Question Mark: Why the Church Welcomes Bullies and How to Stop It

Notes

Question Mark

Why the Church Welcomes Bullies and How to Stop It

Jim Henderson and Doug Murren

Copyright © 2015 by Jim Henderson and Doug Murren

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher at the address below.

Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.

90-Day Books

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Editing by Cara Highsmith, Highsmith Creative Services, www.highsmithcreative.com

Cover and Interior Design by Mitchell Shea

ISBN 978-0-692-39074-0

Printed in the United States of America

First Edition 14 13 12 11 10 / 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Unless otherwise noted, all scripture taken from HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House.:

Introduction

Sociologists tell us that when it comes to relationships some of our most important connections are what they call weak connections. Many of our most important relationships in life—our spouse, business partner, or even our favorite dog—begin with a weak connection stemming from seemingly accidental (or serendipitous) encounters.

The serendipity of my meeting Doug began in a tavern in 1969. My newly formed Christian band, Justice, was playing at the Blue Moon Tavern in Wenatchee, Washington, and we were singing about Jesus. A local sax player named Don Lamphere had come out  to see us, but we had already played our set and were gone. Instead, he found Jesus thanks to Brother Bud, another one of our Jesus People friends who happened to be hanging around after the gig.

A couple months later, Justice was back in Wenatchee and this time Don sat in on the show with us. A seventeen-year-old named Doug Murren tagged along with Don, and not long after, came to the Lord himself. Don and Doug formed their own band called The Last Day—a jazz-rock fusion featuring Don's sax and his testimony of being delivered from heroin. In those days ministry in the northwest was a DIY, rough-and-tumble world full of colorful characters, undefined boundaries, and very few rules.

Unbeknownst to either of us we were about to enter into the rule-ridden, boundary-heavy, personality-driven world of the evangelical church.

Although we went in different directions, our first church experiences turned out to be quite similar. I chose to submit to Pastor Baker—a strong-minded woman (not unlike my mom) who led The Kings Temple where, as historian Mike Hertenstein recounts, she embraced long-haired converts, but kept them in line. She was autocratic. You did what she told you, says Ken Lloyd, which is what I needed because I didn't know what to do. Members were expected to ask elders' permission to move, marry, or change jobs.¹

My own upbringing was decidedly secular, and I parachuted into Christianity, joining the church without knowing it. I said yes to Jesus . . . and then discovered He had somehow become attached to the Bible, an institution called The Church, and a religion called Christianity.

I was looking for a church that would help me serve the Lord and train me to be the man and leader I wanted to be. Having been raised in a one-parent family, I was vulnerable to the influence of older saints and was willing to accept whatever instruction they gave me. I embraced their version of church, worship, morality, the Bible, and eventually even politics. Unfortunately, it turned me into someone I didn't like.

As I reflect on that period, I still can't imagine ending up anywhere else. At that time, and in my current state, I felt as if I had died and gone to church heaven. We worshiped with abandon and sat under(a term I didn't understand but soon discovered was critically important to their agenda) what we referred to as revelatory teaching. We virtually lived at church and when we weren't there, we still socialized with each other. The leaders reinforced what a great decision I'd made and embraced my little family of five with open arms. I have very fond memories of many spiritual experiences that came from that time as well as lifetime friendships for which I'm profoundly grateful; however, I also learned that just because something works doesn't mean it's right.

They exercised an inordinate amount of control over our lives. On the surface it seemed like strong, hands-on leadership, but I was never encouraged to get an education or do anything that might advance my economic situation unless it was somehow connected to the mission of the church. It took a long time for me to realize that I was not benefitting as much from this relationship as they were.

Sadly, my story is not uncommon; therefore, the purpose of this book is largely to help young people who, similarly, are being drawn into churches with well-meaning, good-hearted believers who are unwittingly infecting them with a very dangerous germ called spiritual pride. And, how do you know if you've been infected with spiritual pride? Here are some of the symptoms. You believe:

you have discovered something no one else has ever discovered;

your church/denomination is the only church with the truth;

you've been granted cosmic specialness;

other people need to join your group in order to experience the real thing;

most other churches are deceived, compromised, or clueless;

you have received special revelation about the Bible;

your forms of worship or Bible teaching are superior to all others;

everyone needs to speak in tongues to be filled with the Spirit; or

anyone who speaks in tongues is deceived;

Additionally, if you have no friends who are nonbelievers or if you use Christianity as a cover for your anger, meanness, jealousy, and pettiness you are demonstrating spiritual pride. Spiritual pride is more dangerous than sexual immorality because sexual immorality is something you and others can actually see, while spiritual pride can be hidden and seem to be benign for long periods.

There are numerous religious leaders who've made a very public spectacle of their version of spiritual pride—people such as the late Harold Camping who predicted the end of the world in 2013, the recently departed Fred I hate fags Phelps of Westboro Baptist Church, or the inimitable L. Ron Hubbard who founded Scientology. Those guys are public and visible. We compare ourselves with these people and conclude that because we're not that outrageous or vitriolic, we're not infected with spiritual pride. The sobering truth, however, is that these guys aren't the problem, we are. It's our inability to see fault in our own behaviors that creates the biggest opportunity for religious bullies to walk into our lives.

When Jesus said to Peter, Get behind me, Satan! He was sticking a super long hypodermic needle into Peter's soul to inject him with an antibody to spiritual pride (Mark 8:33). Peter needed to know what he didn't know—primarily that he wasn't God.

