In short, I believe that some pastors
within some denominations, particularly aberrant ones, are taught
certain techniques of thought reform as legitimate and Biblical
standards of conduct. Sometimes, those standards are billed as
something that sets the group apart from other Christians, and they
are generally communicated indirectly through modeled behavior and
under the guise of “how we do things here.” Ministers
don't pull out books titles concerning thought reform to learn how to
manipulate, but the techniques do become part of the culture and are
taught to leadership within the group as legitimate Christian
behavior within spiritually abusive systems.
Thought Reform as a Pattern of
Effective Manipulation
Consider again what we've already
established about what thought reform really is: a pattern of
deceptive behaviors that are used to achieve some virtuous or
desirable endpoint by organizing and motivating a group of people to
work together to accomplish that beneficial objective. The system
fails in several areas, primarily because it resorts to some degree
of authoritarianism, and in the process of accomplishing its goals,
it ends up letting that virtuous endpoint justify the use of less
then virtuous means. When you strip any of these systems down to
dynamics alone, you see the predictable patterns of spiritual abuse,
and those patterns follow us all of the way back to the beginning of
history. For example, in the Garden of Eden, Satan
used loaded language (a technique of thought reform) to twist the
intended meaning of what God stated clearly to Adam and Eve,
rationalizing bad behavior. Likewise, ministers can very easily
justify some of their church government practices through
rationalizing them as something God intends.
As the previous
post noted, people organically figure out what works when they
interact with other people. Look at the most basic early human
interaction – that between a mother and child. A new mother
without prior experience who is attentive to her infant learns
quickly that eye contact and the use of certain sounds and syntax
causes a favorable response in her infant, something reflected in the
infant's behavior. She didn't need to read a study from thirty years
ago that infants learn language and respond at a very early age to
syntax on the right side of the brain, something that lays the
foundation for the development of the comprehension and use of words
on the left side of the brain. She learns what works because certain
uses of syntax elicit a predictable and favorable response from her
child. She learns to do what works, and she guides her child's
growth and learning about communication through trial and error, not
through deliberate, didactic study. I believe that the same trial
and error learning occurs for pastors who figure out how to motivate
people and how to get individuals to work well together.
But that brings up the question of how
well a pastor or a group uses spiritually abusive tactics, a skill
that you tend to see very clearly in hot seat and star chamber
meetings. Could a person have studied certain techniques formally,
never realizing how similar the techniques were to spiritual abuse
and how well they fit into a predictable system of exploitation?
Your particular group of interest may
not follow any formal training in “how a church should work,” but
mine did, and many others do as well (as I believe that Sovereign
Grace Ministries also qualifies as such a program).
The Perfect Storm of Pessimism Mixed
with Paternalism and Fear
Those who hold a basically pessimistic
view of others tend to trust few people and tend to rely on their own
judgment and control. They are less able to trust others and tend to
fall into the pitfalls of micromanaging other people. Those who are
very pessimistic about what God can do in others and what God can do
apart from themselves tend to rely more on authoritarian means to
maintain control in order to accomplish their desired goal.
Pessimism can also manifest as a paternalism that reduces people to
objects or robs them of the goodness that they do possess. Both
paternalism and authoritarianism depend on hierarchy for structure,
and an authoritarian system which makes so much use of hierarchy
allows a means for that pessimism to be formalized.
The Gospel According to Shepherding
I believe that the Shepherding
Discipleship Movement that began in the late 1960s provides an
excellent example of a system that formalized elements of spiritual
abuse and taught those principles as formal doctrine that was
entirely consistent with Scripture. For that reason, I would like to
use that system as an example of training in thought reform, not only
because of my own background and knowledge of the movement, but also
because of CJ Mahaney's roots in the movement as well as his
influence within today's growing Calvinist dominionism. The group of
interest to you may not have a connection to shepherding, but I
believe that an attitude of pessimism about people combined with
paternalism can shape a denomination or a group in such a way that
amounts to training in these methods in many cases. (Read more about
this as the hidden
curriculum phenomenon.) Most aberrant social practice within a
group tends to be communicated indirectly through the hidden
curriculum, though this often results in the most effective method of
communicating behavioral standards.
