“A cult is a group or movement exhibiting a great or excessive devotion or dedication to some person, idea or thing and employing unethically manipulative techniques of persuasion and control (e.g. isolation from former friends and family, debilitation, use of special methods to heighten suggestibility and subservience, powerful group pressures, information management, suspension of individuality or critical judgment, promotion of total dependency on the group and fear of [consequences of] leaving it, etc) designed to advance the goals of the group’s leaders to the actual or possible detriment of members, their families, or the community.”

(HT: Wikipedia)

“…how is it that CJ Mahaney can make 5 references to his pride and arrogance in his blog, [and] that’s somehow celebrated as humility… [but Larry Tomczak] is confronted with observations of pride and arrogance, prayerfully considers these observations, repents of his sin, writes a letter to this effect that is distributed to the entire ministry, steps down from leadership, and submits to months of disciplinary consequences… [only to be considered] ‘disqualified’ to lead a church?

“I’m sorry. But this woman’s posts—more than any others (b/c she was obviously involved in this process)—has convinced me that Sovereign Grace is a cult.”

(comment by “SGM Casualty” on SGM Survivors)

This website is blowing the lid off of the corruption and poor leadership that’s been allowed to fester in Sovereign Grace Ministries, due to years of fear, control, and cultic tactics. It’s heartbreaking to hear some of the stories from former members; moreso to hear the ensuing silence from SGM leadership.

There’s nasty stuff in there, folks, but C.J. et al seem to want to just circle the wagons. Honestly? I think that’s worse than anything that’s being said over on the blog (and new message board).

“Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them.“ — Ephesians 5:11 (ESV)

UPDATE: On Friday, March 14th, Eric Simmons spoke to the singles at Covenant Life Church in Gaithersburg, MD. You can download the MP3 of his talk, but what I find most interesting is this particular quote (beginning at the 13:49 mark):

I’m also concerned because at this point in time, we are at the pinnacle of the Information Age. You can in an instant find tons of information on any subject you want on Google. Do you realize that Google allows you to be one step away from a lot of heresies?

There are a lot of heretics out there with a lot of false teachings that have blogs. And it’s phenomenal to me in our age now, that what is represented on the Internet is now seen as fact, and authority, and truth! And the reality? Most of these guys who are writing blogs are 24-year-old guys living in their moms’ basement, sitting there in their underwear! That’s what they’re doing! They’ve got a robe on, and they’re just typing away. And they’re typing away their false teaching, which is honestly a bunch of garbage.

It’s out there! It’s just one click away.

I would humbly submit that this is nothing more than fear-based propaganda. (I would also like to point out that C.J. Mahaney, Josh Harris and Eric Simmons are all bloggers–Eric doubly so, as he also writes for the New Attitude blog.)

UPDATE #2: I seem to have driven the “Orthodoxy Underground” further underground, as can be attested by Google’s cached versions of these Blogger profiles. (Thanks to Elaine Hooton for pointing out that the blog was apparently taken down.) I don’t know much of anything about the blog (it was private; you had to be pre-approved by their admins just to read it), but apparently (according to Google) Thabiti Anyabwile, Justin Buzzard and Ricky Alcantar were all members of the blog. So why’d they delete the whole thing, just a few days after this matter came up?

UPDATE #3: Bugger. The Google Cache link doesn’t work anymore. Well, it just listed the Blogger profiles for Eric, Thabiti, Justin and Ricky (and showed them as linked to the Orthodoxy Underground site). Thanks to Dan for catching this one!

UPDATE #4: What do I mean by “cult”? Find out here.

You see, I’ve been in discussions with the pastors (regarding tithing) since our pre-membership interview with Jason Reyes (soon to be the new senior pastor of Covenant of Grace Church in Akron, OH). Sadly, they didn’t bother to even try to answer my questions until they found out that I had posted my thoughts on the tithe here at my blog. Even then, I was met with a general unwillingness to discuss my questions and concerns; rather, the conversation was continually focused on challenging my lack of trust in and respect for them. They couldn’t understand how my trust was largely dependent on their actions and approaches to my questions. You see, I did trust them when I joined Chesapeake in November of 2005. It was only after months of evading and ignoring my questions that I began to get exasperated with them. In the meantime, other things appeared on the radar that only added to my unease and distrust:

