Thread by @hlgriffin

I think about this a lot with all the tragic accounts of spiritual abuse that we have heard from the @ACNAtoo survivors of @MidwestAnglican. I believe that the leaders were sincere, but time after time they dismissed the people they were hurting. A 🧵.

https://twitter.com/LarrySnodgrass1/status/1450162411181273094

This is very easy to do if you are convinced that you are doing a better job than most at taking the Holy Spirit seriously & are deeply invested in seeing growth & transformation in the people under your care.

I believe that all the leaders of the @MidwestDiocese have probably been completely sincere in their good intentions to help people and didn't realize at the time that they were hurting people.

However, the pattern we see in the dismissiveness or inadequate follow-through of leaders to people under their care who tell them that they have either been directly harmed by the leader or by someone under the leader's supervision is deeply disturbing.

This indicates the hardness & pride of hearts that see themselves as soft and tender- hearts that are seduced by the inner witness of their own sincerity & the willingness of those around them to endorse leaders’ maturity, skill, & wisdom on the basis of sincere good intentions.

If the only people who are promoted to positions of authority agree in this assessment of their leaders and if only the training provided by the top leaders is adequate, then a culture emerges in which everyone in power has the same blindspots & weaknesses.

If the leaders have inflated views of their own maturity, health, wisdom, discernment & calling, no one in the community who has enough respect & trust to be heard will notice. They have earned trust & respect b/c they align w/ the Good identity shared by the leaders & community.

Everyone who is identified with the community & benefited from the real or inflated good that is present is going to have a vested interest in suppressing stories about the harm leaders in the community have done to others, even if that harm was inflicted without malice.

This is because leaders & community members inflate the goodness & health out of their community b/c there is some deficit of wisdom & health but high goals of what health & maturity should look like. There's a deficit between goal & capacity to meet that goal.

If we think that wanting good things & meaning true things hard enough should get us to the goal, we'll feel ashamed & discouraged at failing. There's an incentive to move the goalpost to what the leaders & community can achieve w/ their best efforts.

If not knowing how to do something effectively isn't shameful, then it's not necessarily a reflection of a moral failure on the part of leaders or of the power of God if something isn't working.

If God is good & can meet us where we are & address our mistakes, it's easier to face them. If parts of us are inclined to take our inability to do things in accordance with our goals & calling as either a shameful failure in ourselves or a deficiency in God, we'll avoid reality.

This is particularly a temptation in Christian leaders who recognize that people are hurting and that God wants to help them so much more than we allow ourselves to hope in the day to day mediocrity & low expectations of white, middle-class American Christianity.

This recognition of the suffering of others & God's willingness to help much more powerfully than what we have been expecting is usually tied to suffering in the life of the leader. They don't want other people to hurt the way they were hurt. They want to see people get healed.

They usually receive just enough healing & show just enough giftedness themselves to be promoted way too early by their own leaders. We dispense Maturity Cards readily to anyone who is sincere, gifted, has good doctrine & has made a modicum of good doctrine in Evangelicalism.

The responsibilities & burdens experienced by pastors who are even remotely attuned to the brokenness of this world are crushing. Few are trained to respond adequately & they are almost never given enough support to sustain their own growth & the flourishing of their families.

If you don't have enough support & everyone around you is looking at you like you're supposed to know what to do & how to do it, there's an incentive to block out pain or shame or negative feedback that is beyond your ability to process.

Some pastors do fine only serving people who are already doing pretty well by white, middle-class standards. Just about everyone else gets that it's not worth the risk to disclose needs that they sense may be out of his range.

For those who have vowed to help the hurting, they have to shield themselves in whatever way they can while still preserving their self-image as those who expect great things from God and care deeply for the wounded.

We all need to see ourselves that way and it may be true in a lot of areas, but none of us can handle shame or pain that exceeds our real hope in God's ability to heal, and most of us have a great deal of inflated faith & hope, so we also inflate our love.

The easiest way to evade our failures is to only surround ourselves with people who will minimize them. Those who are hurting and claim we have hurt them are categorized as complainers who have something amiss in the disposition of their souls.

In Charismaticland (and I am a charismatic) here our trusty deflection devices to describe why someone's complaint against us is valid:

1. They haven't followed proper procedure (Matt 18:15-19).

2. They must be unforgiving (especially if you sincerely said you were sorry).

3. They must have taken ungodly "offense" or be operating in ungodly "judgment." This one is especially handy if you don't agree with their assessment of your behavior. Your discernment as a leader is the one that always carries in a disagreement against someone with less power.

4. They are generally difficult & malcontented person. You've tried & you've tried & you've tried to help them. They aren't getting better w/all the sincerity you can muster to biblical goals. The problem must be with them b/c it can't be w/God & it can't be with you.

5. Their concerns are out of proportion to the mistakes you are willing to acknowledge.

6. They have failed to be satisfied w/ your sincere apology & the efforts to bring restitution that you have considered appropriate.

7. They are motivated by demonic forces & their criticism of you is a demonic attack.

8. They are liberal (maybe motivated by liberal demons?) & you are biblically conservative. These challenges are happening not because you've failed, but because you are particularly faithful.

