The following account of a church’s experience with disciplinary action is based on Lee and Bev Hotchkiss’s memory of events. Names and other identifications have been changed because of the sensitive nature of what happened.
Lee Hotchkiss, pastor of the Evangelical Free Church in Pineview, Colorado, knew Georgina’s sobbing voice immediately, even though it was 2:00 A.M. and her call had awakened him from a sound sleep. She sounded hysterical. “Jack just told me he’s having an affair,” she cried.
She was a member of the church, her husband one of its five board members. Her voice shook as she poured out her story. She had never suspected before tonight. She still did not know who Jack was sleeping with. Lee listened, then offered what encouragement and hope he could. Trained as a marriage counselor, he was a hard man to ruffle. Georgina’s wild voice seemed to calm somewhat, perhaps as she realized that even her pastor could not do much to help her at two in the morning. Lee promised to pray. Finally they said good-by.
Lee’s wife, Bev, lay beside him, fully awake. He told her what Georgina had said. “Who could it be?” she asked.
“The way Georgina is going at him, I’m sure she’ll weasel that out of him before morning,” he said. Lee felt himself losing the calm self-assurance he had put on automatically when the telephone woke him. He sat on the edge of the bed, his chin down toward his knees. What would this mean? Jack would have to resign his church position. He had just been at the parsonage two days ago for the Saturday men’s prayer breakfast, kidding, talking like a champ. Jack, an adulterer? Georgina, who had a plain face with scars from severe acne, had told everyone how happy they were together. She had said almost too often how God had blessed their marriage.
“I guess it can happen to anybody,” Lee said.
“Are you going to come back to bed?” Bev asked.
“It’s no use now. I can’t sleep. I’m going out to the living room. I want to pray.”
Bev got up too. Her anger surfaced more quickly than Lee’s. “How could he do that to her? And those two beautiful children. Georgina may not be any great beauty, but she loves him. She loves those children. Don’t you think so?”
Lee was characteristically thoughtful. “Yeah. She loves him. I’m sure she’s not always that easy to live with, though.”
“But that’s no excuse.”
“No. It’s no excuse.”
In the living room he knelt at the sofa. He prayed for direction. He had dealt with difficult marriages before, but this was new. Their little church, barely two years old, just into its new building, would be rocked. Why had he missed the signs? He had spent so many hours with Jack; why hadn’t he known? He felt guilty. Had he expounded the Scriptures clearly on marital faithfulness? Looking back, he knew he could have said more. If he had had any idea. If he had just had any idea.
The phone rang, jarring the night silence. Lee was sure it would be Georgina again. She was the sort of woman who needed constant reassurance. But a man’s voice was on the line: Dennis, another member of the church board. He sounded buried in gloom. He had just discovered that his wife, Sharon, was Jack’s other woman. Apparently it had not taken Georgina long to get a full confession from Jack. Georgina had called Sharon; they had screamed at each other on the phone. Sharon had just come back from five days on the high plains; she had taken the time off because, she said, she needed the time to be alone. Now they knew why.
Lee felt sick at heart. He had spent hours with Dennis and Sharon. They were young, immature in many ways, but full of potential. Dennis had been considering going back to school, entering the ministry. Now this.
“Sharon says they’re going to go away,” Dennis told him.
“When?”
“Right now. She’s packing her suitcase right now.”
“Where’s Jack?”
“He’s coming to get her.”
Lee was at a loss for words. He could only encourage Dennis, just as he had been doing for weeks. “Just keep loving her, Dennis. She needs your love. Love is what can straighten this situation out.” After promising to call Jack, he hung up. The night was becoming a nightmare.
Bev had come in and listened. She was dressed as though she planned to go out. “I was thinking about Georgina,” she said. “I feel so sorry for her. I thought I’d go over and try to comfort her.”
Lee explained about Sharon. Sharon was twenty years old, blonde, cute, seductive. She dressed to please men, to show her figure. She acted sweet. And she had been involved with men before she married Dennis. Lee knew that because they had come for advice over finances; as a young couple with two small children, they had constant troubles reconciling their limited income with their unlimited expectations. Sharon in particular hardly knew what it meant to wait for something she wanted. They spent the winter on the slopes, an expensive habit. Trying to control their budget led to other subjects, naturally. Despite their troubles, Lee would not have picked them as candidates for a breakup.
“And they’re going to take off tonight? To where?” Bev asked. “What about the children?”
