I will change your name
No longer wounded, outcast, lonely, afraid - your new name shall be Confidence, Joyfulness, Overcoming one, Faithfulness, Friend of God, One who seeks My face.
No longer wounded, outcast, lonely, afraid - your new name shall be Confidence, Joyfulness, Overcoming one, Faithfulness, Friend of God, One who seeks My face.
Why, in midlife, did I suddenly find my boundaries battered and my adulthood denied?
Frustrated, exhausted, I realized: I would never count as an adult in my church system. Free at last, I’m embracing the adulthood God works in his own
Many see the SBC #churchtoo issue as, primarily, a matter of wrongdoing on the part of some individuals and churches. But that approach gets us exactly the same place as when we try to figure out a narcissistic abuser by assuming he has the same qualities, feelings and motivations that truly caring people do.
Cliques are by nature, exclusive. Wherever they occur in the church landscape, they fragment the church. They prevent the people of God from becoming one.
When the "threat alarm" goes off in an abusive church system, the response is orchestrated and brutal. But it's church: Appearances must be kept up. People loyal to the system confuse while pretending to clarify, cover-up while pretending to address, attack while seeming to answer, put-down while pretending to help.
Behind the scenes at Living Proof Live, I'd found a celebrity culture - not the "one anothering" of the church of the living God. So with all my heart, I cried out for change.
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.
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.