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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.
Willow Creek Investigation: Allegations Against Bill Hybels Are Credible: Independent Advisory Group releases report backing claims of pastor’s “sexually inappropriate words and actions.”
SBC Task Force Asks for ‘Ministry Check’ Website, Other Reforms to Stop Sexual Abuse
Bombshell ‘Hillsong’ doc details sex scandals that battered celeb megachurch
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…