The Barnabas Blog

Early on in my days as an RN, I greatly enjoyed working with patients who had come through multiple trauma situations. Even when I was in nursing school, I would frequently spend my evenings at work as a patient care tech, in the Emergency Department or in the Surgical Intensive Care Unit. The reason was because these areas were generally the hubs for patients who had multiple trauma insults to contend with. Then when I graduated from nursing school, I went to work in the SICU and it was there that I found a niche specifically with neuro-trauma and the other injuries associated with the brain and the spinal cord. There have been numerous times that I have seen patients that hardly had a mark on their body but had been dealt a massive blow to the head to the extent that they never recovered. In fact, far more than I would have liked to seen, were sent to long-term care facilities basically in a very obtunded or comatose state. Never again would they function normally and be ab...

This is the last post on this particular series. I appreciate the comments, e-mails, and phone calls that I have received concerning this very sensitive subject. The genesis of this blog series actually begin when I was asked by J. R. Ensey to put together a paper to present at a theological forum that he hosts annually at various places around the country. I am very appreciative at the response I received when I delivered this paper at the forum in Albany, Georgia a few weeks ago. I have just a few final thoughts to add before moving to other areas on the blog. What I increasingly discovered was in these dark spiritually abusive environments that it serves as excellent and fertile conditions for hypocrisy to prevail. As you dig deeper into these environments you soon discover dark, deviant sins and moral corruption simmering beneath the surface. I believe that the huge level of repression that takes place in these “churches” does nothing except bring out the worst sins of t...

This post may seem as if there is an overlap from the last post . In our last post, I tried to show you what actions the spiritual abusers resorted to. In this post, I will attempt to show you what a spiritual abuser looks like. Leadership seems to be the buzzword of our times. Bookstores now have multiple rows upon rows of books concerning this particular subject. Some of the content is very good and can help a person to hone their management skills and work toward becoming self-disciplined in a manner that will prove good for the organization that they are serving. I personally have benefited from some of the secular leadership books that I have read over the years. Despite all of these necessary and good resources only a small, in fact, microscopic amount of these books address spiritual issues in the life of the leader. There aren’t any spiritual leadership concepts given in the books that Jim Collins has written. Patrick Lencioni does not address the spiritual side ...

This is the third installment in a series on spiritual abuse ( Part 1 & Part 2 ). The whole idea of spiritual abuse is a very troubling at best. The church was intended to be a place of redemptive recovery facilitated by the grace of God. When manipulative control moves to the forefront it can have a very harmful effect on the people who gather to worship. It also has to be established that spiritual abuse can take place in a reverse order. It can originate from the congregation in the form of a board of elders or a single influential member who controls the pastor through financial means or sometimes through psychological and physical intimidation. Increasingly one will find the reverse order in churches that once had to deal with a pastor who was spiritually abusive.

To give a little history as to how some of the heavy-handed authoritative traits came into play among pastors you have to trace back to the charismatic movement. Out of the charismatic movement there was the evolving of a concept called “shepherding.” The Latter Rain movement actually had its earliest beginnings in the late 1800’s and was born out of the Methodist and Holiness camp-meeting environment. It would continue to generate momentum and experience growth during the post-World War II years and be much encouraged by the Charismatic movement in the 1960’s and 1970’s. Marked by extreme excess and abuse of the gifts of the Spirit, this activity led to the production of “prophets” who had little use for personal holiness and consecration. After a while it appeared that they only had a desire for their own personal kingdoms to grow. As time went by these intruders became susceptible to moral and ethical failures. The subsequent fallout from their failures caused many who ...

For the last six weeks or so, I have been researching, reading, and taking notes from various places concerning the difficult subject of spiritual abuse. One of the reasons for my doing this is in preparation for a theological forum to be held in Albany, Georgia in a few weeks. It is being organized by the former president of Texas Bible College, J. R. Ensey , and hosted by Pastor Steve Waldron. Back in the summer, Brother Ensey sent out an e-mail soliciting papers to be written on various subjects and after musing through the choices, I started thinking more along the lines of a pastoral theology kind of subject. Although I am not quite sure how I finally settled on this particular issue, I have been thoroughly enlightened on this subject. In the past, I have written on church trouble from the angle of people in the congregation who found great enthusiasm for tormenting pastors until they finally ran them off. The religious landscape is littered with men who no longer pasto...