Have you experienced a church split?

[salamacum]

Church splits - far more often is the loss of capable and godly and biblically-eduacted people. Now that MUST be a challenge for the rest of the congregation. "So why has Bill left?" - and you told that he feels his time at Westbridge Community church has come to an end and God has told him he has new opportunities elsewhere. Oh and by the way he bears no resentments against leaders and congregation and wishes you all the best as you continue to follow His will.

Had a conversation over lunch last week with such a person who left a big church and came to our little fellowship. It was as if it was a big thing he had to talk about with someone. Apparently the new pastor changed and got a "work from God" to achieve. As people were dragging their feet about this new challenge (and it was radical) the new pastor started to bully them from the pulpit about the need to be"soldiers in Christ's army" and obey those over you. Well, there's no answer to it, is there? It's perfectly acceptable exposition. It was the right season , prophetically, to use those metaphors.
My friend (no intellectual slouch) gently confronted him with other verses to do with family and hospital. Defensively the pastor said that everybody had to "get on board".
The haemorraging became a fountain. Again- good biblical defense of that - "Gideon and the 300".
My friend left and there is now no contact.
He conforts himself with the fact that the pastor's own apostolic cover considers that he has a big sense of inferiority and can't cope with difference of opinion.

 

[melburnz]

Check out "Congress WBN" (Google it). The church became involved with that and set itself up with a hierarchical stratum. Authority flows from the top down and the top gets it's authority from an "Apostle" and so on....

We tried to resolve it. Didn't happen.

I don't want to sound innocent here. I went along with the teaching for quite a while but finally saw the truth of the beast. It's cultic. Period.

Bob
Spearfish, SD

congress wbn lead by noel woodroffe is a cult. their inner mandate is to find churches and absorb them. full financial details are passed over to the main body at congress wbn. in exchange for "teaching" which is a weekly video of noel woodroffe preachinf or other heavily edited "leader" worship. they call themselves the leader lead movement .they use their tithe funds to pay for extravagant trips for their senior elders to attend meetings with other leaders with no community outreach....ever. in one case members paid their senior elders 130 flights in one year. they enforce arranged marriages. noel woodroffe classes himself a higher apostle than Paul. other leaders never have a chance to pass the senior elder and have been spiritually broken them selves. 100% cult. check out their " canopy tv " and see the circus for yourself it's scary. they prey on third world countries in Africa and the Pacific and openly flash their rolex watches during preaching. watch out for this cult. congress wbn is a part of the new apostolic reformation. bill hamon created this arm following from wagners heresy.

 

[Amittai]

Too many to be counted. I have scattered major fragments of testimony over my posts in many threads.

Sample issues:

- elders ordered not to tell us why they were having a row - half the church left - then we were told "the nasty people have left" - then I left.

- the moment I joined the next one, I saw everyone was headed for burnout. After 2 years not getting through to anyone at relationship level (and I did try) I left. Soon after, their vicar was suspended, am not sure "why".

- inflitrators cause a large chunk of membership to turn against another large chunk (there is a large chain of these in several countries) - big and lasting trauma. One of their favourite and sickest tricks is to brag about their bad business deals and their lurid ways of gaining influence over people, specially to troll and compromise us.

Sentimentality, immaturity, mania, hysteria, yuck. The vortex is just sucking in everyone for miles around.

I've known some pretty sinister church mergers too. Po faced vaguely spoken "bosses" take over.

 

[Amittai]

...
The haemorraging became a fountain. Again- good biblical defense of that - "Gideon and the 300".
My friend left and there is now no contact.
He conforts himself with the fact that the pastor's own apostolic cover considers that he has a big sense of inferiority and can't cope with difference of opinion.

Ah yes the Gideon defence rings a bell, as does apostolic cover.

Ah yes the loss of contact.

 

[Amittai]

...

The new church was quite successful for about 10 years, until the governing body of the church went on some kind of retreat and came back spouting out a whole new gospel, which didn't sit right with a great deal of the church, and another split occured.

...

They must have been to one of the camps of the Medes and the Persians, who hand down their laws on graven tablets. It's when there isn't a split that it is even more worrying.

A catch word of the "new apostolics" is "graciousness" which they don't show, merely unctuousness in an iron fist.