Here is the latest on Juanita Bynum’s situation (some brief background on her husband):
(ajc.com) The estranged husband of national evangelist Juanita Bynum was facing turmoil in his personal life in the months before he allegedly lashed out and assaulted his successful wife in a hotel parking lot.
Thomas W. Weeks, 40, was evicted from his Duluth home after he and Bynum had separated. And he had a verbal dispute with an employee that turned physical, according to police reports.
Earlier this month during a sermon at the church that he and Bynum founded, Global Destiny Church in Duluth, Weeks alluded to marital problems between the two, church members said.
“He was really mean,” said Tiny Gilyard, 41, of Lawrenceville, who has attended Global Destiny for a year and witnessed Weeks’ sermon. “He explained that [Bynum] is not going to be preaching anymore. He said she was just going to come and sit down. … It was like he was jealous of her.” (more…)
Here is some news on another televangelist couple who is also on the road to divorce–
(christianpost.com) The married duo pastoring one of the nation’s biggest churches is planning for divorce.
Randy and Paula White of Without Walls International in Tampa, Fla., announced their decision to split at their Thursday evening service, shocking most congregants and bringing some to tears.
“It’s the most difficult decision I’ve ever had to make in my entire life,” Randy White told the congregation with Paula by his side at the podium appearing choked up, according to Tampa Bay Online.
Married nearly 18 years, the Whites, who have both been married and divorced before, said in interviews that the split is amicable. They also mentioned that the divorce comes after years of visits to counselors.
Trouble in the couple’s marriage was picked up by The Tampa Tribune in May as the two were rarely seen preaching together anymore.
Both blamed the two different directions their lives are going.
Paula, 41, the church’s senior pastor, leads her own ministry, making frequent trips as a sought-after speaker, author and televangelist. She leads monthly services at her newly opened Life by Design Empowerment Center in New York, appears regularly on “The Tyra Banks Show” as a life coach and serves as oversight pastor at Family Praise Center in San Antonio, Texas.
Meanwhile, Randy, 49, has been traveling to Malibu, Calif., where he plans to start another church, he told his Tampa congregation. He already signed a one-year lease on a beachfront dwelling there but plans for the new church are on hold, according to TBO.
Randy White will remain at Without Walls as senior pastor and Paula will remain based in Tampa and pledged to return frequently to preach.(more…)
And finally, here is some very questionable news regarding former pastor, Ted Haggard—
(christianitytoday.com) Ted Haggard, former megachurch pastor and former president of the National Association of Evangelicals, is in the news again—this time asking gifts to provide two years of financial support while he and his wife Gayle study psychology and counseling at the University of Phoenix.
He sent an e-mail to reporter Tak Landrock of ABC affiliate KRDO—and from the way it appeals to “friends like you,†it sounds like it was sent to a lot of people. KRDO has posted the letter as a Microsoft Word document, which you can download from here.
The news was also covered by the Colorado Springs Gazette and the Associated Press.
The letter raises three issues:
First, the e-mail blindsided the group of overseers charged with seeing Haggard through his time of repentance, recovery, and restoration. The Gazette quoted Mike Ware:
“We will review that his statement was premature, and we will talk to him about that. It is not an official release from us,†Ware said. Ware wouldn’t comment on the propriety of Haggard’s plea for money but said he felt it was premature of Haggard to release the statement without first consulting the overseers.”
And there is more (follow the links in the full article I excerpted above)
Trust me, there is more coming out over other individuals in the near future.
Some time ago on this site I briefly talked about my own experience in ministry in both the local and national level. I guess I do not talk about it much here on this site because many of the folks are well known and I am not into diming folks out. I am a firm believer in scripture and the passage found in Numbers 32:23 is no exception: “But if ye will not do so, behold, ye have sinned against the Lord: and be sure your sin will find you out.” So it can become very difficult at times when I am talking with someone about church issues either on or offline because little do they know, I have seen a whole lot. So trying to craft a conversation around these things can be very difficult.
My experience
If the following sounds like I am rambling a bit, please forgive me. All of this latest news brought back a whole lot of memories. This is an abbreviated version.
When I first started out in ministry, I was in my early 20’s and in the middle of a very promising engineering career. At the same time I was engaged to a woman who I had known since high school. She had a son from a previous relationship but I never saw that as a negative. If anything, it was a positive. This particular ministry was something I started after seeing my dad do the same thing. Basically what I did was to gather a group of young men in my area and just spent time with them. Yes we would have Bible study, but my main focus was to teach them how they could be effective in their own communities. One of their first lessons in being effective was with a broom. I had each of them get a broom and we began to sweep some of the streets in their city (a city that was not known for having clean streets). Their pay was me taking them to MacDonald’s afterwards, so no federal grant was needed. We also did fun things like going to the mall, overnight trips, etc. These were great times because we really got to know each other. This ministry later evolved to include some young women who also lived in the area. Although I have lost contact with some of these kids (who are now grown), I am very happy to see that quite a few of them have graduated from college, got married and are doing very well for themselves. Looking back, I know the Lord used me to be the difference in their lives.
To me, this was ministry. I didn’t have business cards nor did we have a name. Nothing wrong with that, but it was not something I felt was not needed. Kids were coming from literally all over different parts of the state and Philly, so you can only imagine how my parent’s basement looked every Friday night. To this day I still do not know how kids were finding out about what we were doing in Philly and North Jersey.
For the first time in my life I really felt alive. I was doing what I knew I should be doing with my life: Mentoring youth. While all of this was going on, my relationship with my fianc’ee was quickly sinking. Even though I was spending a whole lot of time with both her and her son (who was a toddler at that time), we both knew that this relationship was not going anywhere for reasons unrelated to what I was doing with the kids. It was a difficult break up for both of us, but we both knew it had to be done.
