Staff Titles and Their Effect of Control

Aug 3, 2009 12:27 AM
Staff Titles and Their Effect of Control
by makestraight

[updated 8/3/09, 10:25am]

In the Bible, there are no references specffically to any title of ‘Staff’. Paul refers to ‘overseers’, ‘elders’ and ‘deacons’.

He lays out the requirement of such people clearly in 1 Timothy, chapter 3 and chapter 5. You can also read the book of Titus about elders. [By the way, he specifies that elders should NOT be overbearing or quick-tempered] Also, Peter talks about elders in 1 Peter 5:1-3.

It’s pretty evident from those texts that overseers, deacons and elders should all be SEASONED people who have been following Christ, and how have earned respect, both from his own family and the church.

But what occurs at Gracepoint Fellowship Church is that Pastor Ed and Kelly Kang hand out titles called “Staff” to people who are not working for the church full time. They are really just volunteers.


If you’ve known no other church besides Gracepoint Fellowship Church, you probably don’t even notice the oddity of it.

Why does Gracepoint give out these titles? After I’ve given much thought to it, and from my own experience from having served as “staff,” I’ve come to the conclusion that again, it’s for the sake of Pastor Ed Kang and his wife Kelly having control over the whole church. As I’ve mentioned before, they idolize Excellence, Efficiency, and Efficacy.

To be fair, first of all, this staff thing started from Becky, who appeared to have adopted it from her affiliation with University Bible Fellowship [UBF], which practiced the “Shepherding Movement“. [read some true horror stories of UBF]

Here’s an excerpt from Wikipedia on the movement:

Criticism and controversy

The movement gained a reputation for controlling and abusive behaviour, with a great deal of emphasis placed upon the importance of obedience to one’s own shepherd. In many cases, disobeying one’s shepherd was tantamount to disobeying God. A few of these criticisms were exaggerated, but many lives were damaged. One such testimony can be found in the book Damaged Disciples by Ron and Vicki Burks. Noted Baptist evangelist Bailey Smith, for example, in his work “Real Evangelism” mentions having collected a very large number of testimonies of people he had encountered who were damaged by Shepherding teachings.
The movement was denounced by many charismatic leaders such as Pat Robertson and Demos Shakarian, and a 1975 meeting (known as “the shoot-out at the Curtis Hotel”) to resolve the dispute achieved little. The Fort Lauderdale Five eventually parted company. Derek Prince and Bob Mumford both publicly distanced themselves from the teachings. Derek Prince withdrew in 1983, stating his belief that “we were guilty of the Galatian error: having begun in the Spirit, we quickly degenerated into the flesh.”[3]Bob Mumford issued a “Formal Repentance Statement to the Body of Christ” in 1990 and was quoted as saying, “Discipleship was wrong. I repent. I ask forgiveness.”[4][5]
[I recommend that you read the whole article]

Does this sound familiar? Because it’s exactly what Gracepoint Fellowship Church still practices.

Pastor Ed and Kelly Kang believe that the church in America today is too “watered down,” and too into comfort. I’d have to say, that I do agree with his statement. I’ve heard of my share of suburban Christians who are just Sunday Christians at best. There’s a good book called “The Body” by Chuck Colson that talks about this.

But I don’t agree with the Kangs’ idea of the solution, which is to control everyone through forced accountability, guilt, fear and debt, which is essentially the basis of what UBF did.

There are variations of the staff title at Gracepoint.

First, there’s the “staff intern” which is the titled handed out via invitation to older college students and the ones that just graduated. They don’t have any ministry of their own, and they are assigned a direct “staff member” leader, who would basically be their direct mentor. The staff is a person who might lead their own small group and teach at times. The staff member reports to a director, who is over the staff. The staff member will report all the ins and outs of his/her ministry, along with how the staff intern is doing, passing along the sins and struggles of the staff intern via email or the weekly report I’ve mentioned.

