Smith family members are making serious allegations against Brian Brodersen.
Brian Brodersen, who recently took the helm of the very powerful Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa franchise, is having serious allegations leveled against him by other Chuck Smith family members.
The situation is complicated as motives for the release of the allegations are being questioned by some CC insiders as there is a very nasty family feud boiling just behind the scenes of Brodersen’s Big Happy Calvary Chapel Family PR puff-piece recently in Christianity Today:
http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2014/february-web-only/change-calvary-chapel-chuck-smith.html
Sources tell me that Brodersen and the Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa board are threatening a lawsuit against Jeff Smith and The Word For Today franchise. It is reported that Brodersen and CCCM want ownership of the rights to control and use Chuck Smith’s huge library of sermons and teachings and the TWTF radio franchise.
At the moment a board headed by Chuck Smith’s son, Jeff Smith, owns and controls those sermons and teachings and radio properties and a family source close to the situation says that the goal of the current TWTF board is to make Chuck Smith’s audio-radio-teaching library available to the public free of charge online.
Calvary Chapel Abuse Commentary and Opinion:
The allegations against Brodersen by other (multiple) Smith family members are very serious. While motives are being questioned, my personal concern is for the truth regardless of motives. Just because someone doesn’t like someone else or doesn’t agree with someone else does not mean you dismiss the allegations as false. If you applied such a principle then you couldn’t believe any allegations made by most anyone in politics, religion, business etc. The issue is: Are the allegations true or not? In this case, there are two sets of allegations, one is personal to Brodersen’s conduct as the perpetrator, in the other set of allegations it is with regards to Brodersen’s protecting someone he allegedly knew had committed a crime.
What is concerning to me is that I have reached out to Brodersen multiple times now for his side of the story with no response. I publicly ask Brian Brodersen to come forward and give an answer to the allegations before I publish a more detailed and specific article about these issues.
The recent puff-piece in Christianity Today is insulting and an example of the lying that Calvary Chapel leadership engages in on a regular basis. The truth about things and what is really going on behind the scenes is the last thing you’ll ever hear candidly from Calvary Chapel leadership, even though the “bible” seems explicit about God “hating” liars.
To be frank, the Christianity Today interview is about like watching an infomercial or reading a press release from the communist Chinese “official news agency.” The real story going on is intentionally hidden from the money-giving public being solicited for money in the name of Jesus.
A personal note: It is becoming much clearer to me why Chuck Smith didn’t want to touch my personal Calvary Chapel child abuse story with the length of Moses’s staff.
Brodersen and CCCM may decide to sue…that seems to be part of the Calvary Chapel Ethos and DNA and history…but that will not deter me from trying to uncover the truth of these matters and to report on matters of serious public interest.