Linking up with a national ministry
There was a ministry that I had heard about on TV at that time whose focus was reaching Black kids (and others) in inner-city schools and HBCUs. It was a ministry that taught kids how to not only plant Bible clubs in their schools, but how to become leaders. It was very exciting because they were basically doing the same thing I was doing except it was on a national level. Seeing that many of the kids that I had mentored were getting ready to graduate, I decided to leave my engineering career and the group to relocate to Atlanta (the new HQ of this ministry). Long story short, what started as a dream come true turned into a pure nightmare as a power struggle emerged amongst leadership that resulted in the abrupt ending of many friendships. Before the split, “church” to us was meeting in each other’s houses and apartments. Eventually a building was needed, but it wasn’t something that defined us. I went to Atlanta to build this ministry whose sole purpose at that time was to GO OUT and reach others for Christ–not build a church ministry. Once we did find a building, all of a sudden we became what we said we would never become: a self-serving enterprise. It didn’t take long for the pastor to get their Mercedes’ and to appoint some of the men as their unofficial ‘body guards’ (as if they really needed them). What started as ministry that was enjoyable turned into WORK for the sole purpose of making that church the “it” church. In short, we became a social club. Getting folks to respond to the altar call was easy. Getting folks to live it everyday was a different story. We were cool Christians with a lukewarm message. Folk that could not keep up with the pace or get with the program were cut off like a bad habit. Folks saw what was going on, but were too afraid to say anything about it lest they met the same fate. As for me and my wife (oh yeah, I got married during this time), we had just purchased our first business. At the same time, she was pregnant with our first child, her father was dying of cancer and her mother was very ill as well. My Dad was also ill during this time so needless to say that making every service was not a priority for us. Long story short, folks began to distance themselves from us so we decided to leave. This was very hard for us as it has taken years to be healed over that departure. To this very day it saddens me how on this ministry’s website how they have edited folks out (not just me or my wife) who played critical roles in building that ministry.
Man, that was something I was used to in the world, but not in the church!
Another national ministry
About two years or so after leaving the church in Atlanta, we decided to move to California. Like most families one of our first goals after we found a place to live was to find a church home. The unique thing about this ministry was that it put me even closer to nationally-known ministers. This was never my goal, it was something that just happened. I quickly learned that the closer we got (eventually we became staff members), the more junk I began to see. I sat in meetings with leaders who came up with ‘revelations” from the Lord on how to get more money to pay for their growing empire. The pressure of being a celebrity kept many of these folks from confronting very serious issues in their own lives. To them, this was just part of the sacrifice of being a servant of the Lord. I also saw and heard of other things that just shocked me coming from folks who preached so hard against these things. Then of course there were the power struggles, strained friendships, etc. This was becoming a popular rerun in our lives it seemed.
Some early Church history
The one thing that always stayed constant was the amount of folks who continued to blindly follow these individuals without asking the hard questions. To many, these individuals were gods who could do no wrong. I have also noticed how many pastors in the past few years have distanced themselves from the everyday man by assigning “Bishop” in front of their name (I guess Rev. is not enough anymore). If you search the scriptures and do some serious study in early church history as I have done, you will never hear of the early Christian church referring to its leaders as “Bishop” or “Pastor”. The early church was never title oriented. You only hear about titles at the rise of the Catholic church. The early church was also never into mega-churches. Here is something I found on Wikipedia that talks about this:
Those Christians who meet together in homes usually do so because of a desire to return to the simplicity and purity of Church meetings as found in the New Testament. The New Testament shows that the early Christian church exhibited a simplicity of fellowship and interactive practice that is typically not the case in conventional churches. Christians walked closely with each other, in close fellowship, sharing their lives in Christ together. This is expressed well by over 50 examples of the phrase “one another” found in the New Testament starting with the words of Jesus in John 13:34, “Love one another.” (source)
Other study of the early church will also reveal that the Church was never meant to be a business or enterprise. It was based on the simplicity of the gospel message as Christ taught. You will not read about leadership having bodyguards with earpieces–but that is commonplace today in many churches. Neither will you read about leaders using ministry money to buy multi-million dollar homes, exclusive transportation, etc. This does not mean that a pastor must live squalor, it just means that historically there was nothing posh about being a pastor or traveling evangelist.
Much of the western church today has abandoned the simplicity of the gospel in pursuit of building personal empires (the people mentioned in the beginning of this post are just few of the many examples out there). I have been in far too many churches across this nation–regardless of ethnic makeup–where the pastor is treated as some sort of celebrity god who could never do wrong. I have heard of stories and seen for myself church members literally being pushed to the side by church ’security’ to make room for the pastor as he walked by. This is not Christ!
More and more I have been meeting folks from all walks of life who still consider themselves Christians, but are just fed up with what the church has become in the past few decades. In fact, I have met many folks who have stop going to traditional churches all together for weekly Bible study with friends and family–just like the Church started.
As for my family and I, finding a church has been very difficult. It is to the point that all I have to do is look at a church’s program and know exactly what materials they use and what they are all about.
It is my hope that the latest round of fallen televangelists will take a serious break from ministry and get all the healing they need–even if it means letting the ministry/enterprise go altogether. For once, they need to forget the crowds and realize that only GOD can ultimately help them–not a personality.
Related:
Fox’s Book of Martyrs
The Demise of Gospel Preaching In The Modern Evangelical Church - Part 1
Today, one of the pastors of my church said a lot of what you have written here.
Great job.