There’s been such a hefty amount of discouraging church news lately—some from yesterday, some weeks old—that I’ve been shoving it all into a file. I don’t have any plans for it or anything, it’s just that sometimes I enjoy depressing myself. It all came to a poignant crescendo, as I’m sure you remember, with Alistair Begg last week, but there are a lot of other discouraging stories that have nothing, at least not on the surface, to do with that. Yesterday it came across my feed that Willow Creek is shutting down one of its biggest locations. Protestia has the scoop:
Willow Creek Community Church has announced they’re permanently shuttering their Chicago campus location, with senior Pastor David Dummitt citing an “unsustainable financial scenario.”
This, I’m sure, must be horribly discouraging for all those churchgoers, not least because they only just bought the building. The article says that Willow Creek used to have 10,000 members, but then Bill Hybels was accused of “decades of sexual misconduct” including allegations of “inviting women to his hotel room, making suggestive comments to female employes, extended hugs, kissing a woman against her will”…and some other stuff I’d rather not type out.
Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) King David Doing Penance, 1510
You know what linguistic expression I’m tired of? “Misconduct.” That seems far too tepid a word in this situation. I would like it better—indeed, I’m sure it would reenchant the world since that’s what we’re supposed to be doing—if we could say something like ‘Bill Hybels has been accused of sinning against some female imago-deis. All the things they’re saying he did are forbidden by the law of God and, once it has all been investigated and proven, he will be put out of the church until he repents, and then, when he’s let back in, it will be to take up some inconsequential and menial task.’ Sadly, I understand that this isn’t how any of this works. You can’t use the word “sin” in the court of law or public opinion, let alone “sexual immorality.”
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