A Church Called Tov: Forming a Goodness Culture That Resists Abuses of Power and Promotes Healing Hardcover – October 6, 2020

If well circulated, this book can help transform today’s church culture! Scot McKnight and his daughter Laura Barringer wrote a compelling challenge for megachurches to resist abuses of power and start promoting healing. His mission—to develop churches of grace and love rather than hurt and abuse. Recent years have produced too many national headlines of celebrity pastors falling from grace and being kicked out due to affairs and other sins of division and false teaching. This book is not only an exposé, but also an attempt at producing tools for creating a healthy “good” TOV church culture. McKnight offers hope to help churches turn from a toxic culture into one of goodness, from a celebrity-oriented church to a service-oriented church. This is a much-needed book that would be ideal if church leadership across the country would embrace it as one of their key reference books for protecting their church from becoming toxic.The signs of a toxic church are comparison, competitiveness, fear of rejection, secrets and lies. “Toxic, flesh-driven cultures breed a lust for power, success, celebrity, control through fear, an emphasis on authority, and demands for loyalty (23).” Also, commonly found among celebrity pastor cultures is narcissism and power achieved through fear. The ideal, instead, is a TOV church with a Christlike culture that nurtures truth, offers healing for the wounded, seeks opportunities of redemptive grace and love, focuses on serving others, and looks for ways to establish justice (23).McKnight points out, and I agree, that the most destressing part of a church scandal is how the church typically initially responds when allegations are made. This exponentially expands collateral damage from the leader’s sin. You can tell if the church is toxic or TOV based on what the church leadership does FIRST when accusations fly. “If they respond with confession, repentance, and a commitment to finding the truth, they are healthy and TOV. If they respond with denial, new narrative of what really happened, attacking the accusers and defensiveness then it is toxic (41).”McKnight gives specific advice on both how to spot a toxic church (i.e. the eight signs of a power-through-fear culture) and how to appropriately respond to sexual sin in the church (i.e. Jim Van Yperen’s seven-steps for public communication regarding sexual sin in church). He concludes with three tips on what we can do to break the celebrity syndrome. Those tips are to accept that there is: 1) no such thing as the most important pastor. 2) no such thing as most important church in a denomination. 3) and the concept of “celebrity pastor” and “celebrity church” contradicts the way of Jesus (189-190). He points out that Jesus was the anti-celebrity, and he compares celebrity pastors to the Pharisees in how they do everything for show and “love being seen” (190). Whereas, on the contrary, a church called TOV “will empower women (and others) in their giftedness and encourage those gifts to flourish within the body of Christ and in the world.” (106).Having spent sixteen years as an agent in the secular entertainment world, I found the bad behavior of toxic church leaders to be reminiscent of Hollywood during the Harvey Weinstein era in which I worked. The abuse of power, fear mongering, sexual attacks and denial behavior of toxic pastors who have been caught in sin, I found reveal little difference in how things are handled in the business or political world. Denial and attacking the accuser is done every day. That is what abusers do. And more so, abusers are typically charismatic and well-liked by their public. They protect and hide their secret dark side well. The devil’s great tool and most earth-shattering affect is when it is committed by “Christians” in the place people should be safe—the church. I have often said the deepest pain, with the most damaging aftermath, is betrayal by the church because it can forever affect the believer’s faith in God. And the misuse of Scripture by the leadership to attack and discredit the accuser (such as Matthew 18 and 1 Timothy 5:19) is especially damaging to the victim. McKnight addressed this well.If well circulated, this book can help transform today’s church culture!The size of the church does not matter. What matters is the size of the pastor’s ego (176). In TOV churches, leaders maximize their giftedness when they empower others to maximize their own giftedness (176).

God 👍🏻👍🏻

TOV is the Hebrew word for Good! It is used extensively in Genesis chapter one to describe how God felt about creation. Each day ended with God stating that what was created that day was TOV.So God intends that His creation be good and that mankind also be good and by extension that His Church would also be good. So TOV is what church culture should be, a good safe place for people to learn about God and grow in their relationship with God.But McKnight and his daughter Laura Barringer delve into the fact that many churches today have a Toxic Culture not a TOV culture. They delve into the Spiritual Abuse that some narcissistic pastors develop in their church. Also how and why their Elder boards seem to be impotent to hold these leaders accountable and protect the church (their flock) from the heavy handed leadership styles that are so abusive and toxic.The first portion of the book outlines the many failures of Megachurch pastors who have recently fallen due to blatant uncontrolled sexual and spiritual abuse. They give good examples and extensively outline “what went wrong.” As a retired pastor their descriptions sicken my heart and my soul grieves for the people who were hurt. It also made me sit back and re-evaluate how I might have hurt people during my ministry.But they then go on to describe how to develop a TOV culture in your current church. I was pleased to discover that the traits that they outline are very prevalent in the current church that we attend, for which I thank God regularly.Take notes as you read and share them with your church leadership and start a dialogue at your church about how to keep from developing a Toxic culture and instead nurture a TOV culture.

I thought this was a good book and well worth the effort for Christians to read. I generally agree with their analysis of what can go wrong in a church and the authors’ prescriptions for how to avoid those issues. However, as a counselor (and a Christian) who specializes in treating people suffering from spiritual abuse and church hurt, I noticed a glaring oversight. The authors did not address the topic of people who feel they have been mistreated by the church due to their sexual orientation—which I acknowledge is a difficult and complicated topic. Nevertheless, it is one which is common and widespread. I don’t know if the authors felt that the topic is too controversial and would distract from their message, or if they just do not see the pain of these often faithful Christian believers whose worship communities are rejecting of them, but it was difficult for me to ignore this omission. This is something about which the evangelical church is not done reckoning.

God walked and held my hand while reading this book within my own church ...he literally walked by my side...teaching me a church can become Tov 💯💪👏🙏❤️👑🙌

What the Body of Christ should know.

Excellent so far, great condition and quick service from the seller!