Of all the hard things in this season, one of the most painful to us was the discrepancy between our in-person meeting (Wed, Nov 3, with elders Kenny Stokes and Chad Geyen) and what Kenny said publicly about us on Saturday, Nov 6. I'm going to attempt to describe it below using primary source materials. I’ve written a few brief reflections, but mostly I’m hoping the various emails can speak for themselves.
We considered including this in our 1-month retrospective, but eventually decided not to, as we wanted to limit ourselves to things that others could verify, and referencing a private meeting didn't seem to fit that criteria. But since it's still weighing on us months later, and since the blog is an easier way to share it with more context, I'm writing about it.
Background to our meeting: On 9/28 we sent our letter privately to the elders (via Pastor Bud). We didn't get any response (other than a South elder who reached out as a friend), so on October 20, we emailed the elders, telling them we planned to share our letter publicly and asking if they had any corrections they'd like us to make. At that point, multiple elders reached out, requesting a meeting. We eventually agreed to meet with Kenny and Chad. On 11/3, we had a 2.5 hour meeting with Kenny and Chad, along with two friends we brought. Mickey and I had no agenda for the meeting; our goal was to just listen to whatever Kenny and Chad had to say.
We thought the meeting went really well (see items #1 and #2 below). But what Kenny said publicly on 11/6 left us stunned, prompting Mickey's email to him (item #3) and Kenny’s response (Item #4).
A side note: As we sought counsel from people regarding our letter prior to going public with it, one unexpected recurring theme was people warning us against meeting with elders. Some recounted their own experiences of being hurt when they met with elders to raise concerns. Others talked about how the elders had twisted people's words, said one thing in private and something else publicly, or been manipulative. At the time, I didn’t know what to make of these warnings. They didn’t match my personal experience; I had had only positive interactions with the elders in my 20 years at Bethlehem. We found the warnings sobering, but we decided to meet with the elders anyway. But in light of our experience (e.g. the difference between what Kenny and Chad said on 11/3 and what Kenny said publicly on 11/6), I now understand firsthand what those friends were warning me about. And it grieves me.
Here's a list of what follows:
Item #1: email from Sheus to Kenny Stokes on Wed 11/3/21, thanking him for a good meeting and telling him we planned to share our letter publicly (followed by an email for Kenny to share with all the elders)
Item #2: email update from me to my prayer/support group on Fri, 11/5, describing how well the meeting with Kenny and Chad went
[Note: On 11/6 there was a public Q&A at Bethlehem downtown regarding Kenny’s candidacy for Pastor of Preaching and Vision, Downtown, and in that meeting he was asked about our open letter. For more info about that meeting, you can read a summary in our retrospective or listen to a recording here.]
Item #3a: - email from Mickey to Kenny Stokes on Mon 11/8
Item #3b: A follow up from Mickey, sent Tues 11/9
Item #4: Kenny's response to Mickey (email sent 11/13)
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Item #1: email from Sheus to Kenny Stokes on 11/3/21
From: Hannah Sheu
Date: Wed, Nov 3, 2021
Subject: An Open Letter to the Bethlehem Elders
To: Kenny Stokes
Cc: Mickey Sheu
Dear Pastor Kenny,
Thank you for meeting with us this afternoon. We really appreciated the time with you and Chad. Thank you for making time on short notice, thank you for listening so well, thank you for empathizing and trying to understand our concerns. We felt very well cared for, even though I had feared it might feel adversarial (it didn't).
Based on your suggestion, I am emailing one elder (you), rather than the elders as a group, so that this doesn't get lost in the shuffle. Can you please forward the email below to all the elders? I want to make sure all the elders have the public version of our letter, in case they get any questions about it.
Thank you again for your time today, your care for us in the meeting, and your love and care for Bethlehem.
Take care,
Hannah and Mickey
Dear Elders,
We decided to share our letter publicly and are in the process of doing so.
We are attaching the final version, so that you have it for reference if people ask you about it. The main changes were adding the cover letter and executive summary, a few more stories, and a bullet point about the women's staff report. We also had some minor tweaks to language.
