Dirty Laundry, Grace and Accountability

One of the new blogs I added to the League of Reformed Bloggers is called Secret Radio. It is blogalized version of a novel of the same title by Grace Jovian (a pen name of Jeri Massi). I'm not clear if it is an autobiography or a fictiionalized account of her experiences. She summarizes it this way. "SECRET RADIO is the ongoing story of a woman who attended a corrupt, fanatical church and school and is slowly coming out of it to understand the real message of the Gospel and the power of the Grace of God."

If you read her site and some of her links you will see that she has spent a good many years in the bowels of the an ultra-fundamentalist monstrosity headed by Jack Hyles, First Baptist Church of Hammond, IN and Hyles-Anderson College. If you rummage around her links and the links from her links you will see a pretty sordid story involving some big names in the fundamentalist movement.

A few weeks ago I came across the blog of the X-ATI guy which is a blog for people who used to be involved in Bill Gothard's Advanced Training Institute. His blog is a pretty sarcastic and humorous (biting humor) look at Gothard and ATI. If you want a more in-depth expose of Gothard you can find it in the book A Matter of Basic Principles.

Although I was never involved in the extremes fundamentalist circles that Jeri was involved in, I've been involved in fundamentalist circles and for years was a big time Gothardite. I've left both of them and so I certainly resonate with all of these things. One of the questions that always comes up when you read or hear this kind of stuff is whether or not Christians should air their dirty laundry in these ways.

Several years ago my wife and I were in a Christian bookstore in Orlando and it was right after Sandi Patty's affair and divorce had beocme publicly known. My wife knew one of the workers in the store and we somehow got into a conversation over whether or not that should have been made public. This guy said that it shouldn't. We should all just be quiet about it and let God take care of it.

I also have a suspicion that Christians don't like for this stuff to go public because it somehow weakens our moral authority in a morally declining culture. Christians, particularly in America, have so identified their faith with moralism that this kind of stuff can weaken our sense of moral superiority and hurt us in the "culture wars" we are so intent on fighting. This is not always the case, but a superior morality has been one of the planks in the Christian platform in recent years. Since we have chosen to frame our engagement with the world as a "culture war" of morals and values, we lose ammo when our folks demonstrate "feet of clay."

Although I don't think we should devote a lifetime or an entire ministry to exposing the faults or foibles of particular individuals or ministries I do think it is healthy for those who have been on the inside of these things to let people know what is going on. Here are some reasons.

The first reason is because of the example of the Bible. The Bible is very open about the faults of its greatest heroes. Tim Keller once mentioned that the Biblical hero literature is altogether different from other forms of ancient hero literature. Other hero literature casts its heroes as embodiments the virtues it affirms. The heroes of the Bible are very different. The greatest heroes of the Bible have their faults displayed in technicolor for the world to see. Think Abraham's lies, David's adultery, and Peter's hypocrisy and denials of Christ. This is because the Bible is the story of the great deeds of God, not of men.

I don't think we need to tell all of the sordid details when a Christian falls, but we shouldn't be afraid to admit that Christians fall.

Secondly, the Bible is full of examples, particularly in the letters of Paul, where he names names and identifies those who have fallen away. All of the exhortations to perform church discipline tell us that the church has the responsibility to publicly deal with unrepentant sin.

There is a balance on this. None of this is done for punitive reasons, but only to redeem. It gets a little more tricky with public personalities. When a public figure sins in a scandalous fashion and goes to extremes to hide their sin then sometimes they need to be exposed publicly. But, when there is repentance, we have a responsibility to handle things as privately and quietly as possible. Focus did a good job of handling recent situations involving Mike Trout and John Paulk. Both had moral failures and they addressed them briefly in a public fashion, without giving details and moved on to helping them rebuild their lives.

But, too many of these situations, particularly in regards to the situations mentioned in Secret Radio and X-ATI guy involve sin where there is an attempted cover up.

A few years ago one of the leaders of my denomination (PCA) mentioned that he knew of a presbytery where there were some real uptight, legalistic pastors who were causing problems. This particular leader said that a few years later several of them were gone, they had fallen morally and were removed from ministry. He suggested that these guys, who were very moralistic, didn't understand grace and therefore were prone to moral failure.

