This morning as I scrolled through my Facebook feed I was confronted with yet another old and dear friend who has pretty much left the faith once delivered to the saints.
She’s gone not because of weighing all the eternal verities and reaching reasoned conclusions about spiritual matters…but because the church as she’s known and experienced it are too damn dangerous and deadly to her soul.
We did not protect and defend her from the wolves among us….we defended the wolves and demeaned her.
Now, a nicer wolf has taken her in.
She has already been rejected by many former friends, some of whom have contacted me and asked me to call and correct her doctrine…as if her doctrine was broken before her heart and spirit were.
That is the lie we tell tell about people we break and dispose of in the church…that they were simply apostates in waiting who are now simply showing their true colors.
That lie enables us to keep believing that “sound doctrine” covers wicked character, that if your words are straight, your walk can be crooked.
It screams the unspoken lie that Jesus died for proper pedagogy and not for people…and if people are wounded by the practitioners of proper pedagogy, it’s an acceptable sacrifice.
It denies the reality of how badly we break the hearts spirits of people in favor of protecting power and position.
My Facebook feed is littered with these living sacrifices to ecclesiastical authority and idolatry, some of whom have told me that they have been waiting for me to “unfriend” them for their “heresies”.
I won’t do that because I don’t think Jesus has.
I have been accused of not caring for their souls because of that.
It’s not their souls I’m worried about…it’s the guys being fitted for a millstone.