The leaders and creators of the
Shepherding Movement assumed not only a pessimistic view of the rank
and file Christian, but they went a step further to assume a
paternalistic role over them within the church. As discussed in
these two previous posts, as the world began to weather the problems
the age, people in many different churches including liturgical ones
started to spontaneously speak in tongues, a spiritual gift
associated with the Feast of Pentecost in the Book of Acts. The
evangelical leaders feared that people would forget about doctrine in
favor of “experientialism,” seeing Christianity and salvation
only as a means of having a good time that did not really result in
good moral behavior. They were afraid that the Christian faith and
the growing numbers of new converts would abandon the foundations of
the Faith. To compensate for the ecstatic nature of tongues and the
interdenominational meetings that started to crop up (as many saw the
spiritual gifts as God's way of uniting all Christians together),
many of these evangelical leaders placed emphasis on discipline,
accountability, and formulaic living as a way of controlling what
they feared would become chaos within the church.
As previously established, there are
just so many effective ways to control people and to control groups
of people to get them to behave in a particular way. Taking a
pessimistic and paternalistic view of individuals but with a
generally good motive, the leaders in shepherding established systems
of control for churches and for individuals within churches. One of
the primary and effective means of controlling or managing a group
comes through hierarchy, so they established formal systems of chain
of command within their churches and within their networks of
churches. The objective nature of the chain of command also went
hand in hand with the idea that there were certain formulas that
should govern a Christian's behavior. To enforce the chain of
command, it necessitated a focus on authority structure which had to
be taught to church members, and that necessitated a focus on
submission. Hierarchy and submission started out as a means but
quickly became an end unto its own and was soon magnified as one of
the primary virtues that the church required of a Christian.
Saved Into Shepherding, then Trained
as a Shepherding Discipleship Movement Pastor
All of the spiritual training taught
submission-authority doctrine to to our pastors and elders at that church right along with the
distinctions of evangelicalism, and they believed both to be one and
the same. They see the aberrant submission doctrine as essential to
evangelical faith. They remain inclusive and under no circumstances are
they mutually exclusive concepts for them.
My husband and I had the advantage of
experience in other evangelical Protestant churches and training in
doctrine which did not place emphasis on submission-authority
doctrine, so we did not equate those teachings as essential elements
of being born again Christians in a living faith. It was clear from
an early point in our experience in this shepherding church that the
group felt themselves superior to other churches, and our early
positive experience reinforced that idea to us, but we did not
understand exactly why this group felt that they were so superior.
We were able to look back to see that all of their doctrine formally
required and formally taught these doctrines of shepherding -- that 's what made them feel superior.
Submission doctrine was taught at every
level within that church, informally and formally.I only learned of
some of these influences through what you could call the elders'
“continuing education” and through their pastoral affiliates
because I worked in the church office and volunteered at their Bible
College. We had our own Bible College and Seminary which helped
control what doctrine would be accepted and taught. Only those
individuals who appeared to be properly trained and demonstrated
consistent compliance with these doctrines over time could truly fit
into the leadership system there. Everyone had to attend Bill
Gothard's basic course to qualify for a leadership position such as a
home group leader or teacher, though this was never stated formally
anywhere. The writings of Watchman Nee and Bob Mumford and those who
preached and followed them also figured into the group as guiding
influences.
Mahaney's Second Generation Version
of Shepherding
Mahaney
helped run the cultic People
of Destiny, one of the first and longest standing
Shepherding/Discipleship group, and it's still alive and well today.
What kind of sage advice do you think he gave to Mark
Driscoll in his capacity as a mentor to him? Did either of them
sit down to study how to run a cult? Probably not, or not exactly.
However, in terms of “the
duck test,” the final product looks quite cultic and conforms
to the spiritually abusive practices of the Shepherding/Discipleship
Movement. But what, exactly, does Driscoll learn from Mahaney?
