Gods of the Smoke Machine: Power, Pain & the Megachurch

Featured Speakers:
Julie Roys, Scott Latta, Lance Ford

Julie: Mega church pastors have never been more influential than they are today. They have massive social media platforms, media empires, and even entire colleges under their control. But the churches, these men pastor, have also never been more prone to abuse and hurt. It seems monthly, if not weekly. There’s a new story of a powerful church harming innocent congregants or staff.

In Gods of the smoke machine. Award-winning journalist Scott Latta goes inside America’s largest churches to uncover the hidden stories of trauma happening behind closed doors. He also looks at why these churches have become this way hinting at possible solutions. Stay tuned. My live interview with Scott Latta is next.

Well, welcome to this special YouTube Live with Scott Latta and myself exploring the abuse and hurt so prevalent within America’s megachurches. I’m Julie Roys, and in just a minute I’ll be introducing Scott. But first I wanna thank everyone. We exceeded our $20,000 goal and raised a whopping $25,000 in one day.

This is an amazing. Start to our December campaign, we need to raise $145,000 by the end of the year. That’s an ambitious goal, but it’s what we need to meet our annual budget of $700,000. Now you may be wondering why the Roy’s report needs that kind of money, and the answer is that we’re expanding our staff so we can expand our reach and do more investigations and more podcasts and provide more res re, more resources to restore the church.

Just two days ago, we added veteran investigative journalist Daniel Sillman to our staff. Daniel is the former senior news editor at Christianity Today and did amazing work there. Uh, during his time, you may remember that he broke the story about Ravi Zacharias abuse of spa workers. He also uncovered allegations that a Fuller seminary professor secretly practice polygamy.

And during his time at ct, Daniel was trusted to independently report on sexual harassment. Within the publication itself. So we are absolutely thrilled to have Daniel join us, and I think you can expect, uh, great things from Daniel in the days to come. Daniel joins an already amazing staff. It includes our senior editor, Julia Dean.

Julia is the former religion correspondent for Newsweek Magazine, but she’s also worked as a reporter or editor for the Houston Chronicle, the Washington Times, and several other publications. So you may have noticed that our writing has been CRISPR and more compelling in the last few months, and that’s because Julia is editing all of our copy and she’s just a phenomenal writer and editor.

But as you can see, we have a growing staff with other editors and support staff. We also added several new freelance reporters and contributors. All of whom are experienced journalists, and we have a video production team that makes these broadcasts, pos, uh, possible. Uh, just a fun note about Josh Montez, who’s engineering tonight’s broadcast.

Josh formerly worked for James McDonald’s walk in the Word broadcast ministry, and he helped us. Bose James McDonald back in 2019. So now to have him working for the Roy’s report is just really, really cool. And it’s exciting to see, uh, God take these incredible people with incredible talents like Josh, and then redeploy them to further our mission of reporting the truth and restoring the church.

Also, I wanna mention that on this live stream, I’m going to be announcing a really exciting new initiative at the Roy’s report to help restore the church. So stay tuned for that. Uh, but we can’t do anything without your help. We are grassroots funded operation, so we rely on your donation of $50, $500 or $5,000, whatever it is, uh, that you can contribute.

To do this kind of work. So if you believe in the mission of the Roys report to hold the church leaders and ministries accountable, please go to julie roys.com/give now. That’s Julie Roy, spelled ROY s.com/give now. And when you give at least $50 to our ministry, we’ll send you a copy of Scott Latts book Gods of the Smoke Machine.

So again, just go to Julie Roy, spelled ROY s.com/give now and partner with us in this important work and together. Let’s make a giant leap tonight toward our $145,000 year end goal. Well, joining me now is Scott Latta. Scott is an award-winning journalist who has spent a decade reporting for humanitarian organizations, and recently he turned his attention to exposing the abuse and harm that’s far too common in many American megachurches.

Scott wrote, gods of the Smoke Machine, power, pain, and the Rise of Christian Nationalism in the Mega Church. So, Scott, welcome. It’s a pleasure to have you join us.

Scott: Oh, thanks so much. I’m, it’s so thrilled to be here. I feel like you and I have been reporting on kind of concurrent tracks for a long time, so I’m so excited to chat.

Julie: Yeah, we definitely have. And reading your book, you know, we were kind of joking before we got, uh, hopped on this broadcast that many of the stories and. And the churches megachurches and the celebrities that you talk about in this book are ones that I’ve become so familiar with because I’ve reported on a lot of them too.

And I, I think I counted, I went back in the, the end notes at the back and said, I wonder how many times the Roy’s report is here.

Speaker 3: Isn’t there? Isn’t there? Yeah, it sure

Julie: is. It’s like a, a dozen times or so. Yeah. Uh, that you mentioned the Roy’s report, which I love. We love to see the work get more profile to, to get more people aware of.

Mm-hmm. You know, really what’s a crisis, I think in the church right now and aware of the abuses and the corruption that’s just really, really rampant in the church. And you did an excellent job, uh, just documenting so much of this. And I was saying so many of our stories, you know, we release one story at a time, one investigation at a time.

And I think people can miss that sort of 30,000 foot view. And that’s what I feel like your book begins to give us, you know, kind of peel back and look at all the stories that are similar and what kind of patterns we’re seeing. And so, uh, really get great job. It must be exciting for you, uh, to be rolling out this book, uh, right around Christmas time.

And, uh, what kind of response have you gotten so far?

Scott: Well, I think my hope for the book is just that the people who have experienced pain or harm inside really large churches feel seen and that feel like it’s possible for them to have a voice because it’s so hard to have a voice when you’re in a large church, right?

Mm-hmm. And so I think that’s what what’s been really gratifying in my conversations with people so far is hearing from people that they’re grateful. One woman told me that at a book event in Oklahoma, she said, I finally feel seen. And just when I, when I meet people like that, it just reinforces to me how hard it is to have a voice when you’re in a really large church and if you experience something harmful or traumatic or painful.

So I think that’s been kinda the most rewarding part of it so far, uh, is just the conversations that the people I’ve met and pastors honestly, who have come to book events and shaken my hand and said, thank you. It’s such a, such a kind of a universal issue right now as megachurches grow their presence and their power.

So I’d say that’s been really rewarding so far.

Julie: I love that, and I’ve heard that from people as we report as well. I feel seen. I feel heard. Yeah. And it’s so important that these people, again, like you’re saying in a mega church, you’re often anonymous. And so if you get hurt or harmed, where do you go?

Like where does your story, you know, where do you go with your story? You start out with marchers school’s, church in the introduction, and in many ways I think he typifies so much of what this book is about. Talk a little bit about how Driscoll is sort of a prototype of what’s happening, yeah. On a much larger scale across the country right now.

Scott: Yeah, you’re, I think you’re exactly right. And just, I’m sure most people watching are super familiar with Mark Driscoll. But, so Mark Driscoll was pastor of Mars Hill Church in Seattle, and I think at their peak, they had, I think 15 campuses across five states.

He was one of the most influential megachurch pastors in America. I, when I was younger, in my twenties, I used to stream his sermons on iTunes from the other side of the country. I think he really resonated with a, a generation of young men. But what we couldn’t see behind closed doors was the environment that he fostered of of domination and requiring, you know.

Subordinates and submission to him and bullying and things like that. And there’s a great podcast, the Rise and Fall of Mars Hill by Christianity Today. They did a great job, really thoroughly reporting kind of the culture of abuse that he fostered at Mars Hill. And I think you’re exactly right that he really typifies these issues of power and control in large churches because Mars Hill worked really hard to try to hold him accountable.

They did so much work and so much research and had so much evidence and they tried and they were gonna ask him to step aside and go through a restoration process that involved counseling and he just refused it. He just said no and resigned. And the church dissolved immediately. Immediately, the church dissolved Mars Hill, one of the largest churches in America.

And so he moves to Arizona and now he started a new church, Trinity Church in Scottsdale. And I was really fascinated by him as a character in the book, because I think he’s really different now. I think a lot of the, the patterns of his speech and rhetoric are the same, but him personally and his character, and.

Openly political and far right he is right now, he’s really become a political commentator in a way that I didn’t see him doing in Seattle. So I was really interested by him, but I think you’re right. He typifies these problems of accountability and how hard or even impossible it is to hold megachurch pastors accountable and power and control over people’s lives.

And you’ve done so much reporting on Mark Julie, I know that, you know, you’ve, you’ve reported on this too, so, I’m sure you’ve seen these patterns as well.

Julie: Oh yeah. And actually I recorded a podcast with Mike Cosper who did the rise and fall of Mars Hill, and we talked about this new rebranding, you know, it’s Mega Mark now, right?

Yeah. I mean, when he left Mars Hill, it was like he was kind of struggling to, you know, how do I. How do I rebrand? How do I relaunch? And then somehow he hit on this mega mark. And, T-P-U-S-A has been platforming him now, which is really grievous. I, one of the reasons we did that podcast was to alert people, Hey, I don’t think mark’s the spokesman you want on T-P-S-U-S-A right now.

Um, but maybe they do. I mean, I don’t know. Uh, it’s, it’s will be interesting to see Yeah. As that continues. There was one thing about what happened with Mark, though that I think is it’s really telling is that it took about, what was it, 21 pastors writing a document to get the elder’s attention that we need to do something here.

But that’s 21 pastors banding together to do this. But if you’re a lay person. At one of these mega churches. What kind of power do you even have if something happens to you?

Scott: None. Honestly. None. Right. You have zero. Well, because of all the layers that are put in place to insulate men in power, and it is pretty much all of us.

Always men, almost always men, universally, to protect guys like him to protect these really ultra, mega church pastors. And I think that is, I don’t think, I don’t know if that’s unique to mega churches. I think a lot of churches of all sizes do this. They work to insulate pastors. But I think this is what I think is unique to really large churches is that a mega church has the resources to not just be your church on Sunday, but it has the resources to reach into all these different aspects of your life.

