Description
Let’s talk about red flags in churches:
- People vs Jesus
- Fear vs Love
- Authority vs Responsibility
- Accountability and Consequences
- Learn the Bible vs Learn what I say
Bible Verses:
1 John 4:18: Such love has no fear, because perfect love expels all fear. If we are afraid, it is for fear of punishment, and this shows that we have not fully experienced his perfect love.
1 John 4:8: But anyone who does not love does not know God, for God is love.
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Celebrities for Jesus By Katelyn Beaty
A church called TOV by Laura McKnight Barringer and Tish Harrison Warren
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Transcript
today we are going to be talking about cults hey everyone whether you’re a returning weirdo or a first-time friend I’m glad you’re here uh I just finished watching Shiny Happy People and I never watched the Duggars show at all so I did not realize this was the connection and all that kind of stuff um I found the show disturbing and fascinating uh as you do but um for the most part I thought they did a pretty good job on specifically looking at uh that cult um and not trying to lump it in with Christianity
my only real complaint for it is that when they highlighted the influencers that are tied back into that cult uh all the clips at least from what I could tell all the things they were talking about were like the normal Christian stuff they weren’t pulling clips that necessarily highlighted the like radicalness that these Cults do with the Bible so I wish they would have highlighted them saying the radical stuff versus kind of the more normal Bible scripture Jesus stuff I thought it would be good to talk about how do we
know it’s a cult versus how do we know it’s Christian and I was thinking back through the whole show and things like that and decided on some things that I’m like okay if an organization is using the Bible but they’re doing these things you might it’s a red flag at least I won’t go off and be like it’s definitely a cult but it’s at least a red flag and an unhealthy Church situation that needs to be called out so we’re going to go through some of these things if you want more about them
or a deeper dive we can go over those but I would also say like this some of this stuff applies to even churches that have gone bad like if you haven’t listened to the podcast that’s about the fall of Martin it’s called the rise and fall of Mars Hill that’s what it’s called um it’s by Christianity today it was like a deep dive expose on how Mars Hill collapsed basically which was this huge like one of the first huge multi-site churches in America back I want to say early 2000s is when it
collapsed I can’t remember when they started um but right around that era and it just one day didn’t exist anymore like I remember the Sunday wherever he’s like did you hear about Mars Hill they just closed up shop um and it was really bizarre and it was kind of hush-hush and it was before like tons of like social media kind of stuff like if that had happened during The Tick Tock days I can only imagine what all the tick tocks would have been um so they kind of lucked out on that but the podcast is really good because
it does a deep dive into the unhealthy things that allow churches to go bad um which I think are also the same kind of bad things that allow Cults to happen I think the biggest difference between churches that go bad and Cults is that and I mean this is just me outside looking in opinion kind of thing in a cult the main guy is trying to be the main guy like they’re using maybe the Bible or some other text but for the most part like they’re they’re saying like I’m I’m the bee’s knees like I’m
I’m the second coming of Jesus like whatever the weird stuff is that they’re saying like I’m the top dog and they might refer to God and stuff but like their name is the name in churches that go bad I think they are still convincing themselves and others that God is the main show but behind the scenes it’s not so on surface level I would say that’s probably why churches go bad versus becoming Cults kind of thing but these are these are the red flags that I came up with uh so if you want to know if
you’re in a if you’re in an unhealthy Church situation or if you might be in a cult this this is what I want you to highlight so uh person versus Jesus so are they primarily pointing to Jesus or are they primarily pointing to a person or an Earthly thing or even is a person becoming the most important thing versus everything else uh so I’ve been in some unhealthy Church situations um for a variety of different stuff and I and even in the Mars Hill if you look back I’d say um a lot of like on the surface they might say
they’re talking about Jesus or talking about God but if you actually look at the substance of what’s being talked about it’s not necessarily about Jesus and God it’s about either uh cultural things it highlights more feel good stuff it highlights more of Personality it highlights more of just things that aren’t specifically Jesus in the Bible if if the majority of what they’re talking about is not Jesus in the Bible then that’s a red flag for me another red flag is fear versus love and I think
this is like such a big marker and I wish I would have spoken up in some situations more so that look there’s too much fear in here for this to be healthy um so even on healthy churches there is a dynamic of fear like I’m scared of feeling like I’m scared of a person I’m scared of losing my job I’m scared of losing my position I’m scared of whatever if you listen to the Mars Hill stuff you’ll hear a lot of fear and there were people that still didn’t want to do it out of didn’t want to do the
