Lately I was watching a documentary on Netflix about The Jonestown Massacre and it reminded me how things can sometimes go wrong at church. If you aren’t familiar with the Jonestown story, it’s a heartbreaking tale of a group of people on a mission to create a utopian society. It started off pretty innocent. Admirable, even. A group of individuals committed to treating everyone with dignity, calling people to step into a lifestyle of wholeness and healing. Over the years, however, something shifted. It started with a move from the United States to the jungles of South American and ending with over nine hundred men, women and children drinking cyanide-laced Kool-Aid, committing mass suicide at the direction of their leader Jim Jones. By that time it was too late. No one really understood what had happened. The most terrifying part about the whole thing, to me, was listening to the testament of five survivors who escaped the massacre that day. As I listened to their stories I expected them to say things like, “Jones was just a monster,” or “He tied us up, and we couldn’t find a way out,” but instead I heard them talk about how Jim Jones was known for his kindness, charisma, and heart for justice. That’s why they were a part of his movement. “This wasn’t some group of zombies,” one of the men explained. “These were high-functioning, thinking people just like you and me.” The documentary showed footage of Mr. Jones touching people who were considered “untouchable” at the time, much like is recorded of Jesus so many times in the Gospels. Indiana, where Jones’ preaching career began, was laced with racism at the time he lived there, but Jones stood against such attitudes. He embraced the black community in a way no other church was doing. In fact, he even adopted a black child into his family, far before that was the socially “in” thing to do. That’s the part that got to me. Things didn’t start bad with Jim Jones’ church. They got bad over time. And it made me think about how things can deteriorate when we stop asking questions. There was another gut-wrenching church incident in the media lately. None of the details have been confirmed, so I tell the story cautiously. But as far as I can gather, it goes something like this: A young man, connected to a well-known and popular institution within the evangelical community, was practicing several more-than-controversial “spiritual disciplines” in his “Bible Study.” When his wife threatened to tell her counselor, this young man commissioned a friend to murder her. She was killed. It was staged as a suicide. Much like Jonestown, those left in the aftermath of this tragedy didn’t say things like, “we thought he would kill us,” or “I felt so trapped I just couldn’t say anything.” They said, essentially, he tricked us. I heard one girl (not in the Bible study) explain in an interview how, as far as she could [...]
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