Some ex-RP people put this together in the last few weeks. We were sharing our experience of leaving the RP church. As we talked about our stories and the stories of those we know, a sickening pattern emerged. Every male in the discussion as well as others I knew were generally given their form, and few of the forms had the ominous "outside the church there is no ordinary means of salvation." Generally no follow up texts, e-mails or calls came from the church.
Women, however, had a completely different experience. They pretty much all got the warning on the form, and not only that, they were repeatedly called, texted and e-mailed (harassed) between the time they sent their notice to the church and the time the church "allowed" them to leave.
A former OPC member said that her previous pastor and elder knew she worked at Starbucks, and started meeting each other regularly for coffee when she left the church.
I think there is a sick and twisted doctrine behind this and, while I endured a bit of it, I think when it comes to women, the RP leadership has decided to double down. When I informed my church I was leaving, a couple of elders asked to meet with me. I had no real issues at that point. One tried to enumerate my sins and suggest he would be happy to work on them with me (hard pass!). The other, however, talked about how we had similar concerns and how we could jointly be a positive influence for change. What he said afterwords, though, was shocking and disgusting. He said that he saw making membership vows to be a "marriage", and that the church should "give me away" to my new church, like a father gives away a bride to a spouse. (Don't think women would sign up for being given away by their ex-husbands!!!) Others who left have also been subjected to this line of reasoning.
That's why I think women are so much more harassed then men. Maybe the dots don't connect so nicely when when the church wants to give away men, but when it's WOMEN, it must feel to these men like their daughters are eloping. How dare they! In that way, they feel like they really need to push for a proper "wedding", even if it requires harassment and abusive pressure. That's how many women have described the leaving process:
- Immediately, the resources of the Session are devoted to winning the person back. That might be constant texts, knocks on doors, e-mails, visits from other members talking about how important they are, etc.
- Fear and legalism. People are told (erroneously) that they must leave the church "the right way" - that their membership vows are permanently binding. That they must meet with the Session and "request" to leave or transfer.
- They're told that they must inform the Session where they intend to go. (Don't do this!) Women have said that their RP pastor contacted or met with the pastor of their new church and poisoned the well.
- Some have been threatened with discipline if they don't follow "the process" (the process is whatever hoops the Session decides they must go through, BTW)
- I know some families that were manipulated into shaming their daughters/sisters. I think the fact this is a common tactic creates a familial pressure within the RPCNA, and part of the reason this blog is currently anonymous - for me and my family's sake.
16 comments:
I'm not sure I've ever heard of "giving away" a member to his/her new church. It sounds like it's SUPPOSED to be some kind of a beautiful metaphor, but it really doesn't work. Thank you for rubbishing it the way it deserves.
The rest of this is ..... well, if I trusted in my church leaders the way I trust in God, it would be faith-shattering. And for someone who wants to completely deconstruct their faith for exactly this reason, it can feel very hollow to respond, "I know this is what you went through, but hold on to God; He's better than this .... even though all the evidence you have from these people who say they're His ministers tells you completely the opposite." And although the lawyer in me is very much in favor of procedure (maybe to a fault, as my wife can attest), this is all very abusive and 100% not okay.
It's weird. It's not so much of a trust as a forced representation. What I mean by that is a different facet of what I've said before, that the system is more important than the members and must be protected at all costs.
So, maybe in some sense, the RP church acknowledges that its leaders are fallible, but what we hear week after week is that they are Spiritually gifted to speak to your situation, that they are Spiritually gifted to be above reproach, and that they are Spiritually gifted to be Christ's representatives to you.
When elders do questionable things (like an elder telling me that my "concerns" about marriage curriculum were "evidence" that my marriage was bad and I really needed that curriculum) the church seems to want to double down on the Spiritual gifts of the leaders and not acknowledge their fallibility.
That cognitive dissonance is hard to shake. Every kid starts out thinking their parents are good parents. Maybe they accumulate enough evidence to back up their thinking, maybe they slowly realize the truth, or maybe, like me, they may have seen a small crack in the glass here and there, but next thing they know, the entire pane lies in millions of fragments on the floor.
I think that's a good analogy for what many lifelong RP'ers experience. They grow up thinking that the theology is polished and precise, that the leadership is loving and exemplary, that their own families are superior, but when enough of the cracks join together, their whole life is millions of fragments on the floor.
