Joshua Harris falling away from faith: 'I am not a Christian'

Carl Trueman had a really great article on this as well at First Things:

In a sense, that is exactly how and why the YRR was so successful: savvy harnessing of fashionable idioms and marketing strategies, exceptionally clever use of social media, large and well-organized conferences, and professional-grade websites—all fronted by attractive personalities and brilliant communicators. Orthodoxy as performance art, one might say. And Harris was both a product of and a player in the YRR project.

Many Christians were helped by all this. The YRR theology was at best a diluted form of Calvinism, but it had a largely positive influence in the pews.

But the movement’s leadership was often arrogant. In public, critics were derided and then ignored; in private, they were vilified and bullied. An extensive informal network of individuals, institutions, and organizations who wanted a slice of the YRR action was happy to oblige the padrini by keeping critics on the margins. And one by one big leaders fell from favor: Mark Driscoll, James MacDonald, Tullian Tchividjian, C. J. Mahaney, now Josh Harris. On Friday the news broke that The Village Church, home of YRR megastar Matt Chandler, is being sued over alleged mishandling of sexual abuse.

But at no point has there been any apparent heart-searching, among those left in the movement, as to whether such falls indicate a problem in the very culture of the YRR—at best a lack of judgment in its choice of headline acts, at worst a fundamental lack of integrity. Sorry, as Elton John sang, seems to be the hardest word. Which is odd for a religion predicated on repentance.

[Joeb]

Agree with what your saying but that’s not what is being taught regarding the Purity and Patriarchy Movements ie Purity Rings. Unbiblical things are taught like the sin falls on the gal if the guy goes to far. Even to the point if it is 14 year old gal and a 30+ year old man in the church.

I’d oppose that too. Maybe I’m blessed not to have first-hand experience with the additional aberrations. I was focused on the well-intentioned “helps” toward what is supposed to be a baseline biblical sexual ethic.

One thing that is worth doing, for those (like me) in churches that haven’t “made the papers”, is to take a look at how things went wrong elsewhere “in our orbit” to see what habits lead to “making the papers.” I have written a protection policy for my church, and one of the things I did was to do my best to see what unifying factors are found at places like ABWE, BJU, and other scandals. A few of the things I noticed were the assumption “we can handle it inside” (leading to not reporting at all) and concentrating on the “sin that led to the bigger sin” at the expense of dealing with the bigger sin. For example, a consistent theme in the BJU Grace report was that a woman would be counseled to deal with “her sin” of breaking BJU rules, but the man’s sin of rape would not be addressed well, if at all. That’s one thing that got Paige Patterson in trouble at both SEBTS and SWBTS as well.

The major apparent sin at SGM, for example, was that they thought they should ordinarily handle it inside, despite being aware of Maryland’s mandatory reporting law. To address that tendency, I put the reasons why we want the police involved—subpoena power, mandatory discovery, resources to investigate, well-developed nonsense detectors, collection of physical evidence, and rights for accuser and accused—right into the document. I also put a couple of statistics about the problem right there, so everyone who read it would have an understanding of how bad the problem was.

Another, harder nut to crack; we tend to defer to those with power and authority in these cases. Mandatory reporting is intended to help with just this, but other than that, I got nothin’.

Interestingly, how I knew I’d gotten a few things right was when some of the deacons reviewed it, they tried to undo the very parts I’d put in to deal with my guess at our institutional weaknesses. It was something of a confession, and I dealt with it by prayer and by pointing out “you can go to jail if you do that.” Our culture is somewhat predictable that way.

In case no one already noted it: https://www.christianpost.com/news/joshua-harris-marches-in-pride-parad…

Thanks Aaron. Very informative.