Church scandal

While my own church continues to endure a serious financial scandal, I see that Julie "Bible Girl" Lyons is writing this week about grave problems within her religious tradition, Pentecostalism. Powerful stuff, as usual. Lord have mercy, but the lady can write. Excerpt:

I know from my own observation that sexual immorality is widespread among Pentecostal clergy, and in many cases no church governance structure exists to do anything about it. Church leadership is frequently passed down in families as though salvation is acquired through DNA.

Prosperity teaching — which, when taught responsibly, can extract people from the mire of poverty mindsets — has degenerated into unabashed greed and charlatanism, with preachers shilling for multilevel marketing schemes that will never benefit the vast majority of the peons who buy into their promises of easy money.

...There was a time when all Pentecostals preached a high standard of holiness. Sure, there were frauds — drunks and debauchers who pretended to be one thing and were found to be another. In the South, especially, the concept of the double life has a storied existence, evidenced by the plantation masters who proudly occupied the family bench in church on Sunday and ravished slave girls on Monday.

But in the Pentecostal churches, among the brothers and sisters, where few had earthly riches and social status was of no account, sin was an enemy for which there would be no quarter. Sinners had but one place in church: on the mourners’ bench. Jesus, after all, came to free us from the bondage of sin, and Pentecostals took him at his word.

In recent years, though, I have seen a type of church emerge that has many of the bells and whistles of Pentecostalism, such as prophetic “words” from God, exuberant worship and high-octane preaching, but there is no standard of holiness. I call these people post-holiness Pentecostals — rollers without the holy.

In place of preaching against sin, the leaders exalt their status as “prophets” and teach that their followers have no right to question them. If they do, they’re branded “Jezebels” with “rebellious spirits” who’ve become instruments of Satan to bring down God’s anointed. None of this has a speck of Biblical support, but even one’s right to examine teaching through the lens of Scripture is discounted. When these leaders end up in grievous sin, members are shamed into believing that their only recourse is to shut themselves in the private prayer closet and beg for God to speak to their leader.

Which, by the way, I’m sure God has already done, many times over. If the Holy Spirit lives inside of us, we are continually made aware of our own sin.

I’ve never figured out how these leaders and their followers get around Paul’s command to “expel the immoral brother,” or his warning not even to eat with someone who calls himself a brother and involves himself in sexual immorality, or his counsel that we have a duty to judge those in the church. I’ll guarantee that you’ll never hear in these churches the testimony of Jude, who foresaw a day when the church would be dominated by “…godless men, who change the grace of our God into a license for immorality and deny Jesus Christ our only Sovereign and Lord.”

Look around you: We are living in that day.

The recent scandals among Pentecostals have shaken me. I struggle to understand how people who’ve come into contact with the very presence of God through worship, who’ve seen the power of the Holy Spirit at work in miraculous ways, can get involved in such craziness.

I was talking yesterday to a dear Catholic friend about church scandal, and I mentioned to him how down I was about the mess in the Orthodox Church in America -- but how I was determined to find a way to get through it without violating my conscience by turning away from it, or to shipwreck myself as I did within Catholicism. I have no idea how to do that, but I know I have no choice but to find a way. He said, "It does seem like the Lord won't let you get away from having to face the reality of sin." Yes, it does.