Category Archives: Struggles

Government Run Amuck

August 6, 2011 By in America, Bondage, Courage, Politics, State, Tyranny 1 Comment
Government Run Amuck

S&P downgraded the United States last night.

I hope and pray that this will serve as a wake-up call for the Church to realize that Biblical precepts can’t be mocked if any nation wants to survive. If God’s people don’t begin to understand, articulate and follow those precepts, then there is no hope.

One of those precepts is that God has ordained certain roles and responsibilities for civil government, and Scripture has lots to say about how individuals, families, the Church, the State and voluntary associations are to function.

However, there is not a single verse or example in all of Scripture which lends any credence to the view that God has given civil government the right or responsibility to re-distribute wealth or provide for our individual health or income. See The Growing Idolatry of Civil Government.

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Abusive Church Leaders (Part 2) – How Should We React?

May 28, 2011 By in Abuse, Abusive Pastor, Christ Chapel, Church, Courage, Judgment, Pastor, Predatory Leaders, Sin 15 Comments

How should we react to an unrepentant pastor who’s used his position of trust and power to prey on women – often after turning to him for spiritual counsel and support during vulnerable times in their lives?

All the theory in the world is great. But one thing I’ve learned from experience is this: Those who want to help these women find justice and closure, and protect others, need an unflinching resolve to stand toe to toe against these predators.

Typically, a predatory pastor is not accustomed to being questioned or challenged by anyone. He often will try to deflect accountability either through intimidation or a charm offensive – or both! These men are master manipulators, and it takes a God-given strength of will to stand firm, force answers, stop the abuse, and expose their evil as a warning to others.

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Abusive Church Leaders (Part 1) – My Personal Angst

May 23, 2011 By in Abuse, Abusive Pastor, Christ Chapel, Church, Confession, Healing, Judgment, New Covenant Fellowship, Pastor, Predatory Leaders, Repentance, Sin, Woundedness 14 Comments

Much to my dismay, God keeps bringing people to my door who have been abused by a pastor or other trusted church leader.

Over the last year, I’ve taken on three cases against abusive pastors. Two involve significant embezzlement and fraud by pastors in different churches. A third involves extensive sexual abuse and misconduct by around half a dozen men on the pastoral and ministerial staff at Christ Chapel Assembly of God in Woodbridge, Virginia.

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Helping or Enabling?

June 21, 2010 By in Grace, Love, Mentor, Mercy, Ministry, Sin 14 Comments

It’s hard cut lose a man you’ve been ministering to and let him ultimately bear the full consequences of the mess he’s made of his

life – not to hurt him, but to let him finally hit bottom.

I am friends with and minister to men and women who most people, and many churches, shun (except for arms-length “programs”, if even that). Pick a vice – any vice – and I’ve likely come beside and embraced those in bondage to it: former drug addicts, narc dealers, sex offenders, embezzlers, thieves, gender benders, Satanic ritual abusers and even murderers.

Because I’ve been willing to see past the sin and accept the common humanity we all share – not as one who is perfect but as a someone willing to walk with them as we sort out our individual imperfections together under God’s mercy and grace – some of these folk are now following the Lord.

I love such people, because daily I see how God creates beauty out of their ashes.

I am blessed, because I serve a God who, above all, creates. He takes destruction – what has become void and without form, in the words of Genesis 1 – and brings wonder and life and order. . .

. . . and He delights most of all, I’ve found, in redeeming lives that many think are beyond hope.

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Freedom

April 28, 2010 By in America, Bondage, Faith, Liberty, Self Government, State Leave a comment

In return for a little less freedom, civil government ever seeks to solve problems we should be solving on our own through individual responsibility, family support, personal charity or voluntary associations. As we’ve continued to trade liberty for government “solutions” (which never in reality actually solve much, but often make things worse), little by little we’ve become increasingly enslaved.

Every American should watch this cartoon from 1948 and heed its warning about Utopian promises to fix all of our problems. It is more relevant today than ever before.

May we once again find the courage, and the common sense, to stand tall as free men and free women.

For a related bog, take a look at The Growing Idolatry of Civil Government.