• The pastors paid themselves hundreds of thousands of dollars in 2006 (according to their own financial statement), while giving roughly $18,000 as “benevolence.” When asked about this, their response was that the issued Statement was not an accurate reflection of their financial activity.
• The pastors refused to support from the general fund–or even to collect a “special offering” for–a family in the congregation with known serious financial needs. Meanwhile, they collected a special offering to cover moving expenses for two pastors.
• Jim Cannon (the senior pastor) personally told me in front of Jason Reyes and a Care Group leader that his preference was for my membership status to be reevaluated should I choose not to tithe to him. Later, to illustrate his rationale for this, he drew parallels with a wife not trusting her husband to handle their money. But when I pointed out that I wouldn’t/shouldn’t/couldn’t Biblically divorce my wife over such a matter, his response was that a church membership wasn’t like a marriage.
• Jim also told me that in his study of the tithe, he had considered no extra-biblical writings on the subject of tithing penned before the Protestant Reformation. Thus, all early “Church Fathers” epistles, the Didache, Josephus’ writings, and any other works which could have shed first-hand light on how the early church viewed tithing… were ignored.
• Jim’s response was to call me a “freeloader” and claim that I had “integrity issues” when I told the pastors that not giving to Chesapeake was a matter of conscience: they had collected over $850,000 last year with, as I said before, only $18,000 (2.5%) going to those in need. (I took the money I would have given them, and instead gave it to organizations like Compassion International and Blood:Water Mission.)

And in the midst of all this, the pastors tried to shut down an evangelistic effort from a Godly man in the congregation—to spend time with some other Christian men in a pub, where they could interact with people on “neutral territory” and begin to develop relationships with them. The pastors also forbade this man to pass out copies of a Mark Driscoll book to his Christian friends until Jim had approved it, and they almost banned the men in our Care Group from going on a camping trip they were organizing. Why? Because they wouldn’t get back in time for the Sunday morning service.

From what I’ve seen, Sovereign Grace Church in Joppa, MD (their new name, as of September 12th) isn’t a local church. It really bears far more resemblance to a cult:

• The leaders are domineering and in some areas tyrannical;
• they have tried in numerous ways to psychologically manipulate the congregation;
• they demand trust rather than desiring to show themselves worthy of it;
• they are frightened of “their” people being exposed to “non-approved” books and ideas.

So that’s why I left. I tried to reason with them for nearly two years, but it has proven fruitless. The pastors are content to continue as they have, and it’s just become too heavy a burden. It’s kind of depressing, because I love the people I know at Chesapeake, but with the mindset that many people seem to have (that “we must attend the same church or else we can’t be friends”) it seems it’ll be extremely difficult to maintain our relationships.

So where is the Seitler family headed? I don’t know, but I’m definitely scarred from (and scared of) this overbearing leadership, and so we’re probably looking more toward a house church than toward any other “model.” In the meantime, we’ve actually enjoyed greater fellowship with other believers in the past few weeks than we had when we were in “the club”–and it was mostly due to opportunities that wouldn’t have been available to us if we were attending Sunday morning meetings and Wednesday night meetings and…

UPDATE #2: The post I linked “moving expenses” to (on a blog written by Jason Reyes’ wife Laurie) has been removed since my post appeared here this morning. Just to show you there really *was* a post there (and to let you still read it), here’s a screenshot of Laurie’s Delete Post from within Google Reader. It was the only place with a copy still available.

And here’s larger versions of the six pictures from that post (including the last one, which Jason’s actually in): 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

I guess this is just another example of their tendency to cover things up instead of dealing with them.

UPDATE #2: Laurie now has a video on YouTube showing the house.

UPDATE #3: What do I mean by “cult”? Find out here.

Challies Dot Com SideBlog: A La Carte (07/18)

Blogging: The 2006 Blogathon is going to begin soon. If you’re interested in raising money for the cause of your choice, perhaps this is a way of doing so. It involves 24-hours of blogging at 30 minute intervals.

I’ve signed up to participate in the Blogathon this year (thanks, Tim!). 100% of the donations pledged via my blog will go to Covenant Mercies, a “sponsor-a-child” sort of program run by Covenant Fellowship Church, one of Chesapeake’s sister churches. They do some great work caring for orphans in rural Uganda, and I want to support them!

So please sponsor me, and pray I’m able to stay awake for 24 hours straight!

Laurie Reyes (Ordinary Mother) just recommended Seeing the Gospel in all things, a post from Mark Lauterbach’s blog, GospelDrivenLife. I read it, I liked it, and I so I thought I’d pass along the recommendation:

“…when God speaks of the places where he was faithful, he develops the details. When God writes about the places of failure, he speaks of his care and not their sin. He made this point — God is forgetful of our sins. He does not summarize our lives as those moments of great transgression on our part. In our self-righteousness we make a monument to our sins and live in endless regret of them. In our pride, we make monuments to others sins and remind them of them. But God records his gracious care of us in our sin so that we see his mercy and not our evil.”

