My last post described the manipulation of the elders. The result was devastating and seemed to me to portend the decline in the church as a whole. When the church shifted to the industrial complex church governance model, six of the thirteen elders resigned. There was no notification of their leaving their positions by church…
Chapter 7 discusses four categories of damaged souls that I saw in analyzing the situation at FCCF: the elders, the church, the whistleblowers and most of all the victims. I found an excellent description of the manipulative personality in Martha Stout’s book, The Sociopath Next Door. Are you doubting your sense of reality? Can you…
Cannot churches learn from this advice? Oh, that they would all be willing to submit to a third-party review of policies and practices as outlined in this article: https://tcpca.org/rice-report. There is hope and healing for the wounded church and for the abused victims. Abuse cannot be shrugged off. “Pastor Jimmy turned this information into a…
Jimmy Hinton turned my head to another way of thinking with his perspective. He wrote about how his father chose victims in the book, The Devil Inside. I thought the grooming activities were the red flags of a pedophile’s technique, but abuse could have already begun by the time those become evident. The church body…
I learn from example. I watch others to see what I can do better than I did before. The trick is to discern between a good example and a bad one. Case #1 is FCCF, and Case #2 is Somerset Church of Christ. Case #1 or Case #2, you decide based on the parable comparison….
What if the voice of reason had prevailed at FCCF? What if it looked like this one suggested by a former elder? From the book: “What would happen if the elders revealed to the congregation a set of guidelines to be followed for a number of important issues? These issues might include the following list:…
For all that FCCF did wrong in their handling of abuse, I wanted an opposing example of a church that slogged through similar circumstances and did it the right way. I found it in a book written by Pastor Jimmy Hinton, The Devil Inside. I created a parable format to compare and contrast the two…
I moved out of the St. Louis area a few months after the return of the celebrity minister to the FCCF pulpit, but I took the upset, pain and anger over the treatment of the victims with me. It weighed heavy on me for over six years, until I began my effort to put the…
Is help that comes with restrictions helpful? Can the scars of abuse be dealt with in 6-12 counseling sessions? Should the church have offered to pay more than what insurance wouldn’t pay? What if the victims aren’t insured? If you re-victimize the survivors by forcing these restrictions, is that helpful or hurtful? If you fire…
There were eleven or twelve elders in 2012 when the vote to change the bylaws occurred. Five resigned because of the bylaws change. Seven elders remained at the time the news of Brandon’s arrest came out. Were you aware of the elders decline? Did the people in the pews realize the change and recognize the…
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