The Sovereign Grace Issue

I don’t know how many of you have been following the recent troubles of the “Sovereign Grace Ministries” denomination, or even know what it is for that matter, but I’d like to say a few things on the subject, so I will provide a short background.

In 2011 one of Sovereign Grace’s founding elders, a member of their board of directors, left the denomination and released more than 300 pages of documents (including his personal notes, e-mails, and memos) alleging that the denomination’s leadership was guilty of hypocrisy, spiriabuse, and inordinate love of its own reputation. The denomination and church leaders who supported it immediately responded, primarily by denying the vast majority of the allegations. There is another issue that has popped up in about the same time frame, but this is the primary issue I would like to discuss, the allegations by this former ministry leader and others, and conversely the response of Sovereign Grace Ministries.

As a guy who has admired Sovereign Grace’s music and teaching from afar (but has no personal connection to it), but who also has a deep belief that we are sinful human beings who mess up and need to confess it, both to God and one another, I believe I am in a unique position to look at both arguments. In the end, I found that I could no longer trust either of their responses in regard to each other due to a number of factors on both sides.

The Detractors

The primary detractor of Sovereign Grace is the elder who left, Brent Detwiler. The most popular internet detractor would be an anonymous blog called “Sovereign Grace Survivors”. I’ve read through about 20 Detwiler posts as well as 40-50 pages of the documents he released upon his resignation from SGM, as well as 30-40 posts on the SGS website. My conclusion from reading all of these is that they essentially disqualified themselves from argument legitimacy to anyone outside the denomination because of three factors: bitterness, tinted glasses, and a strong martyr complex.

Bitterness – After reading post after post on both Brent’s website and the SGS site I found that many were similar in composition. Insert accusation X against a SGM leader or church, tell a story illustrating accusation X, exposit on how terrible the leaders of SGM are for allowing said accusation to happen. My issue with this isn’t so much the format but rather the way that it is executed. Over and over I found myself depressed by the extreme twist of bitterness coming from those expressing their hurt and disappointment. Bitterness, as opposed to those other feelings, is by definition characterized by intense anger and hostility. I found repeatedly (not in all posts, but in most) an extreme sense of loathing and hatred towards SGM and a complete lack of forgiveness for them. Often this presents itself when it seems a post is not attacking sin, or evil, but a person/organization, it truly seems to me like many of SGM’s detractors have forgotten who the enemy is (Satan, sin, evil) and replaced it with a more personal one (C.J. Mahaney, SGM, etc.).

I want to say to any detractors who might read this that I understand this, I really do. When I was young a church fired my parents for trying to tell the truth to the congregation (the board had been acting illegally in their business practices and my Father found out). They proceeded to black ball us when other churches would call for references, lying and saying that we were asked to resign for negligence or inappropriate behavior rather than for ratting on the board, causing us to live on food stamps for two years. I was bitter about that for more than 7 years, and I only realized in college that (since it was an affluent church) it had created in me a personal distrust of anyone wealthy. So I understand, I really do, and I don’t want this to sounds like I am condemning you. But at the same time, I can’t take anything you say without a grain of sand when it’s so clearly colored by bitterness and a lack of forgiveness. I wouldn’t have been the person to ask about that church because I was clearly biased, and the same goes for most of you and SGM. This leads to point #2.

Tinted Glasses – Maybe this one is just an outsider looking in and not getting the full view because I don’t know the culture, but I often would read a Detwiler or SGS post and walk away going “huh?”. Specifically, there were a number of “reactions” or “reviews” of how a SGM sermon, book, statement, or interview testified to SGM’s overall attitude or abuses. I found every single one to be confusing and unhelpful because in every single post it seemed the writer was responding not to the content of the sermon/article/etc. that he was reviewing, but rather to the piece that he/she had wished had been written for them to critique. Often I would look at the quote they put forth, then their response to the quote, and wonder if they had even read the same thing I was reading, because their response to it made no sense and often critiqued what they thought the writer/speaker was implying, rather than what he was saying. If you want me to take your reviews seriously, I need them to be reviews, not rants disguised with a quotation or two and a title that resembles that of a recent sermon/interview/article.

Martyr Complex – This one is more subtle, and it’s the one that I feel the least confident in, so if you are a detractor and think I’m wrong about you on this one, I very much could be, but check for it anyway, it never hurts to self-examine.

Often in reading detractor posts, along with the sense of hurt and bitterness, there seems to be another sense that often comes with those, and that’s a kind of “woe is me” feeling. Often in SGS posts and occasionally in Brent’s (I apologize for not referencing specific posts, I can go back and find them for you if you want, just let me know), I feel like the writers believe that they are heroes tragically suffering for the Cross. This often confuses me when it ends up in the same article as the bitterness and misrepresentation discussed above. 

