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Religion Gone Rogue
Stop Sweeping Sexual Abuse Under The Rug
(Read part 3 first if you haven't)
There will always be those who say "What do you expect? Kids were abused. It was THAT church”. But I'm not writing this for any church in particular. I'm speaking to those whom power corrupted and the hypocrites in every human institution who are hiding behind their walls of religious glass.
Soldiers leave home to protect their wives. Working men leave home to provide for their families. Then, without conviction and commitment about what morality entails, they end up in a foreign land or a foreign office building, sleeping with a prostitute or making out with a secretary. Similarly, the best of intentions without convictions will fail to stop any religious compound from becoming another Waco, and it’s generally not outside enemies which implode the compound.
It doesn't matter if you attended Boerne Christian Assembly and like many others in the patriarchy movement lost your faith to the sexual scandals that occurred there. Suffice it to say that Doug Phillip's church didn't start the same way it burned to the ground. "He who thinks he stands, take heed lest he fall" is what the Bible warns us about.
It doesn't matter if you put your faith in Vision Forum and their bold claim based on rallying around the Alamo. They said men were supposed to valiantly protect women and children, but there also came to be self interest intertwined and subtle messages secretively and manipulativly encoded. The latter eventually came to fruition and before we knew what was happening, the tares took over the stage and trampled the wheat. The initial message might have been true, but that didn't make it’s method of implementation autonomously correct, genuine, or the end honorable in any sense of the word.
You may have once idolized 19 Kids and Counting, only to find out they're human beings, subject to sin like the rest of us. Maybe you hated them because you thought they were conservative, or maybe you're disgusted; not even by the sin that spilled over as much as by the hypocrisy. How did hiding of sin while failing to effectively deal with it prevent a Reality TV show from turning into more tabloid material? It didn't, yet some of us would seem convinced that our situations are somehow miraculously different! How do we think we'll never end up on center stage unless we want to?
Perhaps you were one of the young ladies who attended Bill Gothard's Institute of Basic Life Principals, only to discover that Bill himself wasn't always that "principled". Alot of things snow-balled at once over the last several years. Maybe you were a young lady who lied about him just to jump on the bandwagon, as he alleges, or maybe he's in fact the one lying and you were a young lady who told the truth. There's nothing secret which won't be laid bare at the judgement.
You might have grown up Amish and quickly learned that cases such as Torah Bontrager's, or the married woman victimized by Amish Bishop Samuel Mullet or these young girls, or this case in Wisconsin or this one and this one in Pennsylvania, or this recent incestrous rape case in Seymour Missouri were hurriedly hushed up by bishops and considered "handled", just so other innocent girls could continue being "manhandled" and the stellar reputation of the church not be tarnished.
Holiness isn't evidenced by what you see on the outside, and the horrors of sin aren't always plastered across our face. It doesn’t matter what we witness though, if we never learn from it, and it doesn't matter what we say is wrong if we never take any steps to stop it.
What if, on the other hand, you are the sexual abuser? What if you are the porn addict, the molester, the rapist, the pedophile, or the minister having an extramarital affair? You still have hope. You still can change. It will absolutely disqualify you from leadership, and it won't remove repercussions that come along with justice, but even if you were a pedophile priest who had been abused by another pedophile priest who had been abused by another all the way back to Saint Peter, the possibility remains for you to become a new creation through confession and repentance.
True repentance doesn't look like a private confession in front of another priest in your own parish though, or fessing up to a partner in crime with a non-disclosure agreement behind closed doors like Doug Phillips tried. It looks like a public acknowledgement of where you erred so people know how to protect themselves from you, and so you can prevent yourself from reoffending. It looks like a public committment to right your wrong to the best of your ability. That might incur legal repercussions, but legal repercussions are better than eternal repercussions, unless we don't actually even believe in eternity. The way we live is often enough to make one wonder. Repentance then is evidenced by fruits of repentance, like getting the help you need and walking accountably with men who will hold the soles of your feet to the fire where you need it. Just going into isolation and feeling sorry for yourself isn't fruits of repentance, because any little lost boy or girl could come wondering by your cabin in the woods looking for a piece of bread and a dry bed to sleep in, and then without repentance, what would you do with that scenario?
There's no limits on true repentance, but as much as non-Catholics have mocked "confession", now they've ironicly become masters of omitting it entirely and so have many Messianics. That, loved ones, will kill us, and IS killing us. It's killing assemblies, congregations, and individuals. It's killing children and it's killing the bride of Messiah. What is worth stopping the Bride from dying so her wedding with the Lamb can be consummated? What is it worth doing to ensure her own daughters and sons arrive at the marriage alter with their virginity?
