I direct a homeschool co-op.
I receive no pay for being the director. My children pay full tuition to attend. It’s a volunteer position.
My roll during the school year involves saying an opening prayer, giving announcements, leading in the pledge, and giving out birthday pencils. It’s a Co-op that was set in motion over 16 years ago and has pretty much kept going all this time with minimal changes in the program. About a third to a half of the members attend an Evergreen church.
In the last week, I have received two calls from Evergreen pastor’s families that attend Co-op thinking they may need to pull out of Co-op because I’m the director and they wonder whether or not they can look me in the eye knowing what we think after reading Terry's infamous blog post.
What I can’t figure out is why they could look me in the eye all year long during Co-op. They certainly knew what we thought after a year and a half of patient discussions about what we thought. Good grief, we left Evergreen over a year ago over what we thought about the organization.
One pastor mentioned to Terry that calling him proud was hurtful.
So I want to address that issue. Did Terry call the Evergreen pastors proud? Because that certainly would be hurtful if he did.
Going back to the post you will find what he said. Here it is:
“But before I go any further, let me qualify the bluntness and offer a disclaimer.
I am not saying that Evergreen pastors are all proud men. I still count some of them as my friends (at least until this post) and would not want to be so strident and insulting as that.”
and then he goes on to say:
“I suppose you could say I’m challenging entrenched theology, philosophy, policy and assumptions,
not people.”
This is probably one reason to put the post back up. It was quite lengthy and people may have skimmed over some important parts or might be remembering what they thought it said, rather than what it actually said.
So, then, what did Terry mean by using the phrase “culture of pride.” Of course he is the only one who can speak for himself, but here’s what I think.
He said:
“And then, from this leadership ethos flows a kind of exclusivism, elitism and exaggerated expectation of organization loyalty that seems to us unhealthy.”
In the both the local and national teaching there is an expectation of loyalty to “the group for the rest of your life.” This is a form of pride. It comes across as, “We are the best so you should never leave.” It’s “team spirit” taken way too far.
In the local teaching, I have heard, “Be careful who you listen to and what books you read (of course you should be careful),” but then the speaker goes on to say, “All you need is right here is this church.” That is what I would call elitism implying that they have the only teaching that you need.
This “culture of pride” sort of takes on a life of its own.
Terry was challenging an organization in the hopes of helping them see some flaws that had hurt them in the past and seemed to be showing up again. After all, pride was one of the things they apologized for in the 13 page 1991 Statement of Apology and Error.
That said, I want to address the issue of slander and division.
Here’s what I think is slander.
Terry has tried as best as he could to research both sides of this issue, he presented it in as loving a manner as he could after spending untold hours researching things and trying to talk directly with several pastors about the specifics. No one would address the substance of the history. No one would
even look at the information he had from Wellspring to refute it.
And, now, the word that is going around is that he is slandering people and being divisive. I, personally, think this is slander. Terry was talking about an organization, not people and doing it because he saw a significant flaw that was hurting the group.
And, as long as I am on a roll, let me tell you a couple of other things that we have kept to ourselves till now.
When it became apparant that we needed to leave, we were asked to come up with a statement that could help the pastors answer any questions about why we left without them having to tell our entire story. The statement was a couple sentences that said we left over church government and church loyalty. It didn't begin to express why we left...that took a 22 page blog post, but we were trying to be helpful so came up with a short statement that could be used. It got down to the tweaking of the words in a few back and forth e-mails and then we were asked to agree to use this statement and to
say nothing more if people asked us why we left. We did not agree to this.
About two weeks after we submitted our letter of resignation, we received a two page response letter from the Bloomington pastors. They expressed how they disagreed with our conclusions and said that we "missed the mark," "were unfair," "were inaccurate," and had "borderline defamed them". Then they went on to say that in spite of all of this they vowed to speak honorably about us to others and hoped we would do the same. That was their right.
Within a week of sending us this letter, and without our permission, they sent a copy of that letter to our grown children who still attended Evergreen. That is not what you do when you vow to speak honorably about someone. But, as Terry said, one of the issues we had when we left (and something GCM apologized for in the 1991 statement) was that they interfered between parents and their grown children. So, we weren't surprised.
And, finally, in our final meeting with one of the founding pastors we were told, "You realize that if you go around telling people that you think we are wrong, we are going to have to defend ourselves." What was that supposed to mean? I tried to put it in the best light and assume it meant that they would have to explain Biblically why they thought we were wrong, but it was an odd thing to say.
I have more to say, but I'm done for today.
This is Sandra Lee. (Wasn't she a singer back in the 60's, no, wait, that was Peggy Lee.)
