by | Jun 17, 2024 | Uncategorized
According to the Texas megachurch, founder Robert Morris properly disclosed his misconduct and has had “no other moral failures” since he touched a child in the 1980s.
Update: Robert Morris has resigned from Gateway, according to a statement released Tuesday, June 18, from its elder board.
Gateway Church did not address allegations of past abuse—or “moral failure”—by its senior pastor, Robert Morris, when it gathered to worship this weekend, just a couple days after a woman who said he molested her starting at age 12 in the 1980s shared her account online.
The Southlake, Texas–based megachurch made a last-minute change so that its executive pastor, Kemtal Glasgow, could take the stage instead of the guest speaker, Albert Tate, who was scheduled as a part of Gateway’s summer series and who was himself placed on leave last year by his church in California over inappropriate text messaging.
Glasgow, who said he was on his way to church when he got the call that he would be filling in that day, preached about patience, listening, and waiting on the Lord. His message was broadcast across Gateway’s 10 campuses, which draw around 25,000 people in-person each week. He did not mention Morris or any abuse allegations.
Morris, 62, founded Gateway in 2000, and it has grown to become one of the biggest megachurches in the US. He also has a global following, thanks to his programs broadcast on Christian TV and radio. Morris formerly served as a faith advisor to President Trump and had been an advisor for Mark Driscoll’s new church.
Nondenominational and charismatic, Gateway is one of the top producers of evangelical worship music. Singer Kari Jobe served as its previous worship leader, and Gateway Worship music was streamed over 300 million times last year alone. On Sunday, the congregation opened with one of its own hits, singing “Praise the Lord.” …
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by | Jun 17, 2024 | Uncategorized
The Dutch theologian argued the biblical worldview is fundamentally incompatible with ethnocentrism.
It’s no secret that Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck has enjoyed a renaissance in the past few years, as James Eglinton also pointed out in a previous piece for CT.
Ever since the English translation of Bavinck’s landmark work, Reformed Dogmatics, was released in 2008, there’s been a constant stream of fresh readings of his life and thought. More recently, new translations of lesser known but no less important texts include his Christian Worldview, Christianity and Science, and Guidebook for Instruction in the Christian Religion; and new editions have been published of Philosophy of Revelation, based on his 1908 Stone Lectures, and The Wonderful Works of God.
Theologians like me are also rediscovering the neo-Calvinist tradition shaped by Bavinck and his fellow Dutch theologian, Abraham Kuyper, and examining how these thinkers might engage with cultural issues today, including our nation’s reckoning with racism. And while many have recently (and rightly) criticized Kuyper’s checkered legacy on this issue, they have often neglected Bavinck’s contributions on the subject, which many scholars see as an improvement on Kuyper.
Bavinck’s assessment has enduring lessons for American Christians living in a polarized political climate. Similar to Bavinck’s own context of 19th-century Europe, those in the US today are confronted by the challenges of living in an increasingly post-Christian culture. This has led to heated debates on the identity of America, Christian nationalism, and how we can all find common ground amid our substantial differences.
Bavinck and Kuyper’s neo-Calvinist Christian worldview, for instance, affirmed the diversity of reality but saw …
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by | Jun 14, 2024 | Uncategorized
It’s okay to mourn what’s lost without losing hope for what’s to come.
This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.
In his New York Times column this week, my friend David French wrote about what it was like to be “canceled” by his denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America. He later told me how stunned he was by how many people responded immediately—grieving their own “cancellations” from churches or ministries they’d loved and served.
I was not surprised at all.
Most people, of course, aren’t canceled in the way we typically use that word, but in a way more like the situation described by the late Will Campbell. He wasn’t “fired” by the National Council of Churches, he would joke. They just unleashed a swarm of bees in his office every day until he voluntarily left.
Similarly, many people who feel “homeless” these days aren’t told by their home churches or traditions, “Get out!” Instead, they face a quieter form of exile.
They face those they love, who expect them to conform to new rules of belonging. Sometimes, that’s to some totalizing political loyalty. Sometimes, it’s to a willingness to “get over” their opposition to whatever their church or ministry leaders now deem to be acceptable sins. Sometimes, this doesn’t even happen to these people in their own churches but in their larger theological or denominational homes, or vice versa. It’s confusing. It’s disorienting. It’s sometimes angering.
What it really is, though, is grief.
People who’ve faced this in their own contexts often ask me, “How long does it take to get over this?” I usually quote the landslide-losing presidential candidate George McGovern …
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by | Jun 14, 2024 | Uncategorized
Reports of the death of fatherhood have been greatly exaggerated. There are many good dads, like mine, quietly blessing their children.
Problems with fathers are nothing new. They go back to the beginning. Genesis alone is a vast catalog of fathers’ sins, whether those of Adam, Noah, and Lot, or the patriarchs themselves.
What about good fathers, though? Here is C. S. Lewis, writing in the 1940s:
We have learned from Freud and others about those distortions in character and errors in thought which result from a man’s early conflicts with his father. Far the most important thing we can know about George MacDonald is that his whole life illustrates the opposite process. An almost perfect relationship with his father was the earthly root of all his wisdom. From his own father, he said, he first learned that Fatherhood must be at the core of the universe. He was thus prepared in an unusual way to teach that religion in which the relation of Father and Son is of all relations the most central.
I first read these words in my teens, when a youth minister—a spiritual father in his own way—began putting Lewis and G. K. Chesterton and Dietrich Bonhoeffer in my hands. This excerpt comes from the opening page of a MacDonald anthology Lewis edited. The Scottish pastor, preacher, and novelist’s writings were crucial to Lewis’s conversion, so much so that Lewis called him “my master.”
Lewis writes that MacDonald had “an almost perfect relationship with his father.” This is remarkable on its face. But is it unique?
I don’t think so. Fatherlessness is a real problem, but reports of the death of fatherhood have been greatly exaggerated. In fact, the reason Lewis’s comment resonated when I was in high school was that it named my own experience. True, few of us would reach for the phrase …
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by | Jun 14, 2024 | Uncategorized
Time off at the very beginning helps fathers prepare to bring up their children in the “discipline and instruction of the Lord.”
When our first daughter was born, in the fall of 2021, she couldn’t nurse properly. For my wife, feeding her was an every-few-hours exercise in pure pain. Lactation consultants were consulted, to little avail; a minor tongue-tie operation, newly trendy in such cases, didn’t help either. We thought about switching to formula, but my wife was dead set on seeing nursing through.
So we triple-fed: She would nurse the baby through gritted teeth for as long as she could stand it, while I tried my best to distract her—singing songs, reading, putting something on the TV. Then I’d take the kid and finish the feeding by bottle while my wife pumped. As it turned out, the baby just needed to get a little bigger. By eight weeks, my wife’s pain was gone.
When our second daughter was born last year, the process seemed to restart—then unexpectedly cleared up in week two. The bigger challenge, it turned out, was managing the emotions of the now-toddler, who found herself, unexpectedly, no longer the center of the known universe.
After a period of protest, she settled into a new equilibrium. Yes, mom had a new baby, but she still had dad. For those first few weeks, the toddler and I were inseparable. (I made time for mom and baby too!) Soon, she had grown to like her little sister enough for us all to reintegrate as one happy family.
Both these stories have a key subtext: I was on paternity leave. Under my then-employer’s heroically generous, deliberately pro-family policy, I was free to take up to 12 weeks off per child to help my wife recover from childbirth and to bond with our new arrival.
I was lucky; that arrangement is rare. Most American fathers take only a short stint …
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