I would wager that at some point you've been in the middle of a weird unhealthy gossip circle

where everybody was talking about everybody else and jockeying for positions socially.

And maybe you aren't the one who started it, but you got into it and then you were playing the

game and then at some point it felt icky, hopefully because you figured out it was icky, but maybe because somebody had to

tell you. That was a bad feeling. I've been a part of that. I've been a part of environments where

stuff goes, the term that used to get used so often was a toxic. Things go toxic. But it happens

at church, and that's worse than when it

happens on a baseball team or in a circle of friends. I think church is the most disheartening place

where you have that gossip feeding frenzy, like a bunch of piranhas with meat in the water.

When it happens to church, it's gross. Oh, it's disheartening.

Sometimes I've nobly been on the outside looking in, but I've been swept up in that stuff too.

Heck, I've probably stoked it imagining or crafting for myself in my brain, righteous narratives

about how I was protecting something good

or doing something good. I mean, we always find this sophisticated language to justify when we get

caught up in this stuff or when we make this stuff happen. It's gross. It's destructive. And the

Bible doesn't like it. Jesus doesn't like it. The Bible's pretty dang overt about how that ain't it. This is not a mark of

the values of the kingdom. And yet, the Bible is also delightfully unpolianish about stuff

in terms of what you're going to get at church and how people are. I think it's my buddy Jeff,

who's going to edit this. Jeff has said before that

sometimes people say, you know, the church is full of hypocrites. And his answer is yes, and we have

room for one more. I mean, he's not being flippant there. It's kind of in keeping with the teaching

of the scriptures, with the teaching of Jesus, that, yeah, there are these values of the kingdom,

...