Snippet: Our Inner-cultist

snip·pet | ˈsnipit | noun a small piece or brief extract.

Here’s one from Tim Challies after establishing that one major characteristic of a cult is a lack of diversity of thought:

“A little honest self-examination will probably reveal that we all have a cultist lurking within ourselves. We may pay lip service to diversity, but when it comes down to it we find that our natural instinct is toward uniformity—a uniformity to our own emphases, our own convictions, our own preferences.”

“As we look around a church we ought to see people with a wide range of differences experiencing the deepest kind of unity—different races and ethnicities, different ages and socioeconomics, different convictions on politics, different convictions on education, different convictions on vaccinations, and so on.”

This is much much harder than it sounds.

And while I completely resonate with what he’s saying, I wouldn’t want to accuse someone of being cultish who wants to be in a church that reflects their black, Korean, hispanic, or other cultural heritage in music and preaching styles.

Same goes for those who prefer certain expressions of the music and preaching styles of the dominant American western culture.

All that being said, you can feel it in your gut that something’s wrong when a church is almost completely without diversity culturally and politically and where all agree on masks or vaccines, private or home or public school choices, and so on, whether reflecting the views of the right or the left. Unless, of course, that’s the church air that you breath.

But it really gets cultishly creepy when seemingly everyone basically shares the same criticisms and prejudices against any cultural expressions, political leanings, school choices, or vaccination opinions that don’t match theirs.

When I was in seminary (1980-83), the school hosted a special seminar on cults and how to help people caught up in cults. The speaker was an expert on the Jim Jones inspired cult that ended in the Jonestown Massacre in 1978.

I’ll never forget his advice: If a loved one is getting caught up in a cult, make every effort to let them know you are waiting for them with love and open arms. The day will come for most of them when they will see their mistake. Those who stay will stay because they feel they have nowhere else to go.