Maybe it all needs to burn

Some of you will recognize this song – it was used for the titles of the Rise and Fall of Mars Hill podcast, and the singer, Chad Gardner, was just interviewed in a bonus episode. I had never heard the full song before – it’s a powerful piece of composing, worth a listen.

Sunday Yvette and I were listening to another podcast, a lower-profile one of the pastors-in-pubs genre, talking about the Hillsong scandals, and of course now the report on sexual abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention is in the news. It’s disheartening. Even if there wasn’t politics on top of it, crosses blasphemously wrapped in flags at the Capitol on January 6, there’s not a lot of encouragement to be found in talking about churches these days.

Just a little while ago, talking about yet another scandal, the Ravi Zacharias revelations, Skye Jethani on the Holy Post put the point quite succinctly – that we need to stop asking how we’re ALLOWING these things to happen and to start asking how we’re MAKING them happen.

It may be helpful, to an extent, to remember that “plane lands safely” doesn’t make the news and that the positive work that churches do and community they build is quiet and often taken for granted. Even in these abusive settings, you keep hearing about good work done, friendships formed and lives changed, in spite of it all. That can help to keep some perspective. But it shouldn’t be treated as something to place in a balance against the harm done, as though the one could be played off to excuse the other. There’s way too much of a pattern of covering up leaders’ wrongs because “look at all the good they’re doing.”

Nor, as great as the Mars Hill podcast was, do I think that celebrity culture and the scale of megachurches is the problem. Mark Cosper seemed to keep implying that the ruthless pursuit of scale and idolatry of the famous preacher was the root of the problem there. It was a part of it, certainly; but there are narcissists and abusers in small churches too. The size of a Mars Hill or a Hillsong amplifies their scandals and gets them into the news, but the sins at the root of them are the same as in little communities. When the Catholic abuse scandals broke, my dad, a lawyer, said that every organization that works with children faces these issues; the Catholic scandals were so shocking because we learned of them en masse rather than as a thousand individual situations separately.

I don’t think it’s a uniquely religious problem either. The #MeToo movement a few years ago made it abundantly clear that abuse is all over our institutions, in entertainment, in workplaces, in government, in education, in families. There was a study that suggested some 21% of corporate executives have sociopathic tendencies, at a degree that more like 1% of the general population does (psychopathy has a range of degrees, rather than being an either-or condition). The condemnation of churches and parachurches here is not that they’re different from the culture at large; it’s that they’re so blatantly not different at all.

We live in a culture that has a great celebrity-generating machine. It goes through its churn, elevates people to public attention, funnels money and fame into them. Since religion is a part of our society, it’s inevitable that the consumer machine will have a religion department, and that you’ll get the same dynamics of money, influence, ego and power there as anywhere else. Those who DON’T succumb to the invitation will simply go unnoticed.

Which brings me to a possible answer to Jethani’s question. Our problem is that, as the saying goes, “Nothing succeeds like success.” What I mean by that is this: the Church has internalized a worldliness, a preoccupation with “success.” We dress it up in Christiany-sounding language about “redeeming the culture” and “glorifying God in our nation” or whatever. But it’s a fundamental betrayal of the gospel. We measure the worth of our ministries in things that can be SEEN. How many people attend, how many did we baptize or get to make a profession of faith, how much are they giving, how many kids are attending Sunday School or VBS? Look at this big new facility we were able to build – God is good! Our pastor was invited to meet with a powerful government official – praise the Lord!

But what Christ said is to take up your own cross and follow. Blessed are you, not when you get invited to banquet with the rich and famous and powerful, but when you’re reviled and despised. His strength is perfected in our weakness. The fruits of the Spirit are not membership numbers and healthy bottom lines in the budget; they are love, joy, peacefulness, patience, self-control, humility, kindness. The only metric – the ONLY metric – of faithfulness to the Gospel is what cannot be measured, not by human means. Not, are we bringing in larger numbers of people or dollars, but, are the people here becoming more kind, more peaceful, more loving, more patient, as they mature in the Spirit? Do our leaders humble themselves and control themselves and set an example in these things, remembering that the last shall be first and the first shall be last?

One of the best pieces of advice I ever got from a pastor came when we were members of a church on the brink of collapse in Indiana. It needed a team of elders to lead and rebuild it and I found myself in the group nominated. I really did not feel a calling to the eldership and had serious misgivings, but it seemed like if I didn’t, the church would go under. This pastor listened to me express these concerns and said, gently but firmly, “Jon – God doesn’t NEED you.” He was right. God does His work by His power, working in all sorts of unlikely people and ways. There is no one person among us who is so essential that if we step away, the Gospel falls apart. It’s Christ’s gospel, not ours. The common denominator in all these horrible situations is that someone thought they should protect or enable an abuser because God “needed” them. We need to get rid of that notion for good.

Because if we don’t, we’re not building the kingdom of God, but just another earthly empire, and we should burn it all down.