We feel morally obligated to do this. We love Bethlehem too much to walk away and do nothing. In our minds a 3rd party investigation is the best hope for Bethlehem. We don't want things to continue the way they are, nor do we want to see Bethlehem implode. We hope that getting things in the light and doing an investigation can be a path to healing.
I realize that our sharing publicly will likely pain many of you. We feel the weight of that and don't take it lightly. Contemplating this step for the past two months has weighed so heavily on us. We feel so many relational and ministry bonds at Bethlehem that writing this letter (and contemplating going public) has felt excruciating at times. It's disorienting for us to feel so deeply concerned about and also so deeply attached to leaders at Bethlehem. I hope that you can both hear our concerns and also believe our deep affection for many of you, as pastors who have cared so well for us over the years.
With tears and hope,
Hannah and Mickey
Reflections: I see so much trust, love, and affection in these two emails. I couldn't write that way anymore, but this is a good reminder to me of how I felt last fall. I haven't looked at these emails in 6 months, and reading them now helps me see how my thinking has slowly shifted.
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Item #2 (portion of email update from me to my prayer/support group on Fri, 11/5/21):
...
Second, our meeting with Kenny Stokes and Chad Geyen went quite well. Thank you for praying! They listened well, they were personable, and I didn't feel intimidated at all. It didn't feel adversarial, and Pastor Kenny gave me a hug afterward. Obviously we see things very differently (which is hard). I enjoyed the meeting and getting to talk face to face (and reiterate at the end that we are going public because we love Bethlehem and see this as the best hope for fixing things). I felt so much better about going public after we had a face to face meeting.
Interestingly, they said they didn't know that Joe Rigney had reached out to us. To us, getting requests for meetings from Steve Lee, Tom Lutz and Kurt Elting-Ballard, Joe Rigney twice, Kenny Stokes, and Brad Nelson felt like a full court press. But maybe it wasn't. (I don't know if the lack of coordination is good or bad.)
...
Reflections: I was so relieved that the meeting went well, and thankful that I was able to express my love for Bethlehem, and pleasantly surprised that the meeting didn’t feel adversarial.
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Item #3a: - email from Mickey to Kenny Stokes
From: Mickey Sheu
Date: Mon, Nov 8, 2021
Subject: some "courageous truth-telling"
To: Kenny Stokes
Cc: Chad Geyen, Tom Steller, Jared Wass, Tom Lutz
Dear Pastor Kenny -
I'm writing to express my disappointment with your words on Saturday.
I am disappointed at how you answered [Chris’s] question, which went somewhere along the lines of, "how will you address the concerns raised in Mickey and Hannah's letter?"
1. You never actually answered the question. You instead turned to cast suspicions on our view of the congregation's authority, claimed there were already 3 investigations (meaning the 3 articles that were written in newspapers), and claimed that we were disobeying Scripture in going public.
2. You prefaced your comments with, "we had a meeting with them on Wednesday" without drawing a line later on to distinguish what we talked about together that day from your current thinking. This puts (in the minds of the audience) the rest of what you said under that umbrella, "we talked about this on Wednesday," as if we had hashed through these issues in person.
3. Through your descriptions following (described below), you proceed to characterize our interactions as primarily one of hostility/antagonism towards you and Bethlehem rather than a shared love for Bethlehem and the truth, which was what you and Chad communicated to us on Wednesday. That mischaracterization of our posture and love for Bethlehem was deeply disappointing, especially after I raised that very concern at the end of our conversation, that our love for Bethlehem should not be misrepresented to the congregation. Others saw that mischaracterization too, including [P] who drew attention to it during her question.
4. You described our motivations as antagonistic to the church's authority: "only Hannah is a member of the four that we met with, so perhaps [the congregation's vote against an investigation] has less authority to them, but it has meaning to us." This seems markedly unfair given our expressed acknowledgement (in the letter and in person) that we acknowledged there was a vote, but we were concerned the vote was poorly informed, thus we were trying to convince the congregation and the elders to share these concerns. In that way, we were seeking to work within congregationalism, not against it.