This is true, to some extent, in my case, but what about women and children who were brought up in this environment, were abused in one way or another, and found that the "loving and exemplary" leaders cared more about the reputation of the offender, or the optics of the church system? It was more like having a perfect pane of glass with a hammer thrown through it.
And maybe I haven't been clear enough on the authoritarian system. The system promotes the authorities as being essentially equivalent to God. I'm thankful that my new church is not authoritarian. My pastor doesn't, like so many NAPARC pastors, believe that his words preached are "thus saith the Lord!", but are his understanding and his opinion. He wants them to be God's words, but he doesn't claim that they are. Reading NAPARC pastor blogs - and hearing sermons (I could send you links!) these pastors truly believe they are speaking God's words!
Here's a quote from an RP sermon that I think illustrates the point: "One of the ways we can prepare ourselves for worship is to be in the word during the week. But it sharpens us, it familiarizes us, it exposes us to the word, and then we come in on the Lord's day and we have it pressed upon us in an objective way, and believe me, this happens to preachers as well. When we read our Bibles on our own, so often we can wiggle out from underneath what it's teaching. How often do we read a passage of scripture and we think oh, my wife really needs to hear that or my son or my daughter really needed to hear that? I don't know that it comes naturally to us, we want to let ourselves off the hook, and that's the benefit of preaching. It's that means wherein God objectively presses his word onto his people conforms us into his image, convicts us of our sin, shows us that there is forgiveness and hope in Christ."
Note the contrast between our (including the pastor's) personal/private understanding of scripture and what is preached. This pastor believes, and is preaching that his preaching of scripture is "objective", not subjective like the understanding his members have. It's essentially "papal infallibility" of the preached word. Now, how is a member supposed to deal with that coming from the pulpit? It's spiritual abuse and cognitive dissonance and designed to elevate church leaders while simultaneously sowing doubt in the minds of members.
If you have the link to that sermon, I'd like to listen to it. I not too long ago heard a sermon that felt somewhat similar (https://www.sermonaudio.com/sermoninfo.asp?SID=42623152265778).
Perhaps the hardest truth about meta-sermons like this is that in some contexts their messages are true and need to be taken in, and in some contexts they need to be run from as quickly as possible. The difference, I think, really hinges on whether the pastor/preaching being described is itself trustworthy and faithful to the whole of Scripture.
If you're going to preach about preaching, this difference is a crucial note that you need to point out clearly, carefully, explicitly, and at length, together with an emphatic call for every hearer to be a Berean searching the Scriptures about everything they hear -- and if it lines up, THEN treat it as the very Word of God. Where this kind of sermon falls short, for me at least, is where this sort of response from the congregation is mostly assumed (and thus little mentioned) or else downplayed (and thus little mentioned).
Here's the link I got: https://www.sermonaudio.com/sermoninfo.asp?SID=41191824414286
I think the main concern brought up to me was that it essentially reversed the Reformation principles and put the pastor back in a priestly role. IIRC, Ryce does this by essentially saying that once the canon is complete, the Holy Spirit's work comes primarily (if not solely) through the means of grace, most specifically, the preached word. He positively quotes another theologian who says, "private reading of the scriptures is not sufficient to lead us to salvation." In essence, the Holy Spirit cannot work through the Word of God. Only the PREACHED Word of God. [ I think "means of grace" is a codeword for this line of reasoning ]
And here is how the gnosticism shows up: 43:26 "Our God is never pleased with nor does he ever give us warrant in the word to manifest before him a critical, fault-finding spirit where we are actively searching out for things to complain about during the preaching of his word. ... Brothers and sisters last time I checked, a critical spirit is not among the fruit of the Spirit that is given unto us in Galatians chapter 5. Now a being a discerning and attentive hearer of proclaimed truth, seeking knowledge, that's completely different, because a discerning heart harbors with it a learning, a humbled spirit that is more ready and willing to find fault with self, rather than inflict it upon God's messenger or on His message."
