The Evangelical Scandal
by: RyanChristianity Today has an interesting and thoughtful article on evangelical hypocrisy called The Evangelical Scandal. Quotage:
The heart of the matter is the scandalous failure to live what we preach. The tragedy is that poll after poll by Gallup and Barna show that evangelicals live just like the world
Wow. This article is disturbing to me. First off, his emphasis on marriage needs to be tempered. The abuse that I took in the evangelical church I attended was all because I decided to divorce an addicted, abusive husband. I was judged wrong and shunned. No one there knew anything about domestic violence, nor did they care to learn. The emphasis was on keeping the marriage together no matter what. And frighteningly enough, the thing he says that evangelicals are doing right, small groups, is exactly where this spiritual abuse took place. The pastor was completely on my side; he had done marriage counseling with us, and had told me that, in his opinion, we weren’t really married in the eyes of God. But the small group leadership was very antagonistic towards me from the day I moved my husband out of the house while he was at church.
One thing I do want to commend in this article is the emphasis on the church needing to do more in the community. I taught a women’s small group, and I could never get them interested in doing any kind of service. We could put together a baby shower for someone in the church in a matter of days, but we couldn’t put together a basket of goodies to take to the local fire station once a year. It was sad, really. It is no wonder that people have such a dim view of Christians as a group.
I thank you for your ministry to those of us who have left the church. I would love to talk with you some time about the very subtle forms of spiritual abuse I see happening in today’s church.
Liz-
Small groups definitely sound like a good idea in theory, but, like you, I’ve not seen them really be effective for any kind of good.
And we’d love to have you on the show sometime.
I did some followup on one of the key metrics that Sider and so many others are now popularing, but which he and so many other pastors & authors now seem to greatly misunderstand…. the ‘evangelical divorce rate’. There is a very significant difference. You’ll see the documentation in my article… “Transforming the Evangelical Meme”.