Can a church that's had a history of being toxic transform its culture and become truly healthy?

Or are churches like this doomed to repeat their history despite efforts to change?

Welcome to the Roy's Report, a podcast dedicated to reporting the truth and restoring the church.

I'm Julie Roy's. And on this podcast, you're going to hear a talk from our last restore conference by Laura Berenger. Laura and her

father, theologian Scott McKnight, co-authored two best-selling books on the church. The first book,

a church called Tove, talked about creating church cultures that are truly

tove, the Hebrew word for good. Lauren Scott's second book is called Pivot, and it deals

with transformation, with turning oppressive church cultures into tove or good ones. With

more and more churches and ministries being exposed as abusive and corrupt, this topic has become extremely relevant.

So often, the leader of an organization is exposed as an abuser and removed.

And though many within the organization may want to change it, they often find doing so is much harder than they imagined.

They've been in the toxic organization so long they don't know

what healthy looks like, what it feels like. In fact, their knee-jerk reaction is almost always to do the

wrong thing, not the right thing. So should these organizations just burn to the ground, or is there a

recipe for change? Well, as you'll hear in Laura's talk, change is possible,

but it is definitely the road less traveled, and it is incredibly hard, and it can happen

only if leaders are committed to changing the culture, which means dealing with the invisible

contaminants like greed, ambition, and abuse of power. So this is an incredibly timely and

important topic and one I'm so eager to share with you. But first, I have a very exciting

announcement to make. We have set the date for our next Restore conference. Restore 2025 will

be held February 7th and 8th in Phoenix, Arizona. We're still booking speakers, but already, I can announce that joining us will be author

and survivor advocate, Mary Demuth, theologian and author of a church called Tove, Scott

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