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So, a "critical" listener is one who might question whether the pastor is telling the truth, whereas a "discerning" listener is one who doesn't question the pastor, but instead assumes what the pastor says is true and is self-critical. This is authoritarian garbage. The Bereans were commended for being critical of Paul's sermon. When they did not find fault with Paul's preaching, they accepted it as the truth. What sort of self-delusion does it take for a pastor to say, "I'm speaking the very Word of God, with equal authority to Christ, and if you disagree, it's your lack of discernment, not anything I've done wrong."
It's another false dichotomy. He equivocates "critical" with "desiring to complain", not "trying to determine the truth", and then presents his only alternative, which is accepting what the pastor says unquestioningly and instead finding fault in our own heart for anything we might disagree with. This is pure evil.
I'm not sure I would have come up with the word equivocation (I tend to think of it only as having the intent to deceive or obfuscate, which I'm not sure is what's going on here), but as a description for the dissonant effect produced on the listener I think it's pretty accurate.
When taken in its major emphases, the sermon produces one message, which you've amply demonstrated here. When taken in its entirety, it produces another message, one that is rather more benign and, I would say, orthodox/accurate/biblical. The former is the more likely to be received in the first hearing, taking the speaker's main points as key and leaving aside the smaller points as less important -- essentially, what you would typically do as a congregant in the pew. It's what the sermon's organization invites you to do.
The latter message requires careful attention, a lot of critical listening (in the sense in which you correctly used it), and some background understanding in order to find. It's also probably easier to catch if one has the luxury to read the sermon in written form rather than hearing it preached (always a potential danger of tied-to-a-manuscript speakers who don't have a good ear for how their sermons/speeches sound).
There are a host of problems with this 2-message format, and while I would tend to default to attributing it to carelessness on the preacher's (in this case Mr. Turner's) part, I also recognize that it is the type of arrangement that a nefarious character could intentionally use to press his thumb down on his flock while also providing cover to his rear end in case someone calls him out. Whatever the actual intent, then, the effect is the same either way, and it is not good.
The sermon by Mr. Ryce is closer to an unforced error, and is definitely a "didn't have to go there" section at the end of an otherwise-sound message. Why did he bother?
Or he could have still included it but rescued it by saying that we need BOTH private worship and public worship, a relationship with God individually AND a relationship with His people corporately. Both are means that God has commanded us to use and that He uses to work on us, and it could/should/would have been better to have just been left at that. (I'm a little unsure about whether it would have been a good application of the passage, but I think it could have been made to fit without excessive stretching.) But no, he went straight on to the extra burden of corporate > individual. By his own admission, it sounds like he knew he was going out onto thin ice, and yeah, that's where he lost me.
What I mean by equivocation in this case is not merely saying that "pastor" is equivalent to "prophet", but he dances around the meanings of the word "prophet" and we know that he doesn't mean true equivalence, because he would certainly not say that Philip's daughters were "pastors".
The dancing is, I believe, to position himself as one who must be obeyed, but at the same time distancing himself from the black and white characteristic of OT prophets. That is, OT prophets who spoke anything in error saying it was from God were to be ignored or even killed for acting presumptuously. He wants unquestioned obedience, yet grace when he errs in the pulpit.
I disagree with the major/minor emphases. The sermon must be taken as a whole. If I spend 40 minutes saying it's never okay to question the pastor and the pastor speaks the very words of God, but sprinkle in asterisks here and there - "when he faithfully..." "manner, not content", this is not sufficient. It does, however create the ability to deflect through cognitive dissonance, "but I said, 'when he faithfully preaches'..."
IMO, the intent of cognitive dissonance is to put the congregant in a position where they feel they cannot discern truth, but a path is laid out for them that is okay. So, in this case, it's always "okay" to obey the pastor and never question him. The pastor hints here and there that he CAN be questioned, but such questioning is couched in very negative terms, like "faithfully" and "critical spirit". So, who determines when a pastor is preaching faithfully, and who determines when a member is critical vs. discerning? There is no clarity and the member is gently shoved back to the safe path of accepting the pastor as God's mouthpiece.
I listened to Jason Ryce's sermon again. The thing that struck me is that he talks about Jesus's gift of the Spirit primarily being breathing scripture to the Apostles. This is defended reasonably.
He makes two giant leaps with zero scriptural support. The first is that scripture is, in essence, incomprehensible, without the church. He makes the analogy of supplement vs. meal. So, we are fed when we hear scripture in church, but when we read scripture outside of church, it is somehow devoid of substance. This is contradictory to the teaching of scripture.
