I Thought That Looked Familiar

I’ve been following a fair bit of online discussion about ‘spiritual abuse’ and leaving churches, a trek through the interwebs that took me to The Wartburg Watch 2024. The website looked eerily familiar and the writing tone and subject matter rang a distant bell, so I did a little research. Sure enough, a decade ago I wrote a post about the biblical roles of the sexes prompted by something John Piper said that TWW reported.

Since early 2009, Wartburg has documented and debated cases of spiritual abuse, theological fads, controlling pastors and other church issues, as their mission page declares.

Too Hot to Handle: No-Fault Separation

In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.

Immanuel Can: I’ve got something on my mind this morning, Tom.

I was reading this article. Now, this is an old and still-debated topic, and I don’t deny that the author probably has some good points. But what struck me about this article were several things.

The author asks why it is that people leave a church, and then he goes on to suggest three reasons. In order, they are: (a) our subculture (by which he actually seems to mean the larger, secular culture of consumerism); (b) expectations (and he emphasizes in particular the tendency to forget that the church is a “family”); and (c) the “fatal assumption” … that newer is better (which, by some sort of path, “leads the average church goer to hold the opinion that it is better to be served than to serve”).

Too Hot to Handle: No-Fault Separation

The most recent version of this post is available here.