Restoring Kingdom Builders

Imagine this:

You work as a supervisor at a company that you really like.  You look forward to coming to work each morning, enjoy your co-workers, and find your position utilizes your special gifts and strengths.  Most of all, you believe that you are making a real contribution to your company.  You are always included in management meetings and believe that your ideas make your company better.  You plan on keeping your job for many years to come.

Your company has been undergoing some changes recently, and there’s a lot of anxiety on everyone’s part.  Then one day, you attend an all-company meeting at which the top leaders make a presentation concerning the company’s future and actively solicit feedback from its workers.  You quickly discover that you were excluded from the latest round of meetings and that decisions have been made without your knowledge or approval.

Suddenly, one of your co-workers stands up and accuses you of violating company policy.  You’re taken aback because this is the first time you’ve ever heard of this charge.  You know it isn’t true, and you want to defend yourself, when another co-worker stands up and makes a second charge against you.  You ask yourself, “What in the world is going on here?  Why are they attacking me?”

Before you know it, some other people are making accusations against you as well.  The charges sound like they could be true to others, but you know they are completely false.  After a few minutes, the tide of the meeting has turned so ugly that you just want to crawl in a hole and disappear.

For those of you who work in a company, how likely is the above scenario?

It’s not.  Why not?  Because most companies create policies that protect their workers – and leaders – from being ambushed like that.  If your supervisor believes that you’ve done something wrong, he or she is supposed to sit down with you and talk to you about it face-to-face.  You should never, ever hear negative information about yourself for the first time in a public meeting, and if it did happen, you might very well have legal grounds for taking action against that company.

Then why do all too many churches allow this kind of attack against their pastor?

Jesus, the Founder and CEO of the Christian Church, described the required protocol whenever one worker has a complaint against another worker.  The process is given to us in Matthew 18:15-20.  The steps are simple:

*If I believe that a fellow believer has sinned – especially against me – than I have the responsibility of going to that person directly and confronting him or her with what I have seen or heard.  If they “listen to you” and repent of their actions, then you have restored that person and no further action needs to be taken.

But you don’t first bring up their offenses in a public, all-church meeting.  That’s skipping steps.

*If they refuse to “listen,” Jesus says, then you are to take along one or two other people.  Once again, you repeat the first step but with additional witnesses present.  This elevates the seriousness of the charges.  Once again, the goal is restoration and redemption, not destruction and termination.

But you still don’t go to the church with your charges.  That’s skipping steps.

*Only if the accused individual refuses to change after the first and second encounter should anything be brought up before the church.  Jesus concludes in Matthew 18:17, “If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if he refuses to listen even to the church, treat him as you would a pagan or a tax collector” – in other words, as someone who is excluded from the fellowship.

These steps are redemptive and deliberate.  Confronting another believer with sin involves a progressive process, Jesus says, and the steps are crucial.  You must work the steps in the order prescribed without blowing past the first two steps.  If you can’t work step one, then quit.  Don’t jump right to step three.

But in way too many Christian churches, pastors are ambushed in public meetings with charges they have never heard before.  And sadly, most people who attend those meetings let it happen.

Can you imagine how horrible you would feel if you were abused at your workplace in that fashion?  You’d probably reach for the phone and call an attorney right away.

But who can pastors call when this sort of thing happens to them and no one stands up for them?

If I attended a public church meeting, and someone stood up and began making public charges against a pastor, here’s what I would do:

I would grab my Bible and asked to be recognized by the moderator of the meeting as soon as possible.  Then I would read Jesus’ words in Matthew 18:15-20 in a clear, bold voice.  Then I would ask this question of the accuser:

“Have Jesus’ steps in this passage been followed?”

If the answer came back, “I don’t know” or “I’m not sure,” then I would ask the moderator to dismiss the meeting and make sure Jesus’ steps were followed before any charges were ever brought to the congregation again.  If the moderator would not comply, then I would turn on my heel and walk out of the meeting – because Jesus had ceased being the Head of that church.

But I would go further.  (It’s dangerous to have a pastor as a regular church member, is it not?)  I would insist that if the charges made against the pastor turned out to be false that the church exercise discipline on those who made the charges.

What’s the biblical basis for that?

In the Old Testament, what happened to false witnesses?  Moses writes in Deuteronomy 19:16-19: “If a malicious witness takes the stand to accuse a man of a crime, the two men involved in the dispute must stand in the presence of the Lord before the priests and the judges who are in office at the time.  The judges must make a thorough investigation, and if the witness proves to be a liar, giving false testimony against his brother, then do to him as he intended to do to his brother.  You must purge the evil from among you.”

Did you catch the second-to-the-last phrase?  “If the witness proves to be a liar, giving false testimony against his brother, then do to him as he intended to do to his brother.”  If the witness hoped his charges resulted in the stoning of the accused – and the charges proved to be false – then the witness should be stoned, Moses says.

The result?  One less malicious liar in Israel – and all the other gossips and haters are put on notice that their crap won’t be tolerated.

You say, “But that’s the Old Testament.  You won’t find anything like that in the New.”

But we do in Titus 3:10-11, where Paul writes, “Warn a divisive person once, and then warn him a second time.  After that, have nothing to do with him.  You may be sure that such a man is warped and sinful; he is self-condemned.”

Paul advocates turning the tables on divisive individuals, working the steps in Matthew 18 in an attempt to get them to repent of their body-fracturing behavior.  While many of us would prefer just to boot them out of the church with a “don’t let the door hit you on the way out” sentiment, once again, the steps cannot be skipped: they must be worked.

Even though these verses are in Scripture, how often are they carried out in our churches?  And if not, why not?  I’d like to hear your thoughts.