bottom.

Our church was fairly small (less than 200) and elder-lead for many years. We joined when we moved to OK in 2011. There were 4 elders at that time. During the process of adding some on, one of the four stepped down (left ministry altogether and went to law school, though he remained in our church) while another (lay)elder left over disagreements when our head pastor regarding the Woke movement. (Our pastor was going more and more into the Woke ideology which seemingly began in about 2014). From late 2018 to late 2020 we added 5 more elders.

We ran the great majority of our “out-reach” ministry through a parachurch non-profit org that was lead by our pastor and a “Board,” most of whom were members of our church. The stated reason for this was that people and organizations would give (financially) to a parachurch ministry but not to a church. Our pastor was the “president” of the board.

After we began adding elders - (I was invited but decided against it given my disagreement with our pastor over the Woke question as well as the direction it seemed like we were going with women in teaching/leadership. I felt that I could continue to submit as a member of the body, but not lead in the direction it had been going to previous few years.) -

After we began adding elders, many complaints surfaced from members and past members, some of it - but not all - related to happenings on “the Board” of the parachurch ministry. Our pastor would use his position to make sure he got his way in many board decisions. He used his sermons as veiled arguments aimed at specific board members. For example he preached on Abraham and Lot splitting up, casting himself in the roll of Abraham and telling those who disagreed with him it was his way or the highway.

There was also the issue of numerous plagiarized sermons.

Whenever I would talk to him about concerns I had, it was always, “trust my heart.” I was never intellectually or emotionally satisfied after the conversation. I still had a “disquiet” within. But it was always something I could live with. I trusted him and even though I disagreed and thought he was in the wrong, I still trusted and submitted. I’m not the pastor. I don’t think I should be telling the pastor what to preach or what not to preach. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have opinions.

Maybe I should have already left because of the issues of the plagiarism, Woke-ness, and direction of women in teaching/leadership. But the church was our extended family, our rock, since moving 600 miles for work several years ago. We had never left a church before except when we moved 200 miles for med-school. We don’t believe in “church-hopping.” So we stayed. I also thought it was important to submit to the elders/pastors of my church even though I had disagreements (disagreements that I did not constantly harp on, but that I did not keep secret either).

Ultimately our elders voted 4-2 that our pastor was not qualified for ministry based on his pugnacious behavior (after a 3 month investigation and numerous interviews with members and past members). Many of the people he had pushed around were well known to me, people that had no axe to grind, people that very obviously loved our pastor and church, people that had problems for years but had not been complaining, gossiping, spreading malcontent - nothing. They were devoted submitting members of the church. Most of the offended would leave the Board but remain in the church. Some left the church. Some were members who would leave or simply stay but decrease their involvement. There were dozens of individuals. None of this was about our pastor calling anyone to repent of specific sins. It was all his requiring we did everything his way.

When they voted for him to step down, he said No. (The vote was 4-2, though he insisted it was 4-3 because he insisted he get a vote; he also insisted this vote be unanimous which was not the way other votes were because this vote was so important. He insisted this be unanimous against him and that he get a vote in order for the vote to be binding.) He basically has control of all church property and finances (mostly because he has run off everyone who ever had any other control or tried to call him to account. There was an unhealthy but inherent respect and deference to him shared by almost everyone.).

So when he said no we (and probably 80% of the church) left. Mostly his family remains. Some of them have left.

I specifically asked him in person if he would consider stepping down, at least for a time, in the interest of unity of our local body (given that many were going to leave) and in interest of magnifying our glorious gospel - that there is sin here, but there is also forgiveness and we are not required to be perfect, only confessed sinners accepting of forgiveness and striving toward Christ-likeness. He said No he would not. He said that the ministries that our church was involved in could not continue if he did not continue as head-pastor and Board President and that he had prayed about that and he knew that Jesus wanted him to stay in these positions so that His (Christ’s) ministry could go on. Without our pastor, Jesus would not be able to reach the people of our city.

Well, that right there was enough for me. I told him it would be neither loving nor wise to continue to submit to him when he absolutely refused to submit to anyone else.

This is a long story, but as brief as I could tell it. I will add that I love this man and still pray for him almost daily. I pray for repentance and, honestly for his own soul. He on the other hand continues to lie about the situation and even specifically about me (as I have heard from mutual friends).