4. You claimed that we were disobedient to Scripture (and the elders) by contrasting our actions with the Facebook whistleblower and then quoting Scripture about not suing fellow believers:
"I see the facebook whistle blower as really good and right and helpful, and what the Sheus are doing as not good and right and helpful"
and
"So what I see the Sheus doing is not that. There’s no accusation of calling in the Romans 13 legal authorities. It maps to me like suing believers for personal offense, the very thing Paul says not to do [your emphasis]. Why do I say suing? Because the court of appeal, the judge, is not 'entrusting himself to him who judges justly,'...I cannot find any biblical justification for that behavior. I can’t find any."
I grant that we have a difference in opinion about whether or not our action of going public was appropriate (though I didn't know it on Wednesday, Nov. 3), but I was frustrated that you said these things as if you had said as much in person, implying that we were being disobedient to Paul and the expressed concerns of the elders.
This misrepresents our interactions on Wednesday and in our letter. We emailed you on October 20 announcing our intention to go public. You have had a copy of our letter since September 28. We met on November 3. At no time between did anyone communicate to us "this is wrong" or "I think you're sinning." At no point at the meeting did you or Chad say, "I think you guys are sinning here" or "I think you're doing wrong by the church and by Christ" or anything like that. You acknowledged that we were making an effort to persuade and tacitly allowed that it was a legitimate route (though in your mind ineffective).
As a side note, I cannot help but hear these appeals to Scripture from an elder as an example of a misuse of spiritual authority. You're trying to shut down the conversation by misrepresenting our actions as "going legal" (again, we never talk about any legal routes in our meeting or in our letter) and then casting it under the Bible's prohibitions against suing a fellow believer.
5. It felt duplicitous for you to be saying one thing to our face and an entirely different thing to the congregation. If you felt it was concerning that only one of us was a member, why didn't you say so on Wednesday? If you thought we were being disobedient to Scripture, why didn't you say so then? We walked away from our meeting on Wednesday feeling heard, understood, and generally having the shared goal of building up the body of Christ (though we disagreed with the route). We said as much in our email to you afterward. What I heard on Saturday was markedly different.
6. Finally, and not nearly as egregious because you did actually mention this in our meeting, you repeated your claim that the three articles written by journalists were somehow equivalent to the independent investigation we were asking for. We asked you in the meeting, "surely you don't think those are the same thing" and you laughed it off, saying something like "oh yeah no no no, not the same" and we moved on.
I don't think there is anything morally inappropriate with claiming the reporters had already done an investigation, but it did surprise me that you continued to claim that those three articles (which certainly didn't present Bethlehem with a clean bill of health) represented the heart of an independent investigation. This strikes me as another attempt to cloud things up. Do you really want to claim that those three reporters were investigations in the spirit that we were requesting? If not, why are you bringing it up as if they fulfilled our request?
7. As a side note, I would also like to point out the misuse of power when Tom Lutz cut off my on-topic remarks expressing concern and misgiving about the timing of your nomination to DT Lead Pastor. No one else had been cut off at that point, including a few particularly long-winded statements. It struck me as a particularly blatant act of attempting to control what was expressed by concerned people at Bethlehem.
On Saturday, you warned against people feeling hurt on other people's behalf (also a questionable step in my mind, but this email grows long). Pastor Kenny, now I am expressing my disappointment and displeasure with how you misrepresented our expressed heart (in our letter and on Wednesday) to the congregation, with how you spoke as if we were disobedient to Scripture (and you), without saying so in private first in the many opportunities you had, with how you represented our meeting on Wednesday as hostile or disobedient rather than honestly acknowledging differences while still loving the Lord together.
I hope you understand why the elders have lost so much trust. When one thing is said in private (affirming of shared love for the church, we're on the same general team, we disagree but that's ok), and a different thing is said in public (the Sheus may not respect the congregation's authority, what the Sheus are doing is "not good and right and helpful", the "very thing Paul says not to do"), it becomes difficult to trust.
We'd like to trust you and the elders and move forward together, but it is hard.
