Hes certainly not inspiring the masters of abusive churches to make tangible, meaningful changes to their structures that would add real accountability to leaders behavior. GP members are told to treat their parents and families as an unimportant part of life | If you are visiting your parents more than 2 times a year, your leader may confront you with the concern that you are idolizing your parents and can't spend too much time outside of the GP community. Context. Nuance. Look over there, not at Gracepoint! My time at Gracepoint ended with me feeling at the lowest point of my life, reads a testimonial shared in April via r/UCSD. Their church websites formal response ends by offering his name and a phone number for interested parties to call with questions/concerns. At no point have I seen anyone reveal who Jonathan is, what he does for Gracepoint, or how he is empowered to handle such calls. With the rare time spent staying at home and having the family together, they seem to not care at all to engage. After Doe and her significant other crossed physical boundaries, church leadership placed Doe on a repentance process and revoked her staff post. With the mission to plant "an Acts 2 church in every college town," Gracepoint stands out among the loose network of predominantly Asian American college churches that pepper campuses across. And here is how Ed Kang seeks to maintain the structure of Gracepoint: The incidents reported are not characteristic of our ministry and do not represent approved practices by our church. What did they do, specifically, that didnt go well? Why didnt the masters of Gracepoint do something about these situations years ago? Reading time 8 minutes. GP members must abide by the guidelines set forth by the leaders | "GP culture is the actual bible." I attribute my experience of suicidal ideation and my eventual failed attempt to my experience in Gracepoint, specifically the gaslighting I experienced and what I would call an intentional erosion of independent thinking and reasoning faculties, Doe said in a statement to The Triton. (Usually, they werent. What if an event is purely social in nature and conflicts with a family celebration? Exercising loving care and watchfulness over my fellow brothers and sisters. This sounds like a demand that members snitch on anyone who disobeys. Our first wave of graduates decided to stay around, excited to build up the church and . Then, when he quit Mars Hill, his now-former church leaders began a harassment campaign against him. Who are your "peers"? According to internal emails obtained by The Triton, Center for Student Involvement (CSI) Executive Director Emily Trask followed up individually with the president and did a check-in with the group and the CSI sent educational information to all student organization principal members about high pressure groups via the student organization listserv., In response to an email inquiry from The Triton, UCSDs Office for the Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination (OPHD) said they were not aware of any allegations involving Gracepoint Church.. In April 2021, Gracepoint published a now private YouTube video of Ed Kang, the senior pastor of Gracepoint Church. Gracepoint's leaders packaged this very cult-like behavior as discipleship. I was told that in order to accept the truth about myself I need to accept that I committed the same sins as my abuser and as my parents and that it would be extremely sinful and arrogant of me to think that Im any different, Doe said. Ed Kang in particular tried to rein her in but failed. Every single Christian in America who signs a membership covenant still possesses full human rights, like freedom of assembly (and its flip side, the revocation of assembly), in the same way that BDSM enthusiasts retain their bodily ownership even after signing slave contracts with their partners. 4. (That part backfired hard, thankfully.). Acts 1:8, 1 Cor. Other more devoted GP members would tell on you to your leaders and you would get talked to. Sam C. participated in ABSK from 1999 to 2003, eventually taking on a leadership role within the group. So Gracepoints leaders must feel backed completely against the wall here. Join Online. We are a network of collegiate church plants & parachurch ministries. Some of the stories in the CT article are from people that Ive personally known for many years, and I understand where they are coming from. A thinly-veiled threat. They tried to get their fellow young adults to stop doing drugs and having free sex, and instead to devote all that youthful zeal and energy to Christian devotions. At most, one-sided agreements only require the most surface-level and temporary of good behavior. 8. a huge network of evangelical churches called Gracepoint, on a subreddit devoted to exposing their abuse, The current status of their membership page, a range of backups from 2014 to January 2022, try to make themselves a Designated Adult, Gracepoints leaders have formally responded, Our Response to the Recent Christianity Today Article, he lashed out as hard as he felt safe in doing, a weird sockpuppet account on the churchs forum, becoming a pastor at a small Arizona church, a case of covenant abuse at Matt Chandlers The Village Church, Wartburg Watch offered a good one in 2012, Pastor Jack Schaap, who groomed a teenage girl for sex, is out of prison. I know at least one individual who joined the church after college and wanted to become a member, and wasnt able to for really long time because their testimony was not approved by the leaders. 3. It seems completely immune to all attempts to hold it accountable for its spending and actions. By signing up, you agree to our Terms and Conditions. As I predicted, Ed Kang now slides smoothly into his defense: The system he helped build isnt the problem here. In recent years, former members and staff of campus ministry groups have spoken out about the trauma they experienced as members of Gracepoint on UC campus subreddits, including UCSD, UC Berkeley, UC Irvine, and UC Davis. Danny Duane Pitts, the 58-year-old former pastor of Decatur's GracePoint Church, was indicted March 14 by a Grundy County grand jury on charges of statutory rape and sexual battery, according to . Among other things, he expected Mars Hill members to confess their sins to church leaders. Are they a cult? Followers who signed membership covenants with Gracepoint discovered that they had effectively signed their lives over to their new church leaders. People who value their rights dont respond well to evangelicals usual recruitment ploys.). What Daniel Kim wants here is to go back to business as usual. That second requirement reeks of performative piety. In fact, if every Gracepoint critic did what Gracepoints masters wanted and shut up tomorrow, I guarantee you that even their half-hearted claims of self-examination would end the next day. Without a real god doing real stuff in the middle of Christians Jesus-ing, Christianitys central mechanism and its processes cant work correctly. We're a group of people pursuing our vision- Pointing People To God's Grace.Serving The Church, The Content Warning: The following article contains discussion of depression, suicide and sexual abuse. But our ministry is carried out by imperfect sinners, 1,600 mostly lay ministers, who are works in progress.. A churchs mere membership in any NAMB project is enough to make me question just how accountable its leaders feel they are, and how likely those leaders are to do something off-limits. For that matter, Gracepoints spokesperson only demonstrates every point Ive made today. A 2011 review of a Calvinists book tells us: Quoting [Tom] Ascol [the Old Guards presidential candidate this past election], [Colin] Hansen writes: The conservatives have been in charge now for a couple of decades and our convention is no better off on basic issues than when the liberals were running things. 