God created us to grow to adulthood – spirit, soul and body. Scripture calls us to do just that. The role of leaders, like the role of parents, is to encourage and affirm this process, not to ensure that everyone except the leaders remains perpetually one-down.
What do you do when the Lord answers what you had not asked? This is where it began, my journey with God into his view of women and the church.
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.
The preacher urged people to love the Lord with all their hearts. Yet, tragically, he himself did not know how to do it. He did not know what wholehearted devotion to God looks like. 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.
How many women today can testify: The church culture, to which we have given ourselves, has used us and used us to make someone else look good, while profoundly rejecting our personhood, our adulthood, our worth, us.
When people say as one, “We serve Jesus alone,” yet they continue to collude with what he hates – and to rationalize, minimize and deny it, even to themselves.