So it’s your church, but it’s also your small group on Thursday nights. Mm-hmm. It’s the music you listen to. It’s your coffee cup, it’s your hoodie. It’s might be where your kids go to school. It might be where you go to the gym. It could be your marriage counselor. It’s all of these things. And so. If you experience something painful, if you experience some kind of harm or trauma, you don’t just lose your church, you lose all that stuff.

You lose your community. And so many people in the book had their pain really compounded, all the more by the fact that their megachurch had become their entire community. You come in the doors and the doors really closed behind you in a lot of ways. And so if you’re a lay person at Mars Hill, like you said, and you do have some sort of negative encounter with power and leadership there, what can you do as, as one among 20,000?

So I think that is one of the reasons I wanted to take on this project, is to give a voice to people who didn’t have one and kind of hand them the microphone because like you said, it’s so difficult to feel like you have any kind of story or any kind of, power or voice or presence in a church that large.

Julie: Yeah. And it’s kind of a trade off. And I, I thought you brought that out really well. That in many ways for the Christian consumer, which I hate to say it that way, but that’s, that’s what it seems to be today. You get everything mm-hmm. At the mega church. Right. And the small churches can’t compete.

I mean, they can’t compete with the quality of, of worship and they can’t compete with the kids programs that, you know, it’s, it’s just all around like this incredible, you know, one stop shop for everything for your family, but you are anonymous pastor’s not gonna know your name.

Speaker 3: Yeah.

Julie: And if something happens, and I’ve seen this happen so many times, not you think like your friends, you’ll keep your, those friends.

And most all of the stories I reported, when the person becomes the pariah in the mega church, they lose all of that. Yeah. Like they are, I mean, it’s almost like shunning in, in an Amish community or something. Yes. You, it, it’s what happens. And it’s, it’s devastating. Especially if you’ve invested 20, 30 years, these are your lifelong friends and now you’re out.

Scott: Yeah. Absolutely. I, I think that’s a pattern that is true. I think that’s true. I saw that too in the people I spoke with too, is that if you do come forward you’re not just coming forward to take on the pastor, but you’re also challenging his spiritual authority. You’re challenging his calling from God.

You’re challenging the church’s presence in the community. And why would you do that? Why would you even wanna, you’re, can’t you see all the good this church is doing? And I, I had a woman in the book who had a really negative experience at a church, a very large church, and she told me that when one person comes forward at a church that size, it’s so easy for the church to dismiss their experience as one person’s experience.

And look around, there’s 10,000 people here who are have, who are very spiritually fulfilled, and they’re in a very tight-knit community. And look at all the good work. Doing in the community. This is just you. And she said that the only way to get their attention is to raise the voice of the collective, of, to show them that it’s not just one person’s experience, but it’s a, it’s a pattern.

And so that’s what I hope the book does. But I think you’re exactly right. I mean, I, shunning was the word that came to mind for me too. I, I had people tell me that, they were they would go to a game night with their friends after, after having left the church and their friends were told to delete a picture of them off of Instagram.

Like you couldn’t be seen photographed with people. You really do have to pick a side, unfortunately.

Julie: Can I ask what church that was?

Scott: That was Christian Faith Center in Federal Way Washington. That was, um, Caleb Treats church.

Julie: Interesting. Which is an art church, which we’ll talk about. Mm-hmm. Um, but I heard the exact same things at Trinity Church, where Driscoll is that same thing happened and.

Someone made the mistake of being at a party and getting a picture with this pastor who had been fired, and all of a sudden now they’re outta the church excommunicated. I mean, it’s cultish and not all megachurches are like that. And this experience can happen at a small church as well, but I think the difference is you’re anonymous, you don’t have any power, you don’t really have as much say, and people don’t know you.

So, I mean, it’s just, unless you’re on staff, you know that might be the case. But for you, this is an actual, this is personal for you. You write about, you, were you two out of the three passers, I think you said growing up and even in your adult life, ended up being ousted because of sexual misconduct?

Speaker 3: Yeah.

Julie: What did that you, you don’t talk a lot about what that did to you personally, but I, I’m curious, you know, as I’m reading it. Man. I mean, that’s, that’s a bad, that’s what, 66%?

Speaker 3: Yeah.

Julie: You know, two out of three end up being bad apples in a place that you think is, you know, the, the city on the hill.

Yeah. The light of the world. Like what what’s going on? I mean, what does that do to you when something like that happens?

Scott: I think it makes you question everything, honestly. Because when you grow up, especially I, I grew up in a really large southern Baptist church, and when you grow up in a church at large and you experience the man at the front having a degree of spiritual authority, you’re not allowed to question.

And then you see him mess up in a way that like. You wouldn’t think would ever be possible because he was called by God to this position or whatever. It makes you question everything. It makes you question your faith, certainly, but also like big questions of spirituality and what sort of, where that leaves you, leaves you spinning.

And I walked away from the church in my twenties and the last church that I went to was a megachurch. Uh, my wife and I were kind of looking for a church that could offer us everything, I think, and, and that that took us to large churches. And, and we saw that that just was not working for us. And we had been burned one too many times by the men in leadership positions in these churches.

And I just think that one thing that reiterated that to me in reporting was it reminded me how painful and how difficult it can be to leave a church. I think that sometimes it gets written off too easily, too simply to say, well, if you had a negative experience, this guy’s not your boss. He’s not the law, he’s not your family.

Just leave, go find a new church. It can be a very wrenching grieving process. To leave a church, especially if that is all those things that we talked about earlier with your community, and if you have kids, and if it’s your kids’ community too, that’s a whole other thing that adds a layer of difficulty.

It’s a very difficult process to leave a church, especially if you’re older and you’ve been gonna that church for a long time. So yeah, I think it was, it was harmful and negative and it took a, it took a long time to work through it.

Julie: And we’re gonna talk about deconstruction later on in the podcast, but sounds like that’s a process you’ve gone through.

And I, I look forward to kind of digging into that a little bit because I think there’s so many people right now who are just in that space of what do I believe now that this has happened and where do I land? And I, I’m grieved by how shamed they get. When, instead of like shaming, I feel like we need to be pointing the fingers at ourselves.

Like what have we done as a Christian community that has averaged so many people? And, um, and we should be listening, doing a lot more listening than we’re doing right now. But yeah, I, I look forward to digging into that. But let’s talk about some of the things that have led to these scandals. And you talk about numerous scandals in the church, many of them very recent.

Um, the Robert Morris scandal where mm-hmm. I mean, I’m still trying to wrap my head around this. Um, yeah. And I shouldn’t be laughing, but it’s like, well, you don’t, don’t even know what else to do. A man sexually molests, a 12-year-old girl tells, it was like the open secret. Like all as his elders knew, all these people knew.

And yet goes on for decades. Pastoring a church. Now he’s in jail where he should be. Mm-hmm. And should be for a lot longer than the sentence he got. But but you have a church like that. We have Bill Hybels. What happened at Willow Creek Community Church just in 2018, found out that he had sexually harassed numerous women, Ravi Zacharias, this supposed greatest Apolo AP apologist of the 20th century or 21st century.

And here he had sexually molested all of these women which has now been confirmed with an independent investigation. I think if you would have asked any of them at that time, they would’ve said they have accountability. In fact, most of them, if not all of them, were members of the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability had their seal of approval right up there.

And they had elder boards, they had trustees, they had overseers, right? Mm-hmm. How does this happen that you have churches with these overseers who are charged with making sure this kind of thing doesn’t happen?

Scott: Yeah.

Julie: And yet it does.

Scott: Yeah. I think that’s one of the big questions is if they openly talk about how seriously they take accountability and they have names on their website that purportedly are meant to hold them accountable, then how could these things happen?

And honestly, the pattern that you see and the pattern that I saw in my reporting is that at churches, these large and at churches this large, and we’re talking about very large churches here mm-hmm. Um, that a lot of pastors choose their own accountability. They handpick their overseers, they handpick their trustees.

So there’s a mega church pastor in Jacksonville named Stovall Weam. He was in the inner circle of Arc. Mm-hmm. Which I know we’re gonna talk about. He said he gave an interview, he kind of crashed out of his church in Jacksonville after scandal. And he gave an interview to a local reporter and she asked him about accountability.

And he said, I have two forms of accountability. I have my trustees and I have my overseers. They’re chosen by me. And he saw that as a good thing. He saw that as his friends that he could trust to hold him accountable if he needed it. I think the question in the book is that accountability? Can you count on your friends who benefit from your net worth?

You mutually benefit from each other’s net worth. There’s a lot of money floating around in this world.

Is that real accountability? I think that’s a question in the book.

Julie: Yeah. And, and take Ravi Zacharias International Ministries, that board, who is the chairman of the board. Ravi, uh, which by the way, at the Roy’s report, we have in our bylaws that I cannot, whoever’s the chief executive, cannot be the chairman of the board.

So I could never be both CEO and chairman of the board. We, we mm-hmm. You can’t do that. That’s not accountability. Right? Mm-hmm. Um, so the chairman of the board was Ravi, the vice chairman of the board was his wife. Yeah. One of the other directors was his daughter, who then when he re uh, when he retired, she became CEO.

So, so, I mean, think about it. You’re one of these women that is sexually abused. You’re gonna go to the board. Of course not. Of course. You’re not gonna go to the board. And, and this is where I think, you know, some of these best practices, like having an independent board where people aren’t related to one another.

I would also put in there, and, and you made a you kind of hinted at it, your friends and the money. I think to have people who are in professional ministry, um, on a church board can often be, be problematic, especially at a huge mega church because, you know, I know when I was reporting on James McDonald Harvest, Bible Chapel, all, there were several men who had separate ministries and they knew that James McDonald could crush them if he wanted to, and he did.