The second is that it is specifically the "preached word" that is the substance. Again, zero scriptural support. Many equivocate between "apostle" and "pastor", which he may do elsewhere, but not here.
The consequence, though, is scary - we ordinary Christians cannot approach God without an intermediary. Maybe the intermediary looks different, but still exists. We need an ordained minister to show God to us. Even after we're saved, the Holy Spirit still refuses to lead us to truth without a pastoral truth-teller.
Even what he says about the scripture doesn't correspond to the outpouring of the Spirit. What's different? Old Testament prophets performed miracles and wrote scripture. New Testament apostles performed miracles and wrote scripture. Is that what we were supposed to be looking forward to? Act 2 being a repeat of Act 1? Or is there something fundamentally different?
I think at Synod this summer they are going to review whether to continue to allow women deacons. The ones that are already deacons will remain, but no new women deacons. "I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor." - 1 Timothy 2:12-14 ESV. Is this low view of women due to Paul pointing out that women are more likely to be deceived, so they cannot be trusted with teaching?
Even the ESV which is a patriarchal interpretation does not make the jump you are making. Paul is not saying "women are more easily deceived" Paul is saying "Eve was deceived and Adam was not".
What I've read from commentators, and makes sense to me, is that Ephesus was the center of the worship of Artemis, which was female-led. Thus, like "meat sacrificed to idols", there would be a stumbling block with Christians coming out of pagan Artemis worship into the Christian church seeing women teaching. That is one facet. The other facet is that Paul is addressing the objections women coming out of pagan Artemis worship would have. They would think women to be morally and intellectually superior to men, but Paul is reminding them that women were not superior by example of their being deceived and falling into transgression.
Paul makes a similar argument in 1 Cor 11 when he says women came from men, but then he says, leveling the playing field IMO, in vs. 11-12: "However, in the Lord, neither is woman independent of man, nor is man independent of woman. For as the woman originates from the man, so also the man has his birth through the woman; and all things originate from God"
Do you eat meat sacrificed to idols?
"RPCNA has a misogyny problem"? More like, "the Bible has a misogyny problem". See Old Testament. Unrelated: do you think Moses wrote the entire pentateuch, or multiple authors? The reason I ask is because if the Bible is not a unified message, but rather a compilation of multiple authors (not as much divinely inspired), then it is harder to cherry-pick verses to support your claim that the misogyny is due to the RPCNA and not the ancient text they are using.
Obviously, Moses did not write the part of the Pentateuch where it talks about how he died, so at least one person finished it. As an Evangelical (theological, not political) I believe that the original words are inspired, and the Holy Spirit inspired many people, so the idea that a book might be suspect because Moses didn't write 100% of it seems like a moot point.
I think the Bible has a misogyny problem, just as the Bible has a slavery problem. It was written to misogynists and racist slave owners. The same sorts of arguments were used on both sides of the slavery issue, and much of it was distracting people from the big questions. Just as I would say that the Westminster Confession of Faith has holes that need to be filled in (like domineering elders), I think that taking a prescriptive approach to the Bible leads to misogyny. It's just that we don't do that elsewhere. We (although I've heard some do) aren't petitioning for cities of refuge. We aren't telling sick people to come to church for their oil anointing and prayer. So, we have to understand these passages from a perspective of where they were and where the Holy Spirit was leading. God didn't say to the Israelites, I want a temple with gothic arches, stained-glass windows, solar-powered with lithium-iron backup batteries. Maybe he would do that if he wanted one built today. Point being that the Bible is a journey with God and that journey is not complete, so we have to use God's ancient guidance to understand how he would guide us today.
I agree, and, I think Bruce Hemphill did a reasonable job of explaining how to approach the Bible's treatment of women by first understanding the broad general passages to create a Biblical lens, and then using that lens to evaluate the situational, contextual verses.
But, even in the cherry-picked verses, there is good scholarship that does not push one towards misogyny. One helpful trick is, if this passage were talking about a man would it be translated the same way? Would there be angst over a male "deacon" sent to another church? Would there be angst over whether a male was or wasn't an apostle when it was said they were "among the apostles"? We need to be careful that we are not applying OUR misogynistic lens first before reading the Bible.
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