Scot McKnight - A Church Called Tov: Forming a Goodness Culture That Resists Abuses of Power and Promotes Healing

What a theologically savvy and empathy-embracing book for todays church! Reading A Church Called Tov reminded me of why I love the church, and how that affection can also mean telling the truth about her missteps and broken pieces. In a world of high profile failures and scandals, this book offers a prophetic reimagining of the Acts 2 church. It is hopeful, relevant, and encouraging.

MARY D E MUTH, author of We Too: How the Church Can Respond Redemptively to the Sexual Abuse Crisis

It is tragic that a book like this has to be written. However, if good can come of tragedy, this book is a testimony to that. In this volume, Scot and Laura have given the church a way of identifying, naming, and addressing toxic church cultures with a view to retraining our thinking to create cultures of goodness and healthy churches. It is full of wisdom, insight, and truthful exegesis which brings its own light. It is a gift to leaders, pastors in training, and importantly, victims of abuse who desperately need champions. In my view, this should be essential reading for anyone who has any leadership responsibility in a church.

LUCY PEPPIATT, principal, Westminster Theological Centre, Cheltenham, UK

This profoundly important book addresses the problem of toxic church culture and shows how we change it. It is brave, thoughtful, and transformational. The answers it offers are woven around the key Hebrew word tov, which means goodand so much more. If you have been wounded by your experience of church, you should read this book. If you cannot imagine how church wounds people, you should read this book. It is profound, compassionate, andsadlytimely.

PAULA GOODER, New Testament scholar and Canon Chancellor of St Pauls Cathedral in London

If the church is going to become what she was designed to be, women must be at equal places of responsibility, authority, and influence in all spaces. If there has ever been a time to write a better storya tov storyit is now! The broken stories in this book offer a beautiful transformational pathway forward. I wish this book werent necessary, but it is imperative for leaders committed to integrity and creating a better future.

APRIL L. DIAZ, founder, Ezer + Co.

A Church Called Tov is a desperately needed book, full of eye-opening truths. The church is supposed to be, and can be, a place of goodness, not toxicity. Scot and Laura help us discern the difference. It is clear they have seen and understand both sides and therefore can serve as guides to help us see what is good and avoid what is evil. I hope this work spreads through every church.

WADE MULLEN, author of Somethings Not Right

In a time when scores of people who grew up in the church are walking away wounded, disillusioned, and understandably cynical about a culture that seldom reflects the Jesus it claims to love and follow, Scot McKnight brings us much-needed hope. He does this by helping the reader diagnose and explain what creates and fosters the toxicity that is so pervasive within our modern Christian culture. Fortunately, Scot doesnt stop there. He follows up his diagnosis with an informed and practical wisdom that empowers and equips us cynics to understand how the church can actually become what it was created to be... the community of true health, safe refuge, and genuine hope for the weary and the wounded. In other words, the reflection of the Jesus. Im grateful that A Church Called Tov helped me begin deconstructing my own cynicism about the church. Baby steps forward. Thanks, Scot!

BOZ TCHIVIDJIAN, victim rights attorney and founder of GRACE (Godly Response to Abuse in the Christian Environment)

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A Church Called Tov: Forming a Goodness Culture That Resists Abuses of Power and Promotes Healing

Copyright 2020 by Scot McKnight and Laura McKnight Barringer. All rights reserved.

Cover illustration of church icon copyright AVIcon/Shutterstock. All rights reserved.

Scot McKnight author photograph by Point Lomo University, copyright 2020. All rights reserved. Laura McKnight Barringer author photograph by Magdalena Madziorek, copyright 2019. All rights reserved.

Cover designed by Lindy Martin, Faceout Studios

Interior designed by Dean H. Renninger

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Names: McKnight, Scot, author. | Barringer, Laura, author.

Title: A church called Tov : forming a goodness culture that resists abuses

of power and promotes healing / Scot McKnight and Laura Barringer.

Description: Carol Stream, Illinois : Tyndale House Publishers, 2020. |

Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020018427 (print) | LCCN 2020018428 (ebook) | ISBN

9781496446008 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781496446015 (kindle edition) | ISBN

9781496446022 (epub) | ISBN 9781496446039 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Church. | Sex crimes--Religious aspects--Christianity. |

Offenses against the person. | Authority--Religious

aspects--Christianity.

Classification: LCC BV600.3 .M3565 2020 (print) | LCC BV600.3 (ebook) |

DDC 262/.72--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020018427

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020018428

Build: 2022-04-20 09:27:42 EPUB 3.0

For the Wounded Resisters

***

THE CHURCH IS PART OF THE GOOD NEWS OF JESUS. Jesus mission was not simply to save individuals. He created a people, a community, an institution to bring his enduring light, truth, peace, and goodness into all the world and every part of human society. He built a church, and he calls this church his ownhis bride, his body, his peoplewhich is why we confess in the Nicene Creed that we believe in one holy, catholic, and apostolic church. The late Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey wrote, We do not know the whole fact of Christ incarnate unless we know his Church, and its life as part of his own life.

And yet, I have been thrown into deep doubt and a crisis of faith from the failures of church leaders. I have wept bitter tears as a powerful male pastor surrounded himself with a tight inner ring of adorers and responded harshly to any he deemed unworthy of his careful affections.

It is clear that the church regularly breaks our hearts, disappoints, and even damages us. Both history and our current headlines reveal a church that can be a deeply flawed, sinful, and unhealthy institution, marred by acts of injustice, corruption, abuse, misogyny, and oppression. The contemporary American church is wrecked with bickering and division, celebrity worship and unaccountable leaders, false and shallow teaching, and a Christian industrial complex formed around greed and vanity.