Scott: Yeah. So I think that, yeah, I think this is one of the problems about being in power at this level is that to be a pastor and to be a megachurch pastor, you don’t have to have a license. You don’t have to go in front of a professional board. You could mm-hmm. We could start a megachurch tomorrow and grow it as big as we want, and we could design any form of accountability we want or not.

We wouldn’t have to tell the IRS we were doing it, by the way, and if we closed our church, we would No. Nine

Julie: 90 necessary. No, no. Nine 90.

Scott: We can do whatever we want. And if we close the church, we don’t have to tell ’em that either. And that’s it. And so. What does accountability look like? Also, the majority of mega churches now are non-denominational, which I think it’s questionable whether denominational accountability is, legitimate accountability.

It’s, it’s still internal accountability, but at least it’s something most mega churches are non-denominational aligned now, so they don’t even have that. And so, yeah, I mean, who’s watching? I mean, who is actually gonna step in? Are friends gonna step in and hold themselves accountable? I mean, adult clergy sexual abuse is not a crime in most, in some states, at least still today.

And I think that the system is just not set up to promote real accountability for so many of these men. And I think that’s what’s led to a lot of these problems.

Julie: Absolutely. And here’s the other thing, if you get caught, if you know, your misconduct becomes public, you can just leave right? Your current church and go underground for a while and then say you’ve been restored.

And pop up somewhere else. And this is something that is, there’s actually a church network, and I was so glad that you talked about it because the Association of Related Churches, which is arguably the largest church planning organization in North America mm-hmm. Hardly anybody’s heard of it. Like people who follow our reporting, they know about ARC in the association related churches.

They know about all the scandals that they’ve had, but by and large people haven’t heard of this network. And if they, they may even be going to an ARC Church and not even know it because it’s not like it, it’s out in front. We’re in our church. Um, sometimes the only way to find out is to go to the church finder thing on their network and find out.

Mm-hmm. But here’s the thing about ARC is that they’re not ashamed of the fact that they’re restoring these fallen pastors. They’re actually bragging about it and very openly saying. That, you know, this is something that they wanna be known for. So it, for those who don’t know what ARC is, uh, you do a great job of talking about the origins of it.

Talk about what ARC is, how it got started, and how, I mean, the executive director of ARC is a restored pastor.

Scott: Right. Yeah. So ARC stands for the Association of Related Churches. It’s one of many church planting organizations in the us but I, I think it is the most influential. And it’s associated with several mega churches.

Seacoast Church in South Carolina, church of the Highlands in Birmingham, new Life Church in Arkansas. The ARC lead team is composed of these guys. They’re friends, they’re each other’s overseers. You’ve reported on a lot of them and have gotten non, non quote statements from a lot of them over, over the years.

Yeah. Uh, so ARC exists basically to help start new churches. So they provide startup loans for new churches. I think sometimes it’s like, it ranges from like 50,000 to a hundred thousand dollars, I think, to help new churches make. Salary for the first year to help ’em get off the ground and they call themselves a family.

And then after that you pay back a portion of your tithes or offerings back to arc. They have a huge ARC conference every year, and you are exactly right that these churches look and feel the same. And it’s so funny you mentioned that actually. ’cause I was in Charlotte for unrelated reasons, not related to the book, not related to reporting, but I had to go into church and I went into church and I was looking around and I thought, this feels like an art.

Church, the fonts looked like it. Mm-hmm. The seats, the colors, the branding felt like it. And I got on their arc finder later and sure enough it was, yeah, these churches have a feel, they have a vibe. The architecture is very similar and so, okay, well so what’s the issue with that? Well, the issue with that is that a lot of the ARC pastors of these ARC churches are each other’s overseers.

They speak at each other’s churches. So, you know, Chris Hodge is taking, for example, pastor of one of the, I think the second largest church in America now, church of the Highlands, Birmingham. They claim 60,000 attendees each week. He likes to say that he, every year he brings in all of his overseers to preach at his church.

He goes and preaches at their churches. This is what they do. So they’re each other’s friends they guess, speak it a lot and they are asked to hold each other accountable. And so you mentioned the executive director de Rizzo. He is a restored pastor who had a. Moral failing. Many years ago at his church in Baton Rouge, he was moved to church, the Highlands.

I thought it

Julie: was just a new season he needed to

Scott: change. He moved into a new season. He was called by God new, new season to leave his state and head east. And he joined the staff at church, the Highlands. And he was restored. He was taken outta the pulpit for two years and then he was, he, now he’s on their staff and he was put in charge of arc.

So pastoral restoration is an issue that I spend a decent chunk of the book unpacking. Mm-hmm. And it’s this notion that a pastor could have a quote, moral failing. It often means an extra marital affair, but it can be much worse. It could be much more serious. Very serious allegations against some of these pastors.

And then they’re kind of, well, we just

Julie: reported today, Sam Collier. So this is the guy he was at Hillsong Atlanta, and he goes through a messy divorce. His wife says he’s been unfaithful to her many times. And then this other church replatform him, says they’ve restored him, he’s good to go.

And then she comes. And digs, gives more dirt on him. Apparently the guy was, uh, being extorted by a transgender prostitute that he had visited and his wife knew about it. Now she’s talking about it. Uh, again, I mean, yeah, this guy’s was stored. A guy who regularly went to prostitutes said he wasn’t, and then.

Went back to it again. I mean,

Scott: yeah, case in

Julie: point, but I, I interrupted you. Go ahead. But I couldn’t

Scott: No, no, that’s fascinating. And I, that was, I think one of the challenges of writing this book is that stuff kept happening, right? Yeah. Scandals kept happening. Robert Morris, that whole story happened after I finished the manuscript.

I had to go back and rewrite it because, oh man, it all happened. So it’s constant. It’s very constant. But, so there’s a lot of problems with pastoral restoration. And I think, but one of the most glaring problems with it is that there’s no consistent definition of what it means to restore a pastor of when they’ve crossed the line to when restoration should not be an option.

It’s not, there’s no number in the Bible, there’s no prescription for this. And so I found a study from lifeway Research from the Southern Baptist Convention where they asked a group of pastors, if a pastor has an affair and has to step away, how long should he be asked to step away? And there was no consensus for what that number should be, which I found really alarming because those are pastors.

Mm-hmm. And you had a huge range of answers from one year to 10 years to life. And so some of those well-known pastors in the US have very different definitions of what this is. And so the process just becomes completely determined by the men who are leading it. And it’s completely opaque. It’s not transparent at all.

The victims, the survivors are not brought into the process. They, they get no voice in this process. And so it becomes determined by the guys who once again, are your friends who you’ve asked to oversee you and so, that’s accountability right now in these large churches. And so that’s just one of many issues with this process to me.

But it is a pattern that you see. And like you said, they take pride in it, they brag about it. And it was just fascinating to see how each kind of bespoke restoration process was just like completely determined by the guys running it.

Julie: A hundred percent. I actually have a clip of Chris Hodges where it’s, it’s just a really short clip.

It’s from something that he said in 2021 at a conference, and it’s breathtaking. Yeah. Josh, if you could play that clip.

Chris Hodges: Tino and I are in the middle of about 20 pastoral moral failures or restorations right now. Uh, what was about three a year? It feels like it’s about three a month right now.

Uh, of things that are happening. That’s fine. I love doing that. I wanna be known for that.

Julie: Three a year has become three a month. They’re in the midst of 20 right now. I, that’s breathtaking to me. And, and I think you’re right. I mean, I, I look at scripture and there is something about being above reproach.

I, I’d like to know how a pastor who you know, is involved in adult clergy sexual abuse with somebody under him, can ever be above reproach, has betrayed his congregation, has portrayed his own staff. I mean, it’s betrayed as family. I, I, I don’t understand it. And yet again, he wants to be known for this.

I think because they’ve got so many, I mean, it’s, it’s dozens that we’ve reported on and I’m sure we’re, we’re just scratching the surface. And then they just built. This four and a half million dollar Lodge. Talk about that and what the purpose of that lodge is.

Scott: Yeah, and I, I will say he went on record with a reporter at later saying that he was talking, he was referring to burnout from the pandemic, but he uses the word restoration and he uses the word moral failing.

And so unless he thinks burnout as a moral failure, he’s talking about something different there. So Chris Hodges is, I think, one of the leading proponents of this process. And he does say in that clip that it’s something he wants to be known for. Johnny Hunt, former president of the SBC, who I think has been restored twice.

He in another video was said about him that he personally restored over 400 pastors himself. I have that video.

Julie: We can play that video, but go, go ahead. Right. It’s, it’s pretty interesting. I do wanna play it.

Scott: Yeah. So, but you wouldn’t know that sitting in his church and you wouldn’t know that at church.

The Highlands, I don’t think that video was like at a Sunday morning service for the congregation. It was like an internal pastoral thing. So you don’t know that. And these men are brought on staff and often the staffs are not told why they’re there. The congregations are certainly not told why they’re there.

The allegations against them and the ones at Church of the Highlands that were quite serious, the allegations that were quite serious, the congregations, as far as I can find, were not made aware of what those allegations were. And so. There is part of the book that discusses this building, that Church of the Highlands built that they call the lodge.

And it’s a very fancy, expensive looking cabin kind of set back into the woods. And what happened was they started construction on this building and they called it the lodge for, I think, pastoral. They used the word restoration like pastoral recovery and restoration, ReSTOR restoration, something like that.

And that really triggered a lot of alarm bells. And you did a lot of great reporting on this about mm-hmm. Well, what do you mean by that? And who is gonna be brought in? Because at the time they had pastors going through the restoration process at their church that had very serious allegations and they were not being forthcoming.

And there is a, a pattern, a culture there, I think, of them not being forthcoming about issues like this. And so the community really started kind of. Wondering what was going on in this building. Now he has since come out and said that this is a place for like pastoral recuperation for pastors who are experiencing burnout.

And they do like arc retreats and stuff there. And you pay a lot of money. You come and stay at this lodge. Like they’re he’s saying that they’re not gonna be like having sexual predators in this building, basically. But because they weren’t being forthcoming about the process, it left a gap for speculation to really run rampant in Birmingham.