True Ministry

February 27, 2010 By in Brokenness, Community, Fellowship, Gifts, Grace, Institutional Church, Ministry, Organic Church 6 Comments

Last night, we had one of our best times of “participatory church” as we seamlessly shared a meal, partook of communion, fellowshipped and ministered one with another — and none of it depended on me!

The last several weeks have been very emotionally and physically exhausting for me. On top of my best friend dying, I’ve been struggling to keep up with my various professional and counseling commitments while concurrently experiencing a particularly bad bout of chronic fatigue from my autoimmune condition.

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Regeneration

November 2, 2009 By in Absolutes, Conversion, Evangelical, Faith, Forgiveness, Grace, Repentance, Sin 1 Comment

A friend posted this short video on Facebook and it’s too precious, timely and relevant to pass up. As you listen, may God mercifully and lovingly wound you in order to heal you.

It’s by Paul Washer, who I first mentioned in a blog back in March (see God Is Not Passive). His burden for the Church touched my heart then, and continues to do so now.

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Following God’s Presence

August 2, 2009 By in Church, Jail, Ministry, New Wine, Prayer, Tears 14 Comments

Today in the jail, after two hours of powerful ministry between the men one to another, they stopped and said they decided earlier this week to do something for me. They then stood around me, laid hands on me, and prayed the most wonderful, tender prayers of blessing I’ve ever heard.

I cried as I realized what they were doing, because they’ve learned – maybe with some of them for the first time in their lives – to give rather than always take or receive.

After months of mentoring them on “being” the church (see my blog, The Church in D Pod), they heeded God’s gentle call to new pastures. As a result, they now “get” it and wonderful life is flowing between them and from them – even to me!

How many church leaders – who so closely guard the microphone and the prerogatives of their front podium as they try to direct even God himself during their closely scripted and controlled Sunday services – have ever experienced the joy of being just one of many?

Do they realize they have no monopoly on the many spiritual gifts God wants us to give as acts of worship, to Him and in fellowship one with another?

If not, then they are missing the blessing of letting life and ministry flow under the prompting of the Holy Spirit – not simply from them, but to and around them.

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The Sunday “God Show” at Your Friendly Podium Church

July 19, 2009 By in Church, Community, Ministry, New Wine, Repentance, Tears 4 Comments

When did “church” become a podium-focused “God Show” watched by passive spectators for an hour or so each Sunday morning?

Where do we even find that in Scripture?

I believe that the days of the “podium church” and the Sunday “God show”are passing — where we gaze each Sunday past the back of the head in front of us to passively watch carefully scripted ministry delivered from a front podium through a tightly controlled microphone.

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New Covenant Fellowship? Beware!

June 30, 2009 By in Abuse, Abusive Pastor, Church, Cult, Faith, Fakes, Manassas, New Covenant Fellowship, Pastor, Predatory Leaders, Sin 6 Comments
New Covenant Fellowship? Beware!

New Covenant Fellowship in Manassas, Virginia, started out as a great church twenty-five years ago under a gifted pastor who’s since left. Under Robin Bayles and the current “pastor/elders” (the term they choose for themselves), massive numbers of additional people have left as the church sinks into cult practices and cult doctrines. As a result, attendance has plunged from thousands to barely thirty adults on Sunday mornings.

  • Robin Bayles, the current senior “pastor/elder”, has been secretly enriching himself with around $200k annually from church funds for a sizable salary, a generous housing allowance, numerous benefits and various other perks amounting to somewhere around a million dollars in total Phonyover the last several years — despite the tiny size of the congregation and the fact that he doesn’t even work at the church but works for an unrelated organization. When his self-enrichment was exposed, he denied it and falsely claimed to have taken only a small fraction of the true amount.
  • Robin Bayles has personally acquired and gained wealth from numerous investment rental properties purchased with funds taken from the church. He also has been employed nearly full time for many years — and earns a significant income — from his separate employer. Nonetheless, he has tried to manipulate his shrinking congregation and justify his self-enrichment from church funds with false pleas of poverty.