Sometimes these explanations may be partially true at times, but we would be the last to know if we were deploying them illegitimately. Overconfidence in our own Sincerity, Good Intentions, Wisdom, & Discernment is deeply dangerous in creatures as easily self-deceived as humans.

The more pastors & leaders need to not be like those who have failed them, the more they need to see themselves as more mature and "healed" than they already are.

The harder they have worked in sincere faith & the more they have sacrificed for their ministry, the more it will cost them to face longterm failures & blindspots.

My assumption is that every Christian community has a story about themselves that is partially based on real, good things that God has done & partially on a shared fantasy of Pseudo-Hope & Pseudo-Faith that protects us from our real despair and real doubt about ourselves & God.

The part of the shared community story that is inflated & based on Pseudo-Hope & Pseudo-Faith is maintained by everyone b/c everyone they trust believes it & because facing reality in these areas is, by definition, beyond our faith and hope in God's ability to help us.

The longer the false or inflated shared Community story continues, the more it builds on itself.

Anyone who doesn't uphold it eventually leaves or is pushed out or accepts that they will not be received in the inner circle.

Everyone who was promoted to leadership under the banner of the idolatrous Community story has a lot to lose in facing reality.

To question parts of their Community's identity & story is to threaten parts of their own identities & stories.

We don't talk enough about how many pastors are drawn into ministry because older men clapped them on the back & affirmed their goodness & giftedness & callings.

If you didn't get this from your parents & have any sort of insecurity in your attachment style, receiving this kind of approval from parental figures in church is like incredibly compelling.

It's also incredibly motivating, leading many young adults to volunteer or work long hours for little pay because they are assured in the face of any doubt that this is their calling & that the substitute parents & God approve.

If aspiring leaders have doubts about their ability to handle a situation (sexual abuse allegations?) & their leaders don't show concern or endorse the young leader's judgment, what incentive wld the younger leader have to listen to that nagging voice that something isn't right?

If, as a more seasoned leader, the inflated Community Story is called into question, what kind of turmoil would leaders who had been told that their training was adequate feel if they let themselves think about all the pastoral care situations they may have mishandled?

It's not just overtly narcissistic people who have difficulty acknowledging their mistakes. It's immature or under-skilled people who have been given a Maturity Badge by their Community prematurely & were left to make mistakes while they were sincerely attempting to help people.

That's a lot of shame for anyone to face. If you really do care about people, it's incredibly painful to realize you have harmed them & may have been causing or enabling harm for years unintentionally.

If we don't have hope that God can really help with that level of pain & shame, we will not go there, especially if everyone around us is also too scared to go there.

Our perception of reality is profoundly shaped by trust and by our own agendas about the way things need to be for us to be safe.

If we feel a nagging sense that something's not right & everyone around us signals that everything's fine or that the problem is Someone Else or Something Else, we will suppress the inner alarm bell & align ourselves with the Community Story.

It's very easy for lovely people who love Jesus & are part of communities where Jesus really has shown up & helped people to suppress reality in this way. We gather with people who trust each other & have a similar agenda about the way things need to be for us all to be safe.

If you challenge the False Community story that is alongside the True Community Story, it threaten's people's identities and it threatens the goodness of God.

People will sacrifice their own children to the Family Idols in the name of Jesus to avoid threatening aspects of reality that they don't have the capacity to face, and this doesn't mean they don't love their kids in a real way.

It just means that their doubt & despair & fear & shame leads them to avoid the fact they are hurting their kids. The denial of their continued harm becomes repackaged in a shared fantasy.

When the False Community Story is under threat, look for scapegoats. Look for persecution narratives. Nothing deflects shame like anger at an enemy. Survivor's sharing their stories are framed as manifestations of demonic attack & "Cancel Culture."

Legitimate survivor anger at repeated dismissals & continued endangerment is seen as evidence that survivor concerns are illegitimate. The sincerity and good intentions of those accused of wrongdoing are seen as evidence that they couldn't really be capable of doing harm.

If our identities, sense of safety, & confidence in God's goodness & love is tied up in unhealthy ways with a False Community Story about the goodness of a leader or our Community, we will circle the wagons & do anything possible to avoid the challenges to our story.

To face the possibility that aspects of our Community Stories are false or inflated feels like death, and just about everything we do and see and think and say is an attempt to keep ourselves safe from the fear of death.

To lose a False Community Story that has been keeping us safe is to face the void where we have no hope of God's light reaching us.

It is a real kind of death, and I understand why we avoid it at all costs.

It is true that the only thing that can save us from the death of the baptism of reality in the loss of our idols and identities is the power of resurrection from a God who is beyond our current capacity to hope & trust.

May the true Lord Jesus save us from the False Jesus & bring the power of his resurrection from the death of brokenness and blindness and deafness and hardness of heart beyond what we have thought possible in people that we love and trust.

Come quickly, Lord Jesus.

*modicum of progress

*invalid

*incomplete simile transitioned to direct statement without adequate editing. Inronicly, is like a Valley Girl talking in an 80's teen movie.