To me, a lot of what McKnight says in his book (which has gotten a lot of traction among our friends and former church members) is spot-on about the problems that were persistent in our church. His solutions are problematic though. But he seems to see many other problems very well. I would recommend his book (Tov) to a mature Christian in leadership of a church body. But you definitely have to read with discernment.

Its weird because we still have a church family. We just don’t have “a church.” A few of our members have settled and joined other churches. But many are still not officially members anywhere.

We have visited other churches, sometimes “en masse.” Imagine of church of 150 people and 80 more people show up as visitors on a Sunday morning, and after the service they all sit around a talk and catch up until the lights get turned out on them. That is how it has been. We have had many “events” of all of us getting together at someone’s house - mostly mine - to meet, eat, sing, pray. In some ways it has been beautiful and even fun. But that ugly wound remains.

Was the real abuse of authority the lack of appropriately/biblically exercised authority? I would definitely say that became an issue as our pastor got more and more into the Woke movement. Everything became political and #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo and less and less about any actual sin or any positive or negative discipline outside teaching about racism, sexism, trauma, etc. The Woke stuff just became a malignant rot that destroyed everything around it. Add to that the final revelations about the pugnacity that had been going on for years. That was the thing though - the bridge that couldn’t be crossed. It was no longer a theological difference or an inability or disinterest in shepherding. (Covid made the latter hard and different for a time. I get that.) But it became a sin-issue.

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As an aside, what are the best resources for understanding sacramentalism vs the reformed view? I’ve seen a lot of people online call themselves “reformed Catholic” (even 1689ers!) and I know the Theopolis crowd likes the high church version of Presbyterianism. But they still claim Presbyterianism.

My own first choice would be Bannerman. A lot of guys are twisting Calvin today on this subject. Love,

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Most of my experience with books written about abusive churches and abusive pastors has been to see them invoked by people who are trying to assuage their consciences and acquit themselves either before or after leaving their church sinfully.

Any church that has elders who are willing to love the flock by engaging in matters of real life sin in real life people will face slander and persecution, and it will come in the form of accusations of cultishness, authoritarianism, etc. A pastor is only safe when he speaks about the excellencies of Christ, the glory of the gospel, and the ugliness of sin in the abstract. The moment he moves to addressing your sin, or your wife’s sin, he becomes dangerous. Remember, it wasn’t for any abstract theology that John the Baptist was beheaded. It was because he dared to plainly state that it was unlawful for the king to have his brother’s wife.

I can’t say anything better than what’s already been said, but it all really resonates. I have definitely come to believe that the most abusive pastors are the ones who pretend they wield no authority. We want to think that the most pressing problem is overbearing pastors who get all up in our business and insist on their own way. Some of those certainly exist. But the more pressing problem is certainly the opposite — shepherds who don’t know how, or refuse to get their hands dirty by dealing with actual sheep. Too afraid of getting bit, I suppose. Fearing the sheep rather than the owner of the sheep.

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I’m with you on this one. I get the point about properly-exercised authority in a church setting and supporting the shepherds set over us. That said, as a young man I left one church, along with many others, in the aftermath of the pastor having been fired for “conduct unbecoming”, and also in the aftermath of the elders making quite a hash of how they dealt with the situation.

Another example of how not to do things: Mark Driscoll, who seems to have been tolerated in Reformed circles because, for a while anyway, he was “successful”.

Lay in bed thinking about Nathan’s church this morning. What would I say to him and the people he seems to be leading, at this point? (After all, they come to his house, indicating to me that he and his wife have a vision for hospitality and fellowship, at least.)

I went back and forth in my mind, all centered around whether the problem is really sinful relations or sinful doctrine which gave birth to sinful structures? Was it really, as guys like Enroth, Mauw, and McKnight tell us, unaccountable, male egotists using church office to service their sins, and the destruction they caused their flock—with a likely undercurrent of misogyny which they only bring up obliquely in their books, most likely, because that is a divisive doctrinal issue which might cause them to have a smaller audience. And also, because the point of the intrinsically evil nature of father-rule and the abuses of authority it always causes is made much more effectively among Evangelicals by subtext, today; sotto voce.

In leaders, sin you will always have with you. This is Calvin’s point saying God could have sent angels to preach and shepherd us. But He didn’t, and this to humble us by being fed and led by our inferior.

I have no question Nathan’s pastor was a sinner, just as he described above. But in the end, what best explains the explosion of their church—the sinful character or the errant doctrine and structure of their authority?

Now, I don’t want to force a choice between the two. I’m guessing there’s a good bit of both, but which needed to be addressed for such a long time that in the end the only way to put it all to rest was for the church to explode?

