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Feb 11 • 21 tweets • 7 min read
Lessons Learned after seeing a decade of #SpiritualAbuse and #Racism #Threads

Heres's the story.
Public sin needs public repentance and restitution for the sin in particular.

No one in the church has authority in and of themselves:

Service to the Lord should never be at the expense of our or our family's emotional needs/health:
Organizations and churches that are addicted to power in the guise of "truth" will always demonize those who speak out against their abuse.
The Confessionalism that I saw turned into an evasion of modern problems and social issues that face people in every pew.

Word and Sacrament ministry cannot stand w/o the Fruit of the Spirit.

A sacerdotalism worse than Medieval Rome is alive and well in Reformation churches.
It’s easy to stand up for Justification or the Trinity or Confessionalism in the Reformed world. It’s hard to stand up to abusers, racists, and bigots that you’ve helped create.

But that’s actually what faithfulness looks like in that context.
We need to understand the social contexts of *why* we choose to have abusive leaders & why are they are so appealing if we are to create healthier cultures & systems of power.
Forgiveness and Reconciliation are conflated and misunderstood:

Without thriving counter-cultures of hospitality and grace, we will not be able to teach human hearts and minds about the gospel of grace. We won't be able to keep our kids, let alone teach them.

An overemphasis on the intellectual and cognitive aspects of Christianity led to emotional immaturity and overlooking blatant abuse:
Healing and processing one's wounds were never emphasized before ministry and therefore led to cascading problems:

Sadly, though, we are addicted to toxic, abusive leaders in the church and in society.

Abuse and spiritual trauma remove one's voice and agency while the Gospel renews them. This is the fruit of faithful ministry:
Abusive systems are based on secrecy and fear but Christianity is about openness and vulnerability with self-compassion:
Usually, we are blind to tyrants and abusers because we are addicted to the myth of influence/security.

The Gospel is *NOT* just a truth claim
Too much conservative Reformed and evangelical theology is theologically enabling abuse.
Without a recovery of a politics of peace in the church, the gospel of grace will make little headway in our actual lives.

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More from @word_water_wine

Timothy Massaro Profile picture
Feb 9
Bavinck against Capitalism

"Today's Christianity is narrow-minded & selfish. One evil day it enlisted in the service of wealth and power, thus positioning itself over against the sick and the weak. The altar today serves only to protect the throne.
The priest has lowered himself to be an accomplice of the monarch, & the church has become a mainstay of capitalism. But original Christianity had an entirely different purpose. It opposed all competition btwn social classes. It wanted community & cooperation of its members.
It recommended harmony and love such as exist between members of the same body. If the Christian religion of today wants to regain its lost influence and become a blessing to society, its attitude will have to change radically.
Read 5 tweets
Timothy Massaro Profile picture
Feb 4
Spiritual Abuse and #Racism at the @WhiteHorseInn @Core_Christ @MichaelHorton_ and the URCNA.

I wanted to share part of my story and the #spiritualabuse that I experienced in seminary @wscal, in a confessional Reformed church, and in working for a Reformed non-profit.
Between listening to the podcast on the fall of Mars Hill, seeing the abuse around John Piper and his school, the doubling down of institutional support in many corners of Reformed Evangelicalism, and the continued retrenchment of white
supremacy in Christian culture, I’m so quickly reminded of the spiritual abuse and racism that I saw in my time in the URCNA (United Reformed Churches in North America) and at WSCAL and the White Horse Inn with Michael Horton.
Read 94 tweets
Timothy Massaro Profile picture
Nov 16, 2021
Sadly, “service to the Lord” in American church culture often means taking on unreasonable expectations & duties for the church.

This often leads to sacrificing one’s family on the altar of the ministry, and this can happen very accidentally.
To quote Arcade Fire, ministry today often means “working for the church while your family dies.”
But this is not a godly sacrifice but a lack of boundaries that causes one to emotionally abandon oneself & one’s family.

The lack of emotional self-awareness in ministry can be devastating to one’s family and can lead to a real emotional abandonment on many levels.
Read 16 tweets
Timothy Massaro Profile picture
Nov 15, 2021
What’s the common thread and theme that holds Evangelicals together in America? It’s the adoption of a political ontology of power that holds on to the American dream of Empire — whether they are baptist or charismatic or non-denom or confessional Reformed— that’s the linchpin.
The folks that stand out against this tradition are the anomalies, not the borders or keepers of this movement. Only those who have a distinct political ontology can withstand the pressures to fall in line with that. But not many have offered a different metaphysic robust enough.
Many pastors and teachers who have opposed this American imperialism thought that they could opt for a kind of “political neutrality”. In the end, this leaves congregants at the mercy of what news channel they listen to.
Read 7 tweets
Timothy Massaro Profile picture
Sep 20, 2021
We need to understand the social contexts of *why* we choose to have abusive leaders & why are they are so appealing if we are to create healthier cultures & systems of power. We need to understand this dynamic if we are to root out why our Christian cultures are often so blind.
Why are we addicted to toxic, abusive leaders in the church and in society? Why do we so readily put up with them?
I think ultimately we do so out of fear. We fear the social breakdown that we see all around us.

We cannot control the forces of politics, nature, religion that seem to steal away the good life we want so desperately so we turn to the "powerful."
Read 13 tweets
Timothy Massaro Profile picture
Aug 24, 2021
If so much of Scripture is poetry, song, and apocalypse, why doesn't our theology/teaching/preaching sound like that? We need to recover the mythopoetic resonances of Scripture since that is how we capture the imagination and how God chooses to reveal himself.
Liberals look at the mythopoetic aspects of Scripture, see that they are really there, but conclude the Bible cannot be true.

Conservatives adopt the same historical positivism and essentialism and conclude that these aspects can be literalized and quantified & therefore true.
They both adopt the false binary of myth vs. fact. Myth vs truth.

When in reality, God uses the mythical language to reveal transcendence and uses categories that are effulgent and apocalyptic to move us to awe and reverence before God who transcends our categories.
Read 8 tweets

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