This is the paradox of moralism and fundamentalism. Those who focus the most on morality and go to the greatest extremes to protect it, often fall the most. One of the things you will find in Jeri Massi's site and some of her links is the fact that there is a huge rate of divorce amongst the Hyles-Anderson folks and there is a very high rate of some of the grosser forms of immorality. These folks miss the advice of Paul in Colossians 2:20-23:

20 If with Christ tyou died to the elemental spirits of the world, why, as if you were still alive in the world, do you submit to regulations— 21 “Do not handle, Do not taste, Do not touch” 22 (referring to things that all perish as they are used)—according to human precepts and teachings? 23 These have indeed an appearance of wisdom in promoting self-made religion and asceticism and severity to the body, but they are of no value in stopping the indulgence of the flesh.
The Holy Bible : English standard version. 2001 . Good News Publishers: Wheaton

The rule based moralistic lifestyle of fundamentalism is powerless to restrain the very sin it seeks to restrain. It is only grace that can restrain sin. Furthermore, in the extreme fundamentalist world, when one sins they have to make up for it by trying harder to be good next time. Hence, they never can really feel forgiven.

I was going to say some things about accountability in this regard but I'll save that for another post.

I don't want to come across as saying that sin is insignificant or that we shouldn't strive against it. It's just that fundamentalists fight sin with the wrong tools. Further, though we should always seek to avoid embarassing our fellow believers, there is really no point in pretending we don't have dirty laundry amongst Christians. Christianity isn't a religion about the goodness of man, it is about the goodness of God. We don't have to pretend that we are holier than we are, it is only God who is truly holy.

Comments

[Jeri Massi]

Thank you for the review and comments. SECRET RADIO began with two things. A young preacher named James Spurgeon wrote a series of memoirs called TALES FROM THE TEMPLE, in which he narrated his experiences at Longview Baptist Temple and in retrospect evaluated how wrongthe legalistic system was, and how it had harmed so many (yet TALES FROM THE TEMPLE is hilarious). I considered that there ought to be a woman's point of view memoir to supplement it.

Second, once I had researched the stories of corruption in these IFB schools pretty thoroughly, I realized that even Christians who would not commit the abuses of Jack Hyles and others like him, still do not pause to consider the value of the lives that have been trampled underfoot. As I considered the photograph of Brent Stevens, who was abused all his life and died under "suspicious circumstances" when Jack Hyles' adult (and adulterous) son Dave Hyles was the only adult present, I asked God to give me the love of Christ for Brent and show me the value of his life in God's eyes.

My entire life has been turned upside down by that prayer. It happened gradually, day by day. But a conviction of how valuable his life was, and the realization that all the lives so carelessly used and trampled by these corrupt and self-seeking men who call themselves pastors are of great value to God has grown in me. This is what has kept me writing and seeking ways to document the abuses.

Pray for me, if you will, that God will keep me from overstepping the boundaries He has set for Christian conduct. And pray for God to make me courageous. If you have checked in to the FFF, you see that some of these Fundamentalist preachers are downright rabid in how much they hate me. But the Grace of God and the way of salvation cannot be entrusted to them, and there has to be a demonstration from them and a documentation of the very real truths that they are false shepherds, and people should get away from them and run to Grace and Truth.

[David Mobley]

Good post. It does seem to me important to publicly expose sin, at least of prominent leaders in the church, since this, as you point out, is what Paul does and even what he commands (1 Ti. 6:20). I think you're making a good point -- part of what the church needs to do is to show that it's not all about works.
Like anything else, I guess there needs to be a balance. Before I became a Christian, I was hostile towards the Bible and Christianity, in part because I thought I was living a more moral life than the "Christians" I knew. It was only when I met some Christians who really were different from the world that I began reading the Bible. So it IS important for Christians to shine as lights and be different -- but certainly not to the point that they cover up their own sins!
Good post.

[Phillip Winn]

Thanks for this, and for the link to X-ATI Guy. As an ex-ATI guy myself, I certainly relate!

[Barry Pendergast]

Glad to have come across this site. When all else failed and we had been unfairly excommunicated twice we launched a web site to tell our story and of others abused in a Calgary, Canada church. Since then we have had two magazines tell our story:

http://www.westernstandard.ca/website/index.cfm?page=article&article_id=1333 (needs a free registration)

http://www.christianweek.org/stories/vol19/no21/index.html

We have others interested in telling the story - we have no sorrow at exposing cases of serious spiritual abuse and will continue to work towards solutions that heal the abusers and those they abuse. The pain of our experiences was several times more than the pain of losing a son in 1991! We are blessed to be back in a church where we can continue our joy in being in a ministry that suits our gifts.