Silent majority, I know you are kind-hearted people who just want to peacefully worship God and love others. We all want that. Silent majority, I know you had no idea this was going on in your church. You keep your…
When churches turn on themselves
When churches turn on themselves, things get very ugly very quickly. As if it weren’t already hard enough to be and do church in this culture, we face an exponential increase in internal congregational conflict and turmoil. American Christians are…
If you are a pastor in an abusive church, please know that you are not alone
It happens almost every week. Over the last year, with recurring and uncanny regularity, a pastor or Christian leader reaches out to me to share their journey of leaving abusive churches or organizations. In each case, they know I’m no…
Continuing our retreat from Jesus
This is a photo of me with my father in the upper deck of the New Orleans Superdome at the Southern Baptist Convention in June 1990. We were two of the nearly 40,000 messengers who gathered that year for a…
Get ready: There’s a second wave of church conflict coming
A pastor who works to encourage other pastors recently posted on Facebook that he personally knows 28 pastors who have left the ministry in the past year. That’s one graphic illustration of what the season of our discontent has wrought…
Q&A with a traumatologist on how to prevent clergy abuse and burnout
Editor’s note: The following article was published by BNG on June 7, 2021, but is being republished today because of its relevance to the new report on sexual abuse in the SBC. The unwillingness or inability to do the…
Why ‘moderate’ churches fear telling it like it is
Just over four years ago, when Donald Trump was elected president, I was working for a self-styled “moderate” Baptist church in East Tennessee. One of the (mostly) unspoken rules of this and many other moderate Baptist churches like it across…
Your church’s purpose is not to make you happy
Your church’s purpose is not to make you happy. Your church’s purpose is to help you become like Jesus. Expect the former and live disappointed. Expect the latter and live with deep satisfaction and significance. This conversation has happened enough…
The train of conflict is coming to a church near you
As a child, my neighborhood friends and I loved to play on a train track near our house. Foolish, I know, but quite fun and exhilarating. We learned to tell when a train was coming long before it actually appeared….