No? No.
A response to The Grace Hour’s teaching on repentance, church authority, and what it means to actually be accountable.
Last week, Thursday, on The Grace Hour Show,1 John Love sat down with Tom Schaller2 to, quote/unquote, “debate” whether or not repentance is necessary for salvation. Now, if you’re like me and you have complicated feelings you’re still untangling about the very concept of salvation, to the point where whether or not repentance is necessary doesn’t even factor in, you’re in luck! Right now, I don’t care about the conclusion of that discussion — if there even is one.
John Love, former youth pastor at Greater Grace World Outreach, former chaplain for the New York Knicks3, current GGWO board member and secretary, said something I found fucking stupid from a man who has been a pastor since some time in the 1980s.
Around minute marker 9:27, John Love says:
“…it’s possible, too, that if there’s an emphasis on repentance… you might minimize the ministry and the power of the Holy Spirit.”4
To which I’d like to respond:
I’m fairly certain there’s nothing a mere human can do to “minimize the ministry and power of the Holy Spirit” if, in fact, it is as you say: the Holy Spirit is a co-equal member of the Trinity that makes up God.
To quote the book of Job5, Johnny:
“Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding….
Have you commanded the morning since your days began and caused the dawn to know its place, so that it might take hold of the skirts of the earth, and the wicked be shaken out of it? ….
Have you entered into the springs of the sea or walked in the recesses of the deep? ….
Have you comprehended the expanse of the earth?….
Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades or loose the cords of Orion?…
Can you lift up your voice to the clouds, so that a flood of waters may cover you? Can you send forth lightning, so that they may go and say to you, ‘Here we are’? Who has put wisdom in the inward parts or given understanding to the mind? Who has the wisdom to number the clouds? Or who can tilt the waterskins of the heavens when the dust runs into a mass and the clods cling together?….
Do you know the ordinances of the heavens? Can you establish their rule on the earth?”
Do you, John Albert Love, Jr., in the context of your theology, do you really think that you could ever be more powerful than the Holy Spirit?
What I learned from you and your ilk in my 20ish years6 within your ministry was that any “power” a human person might possess is from the Holy Spirit, it is from God themself. And there is nothing that I can do that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the Creator of heaven, earth, and sea, cannot outdo.
Stop trying to manipulate the people who still listen to you. The good people and the questionable people, who have decided, despite everything, they’re going to keep listening to you, Tom, Steve, et al.
Do they know, John, that you are named in one of the pending lawsuits against the church? Or about the incidents laid out in the GRACE report that describe you shaming kids who needed compassion? Do they know what has been documented and alleged about leadership accountability in cases involving the sexual assault of minors?
All of last week’s Grace Hour episodes were about repentance. We repent to and receive absolution from God, but there are also times we must make our confession of sins public because the people we have hurt are many.
You, John, Tom, and Steve have hurt many.
You may not have committed SA, but you had a hand in covering it up, thereby putting your entire organization at risk. Everyone. All the people in every Greater Grace church have been betrayed by your lack of leadership. Because you are the leaders of this organization and have been, in one way or another, longer than I’ve been alive — and I was born in the mid-1980s.
You are the teachers of Greater Grace. Every pastor who comes out of your little school is greatly influenced by you. They look to you for guidance. Baltimore sends a memo with talking points, and they use them the following Sunday. You tell your congregation not to read inflammatory newspaper articles, they barely mention them. Tom uses gemstones as a metaphor one week, and a couple of weeks later, his nephew in Massachusetts uses diamonds.
The fish, as they say, rots from the head. If the head in Baltimore is rotting, then so is the body in Marlborough, in York, in Accra, Muscat, and Lilongwe. So it is Santiago, in Rosario, in Manila, Bangkok, and Mumbai. Budapest. Helsinki.
Your sins are absolutely against the SA victims by covering it up, protecting their abusers, and denying responsibility and restitution. They are also against the rest of us who were, by the grace of god, not hurt, but put in positions where we could be because of your lax policies and inaction. And, worse, for teaching leaders under your influence to do the same.
You don’t just get to repent to God and receive divine correction: You must repent to the rest of us.
In Matthew 5, Jesus tells the people that when bringing gifts to the altar, if they have sinned against another they should “leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift,” (Matt 5:24). Before one can use one’s gifts for God, a person must make things right with people. In the last two years, I’ve heard a lot from Baltimore leadership, none of which has been anything along the lines of amends.
David, Solomon, and Manasseh wrote songs about their repentance. Where are your songs, John? Steve? Where are your verses, Tom?
Do you think you’re greater than David? Do you think you have the authority to not repent? Were you there when the universe was created? “Do you know the ordinances of the heavens? Can you establish their rule on the earth?”
No? No.
And/or drop a coin in the tip jar to support this work.
A daily YouTube podcast produced by Greater Grace World Outreach, that used to be a radio show with the same name. Before circa 1986, it was called Telephone Time.
John Love is a longtime pastor, and former youth pastor, at Greater Grace World Outreach; Tom Schaller is a graduate of the very first GG bible college class in the 1970s and current senior pastor of the entire organization since 2005.
Notice how well they’re doing now that he’s gone?
Bold emphasis generally, and in all Biblical quotations, are mine. All Biblical quotations are from the NRSVue SBL Study Bible.
Verses pulled from Job 38 & 39.
I regularly attended a GGWO affiliate in Massachusetts starting as a teenager in 2000 until around 2011, then again from 2016-2022ish. I went to youth events/weekends run by John Love while he was the Youth Pastor. I saw his bullshit first hand. You can read more about John Love, specifically, here.
I GREATLY appreciate that you made note of the fact that there are a countless number of us who were very much unknowingly exposed to predators or put in dangerous positions and somehow were not harmed in the same way as so many others. I was personally exposed to and in the company of at least three on multiple occasions and it’s something I still grapple with sometimes.