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Leadership Abuses: Private and Public Sins

May 20, 2009 By in Abuse, Impropriety, Leadership, Ministry, Pastors, Predatory Leaders, Repentance, Sin 25 Comments

“Peace if possible, truth at all costs.” – Martin Luther

“Church” can often be messy, especially when ongoing sins and improprieties begin to come to light – maybe even among our leaders. Yet God, I believe, is calling us all to a new level of collective integrity.

Incomplete Man

So how do we handle leadership failings, especially when they go beyond merely personal sin and involve an abuse of position or trust within a church, movement or mission, and hurts others?

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Leadership Burnout

April 27, 2009 By in Brokenness, Burnout, Grace, Healing, Pastors, Woundedness 9 Comments

Many leaders – including church leaders – suffer from burnout due to emotional and spiritual wounds which they mistakenly rationalize as Godly brokenness. But it’s not; it’s just profound hurt.

In their despair, they often become soothed by God’s love in their woundedness and want to stay there. The problem with unresolved wounds, however, is that they ultimately debilitate us, but Godly brokenness can bring new life – and sometimes literally a new life – if we let it.

That’s because true brokenness goes beyond hurt and changes the core of who we are – and if we’re willing to meet God there, He’s able use our burnout for our ultimate good.

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Woundedness

April 21, 2009 By in Christian, Counseling, Faith, Grace, Healing, Joy, Truth, Woundedness 12 Comments

On Sunday I taught men in the jail, using Psalms 116:5-7 (ESV), about moving from woundedness to life. I challenged them not to settle for mere comfort when confronting hurt, but to embrace life instead.

Gracious is the LORD, and righteous;
   our God is merciful.
The LORD preserves the simple;
   when I was brought low, he saved me.
Return, O my soul, to your rest;
   for the LORD has dealt bountifully with you.

When hurt and wounded, too often all we can muster is a desire for God’s comfort or soothing presence. Although he’ll sometimes do that, what he really wants is to move us past woundedness into brokenness – that low place where we are willing to surrender to him. Only then can we hope to experience the bountiful life, both in us and around us, that comes from finding and finally doing God’s joyous will.

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Conversion

April 11, 2009 By in Christian, Conversion, Forgiveness, Repentance, Tears 7 Comments

It’s interesting how God sometimes returns us to our spiritual roots, even while we are pressing forward in the faith.

Forty-three years ago on Resurrection Sunday, 1966, I became a Christian at eight years of age in response to a sermon preached by George Batson.

George was then a young Assemblies of God pastor starting his first church in Annapolis, Maryland, and my parents were among the first members of his young congregation.
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Sufficient Grace

March 30, 2009 By in Brokenness, Fatigue, Grace, Healing, Peace, Prayer, Scleroderma 22 Comments
Sufficient Grace

When did Christians start believing that God wants us to always be healthy, wealthy and free of adversity?

If asked directly, most believers would deny that’s what they think. But our actions say otherwise.

A Devastating Diagnosis

I started noticing this when I contracted a rare, degenerative autoimmune disease called systemic sclerosis (aka scleroderma) in 2004. It took years to finally link my symptoms to a specific diagnosis, but when it came, it was devastating.

Although it initially hit me hard, it seemed to hit others even harder.

As family and friends learned of my condition, they often reacted with shock. Some simply deserted me – usually because they couldn’t deal with their own pain or awkwardness over my condition. Other times, they left because I couldn’t continue being the fount of money or financial security they had come to expect. I quickly learned who were my true friends, and my true family.

Praying At God

Among my remaining friends, many responded by asking to pray over me. Sometimes they’d say that God told them I’d be healed. Although God hadn’t told me that, I would be gracious, let them pray and listen to their assurances. I appreciated their concern, but what struck me most was how they were reacting more out of their own anxieties than anything else.

Because their theology couldn’t explain why God allowed this to happen to me, they needed to vigorously pray at God and at me in order to drown out their own uncertainties and insecurities. They knew that if this could happen to me, then it could happen to them or their loved ones. That’s not what they signed up for when they became Christians!

