Tragically recent years have seen a number of leadership scandals involving sexual and spiritual abuse engulf the church in America and the United Kingdom. This has included RZIM, Acts29, Mars Hill Church, Willow Creek Community Church, Sovereign Grace Ministries and the John Smyth, Steve Timmis and Jonathan Fletcher scandals in Britain. Social media has played a significant part in rightly bringing these scandals to light, but it has also been used to vilify leaders who are innocent of wrongdoing or themselves victims of the abuse. This talk considers both the proper and improper use of social media in the context of church abuse, and how institutions and leaders can respond in a godly way when they are subjected to scrutiny or abuse on social media. John Stevens has helped the conservative evangelical constituency in the UK address serious cases of leadership failure and shares from his personal experiences on Twitter and Facebook.

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John Stevens is the National Director of the Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches, a family of over 500 Bible-centred churches in the UK, a position that he has held since 2010. Prior to this he was one of the founding pastors of City Evangelical Church Birmingham, which was planted in the centre of the UK’s 2nd largest city in 1999. He was instrumental in starting the Midlands Gospel Partnership, was the course Director of the Midlands Ministry Training Course and is a visiting lecturer at Oak Hill Theological College. John is also one of the pastors of Christchurch Market Harborough, a church he helped to plant when he took up his current role. He was converted whilst studying law at Cambridge University, and after taking a post-graduate degree at the University of Oxford worked for 16 years as a University Lecturer, ending his career as Deputy Head of the Law School at the University of Birmingham. John is married to Ursula and they have four children aged between 12 and 7. He blogs at www.john-stevens.com on theology, church life and ministry, culture and politics.

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