First, you’ve got to go away in order to stage a comeback. It’s cold and snowy here in Chicago in February, so I wouldn’t be surprised if he takes a “sabbatical”. In the Dominican Republic.

Second: MacDonald has the whole family feeding from the same trough. He himself, wife and kids are making BIG salaries from fleecing the faithful. Maybe they should get……jobs….??

BTW: He is a terrible speaker…”and, and, and, and, and”. He has the breathing and pausing characteristics of a former stutter. Plus I think he fiddles himself while standing on stage, with his hands in his pockets.

This fall from grace couldn’t have happened to a more deserving fella.

I’m not going to mince words because I like Pope Francis: there was (and maybe still is) a particular issue with the culture in the Catholic Church, and Francis’s mistakes may well have been a product of that culture. What I think he (Francis) is trying to do is to change the culture, and he has (by his own admission) been pretty authoritarian in the past. I admire his apparent desire to change and grow (“Popes can be wrong” is one of his most celebrated statements!), and believe it is a very good thing for the Church.

Reactionaries really can’t stand him, and are quick to call him out for being “authoritarian”. But I must confess that I see their opposition to him as a sign that he might be doing something right! 😉

https://www.ncronline.org/news/vatican/francis-agrees-his-critics-pope-can-be-wrong

Good morning Tacitius,
This gets back to the whole quantity vs. quality. Yes – He did build a mega church and the TED website discusses problems around the massive debt and other issues. I was reading about the feedback ‘Stupid’ .
https://theelephantsdebt.com/2019/02/15/speaking-truth-to-power-a-letter-by-dave-jennings/
It wasn’t pretty and was used to show that many people had tried to advice/correct James over the years without any success. What happened to James MacDonald wasn’t just a bad day captured and spread by social media, it is the culmination of years of ‘bad’ behavior. My personal feeling that James was worshiping the Golden Calf of Fame & Forutune .
Packing the pews was only 1 thing the HBC Executive team was compensated on, the rest involves the mundane of keeping to budget, managing your team (Bullying is not an effective management style), working with affiliated churches, weathering the enviable down turns…..
Success doesn’t define a church – it is endurance.
— CJ
PS. I forgot that I’m worried that HBC will not survive this Tusnami and a lot of the walking wounded will be spiritually homeless soon. Our hopes and prayers are needed that they don’t turn their backs on Jesus.

Honestly, I think abuse is a problem anywhere adults and kids intersect. It is going to happen, so hopefully we will take proper precautions in every sphere. When it does happen, a strong and open repsonse is everything.

Well, they did build a megachurch from nothing under his leadership, so I suspect he was pretty involved those other six days of the week…

Right there’s a winner…

#BringOnThe990

I have no doubt that Pope Francis is, in himself, a good, compassionate man dealing with an institutional Church in which deep faults are, and have been for centuries, entrenched. I hope that he is able, at least, to begin to make progress in ways that cannot be easily ignored or undone by his his successors.

Yep, denominational churches typically have a much more open operation and accountable leadership, and their congregants haven’t been trained into unquestioningly accept their pastor’s decisions. Long serving elder councils don’t help either, since they end up being more guard dogs than watchdogs.

Yes, he trusted bishops he should not have trusted, but he has admitted to his mistake. The Chilean bishops all ‘resigned’ once he had sent in the investigators and got all the facts.

It will surely take a while to deal with decades of abuse and cover-up, but the change in culture away from popes telling us what to think and towards them asking us to take responsibility for what we think and believe will help to deal with past abuse and make future abuse less likely.

Incidentally, sexual abuse (and the covering up thereof) is a problem that is not only in the Catholic Church. In terms of numbers of cases, the (very large) Catholic Church is ‘worst’; in terms of incidence (ie. number of cases per 1000 adherents), the picture rather more nuanced. The Church of England acted quite early in changing the culture from a ‘pastor-who-must-be-obeyed’ one to something rather more healthy, and that has improved matters greatly over the last 30 years; the Catholic Church in England and Wales were also fairly quick off the mark when it came to dealing with safeguarding issues. Interestingly, the Catholic Church has much less political clout in England than many other places, and this has IMO helped too. The situation was much worse in Ireland, where the social and political standing of priests was higher. There may be an important point here: churches behave worse when they enjoy ‘political privilege’?

One final point: the bureaucratic structures of, for example, the Catholic Church or the Church of England will make it easier to catalogue past outrages, and operational protocols now in place will help to prevent abuse in the future; it will be more difficult to identify in a systematic way historic abuse in ‘independent’ churches.

Is Harvest vetting by the ECFA? I was reading on anther blog where donor contributions were mixed and not used for their intended purpose. I wonder if the ‘real’ scandal is about to begin.

— CJ