Cliques in the church
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.
Beth Moore and LifeWay: The ploy
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.
Dear Beth Moore and LifeWay: My plea
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.
Behind the scenes at Living Proof Live
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.
Behind the façade in the SBC
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.
Going with God
Choosing to go with God where my church culture had forbidden, I had no clue how much seeing and grieving lay ahead. And how very much love and life.
A future filled with hope
It's the best-loved verse in Jeremiah, and God says it to exiles. He announces to people who feel they have no future at all: "I know what I have planned for you. I have plans to prosper you, not to harm you. I have plans to give you a future filled with hope."
The most freeing thing
The work of exile – the work God wants to do through it – is to free you from bondage that masquerades as relationship, to draw you to himself, to show you what is and is not love. Perhaps the hardest thing you can do in exile – and by far the most freeing – is to stay there until it has done its work.
Dis-abling spiritual abuse
Insights from Carolyn Custis James that can help us recognize and "dis-able" spiritual abuse.