I definitely understand that you feel hurt, but there are people all over this world who are literally dying in order to proclaim Jesus’ name, and you seem to think that you’re greatly suffering by standing up against hypocrisy, or more often, against a church model you believe to be flawed. Suffering for the gospel, and specifically dying for the gospel, is martyrdom. Having a few people say bad things about you because you disagree with their church isn’t. It just seems to me like the threshold for “persecution” in the SGS/Detwiler camp is extremely low, and while any level of persecution is wrong, there just seems to be quite a bit of inflating said persecution to make SGS/Detwiler look more “wronged” in the argument. Obviously I am not including in this those who claim to have gone through legitimate suffering in these situations.

On SGM

If you’ve been reading this and are an SGM apologist or member, you probably feel pretty good right now, but I’m afraid this is where I address SGM’s sin issues in this conflict, and I do believe there are some.

Relegating the Laity to Non-Involvement – This is an issue I have with SGM’s entire governing system that ends up filtering into this debate. SGM has a system of church government (originally unofficially, recently made official in their new church government policies) which gives little to no official role to non-ordained members of the congregation. In fact, it really seems that it separates the congregation into the members and the pastorate, the members who are there to learn and the pastorate to govern. This leads to a number of issues such as a sense of pride and untouchability amongst the clergy, a lack of accountability from anyone but the other pastors, and a general sense I could see growing in a congregation that they have no voice in policy and decision making. That said, this is primarily a review of the debate, and in terms of the SGM/Detractors debate, this system of polity makes it hard for me to trust then SGM statements because the only people who really know what happened are on SGM’s payroll. When the only people who know the truth all have their livelihood dependent on that truth not being TOO destructive, it makes it hard for me to not take everything said with a grain of salt.

Refusal to Address Specific Failings – Those of us who are in the ministry (should) know that mistakes happen. We are fallen humans who, until God completes the work he has begun in us, are going to continue making mistakes and sinning against God. I’ve recently been reading “Dangerous Calling” by Paul Tripp, and I think it does a magnificent job of laying out the dangers inherent in ministry and one of those dangers is locking up the things we’ve done wrong for fear of not looking good enough for our job position, or really even thinking that we need to NOT make mistakes in order to be ministers.

It has truly seemed to me throughout my reading of this whole debate that SGM and its leaders are terrified of admitting to specific failings. Truthfully, it doesn’t even seem like they want to respond in the negative to specific accusations! All of their confessions have been to “minor leadership failures” or “sins” or “difficulties”. There has yet to be an “I admit I messed up in this specific situation” type admission out of anyone in SGM. I know it’s hard to admit failure, please know that I do, I personally hate admitting my mistakes, but God is helping me to learn that it is a CRUCIAL part of any healing process and of our own healing after sin. I am sad that so few of the seemingly spiritually mature leaders of SGM appear to have learned this lesson.

General Closed-Door Nature of the Process – I’d like to share a story to illustrate my point here, the church I am part of recently went through the process of leaving the PCUSA and joining the EPC. Throughout the process I think the elder board of the church did a fantastic job of being as transparent as they possibly could with the congregation. I believe that this helped the congregation to have faith in the elder board’s decision and led to a nearly unanimous decision by the congregation to follow the elder board’s recommendation and vote to leave the PCUSA and join the EPC.

The SGM process of dealing with these accusations seems to me to be murky and unsure at best. What was the process of adjudicating the accusations by Detwiler? What is the process for dealing with the types of accusations brought by SGS? Why was it decided that Mahaney should step down temporarily, but then came back, but then went away again? I just don’t know because it seems like the “process” of dealing with this either didn’t exist (the deny everything and pretend it didn’t happen hypothesis) or was extremely internal and unregulated by the denomination at large. This is probably a symptom of a leadership that has the two previous issues I listed. If the leadership doesn’t have accountability from lay members and is unwilling to address specific issues, then I guess it would be pretty hard for them (or in their minds simply unnecessary) to be open about the process through which these issues were resolved.

Conclusion

My conclusion is that I honestly don’t know who to trust, who’s right and who’s wrong, or even what either side truly is angry about or defending themselves against. Detractors, I understand that you’ve been hurt by this whole issue, but if you want me to believe your side of this story it can’t be characterized by bitterness, bias, and a sense of being injured by the other side of the issue. SGM, I understand that you’re afraid of looking bad, but you HAVE to let your laity into your leadership structure, you HAVE to address the concerns brought forth by your detractors, and you HAVE to be honest and open about the processes through which you’ve reached decisions in these issues. Until both sides manage to improve on these issues, I don't know if it's possible for me, or anyone else from the outside, to know the entire truth of these issues.