Friends, I'm worried about you.
Differentiation during betrayal as Christian Maturity
I am worried for myself and my friends.
Let me spend a paragraph on the crisis in our church. By our church, I don’t mean where I am now attending; rather, I mean the wider region of the Christian faith we call our home: the Pentecostal church. Our great leaders have, on the whole, miserably collapsed into scandal—what started with Ted Haggard in the mid-aughts has now erupted into a full-blown wildfire as Mark Driscoll, Brian Houston, Carl Lentz, and Mike Bickle have all fallen into one scandal or another, of greater and lesser degrees. For many of us, these public collapses come on the heels of personal hurts we’ve endured at times from our own personal churches, where our direct leaders have failed or otherwise abused us.
I am worried because many of us are choosing one of two options. First, the natural inclination is to just dip out. Burn all of our bridges, curse the brethren, and give up on the church because its leadership can’t be trusted. Second is the lesser form of leaving, a sort of quiet quitting—to stay, but stay grumpy. Suspicious. Eager to find fault.
Lord, may it not be so.
I need to clarify one more thing here before you go on to read.
I am not addressing this writing to any of those directly abused by Mike Bickle or his “prophetic” ministry here in KC. Abuse survivors need deeper help, deeper work—a trauma-informed professional. I am not trauma-informed beyond my own experience with personal trauma and clergy abuse, so what I’m about to say is not meant to heal the deep wounds Mike Bickle has caused. I’m speaking to those adjacent to his direct ministry, people who were simply influenced, moved, or otherwise discipled by his teaching as well as the teaching of those other leaders I mentioned. In fact, what I’m about to say might actually make things worse for those directly abused by any of those leaders. That being said, please read on if you feel comfortable doing so. 1
A high mark of Christian maturity is differentiation.
Psychology teaches us that differentiation allows us to be present to another’s emotions and circumstances without becoming entangled in them, a state called enmeshment, where our well-being is based on the well-being of another. In our current situation with these disgraced leaders, enmeshment means that our character and relationship with God is dependent on the leader’s character and relationship with God, whereas differentiation means that we can separate our relationship with Christ and his church from the relationships of those leaders with Christ and his church. This means that Mike Bickle’s failures are his and his alone while we acknowledge our pain at being deceived, and more so the pain of his victims, without letting Bickle interfere with our presence to Christ or his body. It means that when our own leaders have personally wronged us, we acknowledge and process our pain while acknowledging that the leader hurt us from a broken place. Most likely, they are not wicked, just making decisions from places of fear, anxiety, mistrust, and their own traumas. Differentiation then helps us walk to forgiveness, and further navigate whether we should proceed to re-establishing trust and then reconciliation.
Those are three different things, by the way—forgiveness, trust, and reconciliation—but they are often equated with one another. Forgiveness can only be given. Trust can be both earned and given once forgiveness is given. Reconciliation only comes once trust is renewed.
Differentiation is hard because it isn’t black and white. It doesn’t feel like justice; rather, differentiation asks us to live in the tension of our pain while letting the other person off our hook. They can still be held accountable by the authorities that be, and in cases like Mike Bickle or Mark Driscoll, they certainly should be, but forgiveness releases our claim to vengeance and allows our heart to see the person as God sees the person, a person in need of repentance, mercy, and revival as much as correction. Forgiveness doesn’t mean that we’re friends again, it just means we release ourselves from the pain they inflicted. It’s takes us from a need for vengeance to seeking accountability for the good of others—we hold a bad leader accountable rather than seek their debasement for debasing us.
We see Jesus practicing differentiation most pointedly during his passion. He stood before Pilate, and rather than plead for his life, he tried to minister. Before the sanhedrin, he did not lash out in accusal, but simply stated the truth about himself and his relationship to the father. In his last moments on the cross, he pled with God, forgive them; they don’t know what they are doing.
This is a hard season, friends. We have been betrayed by the very ones who led us to Christ and the Holy Spirit, but Christ and his Spirit are true, nonetheless.
Christ, make us humble.
O God, make speed to save us. O Lord, make haste to help us.
In the interest of transparency, I added this particular paragraph after I first published this post thanks to some feedback with a friend who is directly involved with the abuse victims of Mike Bickle.
Or maybe the christian church is just wrong. Maybe christianity just attracts the type of predator who wants to take advantage of others in their weakness, by weaponizing god. Maybe a belief system that starts with “suspend your unbelief” gives license to the authority figure to do whatever they want.
Sexual and spiritual abuse is systemic in the church, and extends to all branches of christianity. Don’t forget the Catholics and southern baptists.
My own former church still lists a core belief on their website that the Bible is “without error in the original language”. This is demonstrably false as a matter of fact (not of opinion). Buyer beware. Shame on me for buying when the lie was right there on the package.
So good, Joey. Praying for you, and the Church as a whole. So much deception happening right now. Praying for hearts of forgiveness, discernment and differentiation.