And also when I went out there in reporting for the book a couple of years ago, they built a fence in the middle of the woods surrounding this building. The day I was there, a fence went up blocking the public hiking trail, and people were furious and it traced the property line of the lodge. And so this is a like a pristine hiking trail that the community had built next to this really beautiful river.

And the church had just shut them out. They had shut the whole community out and they would not say why. And they would not take the fence down. And so the community actually started ripping the fence down themselves. I went back the next day and someone had cut a hole in the fence to reopen it back up.

Speaker 3: Wow. And

Scott: so it was just this mess. And because they weren’t just coming out and talking about this, and people knew they had a history with this process, it got so problematic because they don’t engage with criticisms, they don’t engage with, things like that about their church, because Hodges himself has said he does not take criticism from people who rank below him.

He says that God, as a pastor, God only calls him to take criticism from people who are above him. And so I think that leads to just a lot of issues,

Julie: the arrogance of that statement. I just, I, I can’t, and I, and I mean, you read scripture and it. It says very clearly that the overseers are supposed to shepherd people and they’re not supposed to be like the Gentiles who lured over them.

And yet that’s exactly what he’s describing. But that’s, that is a model. It’s the Moses model, right? Where

Speaker 3: mm-hmm

Julie: Whoever that senior pastor is, he hears directly from God, you know? And so the rest of the church, forget Acts two, you know, where the Holy Spirit’s given to everybody and we all can hear from God now, no, the pastor can hear from God and the rest of us, you know, just are there to support the pastor.

And that really is the model that they’re proposing. And it’s, it’s no sur surprise to me that they’ve had so many moral failings among their pastors. And I mean, honestly, do I believe Chris Hodges, who, like when me Con Carter, when he had a. A really nondescript failing of some sort in Yakima, Washington at his church, a mega church there.

He leaves the church folds, he comes to Church of the Highlands, they put him on staff. Oh. And then the next year his secretary comes out and says, oh, it wasn’t just a moral failing, she accused him of raping her.

Speaker 3: Yeah.

Julie: And then Chris Hodges says, oh, we never heard about that. Yeah. Do we believe he never heard about that?

I mean, I’ve talked to these people, right, who have the family members who say, no way. Right? Of course he knew. So, so, so do I believe him when he says, oh, the lodge is not gonna have any sexual predators in there.

Scott: And there’s a staff member who was on record with a local reporter in Birmingham saying that when Carter was brought on there, staff were told that he was there due to financial difficulties at his previous church.

And so, you know, I attempted to reach out to Church the Highlands several times, and they reported for this book and never heard back from them and wanted to give an opportunity to kind of correct these kind of, dissensions in the record. Sure. But they don’t do that. They the line that I heard from people who have been to church there and have suffered painful experiences is that they are told that silence is honoring.

That’s the phrase that came up time and time again, is that when it comes to criticisms of the church, silence is honoring. And that gets taught to students. That gets taught to people in the program. And so you don’t engage with. Folks like us who are I think asking, I think, valid questions about the history and practices there, and it leads gaps for speculation like this, whether, you know, whether they were doing this JD stuff or not.

The problem was they weren’t truthfully engaging with it, which made the congregation question, it made the community question

Julie: well, and, and honestly that’s spiritual abuse. I don’t know where in scripture it says that we should stay silent, especially in turn, in, in abuse situations. Nobody, and I’ve said this many times, but nobody seems to quote one Timothy five 20 that says if a, an elder is sinning, that he should be exposed before all, so that others may stand in fear.

There’s nothing there about covering up. Or there being anything honoring. In fact, it says, you know, in Ephesians that, have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them like that. That’s what the scripture says, but they’re twisting it. And, and I’ve said before, if you’ve, if you’re in a church, many of these megachurches, you are being groomed to stay silent when they.

When there’s pastoral misconduct and it’s, it’s grievous and I mean, it’s just, it’s not biblical, but they make it sound biblical and really it’s spiritual abuse. What’s going on. I wanted, I, I mentioned that we had Johnny Hunt’s video, and I’ve also mentioned that we have, we’re gonna be unveiling a new initiative that we’re doing here at the Roy’s report.

So I’ve asked Lance Ford to join us. Lance is our director of Restoration Resources but he’s also kind of our resident theologian. Um, and I love to bring him on when I hear pastors saying things that have no biblical basis. So there’s two clips that I wanna play. So here’s the deal with Johnny Hunt.

If you don’t know about Johnny in 2022, there was this landmark SBC, uh, study looking into, sexual abuse and the way it was handled within the Southern Baptist Convention. And what it found is that there was just widespread, uh, mishandling of these abuse cases and also shaming and silencing the abuse victims.

There was also this shocking discovery that Johnny Hunt, the former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, had in 2010 sexually assaulted another pastor who would’ve been under him as the president, another pastor’s wife. It’s such a heinous thing to sexually assault any woman, but think of doing that to a pastor who’s under, under you to his own wife.

Unbelievable. And they had stayed silent for a very, very long time. So that comes out and now suddenly Johnny is repentant, 12 years after this event and goes through supposedly some restoration process. And four. Four pastors shoot a video, and I’m just gonna play two short clips from it.

But the first one involves a guy by the name of Steve Kyle. He’s a pastor of Highland Park Baptist Church in, uh, Panama City, Florida. Very interesting what he has to say, so take a listen.

Pastor Steven Kyle: Hi, I’m Pastor Steven Kyle, and I’m here with pastors Benny Tate, Mark Hoover and Mike Whitson. It has been our humble responsibility over the last several months to work directly and closely with Johnny Hunt and his family as they chose to enter into an intentional and an intense season of transparency, reflection, and restoration.

Pastor Johnny considered submitting himself to a similar process, which he founded at Woodstock many years ago. But when he sought our council, we advised him and his family that we thought it was wise for this process to take place away from Woodstock. In order to give the hunts the space and the privacy they uniquely needed during this season, which is the same process Pastor Johnny used in restoring over 400 men to ministry.

We were in agreement with the leadership of First Baptist Church of Woodstock that the Hunts membership should be in the church of their restoration. And they also agreed to submit entirely to the process that we put in place. It has been to us a sacred duty and a serious one, but I wanna be very clear today, pastor Johnny has been accountable to us and has chosen to remain accountable to us going forward.

Julie: So he is accountable to them. Something that stuck out to me, and Lance thought you may have heard this too, away from Woodstock. Woodstock is his home church where he pastored for decades? Is this biblical? To take a pastor who’s been a part of a church who served at a church for decades, pull him out of his church for some sort of restoration process, and, and why would they do that?

Lance: Yeah. And once again, this gets through this whole system and as Scott said, I mean that, that Chris Hodges would just be as bold as to just say, Hey, I’m not gonna be accountable to anybody below me. I mean that and which that echoes Mark Driscoll saying, I’m not gonna receive counsel for anybody that has a church that’s smaller than mine.

So this accountability system is a faux accountability. It’s a pseudo accountability. And this is the problem. It’s a one-way street and it’s vertical. I like to call it vertical accountability. So you’re, you’re only accountable to somebody that’s above you, which is not what the New Testament teaches in the body of Christ.

The accountability that is taught in the New Testament is a constellation of accountability. It is a constant, it’s a mutual accountability. I am accountable to you. And so by taking his process out of his home church, you’re removing him from being accountable and like the, like the pastor said there, you know, he’s accountable to us.

His buddies. It’s, it’s a good old buddy system and this is the way it works and it’s in spades, and I’ve seen it for decades. In these churches and these systems, you’ve reported on it, Scott, it’s in your book, you know, I mean, and everything that, that you’ve seen. So it’s all part of the safety system that you call it accountability, but it is no accountability because it should be within the body itself.

So Johnny Hunt should have to be facing and answering his own people, but once again, you’re only accountable to somebody that’s above you or that’s, yeah. That’s above you. And the beat goes on.

Julie: Yeah. And pretty horrific. You mentioned this, Scott, 400 pastors were restored by Johnny Hunt, who sexually assaulted a woman and then covered it up for 12 years.

Scott: Right. And. Go ahead. Go ahead. No, no, no. You go ahead. No, I, I was just gonna say, and where is the victim in this process? Where’s the survivor? Where’s the woman that this happened to? How is she involved? And if you read the investigative report, which is part of the larger report into abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention, you see that she was talked over in interviews.

She was pushed aside, she did not felt genuinely heard or listened to. And that is also a pattern that you see. Is that the person who was taken advantage of and abused in the process? Is cast aside, Cindy Klier was part of this too with Robert Morris for 42 years. For four decades. She tried to seek accountability for Robert Morrison was cast aside and was not part of his, his process.

And she and her father tried very hard to make the church wear over the years as he grew his cachet and his power. But no, they were not invited to be involved in that whatsoever. They were shut out.

Julie: Yeah, I’ve got another clip and that’s from the same, this same four, uh, group of four. It’s a guy by the name of Woodstock.

Uh, I hadn’t heard of him before. Mike Wit, no, not Wistock, Mike Wits son, uh, who’s also a pastor in an SBC church. He makes some really interesting claims. So, take a listen,

Mike Whitson: Johnny Hunt and I crossed paths back in the mid to late 1980s and along about that same time, uh, God gave me the opportunity. To learn what Galatians six one was all about and what a learning process that that was, and what a teaching moment it was for me to be able to pour into the life of somebody who had messed up somewhere along the way.

And in that process, I learned how important it was for the body of Christ to come alongside people. That needed us at that moment. You know, I look at the passage of scripture and I see that, that word restore and, and maybe just understand that, uh, brethren, if any man be overtaken in a fault. And the fact of the matter is we’ve all sinned and we’ve all come short of the glory of God.