interview process out of fear or it took a while for them to get to the point where they weren’t afraid of doing the interview and in shining happy people there like they talk about fear and how they’re scared of their dads or they’re scared of the head guy or scared of what the community will do and there’s just so much fear and one of the things that the Bible says is perfect love drives out all fear and God is love and so if the root of your belief system is grounded in fear versus Grace and love I
would question how healthy that Faith system is um and that would be a red flag for me the next red flag is hierarchies is there a stated hierarchy and I’m not necessarily talking about Staffing because I work in a church we have an org chart but it is a progression of responsibility more than it is a progression of authority so we look at it as a who and what am I responsible for and the further up you become uh the the next levels always have to do with I am responsible for this thing and these people responsible not in charge of as
authoritarian but my job is to make sure that they are growing healthy cared for encouraged and quipped empowered for the things that they are called to be that God has called them to do and so if your leadership is not looking at leadership from the realm of responsibility and um empowerment and equipping but they’re looking at it as I’m in charge of you so you have have to do what I tell you to do that’s a red flag um that’s a red flag and Paul is very clear that we shouldn’t think of ourselves better than others we
shouldn’t have a we shouldn’t care that that person’s popular and I want to be more with popular people than the not popular people it shouldn’t be popularity like he talks about this whole human Dynamic of thinking that certain people are better than other people and wanting to be with the better people versus the not better people and if that Dynamic is happening within your church World um red flag like consider that maybe this isn’t healthy and it’s definitely not biblical to have a hierarchy where we
say this person’s more important than this person another thing that I would challenge is do they encourage you to learn scriptures on your own or are they giving you the materials with the understanding of the scriptures that they want you to understand uh and that’s a red flag for me you should always encourage people to yes listen to sermons listen to teachers listen and and read and learn and understand but you have to be a student and go back to the Original Scriptures and ask God what is it that you need to understand of
them and what is he really talking about because it is so easy to take things out of context been happening probably for almost as long as the Bible has existed but we like to cherry pick scriptures and make them mean certain things so we like to cherry pick scriptures that tell us that God’s gonna give us money and abundance and happy lives and ignore all the scriptures that God that Jesus is saying it’s not going to be easy they hated me so they’re going to hate you uh there’s that whole dichotomy
and so even if your your culture feels good challenge and and verify like is this actually healthy biblical Christian culture because we can’t just be happy shiny people all the time and unhealthy churches can also feel good and promising but we have to say is this what the Bible’s actually saying like if they are not encouraging you to go back to the Bible and look at what they’re saying against the Bible I would challenge I would say red flag and in Shiny Happy People they had those like booklet things for their
homeschooling program or whatever that this is how you learned what you’re supposed to learn and that is a red flag like you should be prioritizing your Bible versus these very specific learning programs so if they aren’t encouraging you to go and learn the Bible on your own that’s a red flag for me another thing to be aware of is accountability and consequences and I’ll just say the church as a whole healthy or not or cult doesn’t do this part well like this is this is a growing point for every single
church and it’s because when you’re in the depths of it with people and you build relationships it’s hard to say I don’t think you’re doing this right or I don’t think you’re the healthiest person um especially if there’s a hierarchy system like it’s hard to have accountability when people say I’m more important than you are I have more power than you so looking at how churches your church deals with accountability and consequences is a big standing on how healthy is this organization and how
biblical is the organization because Matthew 18 tells us how to have biblical healthy Christian accountability and I just listened to a podcast by Carrie muhoff he’s going through an Integrity series which I really am liking right now I think I think it is something that needs to be talked about more in the Christian and Christian leadership world is the need for better Integrity but he had somebody on I’m putting the book on my to read list and I’ll I’ll link the book below I can’t remember exactly what
it’s called but it’s basically like how christian celebrities are harming the church and it’s this whole look at the sensationalism we’ve allowed certain church leaders um to gain and it’s the whole entertainment aspect we’ve added to church world that is definitely unhealthy but um Liberty pastor and the unhealth there and um and everything around it that’s what the book’s about but uh they talked in that interview about the fact I want to say Henry cloud is the one that said it
but the recommendation that if you have a feeling where you are removed from your church World um because of one of the red flags that I’ve talked about or moral sailings or whatever it is or if you’ve if you’ve been removed from church leadership and need to um better yourself in order to go back um the recommendation is 10 years before you re-enter Church world and uh uh Carrie knewoff said that like nobody’s taken him up on that challenge to wait 10 years before re-entering because a lot of times those