Mr. Lauterbach is the senior pastor of Grace Church in San Diego, CA. Laurie’s husband, Jason, is a pastor at Chesapeake Community Church in Joppa, MD. If only both were bloggers…

New Attitude is back, and they’re blogging live from the conference! I think that’s just cool. (HT: Adrian Warnock.) It looks like a pretty nice conference; I guess I’ll have to get the session CDs once they’re made available.

In addition to the official blog, Carolyn McCulley, Jenn Romanski and Brent Thomas are liveblogging the event.

However, in a shocking turn of events, it was revealed to attendees that C.J. Mahaney stepped down as senior pastor of Covenant Life Church in Gaithersburg, MD in order to prepare for his starring role in next season’s new sci-fi series, Stargate: T4G. Mahaney will reprise his role as Jean Luc Picard, a 24th century starship captain sent 300 years in the past to lead a 21st century ragtag special ops crew into the Delta Quadrant to prevent the rise of an alien race known as the Borg. (And if you don’t believe me, ask Agnax, whose post I discovered while typing this!)

Just a heads-up: links for all three of C.J. Mahaney’s sermons at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, MN are up now. If you like C.J.’s style, I’d recommend you subscribe to his local church’s sermon podcast. He may not preach there as often as he used to, but pretty much all the guys who do received some degree of training from him!

(Photo by Sola Lumina Captura. You’ve got to check out his other photos!)

If I hadn’t proved it yet, hopefully this will be the clincher: I’ve mapped each and every Sovereign Grace Ministries member church in Wayfaring! That’s right, each one — including the in-progress church plant in Frederick, MD! (That was was pretty hard to peg exactly, seeing as how they haven’t found a place to meet yet!)

(That’s supposed to be a live view of the map; if it doesn’t seem to be working, you can load the full version.)

My biggest trouble—hands down—was with the churches in Mexico. They’ve got some strange addressing methods down there, and I couldn’t make las cabezas o las colas of them!

My goal was to map the meeting locations, rather than the mailing addresses. Wayfaring doesn’t have the same data that Google Maps does, though, because apparently Google doesn’t make all that data available in their API. It didn’t cause me much trouble, but some of the markers may be off a few hundred yards as a result of having to eyeball it.

It’s interesting… looking over this map, I can’t help but notice a certain tendency to hug the Appalachian mountain range. I wonder if that’s intentional.

I also see a distinct lack of SGM church planting in the Northwest U.S. I think they ought to plant one in Las Vegas. Who’s with me?

Silly headline, perhaps? Don’t jump to conclusions, though; I think it was just a one-time thing.

The Black Calvinist went to T4G and loved the sound of 3000 male voices praising God, so he caught it on his cell phone and e-mailed it to himself. He loved it so much, in fact, that he wanted to share it with those of us who weren’t able to attend. Wonderfully sporting of him, right? (I thought so!)

Well, as Bob Kauflin pointed out in the comments section, this was apparently a T4G no-no (which, to his credit, TBC was unaware of). And where most would then demand that the file be removed, what does Bob do? He simply asks that the song be properly credited.

Now that’s dealing graciously! Way to go, Mr. Kauflin: I commend your thoughful response!

(Photo by Sola Lumina Captura.)

Last week, Laurie Reyes was mentioned in Tim Challies’ A La Carte sidebar… this week, she gets even more digital ink this week in girl talk: A Tribute to Daryl Cannon:

“This year, I don�t honor my mother for how she has served those who come behind her; I honor her for serving those who have gone before her. My mother�s world changed dramatically last year. In one year, my parents flew back and forth to Las Vegas and New Orleans many times to attend to ill parents. In April of 2005, my mother�s mom died and just three days later my father�s dad died. Just four months later, the flood in New Orleans resulted in my parents taking in my grandmother Cannon as well as my severely mentally handicapped Aunt. My mother was to be the primary caregiver for both. Yet in a whirlwind of airplanes, memorial services, floods, and hospitals my mother stayed the course of humble servant-hood.”

I’ve been both humbled and encouraged while watching the Cannons respond so faithfully to the challenges they’ve faced this past year. It speaks volumes to a guy like me when I see my pastor making such real sacrifices to care for those in need around him. Jim and Daryl are a wonderful testimony to Jesus Christ’s sacrificial love, and I’m honored to have them as my pastor (and my pastor’s wife)!