Amen. And we all need the body of Christ to come alongside of us from time to time. And then the Bible just tells us, uh, that we are to restore, to put back like a broken bone, that we are to heal that bone and like a net that, uh, has a hole in it that lets the fish escape. We are to repair that net.

And then if you really dig into that, you discover that it says not only fix that bone, not only repair that net. Put back to doing what they were doing before the breach and add to them added responsibilities because they’re more keenly aware of the pitfalls that lay ahead. And when I learned that, I thought, wow, I can do that.

And we’d just been doing that at First Baptist Indian Trail for, uh, the last really 35 years.

Julie: I, you know what one horrifying that this man has been doing this for the past 35 years. But also I went, and I, I read that passage and I’m like I kept digging in and I couldn’t see where it said that.

Am I missing something, Lance? No, you’re not. I was digging real hard. I was digging in and I just couldn’t find it. You’re gonna have

Lance: to. Yeah, I mean, this is classical iso Jesus and not exogenesis. I mean, the only thing that he got right was when he the slim definition of this word czo, uh, being a word about mending nets or repairing a bone when he started adding the the dialogue about and to restore.

And it brings a person back to even stronger than there is nowhere, anywhere in any scholarly teaching about that scripture. That’s what, that, what that means of that been Ben, uh, Withington says that type of a, of a interpretation of the scripture toward restoring leaders is a category mistake.

In fact, Galatians one is solely about Paul’s talking about restoring a brother or sister to fellowship in righteous living, not restoring someone to a position of authority. Re restore in Galatians six, one, Paul totally and only means it’s restoring to someone to write living and scholars consistently note and their relationship with the Lord.

With Jesus, it’s moral and relational, uh, restoration, not vocational restoration. Nothing in the context points to offices or titles or leadership reinstatement. And this, is not the pastoral epistles. This is not Timothy and Titus, where Paul goes into great depth to talk about that. You must be of great reputation.

You must be well-spoken of outside the fellowship. You must have good relations in your mari in your marital relations. That’s where he talks about what it takes to hold office. And so, and that’s in the pastoral epistles. And so there is no discussion here in Galatians six one or, and yeah, here in Galatians six one to elders or pastoral qualifications church governance, none of that whatsoever.

So he, it’s just not true what he, what he said there and. Many scholars would refute that to the end that Galatians six has anything to do with a ministry physician. It’s all about your sibling relationship in the body of Christ and your relationship with Jesus himself,

Julie: man. And this man gets up and preaches to his people, and they trust him to be telling them the truth.

I mean, I, and it’s not just him. I, I just hear this all the time, you know, in sermons, and it’s why I’ve just become so skeptical of sermons, and it’s probably why I’m in a house, church where we open the scriptures and we discuss it together. And I’m not listening to one person’s opinion where they’re telling me, if I dig in, I’ll find something that’s not there.

I’m, I’m sick of this, this is ridiculous. But it’s what leads to exactly what you’re talking about in this book, Scott, that man, it’s making things up.

Scott: Yeah. And I just wanna call attention again to the fact that this is four men sitting around a table restoring another man to power. Mm-hmm. And did you pick up on something interesting he did in that clip there where he said, we’ve all send, all he’s doing there sin leveling. He’s is, yes. So let’s not forget, Johnny Hunt is accused of sexual assault of a woman. Mm-hmm. Behind closed doors. And so the equivocation of that to just your common ordinary transgression or whatever mm-hmm. Is a huge issue. And Yeah. And I found in my reporting, Julie, I’m sure you have as well, that mm-hmm women feel very different about this issue than men.

And I spoke to someone it who wasn’t evangelical, and he had done research on this, and I asked him, is there something about large churches that makes them more prone to cases of abuse or things like this? And he was, he vehemently said no. And he encouraged me to look into other large systems like the military or corporations, universities and nonprofits.

I thought that was interesting because first of all, those institutions have huge rates of abuse. Like the military, college campuses, corporations, like a quarter of women on college campuses, report being raped or sexually assaulted. So if that’s the math case you want to compare mega churches to, okay, fine.

But also women can be in leadership positions in all of those situations in the military and in the corporate world. They cannot be in leadership positions in these, in many of these churches. They’re just not in positions of leadership. And I think that also exacerbates all these issues that we’re talking about.

Lance: A hundred percent. And let me, let me add something in there and, and because we’ve heard this tripe a lot, we’ve heard this, well, you get to, in fact, Julie, you and I today, uh, earlier today, we were having a conversation. I told you about an old video that I came across a week or so ago with James Robinson for over 40 years ago during the whole Jim Bakker scandal.

And he and Jerry Falwell on stage. I thought they were gonna get in a fist fight because James Robinson was saying that, that, uh, Jim Bakker should be totally restored, even back to his ministry. And God bless Jerry Falwell. Falwell was making a good stand against it, you know? And, and you know, Ja James three, one said, not many of you should become teachers because you were re we will receive stricter judgment.

Listen, when you take these positions, when you decide to become, to go into ministry and you have a public platform and you are a pastor, stricter judgment for you means stricter standards. It means stricter consequences, it means stricter scrutiny, it means stricter accountability. And so when you lose reputation and you botched it yourself, and you botch it at such great levels, I’m sorry.

Go to Home Depot and fill out an application. A hundred percent. Do something else. Yeah.

Julie: Yeah. I said that we had an exciting announcement that we wanted to make, and we’re gonna be unveiling something that we’ve been working on for months here, actually, almost the better part of this whole year.

But before I do that, I want to talk just briefly about how this happened, because what we’re talking about right now, Scott, I mean the, the crisis in the church is just it’s, it’s an epidemic proportion right now. And I was meeting with, a man who built a very large company and was very well to do, and he knew how to run things.

And in fact, in his company, he wouldn’t allow you to work with him unless you would take his best practices. And so he found that he’s just, he’s tired of working with people who’d make stupid mistakes and just keep doing it. And he’s like, Julie, I see your reporting and everything that you’re doing and it’s not fun to read.

It’s painful, but we need to do it. And I’m so grateful for you exposing this problem. But he said to me, what are you doing to restore the church? And I said to him, you know, we do this restore conference, which I, I, I can’t think of anybody else that’s really doing something to minister to all of these people who have been wounded in the church.

And so often I hear they come to the conference and they’re like. Wow. I, you know, I feel seen, I feel heard the same thing you were talking about Scott, and it’s so healing just to be seen and heard. But then the way that, people who haven’t taken communion in six years or worshiped with people felt safe to do that.

Finally it’s a powerful event and I said, well, we do, we do this. But, but that’s about all we, we had the resources to do. I mean, we’re a small outfit. We’re, we can’t even cover all the stories. And Scott, you know what this is like, like I’ve been in news organizations where you’re like looking for a story and you have to really work hard on your beat to, to find the stories.

We haven’t had any of that from the time I started the Roy’s report. The stories are coming to us and they’re coming to us in such a great volume. On Monday, I got together with Julia Dean and, and Danielson. And Rebecca Hopkins who does the vetting, and we went over, our Monday meeting of going through all of the leads that we got.

And it’s like triage, right? Trying to figure out Well, and it’s painful because the ones at the bottom that are, small churches, we can’t, we, you know, we just had to say we can’t do those, you know? And so we we’re doing more than we’ve done before. But again, I said, you know, with every positive story, you know, if I wanna do a feel good story, it means I’m telling this victim, I can’t tell your story right now.

And that’s really hard to do. But I said, we want to do it like we want. We have learned so much, you know, being in this space that we’d like to do more. And there’s so much wealth of knowledge, like when we get these speakers to come and restore and you’re like, wow, these people know so much.

They’ve been in this space a long time. And, uh, so I called I called Lance, uh, who, I got connected with you back when you wrote it wasn’t when you wrote on Leader, but you connected with me several years after writing it. And I read your book and I was like, man, this guy gets it. And so I I I just asked you like, what can we do?

And the amazing thing I’m gonna try to make this long story short is that you had already raised 75% of support to basically do what I was talking, what I was saying, you know, restoring the church. And he’s like, if you could get, if we could get the resources to do something to restore the church.

I’ve, I can just come work for you full time. And I’ve already raised 75% of my salary. And so we got, we got we got Lance for 25%. It was quite a bargain of your salary. But here God had already been working in your heart to do something. And then after this, this, um, this guy came, this donor who owns this company, came to the Restore Conference.

He gave us quite a big financial gift as a start to do something. And we’ve been working on this. We’re gonna unveil it. The beginning, you know, the early part of 2026. But Lance, talk about what we’re going to do and how this is gonna serve people who are right in this space right now of, being wounded by the church and just feeling, or pastors who wanna do better, or donors who wanna not waste their money anymore and give it to organizations that are gonna squander their money.

Lance: Yeah, well, it, we are very excited about it because I believe that it, we are hitting on some of the answers. You know, the tagline of the Roy’s report is reporting the truth, restoring the church. And some of the criticize criticism that Julie gets or the Roy’s report gets is, Hey, you, you, you, you were do this reporting, but where’s the restoring part?

Where’s, and like Julie just said, it’s just, it’s a, it’s been a lack of resources and everything. So, but the Lord knows how to bring everything together. He knows how to bring a team together. And I know for me, I, I’ve been working on this. The, the book that Julie mentioned, I wrote, it’s coming up on 15 years ago.

So I’ve been on the systemic issues of leadership for years and years and years, and we have to get on the solution side of it. So that’s the thing is we started dreaming together and saying, what would it look like if we were to be able to create a hub where people don’t have to scratch and claw and, and kind of piecemeal and duct tape and bailing wire.

They’re you know, they’re healing and their answers. And what if we bring some of the people that have been working on this for years and years and years and are bringing healing and bringing solutions? What would that look like if we brought them together? And so we’re doing that with a new website that, like Julie said, that’s gonna it’ll launch sometime in the first quarter of next year.

It is being built at a fever sleep pace right now. We’ve got a great company working on it. We’ve got a big team working on it. But it’s gonna have tons of resources and we’re, we thought that we would just give you just a little look at it. And it’s not a look at the website and you’re going, what you’re gonna see is a, basically a blueprint.

