How do you assess how “high control” a church culture is? This is the question I asked Chat GPT and was promptly led to the BITE model “gold standard” in cult assessment . Turns out there are actually concrete, measurable patterns! Hooray! 98% of this post was written by Chat GPT (and fact-checked by yours truly) and this survey allows you to assess for any unhealthy themes of coercion in their church. NOTE: This post has nothing to do with theology. Weird or extreme beliefs

This post was inspired by the ideas that Coach Blake Norton, Mercer County Football (Harrodsburg, Kentucky), recently discussed on Facebook. Their programs are shrinking...and programs everywhere are shrinking. What’s happening? Who is to blame? Is it the “kids these days”? Is it the parents, the school, the coaches, or the sports culture? As a parent, as a coach, and as a therapist for the past 20 years, this is my answer to those questions and my proposed solutions to SAVE

It’s really no secret to anyone at this point that the American evangelical church has an abuse problem. Michael Tait (lead singer of the Newsboys and former member of DC Talk) is only the latest name in the long-and-growing list of sexual abuse scandals. In fact, I posted about this same exact topic about five years ago with the Ravi Zaccharias scandal. Does this mean I’m stuck in a loop, bound to write the same post every five years for the rest of my life? Or is there som

Do you know what the fastest growing segment of cults in America is? The answer might surprise you. Because most cults are not the Netflix kind—with the messiah leader who marries fifty women, declares himself God, and brainwashes people into sacrificing their life savings and shaving their heads. No, that’s actually NOT the norm when it comes to cults. According to most current experts in the subject, such as Anna Kitko (an expert on cults, with one of her Masters degrees sp