I was ordained as a minister by a lesser known Christian denomination. Because it is not well known, people occasionally mistook it for a cult! At those uncomfortable moments, I assured them that it is more than 100 years old, founded on a vision for missions and anchored on the authority of God’s word. However, no denomination is safe from what author, Arnold Cook called (in his book by the same name) Historical Drift, the slow erosion of foundational beliefs. And if a church or denomination drifts far enough, it can become more cult-like than Christ-like. The question is: is your church or denomination headed that way? How would you know if it were?
Having spent the last 15 years working to heal congregations set adrift by crises and wounds in their histories, I want to share four things that happen as a group drifts toward characteristics of a cult. It is definitely a “frog in the kettle” experience, so we need to be aware of the signs, lest a fellowship you love becomes something very different than Jesus intended.
Political authority replaces spiritual authority. While authority structures vary from church to church, it is the spirit with which authority is held that matters most. I know of church leaders, vested with “constitutional” or political authority over their people, but who abuse that authority and are disliked and distrusted. I have met others in similar roles who love and serve their people and who were followed and loved back by those people. God created spiritual authority to lead out of love, example, encouragement and sacrifice. But we live in a day of “power politics” and it has infected the Church. If leaders start “lording it over” the flock rather than serving it, they are headed away from Christ’s model of servant leadership and taking steps toward control instead (1 Peter 5:3), a mark of every cult.
Key leaders are protected and cannot be questioned. This trait is found in all cults, where one person’s voice (or a cabal of select voices) takes precedence over all others and cannot be questioned. Unfortunately, it has found its way into evangelical groups. It can be driven by the self-protective reflex of immature leaders or often results from broken trust between leaders and followers, resulting in an “us” vs. them” attitude and a need to assert control. Leaders stop allowing their authority to be questioned. No one is permitted to express dissent. Should someone voice concern over the direction of the group, they are perceived as a danger or a backslider or a traitor. Groups which protect leaders from scrutiny believe in a toxic view of “family,” and that the “head(s)” of the “family” are unassailable. They forget that healthy families confront bad behavior—even in parents—and do not give it a pass.
God’s word becomes secondary to pragmatism. Churches and denominations that drift from their foundations still do good things and contain many good people. The “frog in the kettle” changes happen slowly. But there will always be signs, and a drift away from the Word of God as the final authority is one of them. Expediency and pragmatism take its place. Agendas replace transparency and slick marketing gets employed to convince the constituency to follow along. Manipulative leaders feign seeking consensus while leading the group toward the predetermined conclusions of their agenda.
Discernment goes by the wayside. Like the prosperous church in Laodicea that did not know what the Lord thought of it, that in His eyes it was poor, blind, and naked (Rev. 3:14-22), a similar loss of discernment occurs in churches that are headed toward cult-like status. In Job 12:23 we read that sometimes God “takes away the discernment of the elders.” In other words, when leaders default to humanistic persuasion to get their way, when they self-protect to avoid dissent and when they handle things manipulatively and lack transparency, the Lord takes away their discernment. Then leaders stop realizing they are adrift from their foundations. Worse, they believe they are going in the right direction! They think they are following the Lord, but they have become like a mannequin trying to pass for a live body. They are no longer a vital expression of the Body of Christ and are becoming a cult.
These are some of the things we have encountered that should set off alarm bells of a potential cult in the making. Leaders need to do an honest assessment, such as the ChurchScan Inventory, of where they are and how they exercise their leadership and listen closely to what the Lord of their church is saying to them. Don’t wait until the Judgment Seat to get that evaluation (Heb. 13:17)!
Rev. Mark Barnard is an ordained minister with the Christian and Missionary Alliance. He currently serves with Blessing Point Ministries. Mark recently coauthored, with Dr. Kenneth Quick, The Dance of the Gifts: How Ministry Leaders Can Discern God’s Will.
This describes my church perfectly. Is there any chance of change?
Seek within, and move on. Organized Religion, Satan, and Man have long buried what Church should really be, and the enemy has manipulated every Congregation and belief system. Ask the Lord to fill you with the Spirit, so that you may become Holy. If you can’t reach those at your current church, don’t be scared to just walk away. Knowing that you have the Good Lord in your heart and the Spirit Guiding you. This is my home church in California, I live in Utah now. Pastor and his wife are two dear friends to me.
Lifeline Church – Lodi, CA
https://youtu.be/z-DLHdxCSIU
It depends. Is your church a part of a denomination or independent? If it is the former, there may be some recourse through denominational officials. If it is an independent church, the chance is less likely that someone can break through and speak to self-protective, insulated leadership. Are you in leadership of the church? If you are, you may need courage to raise your concerns with the other leaders. Do so in a way that shows wisdom and concern, not divisiveness. If your concerns are rejected, you will at least have fulfilled your leadership role in the body and can pray about what your next step should be. If you are not in leadership, it will be extremely difficult to speak to the issues. In that case, pray about what your next step should be which may include extricating yourself from the “church.”
Try to do an objective evaluation of what’s happening in your church. If you determine that you can’t feasibly correct or redirect the behaviors, say, for example, by appealing to higher church authorities, then start edging toward the door. In my experience, the first thing to do is to attend fewer and fewer services. When they ask you about it, shrug and smile demurely. I would not recommend arguing with them — it usually serves no purpose. They’ll simply gum you into submission. Eventually, they may kick you out because you appear to be disinterested in what they’re selling.