So I charge you, I ask you to use your imagination here. This is not all the pretty curtains and all that. This is just the raw studs and concrete. So you’re really looking at a blueprint here. But I’m gonna walk you through just a couple of minutes here of of what we’re going to be, be offering in this new website that’s going to be called restoring the church.com.

It’s. We really have four primary, it’s people that we’re, we’re wanting to serve here, and that’s represented by these four boxes right here. One is basically church boards and elders that either have found theirself in a crisis or know that there is something wrong in their structures, in their systems, and they’re needing help.

The second group are people that are survivors or advocates for survivors of some type of abuse, whether it be SA or just being oppression, um, bullying type of leadership. That would be another category of person. Another category of person would be pastors and or staff members in churches that feel like something is wrong.

In their leadership culture. And the reason I say it could be pastors. It could be pastors that realize that, just don’t know how to change their systems. But it could be staff members that are being abused or suspect that they’re being abused. And then the next categories are church members and donors.

These are people that are seeing something in their church or in their faith-based organization. They feel like something could be wrong. How do we get out of it? How do we change the systems? So that’s, that’s kind of, for lack of better term terms, are our target audience right there. And the tools and the resources that we’re going to offer is very robust.

And so, like you could see right here where it says starting assessment, each one of these will be able to click on that and immediately take a brief, but a solid, a good assessment that will rate where they’re at regarding their suspicions or their feelings or their needs. Right now in that leadership culture, you’ll, it immediately will send an email scoring your assessment and then give you suggested next steps.

And there’s just gonna be a ton of resources in there. Uh, let me get back over here to this screen now. As we move on down, one of the things that we’re excited here is a group that we call Trusted Voices. Nevermind all the names here. That’s all just the web developer. Just throwing names in.

So the names of the, what we’re calling Trusted Voices are experts, some of ’em that you’re familiar with that have already committed to, to become part of the team here. And regularly contribute in writing and also being on more webcasts, more podcasts, and then providing resources. And some of these names are people like Scott McKnight and Chuck DeGroat.

And a lot of the names that you’re gonna be f familiar with that we’re really excited. They are very excited. I was telling Julie when I had shared with Chuck DeGroat. About what we were doing and making the ask if he would be part of this. Uh, he came, he just about came out of his chair. He was so excited about it.

And what’s cool is like you, you can, you can click on one of these trusted voices and it will take you to a page that will show every podcast that we have with them. It’ll show you the resources, whether it be their books, it’d be white papers, it’d be any type of a helpful resource they’ve developed.

And then we also are developing very practical tools. Like for instance, if a church board says we wanna rewrite. Our, as we sit here, a survivor safe board meeting, what would it look like for us to create a survivor safe system in our church, we’re creating templates and we’re creating helps that are very, very practical with these resources that we’re developing.

As you just scoot down here, one of the key things is gonna be what we call a recovery roadmap, which will be an in-depth step by step with guides, case studies, lots of assessments, and all the way down to courses to help rewrite their systems and their structures. It’s just gonna be very robust.

We’re gonna have online courses for all of those categories of people that I shared with. We’re gonna have governance templates to be able to rewrite your so many of these bad policies that Julie reports on. What would good policies, what would biblical. Good policies and structures look like. So we want to help in that regard.

Coaching group workshops, we will be offering, uh, more like one day on site seminars besides just the, uh, uh, restore conference curated reading list of all the contributors. And then just a great place to be able to come and just jump into. Find the articles that you’re looking for, find the resources that will really help to rebuild your systems and your structures.

’cause you know, I’m the, it’s the system stupid guy. So we are really going to offer just a robust array of, of resources and tools to, to, to rebuild your systems. And so this website is a monster. I mean, it’s gonna have so much, uh, that we’re really excited because we believe it’s really gonna be a healing place and truly live up to that.

Restoring the church tagline that, that’s the promise that we’re making at the ROS report. And we wanna live up to doing the best that we can to put our foot forward and helping you step into that.

Julie: Well, I am so, so excited about what you’re putting together there, Lance. And, uh, excited to be a part of it.

And we’re also talking about our YouTube our YouTube site will become more of a, more of a radio station almost, because we’re gonna have multiple podcasts. We’re gonna start a podcast with you and just really trying to, to provide things to. So again, bring some healing, bring some best practices, all of those things.

Yeah. Of course that doesn’t, you can’t make up for bad character, but at least it’ll help you to spot it and to deal with it when it happens. So really thrilled about that. And again, so this is one of the things we got the on-ramp from this donor to do this and to build the website and to do the basics of getting this around.

And, and you’ve been working so hard getting videos ready and all, all sorts of, you know, resources. But we’re gonna need the ongoing, money to support this because we’re, this is free, just like our website. Yeah. It’s free. You come and we, we don’t give you a paywall to, to go read our articles.

We are here to serve you and to serve the church. Mm-hmm. And so, and when we get more money, we don’t raise our salaries, we hire more people. So that’s what we’re doing. And we’re still pretty bootstrapping kind of outfit, but I am so excited about this. So I just wanna encourage you, if you wanna be a part of, again, we have to meet this budget for the end of the year.

If you wanna help us, just go to, uh, julie roy’s dot com slash give now. Um, and I wanna say there’s, there’s also a, a tab there after you, after you go through, you click through to give. Uh, if you wanna give a matching gift, and we had a matching gift come in yesterday, somebody gave, and we just put that $5,000 up there, uh, as a matching gift and boom, man, all of a sudden things took off.

And it was exciting to see. And this is where if you give, then we can match dollar for dollar that gift, and that makes us access that gift only if we get that money. So, um, it’s one of those ways, I, I always think of that verse about spurring one another onto love and good deeds. So when you give that matching gift, that’s what it does, it spurs on other people to give.

And, and that’s really what this donor’s done. Like he gave a, a major donation to us. But it’s to spur others on because he’s not, he’s not gonna do that indefinitely. He’s given us an on-ramp, but then we need to take it from there. But super excited about that and I don’t wanna belabor it, but I know it’s gonna serve the church and I’m super excited.

And so, again, just go to juro.com/give now, uh, and you’ll be supporting this new initiative as well as, uh, our regular expenses, which we really appreciate you, you helping out in that, in that way. We are getting, uh, not a whole lot of time left, Scott, but I, there’s a couple of things that I have to go back to on this book.

And Lance, if you wanna stay with us, you are more than welcome to because there’s a couple of things that I think you would probably, uh, have some input on. And I would love to hear your thoughts on this. But I wanna go to the one part of your book, which is about the rise of Christian nationalism within the church.

And I think if you asked most megachurch pastors, they would say. They’re not political. They’re not political. And yet we know, there’s been studies done. Uh, the election, the 2024 election was very much swayed by the evangelical vote, which, uh, evangelicals got out and voted. It’s not a bad thing, but we’re also seeing this rise of Christian nationalism, and that is very concerning, um, because nationalism, as I understand it, is caring about your country to the exclusion of others and then mixing Christianity into a political system, which is not what it was ever meant to be.

But Scott, talk about where you’re seeing this in the megachurch and how it is promoting sort of this rise of Christian nationalism.

Scott: Yeah, it’s a great question and it’s a very big question and very pertinent right now. So I, yeah, I think you’re exactly right, Julie, that most mega church pastors say that they’re not political.

So that there’s a study that’s done every five years for the Hartford Institute for Religion Research that’s specifically focuses on megachurches, and they talk about mega church salaries and congregation sizes. It’s really the only way to get hard data on megachurches, and it’s all self-reported by pastors, but it’s really the best we got.

And as part of that survey, they say they talk about political activities. And so in the last mega church survey that was done in 2020, the overwhelming majority of mega church pastors say that they, they do not take political actions as a church. If you look at the way they frame that question, what do they list as political actions?

They list distributing voter guides in the church, lobbying elected officials, things like that. Things that I think are probably the most like extreme and direct political actions that you can take. But I think there’s different kinds of political power, like I would consider that hard political power.

And you do see more of it now with this administration, guys like Mark Driscoll who are becoming more open and being more Christian nationalists openly. But there’s also soft political power, which I think is probably what I experienced more growing up in the church and what I think is probably more common, which is just the way it, it feels to be in that church and the things that the pastors stay from the pulpit.

Maybe they’re not distributing voter guides, but maybe they’re cracking jokes about liberals or trans kids or going to the West coast, you see this and it’s just like little, little jokes. Often it’s played for a laugh, but it’s meant to make you feel like there’s a way that you should believe politically in that church.

I think that’s much more common, and I think that. So you see both right now hard political power and soft political power. And I, I would say that the way that this administration is right now, the system has never been set up more to be more amenable to openly political passers having access to actual, real levers of power, like Mark Driscoll says in a video on his YouTube channel that he was introduced by Charlie Kirk to JD Vance backstage mm-hmm.

At an event held by Paul White and mm-hmm. So that’s access, that’s power. He got it immediately. Mm-hmm. He got introduced to the vice president. So, I think that there were certainly political pastors in the eighties and nineties, but not in that way. I think where you had the Vice President’s number in your phone, you got introduced to him backstage.

Mm-hmm. But I’m, I’m curious how you see this too, because I, I see it as an issue that’s just gonna get worse. There’s no reason to think that, especially for at least like, for the next few years, that it’s not just gonna become more common.

Julie: I feel like c Christians are getting radicalized, if I can say that.

The polarization has gotten so extreme and I think post-Trump people are saying things that they didn’t feel free to say before, which for me has been shocking because I thought I knew my friends and I found out I didn’t, you know, I found out they were okay with racist statements that I’m not okay with.

I found out they were okay with really thinking about us. I don’t know if anybody heard the Matt Walsh, and I like some of the stuff Matt says, but a lot of it just makes me cringe where he was talking about, a lot of people say America first and you know, I, I’m actually an America only person and all I, when I have a a go, a government official, I just want him to care about us and me, and I don’t know.