Rather than “hearing” from God about my situation, they were telling God what He needed to do or what they thought He should do. After all, if He’s God and all powerful, loving and just, then they couldn’t understand why bad things happen to good Christians.

Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate prayers! But prayers motivated by anxiety over God’s seeming failings, and by our own fears over sickness and adversities, quickly become tiring to the purported beneficiary.

I have one very close friend who’s an associate pastor. He has cancer and would duck out of church several minutes early to avoid all of the “words from God” and anxiety-filled prayers that otherwise descended on him at the end of each service. I could relate (although things have since cooled down for me, and, I understand, for him too).

Touching God’s Heart

When I was first diagnosed, maybe one out of twenty-five of my remaining friends and acquaintances, at most, would actually come and pray for me in the security of God’s sovereignty and could then truly touch God’s heart regarding my condition. And God’s heart was to simply say He was with me. By ministering from that place of peace which only comes from total surrender to God’s will – without presumption or expectation of outcome – their prayers were like cool drinks in a barren land.

Those ministering out of anxiety, however, couldn’t understand why God would let this happen. Implicit was the assumption that God owed me, and Christians in general, a free pass when it comes to the realities of our fallen world and imperfect mortal bodies.

But there’s no such promise in Scripture. Rather, God simply assures us that His grace is sufficient for all that may befall us.

Peace Despite an Uncertain Fate

I have several very close friends who also have faced a life threatening issue or other major crisis. Once they were able to accept God’s grace in their situations, and surrender to His will without precondition or expectation of outcome, a depth of fellowship and understanding developed between us that’s hard to describe. To a person, we would not trade that grace for anything – including health and healing.

I’m no saint, and I have my down days. I want to be a good steward and so I struggle at times with my future and with what, if any, plans and decisions I can make given my uncertain fate. But generally, the high price of admission has been worth the grace gained as God embraced my infirmities.

Unless you too have been there, I suspect this is hard to understand.

It’s not fatalism – far from it. It’s life from brokenness. It’s peace and calm from being able to finally surrender to God’s perfect will, even with no idea what His will may be, because you finally understand – both at the logical and also at the emotional level – that life only has significance and fulfillment in Him. He created us, so who knows better what to do with our lives?

It’s not premised on any assumption of outcome, other than knowing that your life never belonged to you anyway and it’s God’s to do with as He pleases – even to the point of death.

Becoming Whole Despite Infirmities

I’m in God’s hands. If His will is to call me home, that’s OK. If His will is healing, that’s OK too. If it’s something in between, then there is peace in the promise of His grace for the journey.

It is, more than anything else, being with Jesus in the garden on the night He was betrayed. He was all too human as He cried out for deliverance from His impending cross. After getting past His initial deep, deep anguish, Jesus found assurance only when He could truly say to the Father “not my will, but thy will be done.” He could then endure the cross because of the resulting peace that comes from trust and obedience.

To my healthy friends, think about this. If everyone who made Jesus their Lord suddenly experienced perfect health, perfect wealth, and no adversity or pain, then who would come to Jesus for Jesus’ sake? No one, that’s who! We would all flock to him for what He can do for us, rather than for what He wants of us.

And what does He want? Simply everything, including our will and our very lives. He then uses our total commitment to redeem His creation, despite its fallenness …

And to reconcile people to Himself, despite our brokenness.

In His wisdom, God normally doesn’t exempt us from our frailties or the consequences of a fallen world. Rather, He makes us complete in our weakness. Our lives then demonstrate that His grace is sufficient, despite the consequences of humanity’s rebellion, and that it is only through Him that we become whole, despite our infirmities.

I truly don’t know what God intends for me. I only know that I need to walk in His grace and abide in His will day-by-day as I trust my future to Him – without any presumption of outcome.

When He’s done with this life, He’ll take me home. Until then, my life is His and my imperfect desire is to serve Him with all I have, and all I am, as He gives me grace for the journey ahead.

(c) Copyright 2009, Fulcrum Ministries. All Rights Reserved.

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Soon after writing this in early 2009, my systemic sclerosis began to slowly and miraculously retreat and by the end of 2009 had gone into low level remission – to the astonishment of my doctors. Needless to say, however, the experience of dealing with the implications and initial health effects from the disease changed me deeply.