“I don’t get the impression they’ve thought it out,” Lee answered. “They’re just planning to drive off into the sunrise. You go ahead and see Georgina. I’m going to call Jack and ask him to wait until morning, so we can at least talk in the light of day before they go. I’ll tell him you’re on the way.”
* * *
The lights were on at Jack and Georgina’s small tract home when Bev reached it, but Jack’s pickup was gone. He was a carpenter, self-employed, who worked out of the back of his truck. Had he already left with Sharon? But when Bev knocked softly on the door, Jack answered. He wore blue jeans and a sweatshirt; even in the middle of the night he looked handsome, dark, and trim. He invited her in, awkwardly, and she stepped just inside the door.
“Georgina’s gone,” he said. She had not told him where she was going; maybe she was at the Mastersons’, friends of theirs and also members of the Pineview church. Jack did not say very much, but he seemed genuinely worried about her. “I would go out and look for her, but I don’t want to leave the kids alone,” he said. Bev felt like asking him who would stay with the kids once he left for good, but she held her tongue.
“No, I’ll go out and see if I can find her,” she said. “The Mastersons know?”
“Yeah, they know. She called them up. I hope that’s where she’s gone. If you find her, you can tell her about going to your house.”
Bev was momentarily puzzled. “My house?”
“Lee asked me if before we took off we would come by and listen to what he had to say. I couldn’t say no to Lee. He’s such a great guy. We’re going to meet there at seven o’clock. I think Lee wants Georgina to come too.”
When she reached the Mastersons’, Georgina was not there, and they had not seen her. Pineview is a resort town, its stores and restaurants done in roughhewn pine. People go there from Dallas and Chicago to get out of the rat race. It has only one main street; Bev drove down it, stopping at two all-night stores and looking in restaurant parking lots for the pickup. The night was dark and utterly still; she saw no one. She felt herself increasingly angry: angry over lost sleep, over the fact that she would have to skip work at the bank, over the stupidity and thoughtlessness of people who ought to know better.
She could remember now an occasion a few weeks before, when they were having a work party finishing up the new church. Both Jack and Sharon had been there, and when Bev had offered to take Sharon home instead of letting Jack do it, Sharon had in her sweet way been quite resistant to the offer. So it had been building up that long, at least. Bev felt anger at their audacity, meeting each other at the church. And she felt heartsick and unable to understand the loss. What would it do to the families? To the church? To Lee?
* * *
Lee Hotchkiss did not sleep anymore that night. He prayed, he talked to Bev when she came home, he tried to think what to do. Several times he looked at the Bible passages that deal with church discipline, Matthew 18:15-20 in particular. He had only seen church discipline applied once, long ago when he was a child growing up on the West Coast. Pineview was his first pastorate, though he had been in the ministry for years as a missionary and a youth pastor.
He was not by nature a confrontive person, and when he thought of the meeting he had arranged, he grew agitated and wanted to pace up and down the house. He liked people and liked to get along with them. Pineview Evangelical Free Church was small enough-about seventy-five on most Sunday mornings-for him to pour his life into its men. He had spent many hours with Dennis and Jack in particular. He knew them well. They were good friends. The last thing he wanted to do was to come on like a heavy. Lee was shocked by the news of Jack’s affair, and his understanding of the Bible made him believe he had a duty to confront. But it would have been easier to roll over and play dead, to let them do what they wanted to do.
Georgina was the first to arrive. She had finally turned up at the Mastersons’ and spent most of the night with them. She looked awful: tight, nervous, distraught, unkempt. Bev had gone off to watch Dennis and Sharon’s children, so Lee was alone to greet her. He ushered her into their long, narrow living room, where she sat down on the love seat. Lee found it difficult to know what to say to her. He heard another car roll up. It was Jack’s pickup; he and Sharon got out. In the back, Lee saw a suitcase. Sharon looked trim, blonde and pretty, ready to go. They made a handsome couple.
Dennis drove up last, and they all went into the living room. There was little small talk, just stony nods all around. Lee took a deep breath and began.
He talked about the wrong that had been done but did not dwell on it. He concentrated on hope: hope that marriages could be pulled together with the help that was available. He emphasized that no couple had to struggle alone, that with the resources of the church and good counselors any marriage could not only be saved but have new joy and life breathed into it. He had thought most of the night about what he would say, and though he felt physically exhausted, his brain reeling from lack of sleep, he did not lack for words.