In the days following the T4G conference, I’ve noticed mentions here and there about C.J. Mahaney preaching at John Piper’s church, Al Mohler preaching at C.J.’s*, etc. Wondering if this is some sort of strategic follow-up to the conference, I’ve decided to compile all the T4G guest-speaking sermons here, in the hopes that we can develop a sort of T4G Apocrypha.

John Piper C.J. Mahaney @ Bethlehem Baptist Church:

• May 6-7: Toward Fullness of Love for One Another: Encourage (Eph. 4:25-32)
• May 13-14: Toward Fullness of Love for One Another: Guard (Heb. 3:12-13)
• May 20-21: Toward Fullness of Love for One Another: The Happiest Place on Earth

C.J. Mahaney Dr. Albert Mohler @ Covenant Life Church:

• May 7: The Bible, the Da Vinci Code, and the Christian

I’ll keep this page updated with any additional preaching engagements I come across.

On a somewhat related note, according to J. Ligon Duncan, C.J. preached at (John MacArthur’s) Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, CA on August 21, 2005. However, their sermon area lists Phil Johnson as having preached that day. I was able to find record of C.J. speaking at Grace’s Resolved conference this past January, but that’s it.

* I realize C.J. passed the Senior Pastor role onto Joshua Harris last year. Gimme a break, okay?

Oh boy… C.J. Mahaney has a new book! Except that it’s not, really.

Living the Cross-Centered Life is a soon-to-be-released offering from Multnomah, but it’s essentially a repackaging of The Cross-Centered Life and Christ Our Mediator, two books by C.J. which are worth their weight in gold (judging by the SRP, that is).

Don’t get me wrong, those two books are good… but why on earth should I spend $10 on a 6.5-by-5-inch book whose 96-page thickness is doubled by the cover? Just take a look at the new collection: it’s the exact same price as one of the original titles. (Even at that, though, is $9.99 really affordable for a 176-page reprint?)

It’s disappointing, because I’d really like to recommend these books this book. Vital message or no, however, it’s too much money for too little material.

My recommendation: if you’ve got ten bucks burning a hole in your pocket and you want to be “cross centered,” give a stranger an Outreach Edition ESV Bible and a meal at McDonald’s.

(Note: If you look at my job, you’ll probably consider me a hypocrite. My problem with “collectibles,” though, is primarily when the Gospel is turned into one.)

Well, on behalf of uncoordinated geeks all over the world, I take offense at that kind of athletic condescension and braggadocio. How’s that for a display of “inner resentment toward people who are athletically superior?” Nerds rule, C.J. That’s what this is about.

Take that, C.J. Mahaney! ::thbbt::

Can I share something with you? Hymns are meant to draw us to understand and worship God, not the singer. How many times has someone gone operatic on In the Garden, without meaning it at all when they sing, “He speaks, and the sound of His voice is so sweet the birds hush their singing”? Do you not hear the sheer in-loveness in those words? This is someone who is utterly captivated with the Risen Lord. This is not someone who’s trying to sell albums or impress their friends.

Albert Mohler recently posted in his blog about Oh, to see the dawn (The Power of the Cross), a song that appears on the album,
New Irish Hymns 4. The recording has a bit of that Sandi Patty 80s feel to it, but I’m looking forward to singing this in a congregation. (Knowing my church, that won’t be long.)

Death is crushed to death
Life is mine to live
Won through Your selfless love

This the power of the cross
Son of God slain for us
What a love! What a cost
We stand forgiven at the cross

This are the folks through whom In Christ Alone came. God bless ‘em; we’re certainly being blessed by their work.

Another album to put on your must-listen list is Sovereign Grace’s Worship God Live. (If you listen closely, you might hear Nicole and me in that crowd. In fact, I may be that top-left guy in the “live worshipers” pic on the album’s page.) While not entirely an album of hymns, they form the majority of the songs here. Among the tracks in this album, my highest recommendations are for: Endless Praises; Count it All Joy; His Forever; Jesus, Thank You; God Moves (in a Mysterious Way); and Receive the Glory — lyrically, my absolute favorite song of the whole year:

All that we’ve accomplished you have done for us
And any fruit we harvest is a gift from your hand
We are only jars of clay that hold a priceless treasure
And we exist to bring you pleasure, O God

Not to us, but to your name alone
Be all the glory, the glory forever
For your faithfulness and steadfast love
Receive the glory, the glory belongs to you.

Amen and amen!