In late 2011, my symptoms started re-surging, and in early 2012 a pulmonary function test indicated that the disease had entered my lungs, which is not good.

Although I don’t know what the future holds, I nonetheless remain eternally grateful to have found sufficient grace. Or, to put it more accurately, that Sufficient Grace found me. 

God is Not Passive

March 21, 2009 By in Brokenness, Church, Conversion, Faith, Kingdom of God, Repentance, Sovereignty 4 Comments

I’m seeing others who also are quietly moving forward, with fire stirring in their spirits, to proclaim true repentance, Christ’s Lordship and the Kingdom of God rather than conformist, complacent Christianity.

These co-conspirators are being compelled by God to preach outside our churches because too many of our pastors have been unwilling, so far, to be jarred out of their desire for peace, stability and the comfort of long-standing personal relationships. For those pastors, complacency has become a hindrance to God’s progressively expanding Kingdom.

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God Shows Up

February 13, 2009 By in Bondage, Counseling, Grace, Healing, Jail, Ministry, Repentance 20 Comments

As “Mr. Analytical,” I’m the least probable person I know to be doing pastoral counseling, but God seems to have given me a special grace to walk with people to those places where He wants to meet them in very powerful, transforming and healing ways. I guess it’s one of those spiritual ironies that God uses to confound us. He works through the least likely to ensure that the glory is His.

Whether in the jail or in my home study, I deal weekly with issues that – believe me – exceed anything you might imagine. But the Lord meets us in amazing ways, and folks find freedom in just one or two sessions from decades of emotional and spiritual bondage.

God shows up!

Restoration

The Lord patiently, lovingly wants us to go to those places in our lives where we need his healing. Those places are at the core of our beings, where all the accumulated “yuk” lies. But it’s hard to go there, because there’s pain and hurt there.

My job is to help people get there. When we do, I simply ask Jesus what he has to say. The Lord then dramatically speaks to them in real, personal ways and brings healing and peace to some of the most unspeakable experiences and issues in their lives – including sexual abuse, child prostitution, occult oppression, abandonment, drug and alcohol addiction, sexual compulsions, anger and fear.

I’ve done this hundreds of times, and have never needed a “re-do” session where God has spoken his gentle truth. When God speaks (and He always does if there is a willingness to expose what needs to be healed!), the lies at the center of the hurt and the pain – which have caused bondage and been so controlling – immediately die. Simple and complete; wholeness and health. It’s wonderful to see.

Too often we forget that God wants to restore us to health, and have fellowship with us, because he loves us in deeply personal ways. After all, God valued Adam so much that he walked and talked with Adam in the garden during the cool of the day. God values us just as much, and desires a relationship where we can once again commune with him, and He with us.

Anyone who knows me knows how much I value the historic tenets of our faith, but we can’t major on correct doctrine to the neglect of the personal relationship God wants with us. Doctrine and Biblical truth provide a context for our day-to-day faith, but are not a substitute for intimacy with God and learning to hear his voice. We need both.

Hurt or Health?

It’s sad but true – too many churches have become a refuge for hurt people, led by hurt people, rather than a place of health that reproduces health.

It’s OK to be hurt – there’s no condemnation in that! But we have an obligation before God to seek his healing and restoration.

Perpetual Hospital Ward or Health?

I’ve had lots of challenges in my own life: emotionally crippled close family members, the death of several very close friends, a degenerative and potentially fatal autoimmune disease, an unwanted divorce, and the need to start over again financially. But despite it all, I have chosen life, not hurt.

Too often, as we go through the motions with our day-to-day routines, we forget why God redeemed us. Instead, we slip unawares into a rut of accumulated hurts and emotional pain, and start believing that’s normal.

I encourage those who are burdened with hurt to choose life and seek help.

True Repentance

Jesus, in his parting instructions to the disciples, told them to go forth and proclaim repentance and forgiveness of sins (Luke 24:44-48). That “great commission” applies to all believers, even now!

