Yesterday I posted a largish number of links that demonstrate the rapid move of Western culture away from historic Christian sexual ethics. Most orthodox Christians would see that list, shake their head and lament at the state of the world while whispering ‘maranatha’.

I assume they also would have nodded in affirmation to the assertion that the church should tell a better story and present to the world something vibrantly & noticeably different. I may try to imagine what that might look like in a future post but not today. Today is for owning and taking responsibility for the failures that are evident in the church. It would be a hard sell to demonstrate that the church at large is substantially different from the world and yet because of what we believe we are in many ways worse. No room for complacency but lots of room for humility. This is not an exhaustive list (feel free to suggest other areas).

Abuse

#Churchtoo is not a hashtag that has run its course. I suspect that the necessary cleansing of the church is only just beginning. There are many forms of abuse and none should be diminished over others but the focus in this article relates to sexual forms of abuse. The list is growing but this year alone the light will shine into the darkness of abuse from Ravi Zacharias, Jonathan Fletcher, John Smyth. By the end of the year it seems almost inevitable that there will be more who weren’t what we thought they were. The fallout is only just beginning and leaders in anyway connected are being forced to be reveal either what they knew or why they didn’t speak. (See: Chris Green, John Stevens.)

The interviews between Glen Scrivener and the various people caught up in some way by the Ravi Zacharias scandal are helpful and instructive.

Violence against women

This is not always sexual in nature or motive but it certainly can be as the recent shootings in Atlanta demonstrate. Women have to put up with degrading behaviour in ways that men never will and there is a pressing need for churches to recognise this as a much bigger problem and take it far more seriously. That the majority of churches are male-led could be a real problem here because we do not see or feel the problem. God is not silent about rape neither should we be.

Redcliffe College offer the Pressing Red: Understanding & Overcoming Gender-Based Violence course (I’ve read the book but not taken the course) but it is an example of a step that church leaderships could take. Get educated. At Grace Church with help of of organisations like Restored we have been creating a policy on domestic violence as well as other areas of safeguarding.

Purity Culture

The questions have been coming at this for a while now, accelerated by recent events. However it would prudent to examine what resources, messages and advice churches are giving on sex, chastity, singleness, relationships, marriage and so on. The recognition that many men and women are RECOVERING FROM CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE & SEX BOOKS is necessary and a course-correction needed to avoid repeating or perpetuating harm.

Church Culture

There are plenty who will point the finger at male-leadership and with good reason and where those failings occur in conservative churches at complementarian theology. I certainly don’t think we should brush that off. There are questions that need honest answers. Valerie Hobbs for instance rightly challenges complementarian churches (such as my own and leaders such as me) to work harder to make sure that misogyny and sexism cannot flourish and men who are those things are challenged and where necessary confronted. I think we will need to do much better at learning the difference between power over and power to both within home and church. There is much work to be done.