1) A married junior pastor who seduced the married women he was supposed to be counseling.
2) A senior pastor who covered up a junior pastor seducing women he was supposed to be counseling and let him start a new church instead of calling the police.
3) That same junior pastor, starting a new congregation with my friends.
4) Me and my wife attending this church, recognizing something was amiss because the pastor was running the church on his personality and not the Spirit of God, and leaving this church.
5) My friends deriding us for leaving because we had no "evidence" of wrongdoing.
6) My "friends" discovering the truth about the pastor and ignoring what they said to and about us.
7) Us finding a church with another pastor being adulterous.
8) Us finding and leaving another church running on the personality of the pastor, which fell apart years later.
9) Us finding a church with a private school for our children. The school admittedly hired teachers out of a sense of ministry. One teacher had severe mental issues, but the school overall was incompetent and allowed cheating and misbehavior. We left that church. The school fell apart, and the principal of the school acknowledged we were right, only years later, and the pastor had fired her in the meantime for trying to clean it up.
10) Churches that wouldn't address grievances or follow Matthew 18. They didn't allow or deal with dissent.
11) Churches that allowed cliques, gossip, backbiting, destroying of relationships, etc...
12) Churches that allowed shacking up.
13) Embezzlement.
14) Extreme materialism with the pastor.
15) Definite racism.
16) A promise that their church wasn't a Word of Faith church, and then the next Sunday, being told by the pastor about a man who didn't want to tithe because of financial hardship, tithed anyway, and that next year, bought a recreational vehicle. The pastor then told the congregation that if they started tithing, he would return their money if things didn't go well for them.
17) Churches where members don't even try to understand the Bible.
18) Parents with children who had severe mental and physical retardation, being encouraged to put as much money as they could into large Kentucky Fried Chicken buckets to prove their faith and get their children healed.
19) "Christians" in my family telling us about gold dust falling from the ceiling and miracles occurring in groups like "Women Aglow". Prophets, prophetesses, prophecies, words of knowledge, tongues, and interpretations, phony gold tooth miracles, other false miracles, false teachings, declarations of demonic possession and deliverances, declarations of healings without evidence,
20) Witnessing ministries like Jehovah's Witnesses, Joel Osteen, Mormonism, The PTL Club, Charisma Magazine, The Christian Broadcast Network, Paul Crouch and the Trinity Broadcasting Network, more Charismatic preachers than you can shake a stick at, and on and on... The point being, they thrive while barely being challenged.
21) Most recently, a church that rejected my appeal for a very MINOR bit of help with my wife, who has dementia. No "Christian" in our ten years of dealing with dementia has ever asked what my wife is experiencing or made a serious attempt at finding out if they can help. They do, however, ask how she is. They are satisfied when I say, "She's in good spirits." I never say anything different, and no one has noticed.
