Maybe the church has become bewildering to you. Leaders you trusted and people you respected are acting in ways that do not reflect who Jesus is, nor what they profess to believe. They have turned on anyone among them who appears to threaten the status quo. What is going on?
When witchcraft is disguised, we may look right at it and not know what we're seeing. We may cooperate with it, and not know what we're doing. We may be targeted by it, and not know what is happening. We can be very fooled for a very long time.
Any group that shuns is withholding your deepest needs in order to control you. That’s the opposite of loving you. It’s people you trusted, trying to erase you.
Sitting in my car at that gas station on that winter afternoon, staring at Isaiah 58:1, I began to cry ... Oh. Lord. Not. This. Assignment.
In the middle of that dark-valley time, I often found myself alone with God, crying aloud and writing passionately in my journal. During that time too, I came to identify with David, the shepherd-poet-warrior-king, in ways I had not before. For David was also ostracized by people he trusted. And he cried out in distress - and in faith.
Real rest is so different from what I had thought. It’s so much more expansive, and desirable, and enjoyable. And it’s so very vital. Thing is, I desperately needed real rest long before I knew I needed it. I had no clue how rest-deprived I was.
Why, in midlife, did I suddenly find my boundaries battered and my adulthood denied?
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.