His monologue did not last long. Georgina broke in: “I just can’t believe it, Lee. I thought I married a Christian.” She turned on Sharon and began sobbing. “You Jezebel! You turned my husband into an adulterer.”
Jack said he still considered himself a Christian. He looked tight and uncomfortable.
“Some Christian!” Georgina cried. “Sleeping with any tramp who walks in the church. Is that a Christian, Lee?”
“What right do you have to attack him?” Sharon wanted to know. “If you loved him the way I do, he wouldn’t need anyone else.”
But Georgina would not be put on the defensive. Her emotions came unplugged as she flailed at Jack and at Sharon. Soon everyone was talking at once. Lee became more a moderator and an interpreter than a preacher.
He could soon sense a direction to the conversation. Jack was wavering. He had come because of Lee’s friendship, not expecting to be swayed. But when Lee posed the consequences of his decision, he could not stick to it. Finally he admitted Lee was right.
“What are you going to do, then?” Lee asked.
“I’m going to go home with Georgina,” he said slowly, “and make our marriage work. That’s the right thing to do for God and for Georgina and for my kids.”
Sharon’s pretty blue eyes had been watching Jack’s face closely, as though she thought by her will power she could stop the pastor’s influence. Now she rose from her seat, flushed with anger, unable to speak. She ran to the front door and outside. After the door slammed behind her, no one spoke for a moment
“She can’t go anywhere,” her husband, Dennis, said. “She doesn’t have any keys.”
“Let’s finish our business,” Lee suggested, “and then we’ll see how we can help Sharon.” He felt a tremendous rush of hope. He had not really dared to think they might be changed by confrontation with the truth.
* * *
Bev wandered around Dennis and Sharon’s house nervously praying for Lee. The children were still asleep, so Bev had nothing to do but think about what was going on at her own house. She wandered into the bedroom. An elaborate waterbed, with built-in bookshelves and mirrors, stood practically wall to wall. On the floor was one of Sharon’s flimsy nightgowns and a pair of Dennis’s tennis shoes. She wondered what had gone on between them during the night.
She had been there less than an hour when the telephone rang. It was Dennis, asking her to bring the two boys to the house. “How did it go?”
“Great,” he said. “They’re not going to go.”
She got there as quickly as she could, praising God all the way. As she drove up, she saw Sharon at the back of the house, sitting on some rocks. Sharon did not look up. When Bev went inside, Lee and the other three were on their knees in the living room just finishing up their prayers. Dennis’s boys ran to him, and Bev went outside to talk to Sharon.
She jumped to her feet and began picking red ants off herself with impatient jerks. Bev went up and extended her arms. “Sharon, I love you,” she said. But Sharon fended her off and stared into her eyes, looking so strange and hate-filled that she frightened Bev. Bev backed off.
Lee had come out behind them; Sharon turned on him with the same concentrated hate. She shook her finger in his face. “I’m going to ruin you,” she said. “Everybody in this town is going to hear about you.”
* * *
Jack had repented, or seemed to have repented. At least when Lee talked to him, he said in apparent sincerity that he wanted to do what was right. But Sharon, for all her bubbly sweetness, was a determined young woman. She wanted Jack, and she knew that his weak link was physical attraction. If she could get to him, he would fall for her.
In a sense, Lee was the only one standing in her way. So began an almost comical battle of wills. “It was utterly ridiculous,” Lee remembers. “We were trying to help Dennis and Sharon build a more positive marriage. That’s got to involve trust. But Dennis simply could not trust her with the keys to the car, because as soon as she got them she would set sail for Jack. She would beg him for them, complaining repeatedly that he didn’t trust her-which in a way was true. She couldn’t be trusted.
“Of course, if she and Jack had really been determined, they certainly could have taken off. We couldn’t have stopped them, nor would we have tried. As a matter of fact, they managed several liaisons that first week. But they both had some ambivalence about what they were doing, which we could tap if we got to them in time. It was laughable, in a way, because it was such an adolescent fantasy they were living out.”
Immediately after the news broke, Lee asked two couples to be closely involved. The Mastersons would work with and counsel Jack and Georgina; they were old friends. Loren and Roberta, former Navigator staff members who had been in a Bible study with both couples, had daily contact with Dennis and Sharon. Sharon was so angry at Lee that she could not speak to him. She threatened to print up a brochure about him and spread it all over town. But at times, especially when talking with Roberta, Sharon seemed ready and willing to do what was right. Then days or even hours later she would be headed for Jack again.