personalities they they thrive in that environment which is part of the problem and they need that time to get healthy but they’d rather just fit like just be good enough to get back versus actually good enough to be healthy and so that’s a great interview I’ll link below as well but how does your church handle accountability and consequences um do they just say oh he went to counseling and it’s all good now do they remove them and validate the victims through their process um do they smear everybody
um in the Pro like there is a healthy balance between letting everything out of the closet and saying absolutely nothing there is a a balance between these two and I think a lot of it has to do with whoever the victims are in a particular situation when churches go bad so I would say in a lot of these cases it should be determined by the victims and it it’s such a nuanced thing in Shiny Happy People we see how the victims were blamed basically which is totally not the way to do it but I think too you don’t want to just air everybody’s dirty
laundry because that doesn’t help the victims either like telling everything that happened isn’t good for them either and so I think there is so much Nuance wrapped around what was what happened and what will help the victim heal and what will make the church membership better in order for this not to happen again I think that is what has to happen in each situation and there aren’t rules for it you have to deal with each situation individually but what I will say is if you are in the church world and unhealthy culture is
happening there’s hurts happening um accountability and consequences need to be evaluated and it’s red flagging in your area I would say read the Church of Tove uh that was that was one that I read that was recommended and I read recently they actually look at the Willow Creek situation and everything that happened there so it’s a different Church than the whole Mars Hill exploration and there’s a lot of similarities between those two situations but I would recommend that as a read so the way I want to wrap things
up is how do we make sure that we keep from being in a cult or how do we recognize that we’re in an unhealthy Church culture or keep ourselves from being in these kinds of situations and the number one way the number one way to know that you are in a community that is seeking God versus a community that is seeking self is to read your Bible you have to hear from God and understand God better than you hear from other people and it’s probably something I’ll mention so many times because it was it was like a real
like gut punch moment for me when I read this uh but in the book uh the ruthless elimination of hurry he somewhere in there he makes a comment basically of how we can’t hear we can’t get secondhand Holy Spirit um it’s not healthy and basically I don’t remember the exact wording but basically it was this concept that are we reading devotions and watching other people talk about scriptures more than we’re actually in the scripture spending time with God and that’s when things get hairy when people are relying on
secondhand Holy Spirit meaning they’re relying on what other people tell them other people say all that kind of stuff rather than going back to the source and saying is this really what the Bible is saying um that’s when things get Harry and so the number one way to be able to pass the sniff test to see is real Christianity or counterfeit Christianity is to read your Bible and verify everything through the lens of this is what Jesus actually taught us to do is this what’s actually happening no can it be redeemed or does it need to be
tossed entirely the whole Happy Shiny People and that whole system of belief that’s a dumpster fire like that that just needs to be gotten rid of entirely there is no Redemption I think there is no redeeming of that system of belief because it’s just it’s just humanized Christianity like it uses the language but none of the actual belief system um now that doesn’t mean that unhealthy churches can’t be redeemed and I think with humility and church leaders making hard choices that’s how you get back to the way
things are supposed to be the church I’m at now uh had one of those moments uh decades ago um the senior pet the guy that was the senior pastor when I came on staff when they hired him uh the church had been declining and the elders knew at that time the Elders of that time knew they needed to make a change they needed to bring Health into the organization or the church wasn’t going to exist anymore it was already declining it was already Insider focused it was already just unhealthy culture and so they hired the
guy that was a senior Minister when I came in church declined like a bunch of people left because they didn’t want things to change unhealthy people that don’t know they’re unhealthy don’t want Health but over time because the leaders of that time made a hard decision they did what was not popular but what was right they did what was biblical versus what the culture of even that church said that they should do the church grew and got healthy over time and we and there have always been slip UPS here and
there there are always things that are going to happen because the church is full of humans and humans are all broken messy people it doesn’t matter how long you walk with Jesus you still stumble and trip and fall sometimes and the goal of the church in those moments is to do what restores all people back to God and the way he intends us to be so that that’s the ultimate goal of the church is to help people become more christ-like and make decisions that help people become more christ-like in a healthy Church culture so that’s my take
on some red flags in the church and some recommendations on how to identify unhealthy Church culture and some recommendations on maybe how to learn how to get a little more healthy so so thanks for joining me uh I hope this video is beneficial and if it was make sure to hit the like button hit subscribe so you never miss another episode and we’ll see you next time weirdest