The “director” helps “direct” the ministries. They have top tier meetings with Pastor Ed and Kelly separately, called “director meetings,” where they talk about all the staff and staff interns, along with the direction of the ministry. If there are any big problems that come up, they will all get addressed there. From what I can tell, these are meetings where essentially Pastor Ed and Kelly tell the directors what to do, and then the directors pass that along to the staff, who in term pass it along to the staff interns. Then together, they steer the overall direction of what will be done at church.

Along with the term of “members,” they also use the term “core members”. Being a “core member” means that you go to every meeting and do their version of the daily devotions regularly. If you aren’t a member, you are just an “outreach” and you are assigned in an excel sheet to a staff or staff intern, who will make sure to “minister” to you. [By the way, the members themselves don't really know if they are core members or not, until one day you might be added to one of their many group aliases.]

Quite efficient, isn’t it? Through this pyramid structure of power, where Pastor Ed Kang and his wife Kelly sit atop, they direct the whole church. This has both good and bad effects.

For ministry, you will never have another church deploy anyone faster, or setup chairs or audio equipment faster than Gracepoint. They take pride in that. I was always amazed by that. Of course, probably half the people had no choice but to show up [because otherwise, they would have their commitment questioned and be frowned upon as undisciplined, lazy and selfish, but still the end result is amazingly efficient, excellent, and effective].

The other thing that they do is that they quickly quell any disagreements or problems people might have with Gracepoint with this structure. Information travels up, and a decision is made by Ed Kang and Kelly and they implement something quickly to handle it ASAP. This was how the split was pretty much handled. They heard the rumblings about what people are hearing about the split that happened with Berkland, and they quickly gathered people by their graduating class by a schedule, told them what they needed to hear, and then said, if people had siblings in Berkland, don’t talk with them, and presented it as if only they were telling the truth, while anything you might hear from the Berkland side was not. Also, reports of any members sins travels fast up this pyramid, and if you’re a core member, you might be called for a “talk” which is a rebuke that will start with “I heard from so and so that you did _____”. There is no sense of privacy in discussion. Everything that might seem important travels to the staff intern, who tells the staff, who tells the director who tells Pastor Ed and Kelly – via email.

Note that repentance and accountability only travels up the ladder, not down. In their confucian setup, an older director will never confess his sins to his staff. He will only confess general, ubiquitous sins. ”Yes, I can be selfish.” But nothing ever specific. Also, in something like the internet accountability everyone was FORCED to do with Covenant Eyes, the staff will tell the staff intern to sign him up as a partner, but it will never be the other way around. Same thing for director and staff. Director will tell the staff to sign him up as a partner, but will not allow the staff to see his own internet logs.

I’m almost 100% sure that at least some of the staff and the directors both fall to the sins vastly available on the internet. Combined with the level of stress that they face, and the late nights that they are usually up, and for the singles, the burden of having no sense of control about whether or not they’ll be married – that’s usuallly a formula for sins of instant gratification.

So this kind of submission that only travels UP the ladder creates an environment where people mistakenly feel that their leaders are more sinless, and that the lower ones are just peons of sorts. Obedience to leaders is heavily emphasized as almost equivalent to obedience to God – which is of course, dangerous and false.

There is also constant kowtowing to the title. Two people might be of the same age, and have been at church the same number of years, and both even Christian, but if one is staff, and one is not, then people will behave accordingly, taking into account the staff member’s opinion, and disregarding the non-staff member’s, even if it might have made more sense. Why? Because he has no title, and has less legitimacy.

People by nature are drawn to hierarchy, because it’s a platform for power. We are all sinners, and we subsequently abide by the structure of power so easily – we’re so drawn to it in our sinfulness.

In any case, the back to the staff title. So the staff title and their variations allow for a military-like structure to Gracepoint. Here’s how they pan out when directly compared.

