I’m so glad you’ve joined me at the intersection of faith and true crime here at The Unlovely Truth. Security issues are hiding in every church - do you know where to look for them? I’m your host, church safety advocate Lori Morrison. Our churches need to be the safest places in our communities, so our mission here is to find actionable steps that will make our churches sanctuaries of physical, emotional, and spiritual safety. To give you tools to help make that happen in your church, we’re going to investigate real crime stories from real churches. I’ve got three cases for us to investigate today, so let’s dive right in. 

Highlights from this episode include:

• Mother’s Day “gift” to churches that no one wants

This week in each of our cases, someone was trying to hide something evil. The Bible is pretty clear on how well that’s going to work out.

Luke 8:17 NLT

For all that is secret will eventually be brought into the open, and everything that is concealed will be brought to light and made known to all.

I know there are all kinds of reasons to try to hide what we’ve done individually, as a ministry, and even as an entire church. We are embarrassed, we want to escape the consequences of our actions, and sometimes it’s because we want to be able to continue the behavior even though we know it’s wrong.

When a church does this, the reason is often cloaked in very noble-sounding words: we don’t want to harm the witness of the church. We want to keep up our reputation. We don’t want to tarnigh the name of Jeus.  I’m sorry, but that’s all a load of crap. I’m going to be very bold here and say that the people who are saying this are complicit in the abuse of victims. It’s very spiritually abusive to act as though what a victim has gone through deserves less care that the reputation of the abuser or the church does. 

I’ll climb down off my soapbox now, ut I hope I’ve given you something to think about. Something to challenge your own church leaders about. Because the church should be working for the glory of God and for the people it serves, not the people it put into leadership positions. 

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