I left the Christadelphians this way, which some consider to be a cult, and others refer to as an “eclectic sect.” Apples and oranges — the environment had become culturally and scripturally toxic. I left and never looked back, and my life has been all the richer because of my escape.
Wise advice. Thank you for posting!
I just made the decision to leave a church that was showing radicalized behaviors. Much of the attitude in the church was an, us vs them mentality, incorporating extreme political views into the teachings but essentially calling it, “preparation for revival”. About three weeks ago after a lot of prayer I felt a strong position to move on. I opened up about this decision I was in the process of making to a peer in the church and they encouraged me to stay and give it some more time. After, another week and seeing even more things I felt uncomfortable with and feeling it wasn’t spiritually healthy for me to stay, I decided not to return. It was heartbreaking, I broke down in my car crying today because I was in shock with what I was hearing and seeing and it’s hard. I decided it was best for me to just go quietly without saying anything to anyone. I pray for wisdom in my life as I move onwards and forwards. This article gave me good perspective thank you for writing it.
Thank you for sharing your story. It is hard to leave a church under most any circumstances, even harder when you recognize things that other don’t.
Hello Mark,
I was in a leadership position in my church and I told the pastor I was leaving because I felt the Lord was leading me in a different direction and I saw different things that you have mentioned in the above article. I won’t go into detail, but I told the pastor I would address the church because I felt that was my obligation and he stated I didn’t need to. He did want me to come and address the brothers on why I was leaving and on the things I disagree with. I have been in different meetings throughout my time in the church and they usually didn’t turn out well. Many things that are said are then brought up from the platform “anonymously,” but everyone knows who is being spoken of. There is usually a pressure of “walking away from the truth” and “us vs them” and I wondered why I would need to address certain brothers and not let the whole church know what I was feeling. To me, it seemed like a trap. I was even told that a real “christian” talks to his brothers and if I was truly being led by the Lord and comfortable with it, I would talk to them. It has truly made me feel very guilty and at a loss. Something in my spirit is telling me to not go because the mentality isn’t to hear me out or discuss, but to tell me that I am wrong and headed down a “dangerous path.” Thank you for writing this article. It helps to know others have experienced similar situations.
Another thing they do is to tell you that you will “lose your family”, or “fall into worldliness/sin” if you leave. They also do things like twisting the Bible to keep you in check or from expressing any disagreement with the leader by saying “touch not mine anointed”
Sad but true.
Another thing which comes to mind is the regular practice of telling you that their church is the only church which is doctrinally/spiritually correct; all the others are worldly heretical liberals leading people down the dark path to Hell, and that they are one of the very few which is preaching the Gospel. Kind of gave me the impression that God was letting the rest of the world go to Hell in a handbasket if He was depending on that unloving, racist, controlling bunch to get the Word out.
I hear your pain/anger. Your comment describes a group that is perhaps self-righteous and unattractive to the world. Yet they don’t recognize this about themselves (like the church at Laodicea in Rev. 3:14-22) and would likely condemn such an assessment.
What is your definition of Church? Because mine is that I just left the Cult that I grew up in and there are so many points in your article that are dead on about the crap place that ruined my family and life, and they still are trying destroy me.
The reason I ask this question isn’t because I don’t know the answer to it. I ask this question, because there are many opinions that many people like myself have of it. Mine is not so much the most positive definition, therefore I want to know if there are also people that have the same feelings as I do.
I believe that I have been led astray, by way too many occurrences that have happened within my life, in the past and in the present, and I don’t doubt in the future as well. See there are those Christians that we hear about growing up in the Lord, that we are supposed to be and doing God’s work. But, then there’s the people that preach the word from the Bible and do not actually live what they speak. That’s what I was raised in.
I’m hoping that by writing this article that I may come across people who’ve also been shunned and discontinued in their blood families because of the “Church” Cult that they’re families are unfortunately apart of. Or if there’s anyone out here that can shed light on this dark and gloomy way of thinking what I was taught a Christian should be.
I want to take the time to also acknowledge, that this article isn’t supposed to offend anyone, but if it does suck it up, because there’s been multiple people that have talked about addressing these events, but actually never have the balls to actually do so.
The problem with the criteria commonly used to define cults is that the “cult groups” usually find ways to maneuver around the criteria; they become adept at explaining why the criteria actually apply to other groups, but not to them. Every whacko cult group or sect will have articles and blog sites with titles like: “Why We Jehovah’s Witnesses Are Not a Cult.” Or “Why Christadelphians are not Cultists.” It’s all a lot of blah-blah-blah. They turn the blather into an art form. In the same vein, I was reading a book containing Nazi propaganda, published at the end of World War Two, and reading through it you’d almost think the Germans were entirely reasonable in everything they did during the war. Language can be a powerful, malleable, and effective weapon in achieving any goal.
The bigger a religious group — like the Mormons or Scientologists — the more sophisticated their propaganda machinery. By the time you’re done plowing through their religious material, you’re also half convinced of their normalcy. In visiting the houses of worship of such groups, you’ll also notice that lots of effort is invested in creating appearances of normalcy — and in some regards, things indeed really are mundane and ho-hum and tranquil appearing. It is behind the scenery in these groups that the true nature of them is often discovered; you wake up one day with the realization that you’ve been sitting in a hell hole that has done nothing for your spiritual journey at all.
Thank you for taking the time share your insights. I’m sure others will find them helpful.
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