Member = Private
Core Member = Corporal
Staff Intern = Sergeant
Staff = Lieutenant
Director = Captain
Pastor Ed Kang and his wife Kelly Kang = General
I don’t think Paul had this in mind when he wrote 2 Tim 2:3-4

“3Endure hardship with us like a good soldier of Christ Jesus. 4No one serving as a soldier gets involved in civilian affairs—he wants to please his commanding officer.”

First of all, he was encouraging Timothy to endure hardship, the frail man that he was, and secondly, the commanding officer is not a reference to the pastor, but God. [I wrote a bit about this already]

As I’ve posted about before, the church should be a place of broken sinners that come together, and is an organic structure that humbly submits to each other in servant leadership. But Pastor Ed Kang and his wife Kelly’s idea of serving is to tell everyone what to do, because they know best. They really do regard themselves as the top generals, and they answer to no one below them. They will SAY that they hold themselves accountable to the directors beneath them, but EVERYONE knows it’s not true. What director would have the courage to disagree? They were all homegrown people in GFC, who were all taught to conform and be “obeyers”.

I challenge you Gracepoint members to name just one director who does, and how the accountability happens.

Because of this power structure of no accountability, I believe Pastor Ed Kang and his wife Kelly have become abusive leaders. They are perfectly “nice” and “caring” to those who obey them and are subservient, but to those that don’t, they become [I believe more Kelly than Ed] abusive and manipulative to get them to conform.

Here’s a story from a girl who attended there, who they considered was getting “too close” to a guy. My heart really went out to her – I wonder the level of damage they did to her and how they’ve twisted her view of God over the issue, and their inexcusable, sinful behavior. [Kelly will probably excuse it away as "I did it because I loved her!" but God will judge it accordingly with justice, considering her history of overbearing, narcissistic, controlling "love" as she calls it.]

A major reason as to why this power structure of staff works so well is because it gives the members a sense of importance and motivation. They want to work up from being a core member, to staff intern, to staff, etc., almost like a rat race. Ed and Kelly will TELL you not to worry about that, and to not be performance driven, but if you’re showing no interest in being a staff, then they will address you for not being spiritually “hungry” and for being complacent. That’s part of the double talk they do.

Also, for awhile, for the most part, unless you were staff, you were not getting married, because of the structure of marriage there. I believe this changed only recently. Even if you were not staff, and wanted to get married, you could not marry a non-staff member, because you were not at the same “level” – that left you with the crop of people that were deemed to be “not as spiritual” to choose from. And of course, you could not marry anyone from the outside, unless you were getting along in age [like over 30 for a girl], and they felt that there was absolutely no one at Gracepoint available to marry you.

Additionally, the Kangs can control the staff by holding them accountable to the title of “staff” rather than their faith alone in Jesus. If they said, “How could you do that, you are a Christian!” to something like having a TV, then they would sound lame and legalistic. But if they said, “How could you do that, you’re a staff?” [which they frequently use by the way] then they sound legitimate. Since you’re staff, you’re held to a greater power than your faith, and that’s to your title of staff. So you see many people in Gracepoint who are always struggling to live up to their title of “staff,” rather than merely enjoying being Christian, and being motivated by their personal love for Jesus Christ and his amazing grace for them.

As referenced by the passage from Wikipedia, this is exactly what happened to the Galatian church. [Read the book of Galatians].

They started in grace, but fell into legalism. They thought that Jesus and faith in Jesus alone was not enough. Rather, they thought they had to be greater than Christian – they had to be Jewish Christians, and in order to do that, every “true believer” had to be circumcised to technically become a Jew. How is this any different from this “staff” title? It’s not.

I am not speaking anything new. This is from the Bible. Pastor Ed Kang himself, during the church split exhorted his church members to critique the church if they noticed anything by getting to know the Word.

Gracepoint members and staff, think for yourselves, and judge what is true and right. Stop that little trigger in your brain where you find yourself always providing excuses for Gracepoint and for Pastor Ed and Kelly.