What Can We Learn from Eli’s Story?

Institutional Sin & Generational Harm

Knowing about sin that harms others and failing to restrain it leads to generational damage.

William R Horne
Publishous
Published in
12 min readAug 17, 2022

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Photo by Michal Matlon on Unsplash

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The headlines of scandal, corruption, and abuse of power seem endless. Lamentably, as the headlines above show — the church has not been a space free of such abuse.

How can the place where the world is supposed to experience “heaven on earth” often become “hell”?

Our refusal to look in the face of systemic sin and reckon with institutional cultures of abuse has taken its toll.

And believe it or not, the Biblical text speaks with great clarity to such institutional sin — none quite as clear as the story of Eli in the book of Samuel.

If you recall where we are in the biblical timeline, the book of Samuel starts right after the…

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William R Horne
Publishous

Putting up writing reps while trying to evoke and nourish new ways of seeing God, ourselves, others, and the world.