Sovereign Grace Ministries holds a six
week training session for aspiring ministers in Gaithersburg. What
kind of training do they receive? I'm sure that they call it
spiritual training, but those men aren't getting a crash course in
the Bible, are they? They're learning how to govern churches
according to the rules and expectations of the group (the
hidden curriculum), and they're reinforcing the hierarchy/chain
of command structure among the leadership, along with whatever else
they teach. Let's hope that there will be some Bible training in
there somewhere and that it eventually becomes the individual's
undoing in terms of the spiritual abuse that governs the group.
Mahaney was a part of the same movement
that my former church pastors and elders were birthed into, and they
are all Mahaney's same age. In fact, our church system used to have
a relationship with Mahaney, and we shared many of the same itinerant
ministers (e.g. Mike Ratliff) with them. We were even in the same
geographical area. We followed the same order of worship. We had
members who moved back and forth between People of Destiny and our
denomination which once consisted of more than thirty churches in
Maryland at the height of Shepherding. Mahaney still teaches
submission to authority in a manner consistent with the guiding
principles of Shepherding, and he still requires this same undying
submission of his parishioners who have been wounded in their
churches. He still employs the same wicked manipulation tactics to
exploit those who have been wounded in his system. His system still
requires little to no accountability of their abusive ministers. I
think that I'd be a fool to presume that they're not formally
teaching at least some spiritually abusive tactics to the pastors who attend their school of ministry and to the existing pastors within their
system.
The Overt Pessimism of New Calvinism
as the Seed of Spiritual Abuse
I'm also concerned about the pervasive
pessimism that is characteristic of what is now called “New
Calvinism,” whether it is or is not connected to the Shepherding theology through people like Mahaney. Perhaps people who shifted out of the ranks of shepherding did find a home in some of the fringe elements of the newer Calvinistic movements such as those propagated through homeschooling? But, perhaps, it's just the spirit of the age and what people in this generation seek.
Calvinists like Driscoll place a
tremendous focus on submission and authority. Other people within
this same “Gospel Coalition” speaking circuit also hammer away at
the submission imperative. Complementarianism which was already
strongly embraced by the shepherding movement preaches submission. I
cannot help but think of Bruce Ware's statement that the most
inspiring and moving aspect of the Trinity is not God's tremendous
love for us and sacrifice to make a way to come and die in sinful
man's stead, or some other magnificent element of the mystery. Ware
states that the thing that he finds most captivating about the
Trinity is “the authority-submission structure” which he notes
throughout
his book and in more audio
presentations and radio interviews than I can begin to mention here.
Those who reject their gender beliefs, the New Calvinist view of the
Trinity, and other elements of Calvinism are deemed
to be non-Christian. Some
teach that a true Christian can't be a political libertarian
(even if they bring their specific beliefs under the authority of the
Bible) because an optimistic view of a Christian is inconsistent with
Calvinism and their view of submission to authority.
I believe that Calvinists today take
the understanding of the doctrine concerning total depravity, and
rather than treating it as a statement about God's sovereignty, they
treat it as a statement about mankind. It creates a great deal of
what almost degrades into misanthropy which extends far beyond the
doctrine of the fallen nature of mankind and federal representation
which is part of the Calvinist tradition.
I am not in any way advocating any
belief that mankind has virtue to pull himself up by his own
bootstraps or that there is anything good in man that can save his
own soul through works or as a part of his nature that impresses Holy
God. But I do believe that when these men view the Doctrines of
Grace as a statement about the nature of man instead of a statement
defending God's sovereignty, it fosters both paternalism and
pessimism, even about Christian believers. In turn, it seems that they take election and turn it
into some kind of “survival of the spiritually fittest.” Seeing
themselves as leaders of the elect, I believe that many of these
leaders use these principles to create their own type of thought
reform because of their reliance upon authoritarian control and
tremendous focus on submission to their authority to make the system
work. Perhaps the connection between Mahaney and New Calvinism is
not shepherding that he introduced but a shared need for
authoritarian control. Man may not be the measure of all things for
them in the way Protagoras stated things, but man within their system
of Calvinism certainly serves as the measure of doctrine and church
government.
Tomorrow's
Question:
How could they have not
known what they were doing?
Additional Question:
What if you work for your
church?
