by Mark Barnard
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.
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.