u/buylowguy

I want to understand if this makes any sense at all. I keep hearing people like Mark Driscoll and others like him
create what I’m intuitively perceiving as a false equivalence between “God as a God of Truth” and “God as a God of Love.”

The line of reasoning usually goes something like this: “God is a God of Love, sure. But He’s also a God of Truth. Love without truth is toxic, therefore you must tell your transgender (feminist, Marxist, etc.) neighbor about their demonic ways in order to really love them.”

I feel like this has a lot more to do with drawing enemy lines on a spiritual battlefield than it has to do with some philosophical/theological rumination about the nature of truth and love.

Sometimes I also feel like it’s about activating a permission structure for ideological/political hatred. This enemy creation engenders crisis and fear, which motivates people to give.

But I’m perceiving a contradiction: a “God of Truth” and a “God of Love” cannot co-exist in equal measure the way these people are placing them next to one another.

The field of “truth” they’re referencing is a spiritual truth, right? But what they’re talking about it in reference to is usually a political/cultural concept, like gender roles, how to “vote like Jesus,” etc. So it seems like they’re drawing on a more literal definition of “truth” in the field of knowledge, but this truth creates categories, segmentation, particulars, which allows people to draw their guiding lines within a social reality.

This is useful, obviously. I’m not trying to make the post-modern argument that truth is relative. But it is the case that truth allows us to agree on things like “What is the color green?” and “Murder is bad,” etc.

But it also generates the internal frontiers that pit one against another. “Truth” tends to lend itself in the case of the evangelists I’m talking about to things like, “Muslims are inhabited by demonic entities,” which allows people to draw a line between themselves and those they are against.

But Love — “Agapē” — is on another spectrum entirely, one which dissolves categories altogether.

How can “God as a God of Love” be interpreted with “God as a God of Truth” like these people are saying? If they mean the kind of “truth” we find in the field of knowledge, wouldn’t equating it to Agapeē sort of neutralize God as a God of Love? Making Christ.ms command to “Love thy neighbor as one loves themself” to lose all meaning.

Does that make any sense? I grew up in an evangelical church that was very destructive, and this thought is what helped me to escape, but I’ve been writing about Christianity a lot later and so subjected myself to Driscoll and received a lot of criticism by his followers, and now I feel the urge to know if my logic is making any sense or if I’m just barking up the wrong tree altogether.

I believe I’ve found a story pertaining to a transaction between two non-profits owned by the same person, a pastor. I’ve taken care to collect as much evidence as possible, and I think I have a good story.

However, there are a lot of moving parts. There are multiple transaction which occurred over a number of years between two entities.

I know how busy editors are. It pains me to write an editor an email longer than maybe 100 words, if that. So I need some advice. How do I pitch a story that is inherently complex in a way that is concise, but still gets the point across?

Hello,

I know a pastor who runs a mega-church and his own separate "XYZ Ministries" 501c3 organization. I got curious one day and started looking at deeds and affidavits with his name on them at the county recorder's office (website).

I found that he used the church's money to purchase a piece of property for $900,000, all cash. Then, less than ten months later, he sells that property to his own, separate non-profit for $760,000 dollars, at a $160,000 loss to the church. The affidavit shows that he put $140,000 down, and worked out the rest with the church (himself) somehow.

I noticed that after selling the property to himself (his non-profit), he takes out a loan of $620,000 on the property from a large bank using that property as collateral, which you would think would go to him paying off what he owes on to his own church since its the exact difference between what the property went for and what he put down at the time of purchase.

However, there's no deed of full reconveyance to the church?

He sells the property three years later for $2 million dollars.

There's only one deed of full reconveyance from the bank from which he took out the loan, making it seem as though the church wasn't paid off in full, but the bank was. I can't find any public recording that shows the church was ever paid off what he (XYZ Ministries) owed the church (himself).

Additional information: This particular pastor is famous for financial misconduct. He set up his church so that there is no board of elders or oversight. On the Form 990 for his other non-profit, the board consists of his daughter and a separate insider (also a sketchy pastor).

Am I making this into something suspicious, or is it a suspicious transaction? Is selling a property own by a church for which you are the head pastor to a non-profit for which you're the head employee at $160,000 less than fair market value in the ballpark of private inurement?