TEXAS
Spiritual Sounding Board
Sometimes, catastrophic events sweep us into a stress-inducing storyline that we never intended or even imagined. And the outcomes may change our lives forever. That’s the core of the story in the 2012 movie, The Impossible. Just as a family is enjoying what’s supposed to be a relaxing vacation together in Thailand, they get caught in a disastrous tsunami. It literally sweeps them apart from one another and lands them in crisis mode as they scramble just to survive – and then, hopefully, to search despite stress, find one another, and recover.
I think that’s kind of what happened to Chris Tynes this past week. I don’t know where this experience will take him, but for now, he’s ended up seemingly at the vortex of a long-term controversy involving Prestonwood Baptist Church (PBC) in Plano, Texas. Through a series of events outside his control, he became the latest lightning rod in a spiritual electric storm that started in the 1980s and has been building toward super-spark status since 2010. He was the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time, and he got shocked.
Or – if you believe that God providentially puts the right person in the right place at the right time – then Chris is yet another link in a heaven-ordained chain of people sent to Prestonwood to give them opportunities to respond to truth and justice. And pretty much all Chris did was ask questions, especially to confirm or deny some rumors that had surfaced. Here’s the new reality: Because we live in an era where allegations linger, in part because news online is “unscrubbable,” it turned out Chris read accounts from Amy Smith and Christa Brown about ongoing accusations of issues at PBC with a now-convicted sexual offender, John Langworthy, who previously served on staff with Prestonwood in Dallas. Apparently Chris asked PBC leaders “The Deplorable Question,” and it triggered what seemed to be self-protective actions by one of the largest churches in the entire Southern Baptist Convention.
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