How much, you know, Matt Walsh claims to be a person of faith. I think he’s Catholic. But I’m like as a Christian I was brought up that we care about the world. Like I was brought up to be, like, my parents used to talk about being a global Christian. We had a, I remember this book that every day we you could go to a new page and it would tell you about a country and you’d pray for that country.

Like I was brought up that as Christians, God doesn’t like Americans more than other people. He actually loves us all equally. So this idea that America and this idea that America should be Christian when. I mean, what are we trying to establish a theocracy that any, even Israel had trouble with. I mean, this is in, uh, you know, under a totally different era.

Uh, it it’s shocking to me. And it’s, but people aren’t biblically literate, so I feel like they’re, they mix things all together and they don’t even know that it doesn’t mix. I think it’s, I mean that’s I don’t talk about this a whole lot, but I am very concerned about it. Lance, what, what?

How do you feel?

Lance: Well, I, I think it’s a fundamental problem of not understanding the kingship of Jesus and that there’s another nation, and it, it, it, it’s the nation that comes from, from heaven. And that’s who we are. We are not of this world. You may remember that old Petra song, Julie, you and I are, are, yes, we’re old enough to remember, but we’re not of this world.

And look. I am, I’m as patriotic as an, I’m a Texan, so actually I put my Texan is above being an American. It’s like, Hey, you may be an American, but I’m a Texan. Okay? So I mean, I can get very patriotic. And all that. But above all that our citizenship is not of this earth. Our citizenship is of heaven. And that changes our ethos.

It changes our ethics, it changes even our economics in the way that we should deal and steward what we have. So I think a big problem is with nationalism, and so much of what we’ve seen happen in the last 40 or 50 years, and I really do believe that a lot of what we’re the, the chickens that are roosting right now do go back to around 1980, the late seventies, the warm majority and all that, all that has come to roost right now, and it’s blossomed.

But what it’s fundamentally done is it’s erased our understanding that we are not of this world, and that our citizenship is of heaven. And so that erases all the boundaries. God doesn’t look at this world. With boundaries. We are a people that should have a different ethic, and it comes from heaven. And, uh, so I believe it’s a fundamental issue of not understanding the gospel of the kingdom.

We’ve been taught a gospel that really has been very limited to be about whether you go to heaven or hell, but it should have to do whether you are heavenly on this earth or not. So I, I think that it’s a deeply rooted issue and it’s a, and it goes back to just not even understanding the gospel that Jesus brought.

Julie: We, you mentioned Scott Mark Driscoll, and I’ve got a clip where he talks about globalism and nationalism. It’s not a very long clip, but it’s a taste. So I wanna play that and I’m sure we’ll have some thoughts on it.

Mark Driscoll: It is a good thing if you’re a Christian, to be a patriot. Let me make a little quick argument for patriotism, and I’m a patriot.

I love the United States of America. It’s the greatest nation on the earth, and a bad day in America is still a better day than anywhere else. That’s how I feel. And nationalism started with God and globalism started with Satan and demons, and this is all the way back to the early days of Genesis, something called the nation of Babel, the Tower of Babel, which is ancient Babylon.

And there everybody wanted to do globalism. Let’s all work together so that we can rule the earth. We have no need of God. Let’s have one currency. Let’s have one nationality. Let’s have one language. God came down and said, you’re evil and sinners. That will lead to great. Chaos and evil. So God scattered people into nations with languages geographically and also culturally separated.

Nationalism is God’s idea. Globalism is Satan’s idea. Those who are globalists are demonic, and they’re following the demonic spirit of Babel and Babylon, which is also mentioned in the Book of Revelation because it contributes to the last day’s effort to bring sinners together to rule the earth without Jesus Christ, which leads to the antichrist and corruption.

It’s part of the, the deception of the last days.

Julie: Lance, I would love your thoughts on, on what he just said.

Lance: Oh man, so much. I mean, I, I’m really shocked that, uh, that he’s made this hard of a turn to so blatantly and to say, you know, that. Nationalism is God’s idea. And then to back it up with the whole Tower of Babel issue.

I mean, he just mutilates. I mean, you talk about theological gymnastics at its best. That was Mark Driscoll doing theological gymnastics at its best with this issue and mutating the issue of Babel and nationalism. That was not God’s, perf perfect plan. God’s perfect plan. Once again, it gets back to creating a new people, a new.

Type of people, a new creation, a a, you know, a brotherhood and sisterhood of the people that are under King Jesus. And that he would spread us out and he would send us out like salt and light into scatters throughout the world and throughout the earth once again as being citizens from heaven. This was a big part of Paul’s message.

So then to trump that by saying yeah, no pun intended to trumpet by saying, yeah, by, you know, by saying that, that, that we’re to be nationalists of this world. No way. That’s not the idea of the kingdom whatsoever. And, uh, but you can see this is the pathway that, that Driscoll, I mean, this is what he’s saying.

There is music to the ears of this new followership. That he’s developing now. So he’s just, you know, he’s, he’s the pied Piper. Mm-hmm. And he’s, he’s singing the tune that they’re gonna want to hear, and he’s trying to back it up with theology and it’s, it’s poor to say the least. And it’s, it’s detrimental to the body.

Scott: Yeah.

Lance: Scott,

Scott: so I was in the room for the sermon that he’s referencing there at Trinity Church. Should a Christian be a nationalist or a globalist was the title of his sermon? It was a few weeks before the election last year, and I went down to Scottsdale and wanted to kind put eyes on it. And just to kinda paint the picture for you.

Mm-hmm. I mean, he, there were cars with huge American flags in the parking lot there. The kid in front of me was wearing a MAGA hat. There was before the sermon, you can watch it on YouTube, before the sermon started, he showed a video of Ronald Reagan speaking and shots of like Kamala Harris looking scary.

And it was just very much setting the tone for the evening. And it, I was just really struck by. I’ll leave the theological interpretation to you guys, but Liz, I think you nailed it there, but I was struck by just how it felt like an opportunity for him to just kind of rant out a bunch of far Right talking points to the point where at one point he was just reading off a list of basically like every, everything that gets demonized on the far right, he was ranting against foreign aid to Ukraine.

He was ranting against the un, the World Bank climate change, COVID, all of these things to the point where we were just like miles away from any sort of like. Like appropriate sermon, uh, that I expected there. So I mean, I was looking for a little bit of theory on this. So I spoke to a woman who studied him a lot in Seattle, Jessica Johnson, she’s a researcher and she spent years doing field research at Mars Hill.

And I asked her, ’cause the same thing that you said, Lance, like I was shocked by how it seems like he’s taken a turn. Like this is not the Driscoll that I really remembered watching when I was in my twenties. And he, when he was in Mars Hill. So I asked her like, was he this way at, at Mars Hill? And she said yes and no.

Like you saw seeds of it then, but I mean, he was in Seattle and now he’s in Scottsdale, Arizona. So I think just the environment around him is very different. Very different. But she made an interesting point, which is that. When he left Mars Hill, he was gonna need a new crowd to run with. And she cited like Ted Haggard when he left New Life Church in Colorado, he also went to Arizona and he really became kind of persona non grata in the circles that he was in.

And so she compared Driscoll to a chameleon and she said he just assumes the colors of the environment around him, and that’s what he’s done in Arizona. But I was just so fascinated by how differently he seems now where he is become essentially a political commentator.

Julie: Yeah. Well, and so sad that, that is, he wears the title Pastor.

Um, and does that, which is just really disheartening. I just wanna land. I know, I know. We, I mentioned this before about deconstruction. And you talk some about this, but you talk a lot about other people’s stories, which are gut wrenching some of these stories of people that have been hurt in the church.

And I feel it and you can’t, you can’t be in this space reporting on this and not feel it. You can’t have it not keep you up at night. Um, some nights it’s really devastating what has happened. The one thing I, I don’t know if I’d say comfort in, in some ways, when I read scripture and I read, I mean, even through church history, in some ways it’s always been there.

It’s just never been a part of the church. You know, the evangelical church, which I grew up, we were the good guys, right? Mm-hmm. We had we, we were, and I would say that. My family and the churches I grew up in was very devout and there wasn’t hypocrisy. I didn’t have your experience at all.

And, and people ask me, how do I still have my faith? And I’m like, well, I, I saw generations of faithfulness within my family and I grew up in this wonderful church with godly people who are still walking with the Lord. And so I feel like I’ve seen the real, you know, they say if you wanna understand the real, you have study the real, not the counterfeit.

And I can, I see the counterfeit and I see the real, but I, I’ve done a, I haven’t deconstructed to the point where I’ve deconstructed my faith. I’ve certainly wrestled with it a lot, but I think I’ve, it’s made me look at scripture with fresh eyes and say, oh, I was always taught this, is this really true?

Is this really what it says? And what I’m finding out is that some of it is not true. And some of these things that have been given to us as gospel truth are not. Um, and so I feel like it’s been a really. A healthy process, but I, for you, you know, where, where does this lead you? Everything that you’ve been through and, and seeing all of this, filth

Scott: within the church.

Yeah. Yeah. So I think that was probably. One of the harder parts of the conversations that I had with people was about where their experience left them, you know, kind of on the other side. Mm-hmm. And, and you get the range of all of it. You had people who were just gone. They had broken from their church, broken from their faith, and they were happy to be out.

You had people who were still really grieving it, who really wanted to come back to church, but didn’t know what that looked like for them. You had people who had kind of reassembled the pieces into a different kind of spirituality who were still drawn to the notion of being spiritual about something, but it wasn’t gonna be evangelical Christianity.

So you had people kind of across the broad spectrum. But what you see across all those experiences is that people who are going through that is do not need to be demonized from the pulpit. And that is what you get in too many cases. And I spoke with a reporter, Sarah McCammon, who has a great book called The Ex Evangelicals about this trend, like a broad sociological trend of people leaving the evangelical church.