We have distorted repentance and think it simply means saying we’re sorry, or else we confuse it with confession. That’s not repentance – although authentic confession and forgiveness often are essential components of repentance.

The Greek word for repentance, as used in the New Testament, means to change the way we think so that we then change the way we act. In my experience working with and mentoring lots of men as they get out of jail, it is rare that someone can change the way he acts unless he lets God change the way he thinks. Having the will power, dedication and commitment to change how we act, without letting God change how we think, is seldom enough.

Changing the way I think means much, much more than believing correct doctrine or precepts in the cognitive, rational part of my mind. It also involves changing what the experiential and emotional side of my mind believes. You may rationally believe that “all things work together for the good of those who love God,” but when you lose your job or your daughter comes home drunk or you get a deadly disease, your emotions and reactions demonstrate your true belief. Our emotions and how we react to things spring from, and point to, our true beliefs.

Exposing the Crap in Our Lives

Life’s Septic Tank

For God to change the way we truly think, we need to be willing to open up and expose those beliefs, and their source, to Him. To help make this process understandable, I tell guys in jail that our lives contain a septic tank, and it holds lots of crap and stink. Although God forgives us, He still wants – and needs – to replace that crap and stink with health and wholeness. But to do that, He needs us to remove the septic tank’s lid so all that nasty stuff inside is exposed.

This process of removing the septic tank’s lid and exposing the crap and the stink is confession and repentance – and it often does not involve sin (although it can)! It may simply involve wrong beliefs based on lies that took hold in our lives through no fault of our own – often before we became Christians and often due to experiences during our childhood when our lie-filled belief system formed about ourselves, others, the world around us and God.

Emotions Show Beliefs

Our emotions – based on what we really believe despite cognitive facts and logic – are pathways that lead back to root lies. If we want to allow God to change the way we think so that He can then change the way we act (and react!), then we need to expose those lies to God by taking the lid off of the experiences and emotions that contain them. Once we expose those lies to God, we can invite God to speak His truth to us. In the jail, as God speaks His truth to men about themselves or about things that happened in their lives (as opposed to me giving them a cognitive to-do list of right living – which may be needed, but that’s another process for another time!), wholeness and health floods in and replaces the crap and stink!

This, then, is what we’ve been doing in the jail. God shows up and changes how men think by speaking to them His truth about them in deeply personal ways. And when he does, His truth sets them free!

His Truth Will Set You Free!

God’s Truth Displaces Lies

When God speaks His truth, lies are displaced. Horrendous memories and experiences that were a source of pain, hurt and bondage become places of righteousness, peace and joy. Our job in the counseling sessions is to simply facilitate the ministry of the Holy Spirit as the men take the lid off the septic tanks of their lives and let God pump out all of the crap and stink, then bring health and wholeness by speaking His personal, loving truth to them.

Sometimes it’s not easy for people who come to me for help to do this, because they don’t want to expose the pain and the emotions. But when they do, God speaks his truth to them in tender, loving, personal ways and the lies that previously held them in bondage disappear.

Sometimes, after these counseling sessions, I have to sit quietly to let the glory of God’s presence subside enough for me to reconnect to the so-called “real” world.

Reproducing Health

Our churches were never intended by God to be hospitals or way stations, and our Sunday gatherings are not places intended by God to perpetually sooth our hurts. My vision is that our churches and our lives become places of health that reproduce health.

That doesn’t mean we don’t have problems or have issues, but do we have the zest to confront life and let our sovereign, personal God continually transform us, even through hard times, into the people He calls us, and created us, to be?

Are we willing to repent by opening up the crap and stink in our lives so that God can speak His truth to us and bring His transforming peace and joy?

That’s what the world wants to see – not perfect people, but imperfect people who can traverse life’s issues with God’s grace evident in us.

God is not about covering over or burying our hurt and pain, like old wounds under thick callous scabs. Rather, He calls us to repentance so that He can get at the lies in our lives and heal us through His truth – which means not only doctrinal truth but also truth about our past, who we really are, how God really sees us, and who He created us and wants to empower us to be.

That process not only changes the way we think, but also can’t help but change the way we act.

~ Jim Wright

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