Kudos go out to J. Lee Grady for his latest e-mail entitled “Rape in the Sanctuary: It’s Time for Outrage”:

Rape in the Sanctuary: It’s Time for Outrage
by J. Lee Grady, editor of Charisma Magazine.

Do we just pretend it doesn’t affect us when a pastor is sentenced to prison for raping church members? We need to rend our hearts.

Last month a bizarre drama unfolded in a courtroom in Fort Worth, Texas, involving a flamboyant prosperity preacher and the women he raped. But you probably didn’t hear anything about this on Christian television. We don’t talk about the church’s mistakes if they make us look bad.

I think it’s time to face the ugly facts. Something very sick is happening in the so-called Spirit-filled church. And we need a national outcry.

“Our outrage must turn into a desperate plea for cleansing and revival in the body of Christ.”

Rev. Terry Hornbuckle, pastor of Agape Christian Center in Arlington, Texas, was sentenced on Aug. 28 to 15 years in prison for raping three women who were at one time members of his church. One of them, Krystal Buchanan, 23, a former University of Texas-Arlington, basketball player, testified that the pastor drugged her and then raped her in her apartment.

On the day of sentencing, Buchanan’s mother took the stand and read a somber victim- impact statement written by her daughter. It said: “Hornbuckle, I hated you for a long time. But there came a point in my life when I realized I was chosen by my Lord and Savior to be used in a most difficult way. He needed me to stop you from doing this to everyone and anyone who you may come in contact with.”

I don’t know if Buchanan’s theology is quite right, since I am certain God did not intend her to be raped. But I hope church leaders listen to her painful plea. She is not talking just to Hornbuckle but to the body of Christ at large. She is asking for accountability.

Is anybody listening?

How did we ever get to a place where a “man of God” who prays with passion from his pulpit on Sundays also preys on vulnerable women parishioners on Mondays by giving them methamphetamines and then sexually violating them?

The root of the sickness lies in the fact that those of us in the pews have lowered our standards. We don’t demand character of our leaders. All we ask is that preachers make us feel good, tell us we will be prosperous, stroke our egos, tickle our ears and whip us into a frenzy so that we will think we have been in God’s presence. Oftentimes the whole experience is a sham.

In the squirrelly world of nondenominational charismatic churches there are con men, drug addicts and even rapists who know how to wow the people with their mega-decibel oratory. They know how to touch our deepest “felt needs” and are quick to sell us a book or video on the same subject. But when their sermons are over, they have done nothing but inject their congregations with a spiritual drug.

I suspect Rev. Hornbuckle did more than rape three women. (Prosecutors say he still faces three more charges of sexual assault as well as a drug possession charge.) This minister is also guilty of spiritually raping his congregation. And in a sense he raped us all by tarnishing the credibility of the church as a whole.

But what are we going to do about it? Most of us assume this is just an isolated instance of a good pastor gone bad. Or we are so used to hearing about rapes and drug abuse every day in the news, we don’t think it is that strange when such wickedness takes place in God’s house. We’ve been spiritually desensitized.

We need to feel Krystal Buchanan’s pain.

We read in the book of Judges about a time when a woman was violently raped by a worthless gang of men from Gibeah. When the woman’s master found her abused body at the doorway of a house, he cut her corpse into 12 pieces and sent them to every tribe in Israel in order to shock the people into action (Judges 19:22-30). The Israelites were so appalled by the brutality of the crime that they took swift action against the rapists.

In the same way, we need to let the crimes that happened at Agape Christian Center shake us to the core. Why are we allowing women to be victimized in the church? Why are we tolerating corruption in the pulpit? Why are we chasing after ministers whose lifestyles should disqualify them? Why are we not demanding accountability of those who claim to be shepherds of the flock?

We should be appalled by what happened to these women in Texas. Then our outrage must turn into a deep cry of repentance and a desperate plea for cleansing and revival in the body of Christ.

J. Lee Grady is editor of Charisma ..

This is getting worse, From the one-night-stand Jim Bakker had to the prostitute that Jimmy Swaggart saw, we have seen this growing problem become more and more widespread to the point of a one pastor divorcing and remarrying in seven days, a ’singer’ who marries the ex-wife of his ‘evangelist’ friend, a megachurch pastor who is accused of telling women that sleeping with him will bring them the ‘next level of anointing’ and now this guy in the article mentioned above?

This is not a “Catholic” problem. This is not a “Southern Baptist” problem. This is a global churchwide problem.

We think that it is bad already. If we as the church do not deal with this ourselves, God is going to deal with it and use the secular media if needed. It took the secualr media (Time Magazine) to really bring out the flaws of the prosperity gospel because the church refused to and chose instead to be bullied by men yelling out ‘touch not mine anointed’ by equating money to anointing with the more money you have, the more anointing you have or spew out death threats of God striking people dead or with the ‘curse of Ham’ for standing up for what is right.

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At the same time, Michael Spencer over at Internet Monk wrote a n article on the subject of adultery entitled The Man in the Shadow of Adultery that goes into detail as to why some men choose adultery over the marital covenant and a plea for men who are flirting with the idea or are involved with adultery to repent and run from it. His article cuts to the chase and really gets to the crux of the problem of adultery.

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At the end of this blog post, I’ll leave you the lyrics of an interesting Pink Floyd song. But if someone who is non-Christian can understand the consequences, then why can’t the Christian?

One slip
Pink Floyd
Album: A Momentary Lapse of reason

A restless eye across a weary room
A glazed look and I was on the road to ruin
The music played and played as we whirled without end
No hint, no word her honour to defend
I will, I will she sighed to my request
And then she tossed her mane while my resolve was put to the test
Then drowned in desire, our souls on fire
I lead the way to the funeral pyre
And without a thought of the consequence
I gave in to my decadence

One slip, and down the hole we fall
It seems to take no time at all
A momentary lapse of reason
That binds a life for life
A small regret, you won’t forget,
There’ll be no sleep in here tonight

Was it love, or was it the idea of being in love?
Or was it the hand of fate, that seemed to fit just like a glove?
The moment slipped by and soon the seeds were sown
The year grew late and neither one wanted to remain alone

One slip, and down the hole we fall
It seems to take no time at all
A momentary lapse of reason
That binds a life to a life
A small regret, you will never forget,
There’ll be no sleep in here tonight