Janice Perez Evans tweets, “The abuse my brother Johnathon endured was some of the worst I have ever witnessed.” She adds that the resignation of Pastor Meyer “as well as all of us who have left, is a righteous [judgment] against the elders and leaders of the institution. It is corrupt.”
Evans, a Latina who co-led a task force about racial issues at the church, warns, “What’s going on at Bethlehem shouldn’t be mislabeled. These pastors who were essentially forced out, were not backed into a corner based on so-called wokeism. It is about abuse of power. Ill treatment of women, minorities, and other vulnerable people. Don’t get distracted.”
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Task Force Didn’t Lead to Harmony
After Howard noticed race-related “challenges” at Bethlehem, church elders established a Racial Harmony Task Force. Evans tells Roys her work with task force members and co-leader Meyer was “one of the sweetest times” in her life. People discussed disagreements while remaining united, she says.
But both Pickering and Evans say elders soon accused task force members of being “Marxist” and “woke,” as well as subscribing to the controversial critical race theory (CRT). Evans denies that and calls it “fear-mongering.” Instead, she tells Roys, the members studied Scripture, as they’d been trained to do by church elders.
An 85-page report by the task force was met with silence and inaction, says Evans, eventually causing its members to leave the church.
Howard, the racial-trauma expert, says Bethlehem Baptist Church’s City Joy ministry disinvited him from a 2020 conference for being “too controversial.” It’s “alarming,” he warns, to “have a multitude of pastors or leaders leave all within a very short period of time.”
Beyond those “power figures,” though, Howard tells Roys it’s important to “recognize that these leaders are the overflow of a congregation loss. There have been numerous people who have left that church, especially minorities, and…a lot of women, a lot of battered wives…[who] are still healing from that space.”
A Deeper Look at the Controversies
Joe Rigney, the current BCS board of trustees president, apparently has ties to theologian Douglas Wilson, who wrote a controversial pamphlet about slavery. Regarding Bethlehem’s treatment of women, Piper’s theology of “marital permanence” has raised concerns, especially for victims of domestic violence.
After the May 2020 murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Bethlehem’s pastors and elders released a statement about committing to heal “for the long haul.” This February, Bethlehem’s elders published a statement about racial unity, saying in part, “We believe that in the absence of biblical clarity, ethnic harmony becomes a ‘wax nose’ that we can shape and twist any way we like.”
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Piper, who preached at Bethlehem for 32 years, is now pastor emeritus but has no leadership roles at the church. He remains chancellor of BCS and provides resources at DesiringGod.org, including the “Ask Pastor John” podcast.
Piper details in a lengthy video his transformation from “racist teenager to transracial adoptive father.” Growing up amid the “cesspool” of racism is “one of the great sorrows” of his life, he says, but it’s also why he loves the grace-filled Gospel so much.
In a two-part podcast last November, Piper calls CRT “a hopeless path” because it makes God, the Bible and truth “small and negligible.” He adds, “Critical race theory is not a problem because it raises the challenge of racial justice and racial harmony…[but] because it fails us as we try to take up these challenges in a hopeful, Christ-exalting way.”
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