My thinking is errant doctrine and therefore errant structure of leadership, and what I fear is the hundreds who left will carry away with them precisely what Jason wrote above which all the rebels shout about, which is abusive personalities. So as Nathan and the sheep of his former church begin to look for a new church, they will be wary of the wrong things, and therefore continue with their wives and children to be sheep without shepherds, which they’ve already been for a long time, sadly.

A story: Bobby Knight was a basketball coach, once. Do I hear any “amens!” And by all accounts, he was both loved by his players and hated by the academics. Didn’t matter the money be brought to them and the library he built them and the fact that his players actually graduated.

In time, Bobby got a president named Miles Brand who was a philosophy prof from Oregon and typical of that brood in being weak and sneaky in his leadership while presenting himself as strong and principled. I once had a go-round with him over sodomy in front of about 25 campus ministers and his conduct and words were pathetically passive-aggressive, but that’s for another time.

Eventually, he got Knight under a “zero-tolerance” threat. Knight agreed to it, but shortly after was dissed by a punk on campus, lost his temper, and was fired. Brand then went on to his reward which was to head the NCAA.

An older elder of mine had, for decades, held very expensive and very good season tickets. He was a successful businessman who had taught me much about leadership, and more about hidden generosity. We had lunch weekly and one day he said to me: “Bobby Knight has always been a bully. If they had disciplined or rebuked him twenty years ago, he’d never have been fired today and he’d have been an even greater coach.”

Wise, I thought; very wise. Good men need to be disciplined, and then they do even better.

Jump forward a decade or so to Mark Driscoll. One of our elders moved to Seattle and became an elder at Mars Hill near the beginning. He and Mark shared the hobby of homebrews and exchanged their products.

It some point, we thought about joining Acts 29. We took a carload of pastors and elders out to a church leaders meeting of about 100 out in St. Louis and the vibe of “we’re IT and IT is us” was heavy in their everything. But the content wasn’t actually bad, and we went home. A year or so later, we were on their radar because of several things about our church and leadership, so they invited us to come out to their lead pastors national conference being held in Boulder.

Stephen Baker and I went, accompanied by Stephen’s wife Sebra and my junior high school son, Taylor. There were maybe forty or fifty lead pastors there, most with their wives accompanying them. Only Mark and I had any children, he an infant and toddler cared for by his wife.

The couple of days were endarkening on a variety of levels, and when we left, we never had anything to do with Acts 29 again. They had been kind hosts and we appreciated them, including Mark and his sweet wife with whom (along with our children) we spent some time one evening.

What was sickeningly clear, though, was that Mark was a (small) bully. In fact, he bragged about it. One thing he said was that, since junior high school, no one had ever landed a punch on him. He told all the young lead pastors how much more money he hauled in at this church than they did at theirs. He told them how many people he “ran” each Sunday. He was, as I said, a (small) alpha male bully.

But what was it that left us opposed to Acts 29? Publicly, Mark was a turnoff, but the real issue for us was the obvious lack of any structure of accountability in the denomination, combined with the knowledge that Mark would never lower himself to do the work to establish one. Nor would any of his sidekicks. Acts 29 was incompatible with any Biblical doctrine of authority or structure of ecclesiastical discipline.

So as we left to drive back to the Midwest, we agreed that it was only a matter of time until Mark and Acts 29 exploded. Yes, due to Mark’s bullying and pride. But more because the denomination was unwilling to do any of the hard work of setting up accountability in its leadership. So indeed, years later they exploded. And even here in Sanityville, the narrative everyone has is how nasty a personality Mark was, and is, and how people should have seen his sin and not supported him in it.
True and true, but the real issue is structural. It is a failure to do the difficult work of shepherding and accountability within both the flock and leaders that allowed the personal sins of this or that leader to bear their fruit. Eventually. Long after they should have been disciplined.

My four cents, with love,

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Agreed. Years ago I worked as a transport safety analyst, and one of the things we learnt from the start was, “There is never a single cause of an accident”. So, obviously, in Mark Driscoll’s case: he was naturally a bully who had the ill-fortune to succeed, initially, at what he was doing in Seattle. He then ended up with/in a structure (Acts 29) that could not call him to account, precisely because he was, at that stage, a success. He’s now in Scottsdale AZ (Phoenix area), which has the virtue over Seattle that it is at least sunny (most of the time). Has he learnt from his past mistakes?

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