HBC Troubles: The Propaganda Letter, or Tom's "Word of Reassurance"

Entitled "A Word of Reassurance", I was shocked to read the following. It read like corporate propaganda. 

"Pastor Barao’s ministry at HBC will be missed, and we pray he has a fruitful ministry wherever the Lord leads him."

And then we go on to detail, point-by-point, all the great things Hope is doing, to prove Hope is fine, with particular concern for donors, parents of the church school, visitors (why would they be on mail lists). Maybe... maybe... benefit of the doubt. But it reads like corporate speech and people like me are conditioned to be skeptical when we run into such language.

HBC Troubles: Church Meetings and Early Censorship

See below. A congregational meeting made sense, and this was timely. People are hurting. We want answers. However, when one sister posted a comment asking if Scott, the resigned elder, would be there, this comment was deleted. No one would have known except... the deacon who deleted it accidentally deleted the original post as well, and then posted to announce its deletion and reposting.

If it could be somehow justified, it was still very clumsy. Very, very bad optics, when sensitivity and transparency are critical.

HBC Troubles: The Unity Letter

Entitled "A Time for Unity", Tom wrote this about 5 hours after the shock of Scott Barao's resignation hit. I had remembered (perhaps incorrectly since I can't find the email) that this was the second email that day.

It was better composed.

A few things that stood out were the insistence on a unified elder board. That wasn't really my worry, or Rebecca's. People disagree, they have problems. We couldn't figure out what had been so bad the Scott resigned in such hurt, so suddenly. That was our question. So Tom's answering a question we're not asking, and I'm not sure anyone was asking at that point. Mostly, normal people want to know why? And I'm not sure, for the moment, there was any pressing need to see we had a unified elder board. There was not other crisis facing us or the church. We need brethren to be reconciled for all our sakes.

But maybe that's a normal opinion. Maybe there's a real fear among others that we're looking at the beginning of a church split? This is assurance that no split is forthcoming? Maybe it's the elders projecting their fear that they could be looking at a church split. It's not us they're reassuring but themselves? Don't know.

Of course, the proclamation of unity rings hollow. You only had 5 elders one month ago, one left a week ago, and one just now resigned, and one is a very junior fellow with limited cache... unified is a real stretch. Half of your seasoned elders left within a week of each other. You want us to believe in some nebulous principle of unity, but this seems by definition disunity. Again, this reassurance felt weird. That's all. I'm not sure about including that the entire leadership is in sync. It seems unlikely that all the leaders were contacted that quickly... maybe... but this is more of an elder matter. We're not necessarily looking to the deacons for leadership because... that's really not how the deacons function at HBC.

Other than that... we allowed that Tom Leake could have been as shocked as anyone else, so, benefit of the doubt.

HBC Troubles: The Knee-Jerk

Scott sends his letter. I was at work when I got it and I just sat, stunned. I don't know Scott. I interacted briefly with him. He seemed a caring personality and, as elders went, the most suited to anything caring focused. He led a somewhat powerful marriage seminar which impressed me. But he resigned and sent this letter, apparently not just to a few, but the entire congregation, or even the entire database.

And he sounded hurt, though no specifics were given.

Shortly thereafter, Rebecca and I remember seeing a response from Tom. Maybe just an hour later.  The Pastor had just returned, possibly from jogging, and had been taken by surprise by Scott's email. Our memory is that is sounded very angry, not so much hurt, like this had been an offense, a violation of protocol. It was harsh. I expected grace, a soft touch. This is what I expected from Tom after all these years where this is how he appeared to me. Not anger.

(Later I would believe that all this was simply consistent with someone's hand caught in the cookie jar. Good men are supposed to take the bullying. They are not supposed to end the game and send up a flare that warned others of what was happening. The Pastor truly hadn't planned for this. It was a new paradigm, and a light in which the leaders' carefully crafted image of holiness now sported holes.)

But (I thought then) he was human, he could be shocked and surprised. I gave him the benefit of the doubt. That was the right response.

I don't have that email. Neither does Rebecca. We have all the others. Strange to have a memory so strong but on this no hard documentation as with the rest. All this time I remembered details about it, a claim that he had been out, maybe jogging, when Scott sent it? and didn't see Scott's letter until a just then. Did we make this up?

But an earlier, written memory confirmed that something prior to the "Unity Letter" was sent. From my long account of this (posted later, herein):

Pastor Scott’s departure was sudden, and the hurt in his words was plain. But beyond the implication that he had been hurt, the public email revealed nearly nothing as to the cause of this hurt. Pastor Leake’s immediate reply volunteered far more than he should have in trying to convey that Scott had acted imprudently. He escalated when a wiser person would have produced a softer response. We chalked Scott’s email up to possible imprudence, and an error in sending to a wider forum than Delta, and we excused Pastor Leake’s email as that of someone caught off guard and raw with emotion.

However, Pastor Leake’s email focused very much on the principal offense of Scott as not having followed protocol.

He also revealed freely that there were disagreements ongoing and had been in the past. Maybe some knew, but for much of the congregation this was new information to cloud a sense of elder unity. The Elder Board was not truly unified, contrary to their usual insistence. He volunteered a real possibility as well that Scott may have been legitimately hurt as a result of a disagreement.

I think this was almost certainly a response written through the same HopeBook bulletin board that Scott had used to disseminate his letter, and likely as a direct reply/addendum to Scott's thread. I always got the first email in a thread, but had deliberately blocked subsequent responses to limit Inbox clutter. I believe, that the reason I had trouble locating it is because the entire thread has since been deleted.

HBC Troubles: Scott's "Difficult and Sad Goodbye"

On the heels of Rod's last Sunday, we got this at 10:00am. Another elder, gone? What on earth was going on at this church?


To my dear Delta Flock,

I write today with a broken and heavy heart and a crushed spirit to say goodbye. Effective immediately I have resigned my position as elder at HBC.

HBC Troubles: Rod Montgomery's Resignation

This was out of the blue. The following Sunday, Rod preached his last at Hope and that was it. Granted, I didn't know him and rarely resonated with anything he said. But I had a certain respect for him and saw the congregation had significant respect for him as a man of integrity with a heart for God. But it was sudden.