On a recent trip to Sydney, I found myself standing outside the convention centre in Darling Harbour having a strong flashback to 1996 to one of the most memorable sermons I’ve ever heard. The constant refrain in the sermon was “the Church is the hope of the world”. The speaker at the time was global authority on ‘seeker sensitive’ church growth and church-based evangelism. This was my first conference as a pastor in Australia and I returned home energised, with my passion for evangelism and church leadership burning brighter than ever before.

As I stood outside the convention centre having my flashback, I also considered how things have changed with the passage of time. I’m still passionate about evangelism and church leadership but the speaker is no longer a global authority and has had to resign under a cloud. The rise and eventual fall of Bill Hybels brought a significant degree of confoundment upon believers who held him in high regard. In recent times the evangelical world has been rocked by scandals that have seen other globally recognised figures subsumed by controversy: James MacDonald, Carl Lentz, Brian Houston, Mike Bickle and Ravi Zacharias but name a few.

The cult of personality is the antithesis of Christianity and yet it is what props up many evangelical movements. Each movement that has relied on the charismatic individual is starting to fall apart.

Phil Duncalfe

The victims associated with many of these controversies must navigate what faith looks like for them in the aftermath. Faith and spirituality can be a supportive and comforting resource when things are going well inside the church. However, for victims of abuse, their relationships to God and their faith community can become complicated. They are painfully wounded, and this wound can lead to a range of secondary losses.  Many struggle to enter a church again and struggle to find God amidst the chaos and loss of trust.

All Is Not Well With Our Soul

If you are in any doubt about the degree to which the evangelical church is mired in abuse spend a little time reading The Roys Report. Journalist Julie Roys originally established it as a personal blog that has grown into an independent media outlet that concentrates on “reporting the unvarnished truth about what’s happening in the Christian community so the church can be reformed and restored.” Roys network of investigative journalists keep uncovering a depressing amount of evidence about how the church is a place where countless people are hurt rather than healed. Read her website at your own risk.

People On Pedestals

Matt Reynolds writing in Firebrand online magazine provides an interesting perspective:

While I would never want to suggest anything that undermines the personal culpability of those who have perpetrated evil, I do have the sense that those of us in the larger Christian world who have helped shape this subculture are not blameless. We have created a church that desires “winners” above all else. Much like in the American sports scene or our appalling political landscape, we in the church have a tendency to look the other way for those we think will get us closer to the end we desire. Never mind if someone is a terrible human; just help us hang another championship banner in the arena. Disregard any personal depravity, just as long as we win the election and pass preferred policies. In the church growth era, where success has been measured by attendance rather than the depth of sacrificial discipleship, this is not surprising. We are reaping the fruit of the shallow seeds we have sown for decades.

Reynolds reflects the deep unease many within evangelicalism feel about the elevation of personalities onto pedestals and the exalted position we give these leaders. The loyalty, adulation and trust placed in these personalities exacerbate the degree of moral injury that is caused when people discover the truth about them.

Phil Duncalfe reflects this in his article ‘Evangelicals, New Frontiers, and the Cult of Personality’:

You may not be aware but there is a seismic shift happening in evangelicalism, possibly even a death knell, but more hopefully a reformation. Over the last few years there has been scandal after scandal of celebrity teachers, preachers, and evangelists who have fallen from grace.

It’s taken victims, most often women, years to have their voices heard, often after being smeared by their abuser’s slander and attacked by their abuser’s defenders. The cult of personality is the antithesis of Christianity and yet it is what props up many evangelical movements. Each movement that has relied on the charismatic individual is starting to fall apart.

Whilst the focus of downfalls or exposes is on the personality themselves, you rarely see an analysis of the countless people who have been burned in the process and who suffer from moral injury as a result. For many, it completely ruins their capacity for a functional faith and they drift out the church and have a strained and complex relationship with God.

 Mark Hampton writing for the Gospel Coalition in an article entitled ‘How to Spot a Personality Cult’ gives us three warning signs: shameless self-promotion, numbers mattering the most, and a trail of dissenters.

He offers some key diagnostic questions:

• Is the personality humble, approachable, and servant-minded? Is the personality only in front of people but never beside them?
• Do social media encourage you to follow Jesus, or the personality?
• Do you see candid photos of the personality, or only images of success?
• Does the personality share leadership with others?
• Does it seem that by following this personality you are buying a product that makes you an insider?
• Does the personality show any accountability?
• If the personality left the faith, would you feel compelled to do the same?

Star Billing

In over 10 years working at a national denominational level, I often found myself in meetings discussing potential speakers for the many conferences we hosted. I found a strong and perpetual resistance to inviting anyone from within Australia, and a strong preference for someone from overseas who was a recognised personality. We needed a personality to be a drawcard, and that personality needed to be from overseas. Without that factor it was felt that we wouldn’t be able to attract enough interest. Even though most overseas speakers have very little about mission in our context, the many options we had within Australia were overlooked. The subject matter was never enough, we needed personalities. This is also reflected in much more hip missional circles – conferences usually have a star billing of leading missional figures as an attraction.

This reflects aspects of our culture that suggest that we are witting collaborators in the cult of personality, and thereby willing co-authors to our suffering in the aftermath of the failing of people who we elevate onto pedestals of our own making.

As leaders have a responsibility to imitate Christ, of whom we know that he came in a manner which contradicts our concepts of leadership and power:  “For even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” Mark 10:45. As followers we have a responsibility to resist contributing towards an inversion of the values of Christian leadership. If we manage that we can remove many of the levers and preconditions of abuse, minimising damage to people.

Is the Church the Hope of the World?

And so, I found myself back at that place in Sydney Harbour where an uber-personality from the States filled the conference venue all those years ago, thousands eating out of his hand as he told wonderous stories about what God was doing in a supersize church in Barrington Illionis – a million miles away from our relatively little churches in a culture that the speaker didn’t understand. I’m sure we all hoped that our mere presence at the feet of this modern-day apostle would result in us taking back at least some of the magic to our own contexts.

He said that the church was the hope of the world, and I felt that strongly and passionately, and still do. To be more precise Jesus is the hope of the world, but it is within the context of churches across our nation (and in other contexts) that people encounter faith and experience the transformation that can only come from God.

A middle-aged psychologist I work with recently became a Christian through the influence of her daughter who attends a Baptist church. She is getting baptised in the New Year and the joy that her new faith has resulted in is infectious. Her whole family is being transformed. It is a reminder of the transformative power of the Gospel, faithfully extended by a local church. My prayer is that her experience in future years will not result in disappointment and moral injury. It’s for this reason that we have to keep a constant eye out like restless shepherds, to ensure that a place of hope does not become a place of trauma.

In Part 3 we look at the role of church conflict in trauma and moral injury.