114 were here. Ed and Kelly have the final say on everything about the church and staff's personal life choices. It is mind-blowing to see a Christian leader let their mask slip this badly. And often, church leaders call these contracts covenants. It took me a year of therapy and an unsuccessful suicide attempt to start dismantling those things that I was told about myself, Doe said. A preoccupation with GP new members (this would be mostly college students) | GP loves potential newcomers, they love bringing people into their group. By the 1970s, evangelicals were well on their way to inventing a form of Christianity that wasnt simply observed, but lived to the fingertips and felt in every cell of the body. Privacy Policy. Their leaders dictated how followers lived every aspect of their lives, from home decoration to clothes shopping to what they were allowed to watch and listen to. He obviously didnt care then. In a previous post, I explored the forces that came together to create Gracepointand then made its style of Christianity so appealing to its recruits. A covenant, by contrast, is one-sided. When one member, Lance, did exactly that, then made the foolish decision of arguing with one of his pastors over a potential safety hazard in his communal home, his leaders clearly decided to make an example of him: In the midst of this, Lance had begun a long-distance relationship with a young woman in Colorado. No matter where you are at on life's journey, you are welcome here! Subtle Signs of a cult | Pastor Clint Leiter Interview. They are most likely your lifegroup, ministry group, hangout group, or housemates when you are single. While not intended (it was modeled after the picture of Jesus with his 12), it was clearly a pyramid scheme focused on discipleship. The SBC and NAMB affiliations certainly explain a lot. Theres this kind of encouragement to keep up this facade because at the same time you werent supposed to just be openly out as being bi or whatnot. These start off innocuously. Nor does it contain a single item relating to appealing its leaders judgments and punishments. These included statements like You are a hopeless, morally bankrupt sinner, and nothing good can come from you.. (If you ever wondered why evangelicals seem so hostile to the idea of inalienable human rights, this is exactly why. So its no surprise whatsoever to me that people have been trying to point out Gracepoint-based abuse and overreach since at least 2009. We've recently sent you an authentication link. And what does taking responsibility look like here, since obviously nobody did that years ago? For the same reason, the dudes still at NAMBand enjoyed some high praise from Ezell in the SBCs 2022 Annual Report (on page 201). In a very real sense, Gracepoint weaponized the deepest yearnings and aches of its prey, then played upon their deepest fears to gain their ongoing compliance. And what if the leaders assessment is wrong somehow? Enter the code you received via email to sign in, or sign in using a password. Ed and Kelly Kang character assassinate countless people who left GP, they tell untruthful stories about ex-GP goers to the congregation and students. If a leader turns out to be acting in bad faith, then theres no approved way to eject such a leader from the group or even publicly warn the rest of the group about them. 2. What must Gracepoints leaders do, in this supposed covenant? In his reply to all the pushback he got, Daniel Kim sounds very peevish indeed. They had maintained their friendship while leading successful ministry work around the world. At that time, he began a thread he titled A plea from Gracepoint. His plea, simply put, was for his churchs critics to shut up so Gracepoint could enjoy success with recruitment again. Grace Point Church's influence is realized through exchanged lives, baptisms, student ministry, nationally-recognized children's ministry, life groups, and local and global missions. In authoritarian groups, discipleship becomes a requirement, even a sacrament. So any time you run across something like Pastor Daniels Reddit post or Gracepoints faux-apology, you should immediately archive it. In fact, if they dont, then the contract is considered void (or non-binding). She writes about the intersection of psychology, belief, popular culture, science, A shepherd would generally have no more than 510 men (or family units) under his care. Living by Gods word and growing in character and personal holiness. How are we measuring this? But the matter worsens the further we go into this document. 6. We want to help make your first experience at Grace Point a great one! At the very least, this part should tell them loud and clear that Gracepoint has very poor discernment when it comes to selecting lay ministers and that it then allows these poorly-chosen leaders to operate with impunity and unilateral power, all without any real oversight or repercussions for bad-faith behavior. . [1] It is a remake of Chibnall's UK drama series Broadchurch, and stars that series' lead, David Tennant, along with Anna Gunn, as two detectives investigating the murder of a boy in a small, tightly knit coastal town. Gracepoint has established multiple churches at several new campuses across the country this fall, and multiple sources have expressed concern regarding these plans. New Whiteland, IN Live Broadcasts Every Week: Sunday 9:30 AM Sunday School Pastor's Class Sunday 10:35 AM EST Morning Service For Mobile Users please use the link below if you have problems. The Jesus People, or Jesus Freaks as many called them then, left their homes and traveled thousands of miles to evangelize and live out their ideals. Please, check your inbox! For more information, please see our What if someone feels that a teaching violates their conscience? So Far, So Good. The Triton is not in any way affiliated with UC San Diego and the opinions expressed therein are not the overall public opinions of UCSD, Associated Students of UCSD, or our staff. In 2005, Becky Kims controlling, abusive behavior finally caused a schism within the megachurch.