Best Way to Protect My Children
The best way to prepare and protect my children from wolves in the church is to do what I need to anyway.  I should be helping them seek Christ.  I should be giving them and understanding and respect for God’s word.  So, what can I do?  No matter what church I attend, or how great the teaching is for children, my husband and I can teach them at home.   It is actually required of us as parents to train them up in the way they should go. For us, though we’ve been less than consistent, it means reading scripture to them and discussing it or explaining it as we go along.  It means praying with them daily.  It means setting up times in their day to study

Rotten Fruit/What Has Spiritual Formation Done for One Pastor?
In speaking with those who have left, I am consistently hearing that our former pastor was confrontational to anyone who spoke up. Now, those who left that I know well enough are all very kind people who think very carefully on their faith. They are either hurt or are trying hard to avoid bitterness because of how this pastor dealt with them. I am wondering if this will come out in the survey? If you are looking at the fruit in our former church, you will see a rotten temper with our former pastor, that is for sure. So, if you “go deeper” with spiritual formation, this is what you get? If it were just us, I’d say it’s possible we made some mistake

Repeat After Me
Friends, say this, “I am a living stone” and “I am a priest” Turn to your neighbor and say, “you are my priest.”  Congratulations pastor, you just had a sexual predator, who is not one of God’s elect say he is a living stone and declare he is someone’s priest.  There’s also a thief, a liar, and a mother who beat her child just before service.  Even some out there are nice in our eyes, but are still not saved, are still not sinners and have just said they are someone else’s priest.  Now, if that sexual predator has become regenerated and is saved, that’s a different story.  However, making a m

I’m Getting Tired of Emotionality
Fake emotionality, I cannot stand it.  I am emotional by nature, and wear my heart on my sleeve.  Still, in church and in marketed Christianity, a wavering voice and emotional story can be used.  Sure, it’s great to hear a good testimony, but if it’s used to convince people of a lie or a compromise in the church, it’s wrong.  I don’t know how many testimonies I’ve heard that attempt to manipulate my behavior.  It’s not just a story, it’s a prompting through emotion to support a church, to join the current program or event, to become part of a group, to go to a retreat, and on and on.  Sometimes people praise God through th

My flaws…
I always check my thougths with a few people I trust when it comes to discerning what someone is up to in the church.  I seek out leadership or wise counsel because I don’t always trust my own motive when trying to figure out if somneone is right or wrong.  This is because I may have the human agenda of assuming too quickly that a leader or person is choosing evil in their error, when in fact it might be an oversight on their part.  I ask those around me if they can see the trend I’m seeing.  I have found though, that some people I trust don’t have open eyes for discernment.  I have lost patience at times when I continue to see problems and someon