Just as with Peter, we go about our lives thinking we have all the answers. We don't really know if our interpretation of the Bible is actually 100% correct. We don't really know if our church is the best church. We don't really know if we are right and everyone else is wrong. Actually, we can't even prove the most basic foundational claim we make as Christians—that Jesus is real. We believe it; we hope it; we trust it; but, we can't prove it. So, what is with the epistemic arrogance, the hubris, the reactivity, the angst, and the whining Christians exhibit when we don't get our way? Spiritual pride is not only the primary cause of our inability to spot bullies; it's the number one reason we welcome them and why, in many ways, we need them.

Ask yourself these questions:

How did the church ever become a safe place for religious bullies?

Why do we allow them in the pulpits of some of America's largest and most influential churches?

Why do we put oversized microphones in their hands, multiple cameras on their faces, and digital resources at their fingertips to reach millions?

Why do we pay them garish amounts of money to do it?

What are the spiritual genetic markers in our systems that predispose us to miss the warning signs and minimize character flaws we swore we'd never accept in a leader?

Forget the bullies. They're not going to read this book. You and I need to lead ourselves out of this place, if not for us then at least for the young people who are the most susceptible to the influence of spiritual bullies. You and I are the ones responsible for creating the environment that welcomes spiritual bullies. Until we own our partnership and co-dependency in this symbiotic relationship, nothing can change. This dangerous dance will continue resulting in spiritual confusion and many rejecting Christ due to His guilt-by-association with the system that gave license to religious bullies. I don't think it's a leap too far to conclude that the dramatic increase in people disavowing any religion (a.k.a. the Nones) has been influenced in part by the sudden increase in awareness of the spiritual bullies leading our churches². Until we realize how we contribute to the problem, we won't be able to eradicate it.

Before doctors and nurses discovered the miraculous power of hand washing they ignorantly passed deadly germs from patient to patient. As the author of The Biography of a Germ put it, Most experts laughed at the notion that creatures too small to be seen could fell armies and turn cities into cemeteries.³ Consequently, instead of helping people, these caregivers infected them; all the while they were performing sacrificial and even heroic acts, often risking their own lives because God told them to.

I use what may seem like an odd analogy, comparing this issue of spiritual bullying to a viral infections and I could use any kind of virus, but I want to get a little more specific. Lyme disease is one of the most fascinating illnesses in our society. What's interesting is that it appears to be so benign, so ordinary that we mistakenly believe it is something we could wipe out with an aspirin. The reality is the germ is persistent and intractable and, in spite of all of our high-powered medicines, we've not been able to get rid of it. People actually die from it. Lyme disease gets passed to humans by an unspectacular bug called the deer tick. The deer tick prefers deer, but thanks to suburban sprawl in formerly wooded areas more and more human beings are presenting themselves as a nice alternative.

It's not the bite that gives people Lyme disease, its what passes from inside the tick—the germ known as borrelia burgdorferia or Bb for short—that makes people sick and some people dead.⁴ The deer tick has no knowledge that it is passing a killer germ; all it thinks it's doing is eating lunch. In other words, the lowly deer tick is simply surviving, hanging out on a bush waiting for an unsuspecting deer (disguised as a human) to pass by. When that happens they pounce. However innocent they may be, the deer tick is nonetheless an accessory to the crime. And while killing all deer ticks is neither practical nor environmentally sound (they do provide some benefits), stopping the spread of Bb has become a major focus of the medical and scientific community.

This book is about a similar type of insidious infection that's spreading in the church. Unwittingly, many pastors, board members, and ordinary people are passing it to each other in the name of God. It's making a lot of people sick and more and more are losing their spiritual lives because of it. The disease is our spiritual pride and its presence is the chief reason religious bullying is active in the church. Spiritual pride weakens our immune system and makes it easier for bullies to emerge into influential roles in our churches.

Our a) lack of humility, b) high degree of reactivity to difference, c) epistemic arrogance, and d) uncertainty avoidance conspire like a deadly cocktail both to blind us and to bind us to religious bullies. Like Israel of old we ask for a king thinking he will provide protection only to discover we've become his victim. (See 1 Samuel 8:6-18.)

Our purpose for this book is to relate how Doug and I and countless others we know managed to survive the infections we received from the church without completely abandoning the Bible, its morals, or the institution. Edwin Friedman says that the job of a leader is to define his or her own goals and values, while trying to [stay connected with] . . . a non-anxious presence within the system.⁵ We will share with you the problem we inherited in terms of our perception of what the church is supposed to be about, how we escaped it, why its even worse today and what we need to do to change it.

We do not think that religious bullies are the cause or the core of the problem. They're the symptom—what physicians call the presenting problem. The actual problem is us . . . you and me. We welcome bullies. We seek them out, and when the bully is our bully, we'll defend him to the death. All of that is to say that if I'd been saved in 1998 instead of 1968, it is entirely likely I could have chosen to join a church named Mars Hill with a male autocrat named Mark Driscoll.

As the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky cynically put it, You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.⁶ When war is not affecting us personally we can look the other way. We can wax philosophical and assert that these kinds of problems have been with us from time immemorial, but when war comes to my neighborhood it becomes personal. My head must be unceremoniously pulled from the sand, forcing me to engage.

While Mark Driscoll is not the subject of this book, he is clearly object lesson #1. With his unrelenting drive to hold onto power in the face of abandonment by his friends, his movement, and his staff, he dragged his church and his family into the klieg lights of the public eye. His bullying leadership style placed him in rarified company reserved by history. One is forced to recall Bill Clinton's attempt to bully the press with his brazen public dare, I did not have sexual relations with that woman,⁷ or Richard Nixon's infamous, I am not a crook,⁸ to make meaning out of Driscoll's motives. Few religious figures have come close to receiving the level of negative public attention as Driscoll since the TV