And that’s what she told me is that for too many people who had gone through this, they were going through this wrenching grieving. Process where you’re re-imagining your entire understanding of existence and the universe and everything, and your personal relationship and spirituality. And they were told it was their fault.

They were told that they were sinners. They were told that, they were demonized from the pulpit. They, they were told that they were the problem and that’s not what they needed to hear in that moment. And I think a pastor who does that probably thinks that he’s doing that to bring them back, but it’s driving them farther away.

And I can speak from personal experience to that. It speeds up the process for you when that happens and you hear your pastor saying that because then you start to think, well, why would I wanna be part of this anymore? I’m done. And that was really difficult to have people like crying on the phone, talking about where they’re.

Harmfully experienced in the church, had left them. Maybe it, it, it had been 10, 15, 20 years or more, but they were still struggling like it had happened a week ago. And when we talk about megachurches specifically, also because mega church campuses now are so prolific, this franchise model of a church having 18 to 20 campuses in one city, the visible reminders of a church that hurt you are everywhere.

If you live in a city, there’s a guy in the book who had a very painful experience and he drives by two of those church campuses on his way to work every day from where he lives. So you just see it and you’re constantly reminded of that. So I mean, it did bring back a lot of personal things that I had to work through.

But I think what I took hope in it, in at the end of the day was though those conversations are becoming more normalized, they’re becoming more accepted, and people who have had negative or painful or really wrenching experiences in the church are more comfortable because there’s more people who have gone through it.

There’s people who, and, and it can lead you any number of ways. And so I think it’s kind of a weird little book, and I think one of the weirdest parts of it is that kind of in the middle of the book, I stop the story and I just write this kind of meditation on shame and deconstruction and just bring in all these voices of therapists and counselors and people who have gone through this, and pastors by the way, who have deconstructed and left evangelicalism.

And just kind of my hope for that chapter is that it just shows people that it’s okay to feel that way. It’s okay to be hurt, and it’s okay to not know where it’s gonna lead you because it’s painful and it takes time.

Julie: I know that probably some people will hit that chapter and be like, Julie, why? Why did you recommend this book?

And. And I, I’ll tell you why, why I recommended this book is because not only do we need to be safe for people to say that, but we need to hear it and we need to sit with it. And I loved, Lance, you were there when Scott McKnight, uh, at the last Restore conference basically said the prophets of our current time, many of them are, are people who are going through a deconstruction process.

They’re speaking truth into the church, and we need to listen to that. Although he found in studies that, that he saw that most people aren’t actually leaving their faith. They may be leaving the church, but it seems like, uh, an awful lot of people retain some sort of faith in Jesus. But it might, it probably looks a lot different.

Lance: Yeah. You know, some people, I, I’ve heard it put that some people are, you know, are leaving the institutional church in order to preserve their faith rather than actual leaving their faith. And, um, you know, I, I believe that there is a, a reset that we’re in the midst stuff and that you’re seeing a, a, the, a new old type of church.

And so Julie, like you mentioned, being part of a, of a house, church or a home church and micro church, home, church house church, whatever nomenclature you want to use by every measure, it’s growing like crazy right now within North America. So people are leaving the institutional church. I believe that, that God’s doing a big work there because he’s creating the priest of believers.

And so people are. The, the ministry is getting put back into the hands of the people. And so I, I think that there’s gonna be deconstruction of all different forms, happening. And I, I believe it’s becoming the norm and not the ab norm, uh, right now. And I don’t think it’s a bad thing. I don’t think it’s a bad thing.

So

Julie: yeah. And I don’t think we need to fear it. That’s what I hear a lot. Yeah. There’s a lot of fear. Um, at the end of your book, and this will be the last, my last question, but you go to a little church that has been really impacted by Church of the Highlands, so there’s a little church, uh, is near one of the campuses, what 18 or 19 campuses that Church of Highland is, has, and.

They had maybe 40 sheep to begin with, and Church of the Highlands took half of their church when they came in because, and they, and they can, couldn’t compete and I felt like when you visited that church got the impression the pastor was somewhat apologetic, you know, in the sense that he, you know, okay, this, there’s not gonna be a lot of people and this Yeah.

Speaker 3: Yeah.

Julie: Yet I got the impression when you visited, you liked that church. Now you were apprehensive because you weren’t gonna be anonymous, that you were actually gonna be known people. But I got the impression you liked that little church more than you liked. The mega of churches am am I right?

Scott: I’m so glad you picked up on that.

So I, it was the only time I felt the genuine sense of community in all my reporting for the book. I put in there that it’s the only time anyone shook my hand was when I walked in this Church of 19 people who on the Sunday I was there, it was 11 people. And that church had been around for a very long time and the pastor had a lot of hopes for it.

He had a lot of dreams for how it will grow and reach their community, and that hasn’t happened. And it was important for me to find a voice that could represent the impact that these churches have on pastors, small church pastors, because megachurches represent about 1% of all the churches in the us.

Speaker 3: Mm.

The

Scott: average church in the US has, I think like 60 people. It’s very small and a lot of pastors, the number I’ve seen is about a third are bi-vocational, so they have other work as well. It’s really hard to be a pastor, and so when a mega church with all the resources of a Highlands or a Dream City Church or Christchurch of the Valley or a life church comes in a block away, what kind of impact is that gonna have on the average church in the us which has just a few dozen people?

It’s a profound impact, and he was really. I felt that he was wounded by that. I felt like he was grieved by that. And so when Church of the Highlands moved in, they only lost four people, but that was 20% of their church. That was like every person matters in a church that size. You need people to run music and look after kids and to do all these ministries.

And he told me, everyone who comes here has to participate. You have to do something. ’cause we have 19 people. A 20% of the church walked out the door. And there’s a lot of reasons people go to large churches, but it was, like you said, Julia, it was hard for me to go in and to know that I was gonna be seen and I was gonna meet all these people and his family.

But it was so rewarding, I think to like have a personal connection after being in these big anonymous corporate churches for so long that it felt really poignant to me and important to kind of spotlight that as kinda the close of the book, which is what. Community actually looked like, and maybe it’s not easier or harder to be hurt there, I’m not making that judgment.

But it’s impossible to be anonymous in a community that small. And I think that means something.

Julie: Well, it certainly means something to this generation. I think this generation especially, we’ve never been more lonely. We’ve never been more disconnected. And I think if we lose all of our churches, it’s just gonna exacerbate that.

So I, I appreciate what you, you brought a lot of honesty to this book a lot of research and, uh, I, I just really appreciate the truth that’s presented there. So Scott, thank you and thanks for taking the time, uh, to speak with us tonight. I really appreciate it.

Scott: Well, a lot of it was your reporting, so I wanna say thank you too for you and Lance and your whole team for all, just like the years of dogged reporting and I know how hard it is to seek accountability and, and, and, authenticity from these guys and how many calls go unanswered.

So thank you Julie, for your years of work on this. It made my job a lot easier, honestly to get to the heart of it was the work that you and your team have done. So thanks for welcoming me here tonight. It was really, really an honor to talk to you and I really appreciate it.

Julie: Thank you. Well, likewise.

And Lance, thanks for taking the time as well. Appreciate it.

Lance: Yeah, it’s good to be here. Great to meet Scott too.

Julie: Well, thanks so much for joining us for this live edition of the Roys Report podcast, a podcast dedicated to reporting the truth and restoring the church. Again, I’m Julie Roy, and if you believe in our mission would you please help us meet our goal of raising $145,000 this month?

As I’ve said many times before, we don’t have a bunch of advertisers or major grants. We simply have you the people who care about the vulnerable and the purity of the church. So I encourage you, uh, if you believe in what we’re doing, if you wanna see more of this happening, if you wanna see this, restoring the church.com as well.

Uh, get off the ground, please go to julie roys uh.com/give now and give whatever God puts on your heart. Um, again, that’s julie roys.com/give. Now. And again, thank you for your gifts and for your prayers. We couldn’t do anything that we do without you. So thank you so much, blessings, and I hope that you’re having a wonderful advent and Christmas season.

Lance: We need to be talking about spiritual abuse and religious trauma. This is a place where it’s safe for those who have been hurt in churches. It is also a place for people to learn more about how to respond to those situations, and it is much needed

walking into the room, even taking the platform today felt so safe.

I, there was no nerves, there was no anything. I just, there is an atmosphere of support and comradery and love. That’s here.

I think that it’s really become a kind of a refuge. It’s become a green pasture for people to come find one another and, and so many times there’s a solace, there is a restoration just in finding someone else that’s experienced what you’ve

experienced, to know that there are people from all over the country, all over the world who, uh, have experienced these same things and, and, uh, they’re uniting in Christ.

But healing. And I just think it’s a beautiful experience.

It’s not that we don’t love the church, it’s actually that we do love the church very, very much, and that’s why we’re having these kinds of conversations. It makes me feel less alone when I can talk with someone who’s had a shared experience like that.

It was so cool to see, you know, the room is packed and uh, folks are eager to engage. Uh, they’re encouraged, but they’re also encouraging one another. And I believe that this is so good because the need is so great.

This conference is not only for those who’ve been victimized and hurt, but it is for people who want to be the answer now to what sadly, the church in the last 30 to 40 years has covered up and those who want to be.

The on the cutting edge of how God is moving to vindicate

to show his justice, to bring his healings. I just so believe in the power of story and we need to unite. And so I just would welcome any survivor to come and know that you’ll be loved. You’ll be heard, you’ll be seen. And this is just a safe place for all of us.

Julie: We celebrate what God is doing. We celebrate that the those that have been hurt and wounded by the church, that there’s a place that they can come that’s safe. And they can find healing, and they can find community and they can be ministered to. We celebrate that. It is so amazing and at the same time we grieve that, right?

I mean, how sad is it that we need to have a conference for people who have been wounded by the very place, the very institution that should be ministering, healing to them.