This is what happened when I served as onsite leader for a Beth Moore Living Proof Live event. It’s a peek into celebrity culture, the exploitation and manipulation of women and abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention.
All my life, I had been deceived by Good Christian appearances. Then, when pummeled and guilted to choose loyalty to a church system above all else, I saw.
A true story from the past it seems important to tell. Four questions about the present it seems important to ask.
Ultimately, collectively, the church quenched the Spirit’s voice in order to embrace the society’s values. The church began to preach - and to try to live - a righteousness unencumbered with justice. But. God.
The preacher urged people to love the Lord with all their hearts. Yet, tragically, he himself did not know how to do it. He could only offer a checklist.
When you earnestly seek to do what’s right, inside a system you do not recognize as broken, you’re asking to be blindsided. When you implicitly trust leaders who depend on the system for power, image and funds, you’re asking to be betrayed. Not seeing what you need to see, you won’t have a clue what’s going on.
Even though I cannot live out any commitment perfectly, I can set my heart toward it and use my voice to affirm it. And that matters. A lot.
Today where you live, religiosity slaughters Sabbath by the very way it tries to keep it. But when people desperate for rest leave the comfort of religious exhaustion and stumble toward God himself, Sabbath remains – and the Lord of Real Rest revives them.
Choosing to go with God where my church culture had forbidden, I had no clue how much seeing and grieving lay ahead. And how very much love and life.
Abuse had begun to open my eyes to evils in my church culture. Then, God took me on a pilgrimage into the past, to show me what is happening now.