Up Next: Continue to Part 5>>
(Read part 3 first if you haven't)
There will always be those who say "What do you expect? Kids were abused. It was THAT church”. But I'm not writing this for any church in particular. I'm speaking to those whom power corrupted and the hypocrites in every human institution who are hiding behind their walls of religious glass.
Soldiers leave home to protect their wives. Working men leave home to provide for their families. Then, without conviction and commitment about what morality entails, they end up in a foreign land or a foreign office building, sleeping with a prostitute or making out with a secretary. Similarly, the best of intentions without convictions will fail to stop any religious compound from becoming another Waco, and it’s generally not outside enemies which implode the compound.
It doesn't matter if you attended Boerne Christian Assembly and like many others in the patriarchy movement lost your faith to the sexual scandals that occurred there. Suffice it to say that Doug Phillip's church didn't start the same way it burned to the ground. "He who thinks he stands, take heed lest he fall" is what the Bible warns us about.
It doesn't matter if you put your faith in Vision Forum and their bold claim based on rallying around the Alamo. They said men were supposed to valiantly protect women and children, but there also came to be self interest intertwined and subtle messages secretively and manipulativly encoded. The latter eventually came to fruition and before we knew what was happening, the tares took over the stage and trampled the wheat. The initial message might have been true, but that didn't make it’s method of implementation autonomously correct, genuine, or the end honorable in any sense of the word.
You may have once idolized 19 Kids and Counting, only to find out they're human beings, subject to sin like the rest of us. Maybe you hated them because you thought they were conservative, or maybe you're disgusted; not even by the sin that spilled over as much as by the hypocrisy. How did hiding of sin while failing to effectively deal with it prevent a Reality TV show from turning into more tabloid material? It didn't, yet some of us would seem convinced that our situations are somehow miraculously different! How do we think we'll never end up on center stage unless we want to?
Perhaps you were one of the young ladies who attended Bill Gothard's Institute of Basic Life Principals, only to discover that Bill himself wasn't always that "principled". Alot of things snow-balled at once over the last several years. Maybe you were a young lady who lied about him just to jump on the bandwagon, as he alleges, or maybe he's in fact the one lying and you were a young lady who told the truth. There's nothing secret which won't be laid bare at the judgement.
You might have grown up Amish and quickly learned that cases such as Torah Bontrager's, or the married woman victimized by Amish Bishop Samuel Mullet or these young girls, or this case in Wisconsin or this one and this one in Pennsylvania, or this recent incestrous rape case in Seymour Missouri were hurriedly hushed up by bishops and considered "handled", just so other innocent girls could continue being "manhandled" and the stellar reputation of the church not be tarnished.
Holiness isn't evidenced by what you see on the outside, and the horrors of sin aren't always plastered across our face. It doesn’t matter what we witness though, if we never learn from it, and it doesn't matter what we say is wrong if we never take any steps to stop it.
What if, on the other hand, you are the sexual abuser? What if you are the porn addict, the molester, the rapist, the pedophile, or the minister having an extramarital affair? You still have hope. You still can change. It will absolutely disqualify you from leadership, and it won't remove repercussions that come along with justice, but even if you were a pedophile priest who had been abused by another pedophile priest who had been abused by another all the way back to Saint Peter, the possibility remains for you to become a new creation through confession and repentance.
True repentance doesn't look like a private confession in front of another priest in your own parish though, or fessing up to a partner in crime with a non-disclosure agreement behind closed doors like Doug Phillips tried. It looks like a public acknowledgement of where you erred so people know how to protect themselves from you, and so you can prevent yourself from reoffending. It looks like a public committment to right your wrong to the best of your ability. That might incur legal repercussions, but legal repercussions are better than eternal repercussions, unless we don't actually even believe in eternity. The way we live is often enough to make one wonder. Repentance then is evidenced by fruits of repentance, like getting the help you need and walking accountably with men who will hold the soles of your feet to the fire where you need it. Just going into isolation and feeling sorry for yourself isn't fruits of repentance, because any little lost boy or girl could come wondering by your cabin in the woods looking for a piece of bread and a dry bed to sleep in, and then without repentance, what would you do with that scenario?
There's no limits on true repentance, but as much as non-Catholics have mocked "confession", now they've ironicly become masters of omitting it entirely and so have many Messianics. That, loved ones, will kill us, and IS killing us. It's killing assemblies, congregations, and individuals. It's killing children and it's killing the bride of Messiah. What is worth stopping the Bride from dying so her wedding with the Lamb can be consummated? What is it worth doing to ensure her own daughters and sons arrive at the marriage alter with their virginity?
Up Next: Continue to Part 5>>