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

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).

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.

Tov is a Hebrew word meaning good. The book opens by discussing allegations of misconduct on the part of church leaders (particularly at Willow Creek). However, the authors make the point that we should not view abuse in churches as isolated cases at various congregations but symptoms of a larger church culture that has not nurtured goodness. As a pastor in training, I especially appreciated his advice and believe this is an important book for pastors to nurture goodness in their congregations. It gave me language and helped me to understand how a church should and should not respond in the midst of allegations. In terms of teaching, perhaps the most neglected fruit of the Spirit is goodness, maybe because it seems so vague or it is assumed that a church is good. Scot and Laura's book is a helpful step in correcting this, and part 2 of the book gives a helpful breakdown of various aspects of goodness to nurture. Before this discussion, part 1 discusses church cultures that have become toxic. This book is also helpful for those who have been wounded by the church. I have personally seen how abuse can debilitate. This is not how the church should function. Scot and Laura show how, for people like us who have been wounded, Jesus gives us grace to bind our wounds and equip others to nurture a better church culture. While the book is filled with useful knowledge and there is much to meditate on, Scot and Laura do not write in such a way to make the concepts overly complex. Don't let the one Hebrew word on the cover intimidate you: this is an accessible book, understandable and beautifully written. I can recommend this book for pastors and teachers as well as any lay readers. May Tov abound in your lives.

Great book but the authors do not present a plan that will prevent the reoccurrence of the large-scale abuses that they document. The book does a fantastic job of describing the problems and root issues and a presenting a vision of healthy churches. On page 9 they summarize the book: "First, we will explore how church cultures are formed and sometimes deformed. In order to talk about goodness, we must examine some of the toxic church cultures that have made this book necessary. Next, we will discuss the symptoms and warning signs that are common to toxic cultures. Finally, we will explain how to create a culture of goodness that incorporates what we’re calling the Circle of Tov." The stories are compelling which makes the book engaging, although they are also discouraging. The authors are specific with names and organizations, so vagaries are avoided. They then focus on the need for churches to be "tov" which is Hebrew for "good". This includes empathy, grace, being people-first, truth, justice, service and Christlikeness; they devote a quality chapter to each trait. My frustration with the book is that the authors do not present any kind of proposal for effective accountability. They rely on describing how a healthy church should operate so the implication is that congregations should somehow not let abuses happen. But practically speaking, congregations and even boards do not do this and won't respond to this book. The primary instances they examine are Willow Creek, Harvest Bible Church and Sovereign Grace Ministries all of which were headed by the people who made the ministries gigantic. I don't see how the ideas from this book would've prevented these abusive ministries. Dysfunctonal pastors create dysfunctional boards and pastoral staff. Who will protect the flock if they do not have the awareness or power? Instead, there needs to be a mechanism for enforceable accountability led by someone above the pastors. A regional overseer should be invested with the primary duty of investigating the health of congregations and leadership within the region. Unhealthy leaders should be put on probation and removed if corrections are not made. The fact that this is not practiced in America is a reflection of our general avoidance of accountability. In other words, we are all responsible for the mess because we have not taken serious steps to address the problem. We prefer our "freedom" to honoring God. Men and women and every ethnicity are all fault in this area. There will always be narcissists, antisocials, and other dysfunctional people with good leadership skills who will build congregations. If we do not develop mechanisms to screen these people out then are we not just conceding congregations to their abuse? One other wishlist item is that it would have been helpful to devote more discussion to the many pastors who are not guilty of the egregious abuses mentioned but who are still on the continuum of avoidance of faults and resistance to correction. These pastors wreak havoc in a many more congregations than the severe abusers do, as I can personally testify to. This book represents substantial progress but a reformation is still needed if the church is to be viewed as a place of integrity.

I definitely enjoyed reading this book!

This book was one of the first books I read after a traumatic event. While the reason we left our church was not due to the spiritual abuse, leaving allowed me to look back on our experience and this book was a guide during that time when I did not trust myself to know what was good and true.

I recently read "A Church Called TOV" by Scot McKnight and I was thoroughly impressed. The author does an excellent job of exploring what it means to be a community of faith in today's world. He provides a fresh perspective on what it means to live out the teachings of Jesus and how this can be translated into practical, everyday actions. The book is well-researched and well-written, making it a valuable resource for both individuals and churches. I especially appreciated the emphasis on love, grace, and inclusion, as these are qualities that are often missing in many modern churches. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is looking to deepen their understanding of what it means to be a faithful and loving community

Our staff and elders are reading this and deep in to the book, finding it life-giving and helpful. The first half excavated the problems. It is not a breezy uplift, but it is a necessary displacement with so much that has come into evangelical church culture and power structures. It helped me realize where abuse has come in to structures and ways of pastoring that are bullying and how to confront, resist, and renounce these behaviors even in their seed form. This is a very important book. The authors know scripture and they know the current climate that contributes to toxicity.

A must read for every pastor and especially leaders of church movements.

A challenge to much of the Church's toxic culture, and a needful paradigm shift.

If you, or someone you love, has been hurt by toxic culture or abuse of power in a church, read this book. Scott and Laura describes the heart wrenching stories of real people in situations that should never occur anywhere, never mind the Church. But Scott and Laura do not let the reader descend into the depths of despair. At one point after describing the fruits of a particular toxic culture Scott transitions away from the negativity saying, “that is enough of that”, and then describes actions we can take to develops healthy cultures in our churches. I have just come out of a church with a toxic culture; this book is playing a huge role in my healing. Thanks Scott and Laura.

An outstanding book and a must read for all involved in church and missions. I will read it again soon.

Scot and Laura provided a structured analysis of the root causes of abuse and toxicity, but also provide a grounded scriptural response for the way forward.