Sincerely,
Mickey
Reflections:
Note: Chad was copied on this email because he was present at our meeting on 11/3. Jared Wass (Interim Lead Pastor Downtown), Tom Steller (Elder), and Tom Lutz (Lead Elder Downtown) were copied on this because they were present on 11/6 and heard what Kenny said publicly. None of these elders replied to Mickey. That silence was painful.
Note: the subject line (some “courageous truth telling”) is a reference to something Kenny said in the 11/6 meeting about how elders should be humble and approachable and congregants should be willing to seek “courageous truth-telling.”
As you can see, Mickey was deeply disappointed, hurt, and frustrated with Kenny's words and actions.
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Item #3b: P.S. to prior email, sent Tues 11/9 to the same recipients as above
From: Mickey Sheu
Date: Tue, Nov 9, 2021
Subject: Re: some "courageous truth-telling"
To: Kenny Stokes
Cc: Chad Geyen, Tom Steller, Jared Wass, Tom Lutz
Pastor Kenny -
One final (positive) note: I still hold no ill-will towards you personally (or any other pastors we've interacted with). I do not wish you harm or harbor bitterness. I have no opposition to your personal candidacy for lead pastor downtown. I have been in the past (and hope to in the future) greatly helped by your preaching and teaching. Aside from the disappointment expressed in my previous email, my concerns regarding the lead pastor downtown are primarily about the timing and lack of necessary input from the congregation given the current circumstances. If you were installed as interim lead pastor (with promises to seek congregational input on the process of finding a candidate, who could end up being yourself), all my concerns about that subject would be adequately addressed.
Mickey
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Item #4: Kenny's response to Mickey (email sent 11/13/21)
From: Kenny Stokes
To: Mickey Sheu
Date: Nov 14, 2021
Subject: Re: Feedback from the Sheus - some "courageous truth-telling"
Mickey,
I just returned this evening from a week in Washington DC related to church planting I’ll reply with a brief thought tonight. Perhaps we can talk face to face.
I took it as implicit in Chris’s question, “How will we respond to the Shues document?” to speak to the ethics of the document distribution because the ethics of it informs the response.
I did not offer my assessment of the ethics with you because you didn’t ask me if I thought what you were doing had any biblical justification for it. Even in negotiating our Wednesday meeting, you told me that you had “no questions” for me. So, I presumed that, had I volunteered my assessment of the document, I fully expected that it would be viewed as another “abuse” of pastoral authority. And silencing. So, I waited for you to ask. And you didn’t ask.
When we met, I did hear and appreciate your personal love for me, and understood that you believed that you are acting out of love for Bethlehem.
However, I also heard of your distrust of me and the pastors/elders, and observed your disinclination to follow the leadership of the pastors/elders at Bethlehem. I also perceived your document as an unveiled threat to get the elders to do what you wanted or else.
When our meeting ended, neither Chad nor I knew if you were planning to distribute the document or not.
I hoped that you might seek to be better informed and would follow up on my point to talk to other elders who can speak first hand accounts and more corrections. I though perhaps you might give the elders a equitable hearing like you gave to others. I thought you might do more research into the other half of the conflicts. But that was not the case. So in reality, I didn’t have the data that the document was going to actually be sent out or not when we the meeting ended.
So, while on the one hand I heard and appreciated expressions of love. On the other hand, that’s not the only thing you communicated verbally or by subsequent action.
I just thought I’d send some reply tonight. I could say more, but not tonight.
Grace to you and Hannah.
For the glory of Christ and the joy of all peoples,
Kenny Stokes
Pastor for Church Planting, Bethlehem Baptist Church
Associate Professor of Church Planting, Bethlehem College & Seminary
Reflections:
In Kenny's email, he seems to double down on his words, blaming us for not asking about the ethics (and implying we wouldn’t listen even if he said it was inappropriate) and implying that we were threatening the elders. He also doesn't acknowledge anything wrong with what he said on 11/6. There is much more that could be said about his email.
Mickey didn’t reply, and there were no other follow-ups from Kenny or any of the other elders on this topic.
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