The phone rang constantly, and each time it rang Lee tensed. The phone call might be from Georgina, saying she had seen Jack’s truck parked in town and didn’t know whether the two might be together. Or Dennis might call saying the phone had rung, and when he answered it, the caller hung up. Lee would call Jack, and he would deny doing it. But they never knew who was telling the truth.
One evening after supper, about a week after the affair broke, Lee was at the high school finishing up a project for a woodworking course. Bev came rushing into the class, slightly out of breath. “Dennis just called. Sharon’s been asking for the car keys, and he wouldn’t give them. So she’s on her bike, headed for Jack’s house.”
Lee shrugged. “OK, I’ll go.” He got into his car. It was a June evening, still light. Sure enough, a few blocks from Jack’s house he passed Sharon pedaling toward it. When he arrived, Jack’s truck was there. It was a new house in a new subdivision, with a pile of dirt for landscaping still in front. Lee couldn’t help smiling at the way he headed Sharon off at the pass.
Georgina, who suffered headaches and other painful symptoms associated with TMJ dysfunction, was in bed, and Lee and Jack spent part of the time talking to her. She was a nervous woman, given to fits of emotion, and she could be a nag. She nagged Jack about his spiritual condition: “Jack, if you could only turn your life completely over to the Lord!” Which was an accurate diagnosis, of course, but not so helpful coming from her. Lee talked to her about her need to give Jack some freedom: she was smothering him, pushing him into Sharon’s arms. One minute she could see it; the next she was back at him. But at least the communication process between them was beginning.
The time he spent with Jack alone was even more encouraging. It was, he thought, their most honest talk ever. Jack seemed deeply affected by what Lee said. The thought of leaving his kids, of deserting Georgina, of disobeying the Lord was obviously painful to him. Lee tried to describe the personality problems he saw in Sharon. “This is a pattern, Jack. She’s done it before. She’s doing it now. How do you know she won’t do it to you in a year?”
He could tell from Jack’s face that the message was penetrating. Jack would nod slowly. “You’re right, Lee. I’m going to start learning how to love Georgina, how to treat her the way I should.” Sharon never came. Lee was there for two hours and left after the sky had turned quite dark. He felt elated.
Late that night Jack called. He was at the hospital emergency room. “Lee, would you mind coming over here? Georgina tried to commit suicide.”
The hospital was new, bright, and cheery with wide corridors. Lee had been there many times in the last year, visiting a little boy with leukemia. He found Jack and Georgina in a room alone. Jack looked grave and worried; he was being very attentive to Georgina. She lay on a table, still in her nightgown. It was streaked with vomit. They had pumped her stomach, and every so often a dry heave still came. She looked horrible; Lee thought to himself, This is humanity at its lowest point.
Sharon had been hiding in Jack’s truck when Lee left the house. She had been there waiting during the entire time they had talked. After Lee had gone, she had come to the door. Georgina, not Jack, had answered. They had held a screaming match. Jack, who wanted to keep them both happy, had finally taken Sharon home, putting her bicycle in the back of the truck. Thinking he was gone for good, the distraught Georgina had dumped a load of pills down her throat and lain down to die. That was how Jack found her when he came back. He had taken her immediately to the emergency room.
Lee prayed for them and left, much less elated than he had been earlier in the evening.
The next day Sharon made an attempt at suicide-more a cry for help than a serious attempt, Lee thought, but sobering. The doctor kept her in for observation overnight. She was quiet when Lee visited her, not venomous as she had been. From Dennis, though, Lee learned that his observations about her personality problems, which he had made to Jack the evening before, had been parroted on to her. She now had more reason than ever to see Lee as the enemy.
Two days later came the break Lee and Bev had prayed for: a full-scale reconciliation between the families. Dennis and Sharon had taken flowers to Jack and Georgina, and Sharon had asked for forgiveness. Georgina and Sharon hugged each other, with tears. The four had prayed together. Tremendous elation filled Lee’s heart when he learned of this.
Within a few days he was back at it-trying to stop Jack and Sharon from leaving town. All their promises and pledges were out the window.
* * *
Lee and Bev had put off their scheduled vacation for one week, and they decided to wait no longer. They headed for Washington, to Lee’s folks, and spent the week sleeping. Their two daughters played in the pool and with their grandparents while Lee and Bev recuperated. They had not realized how much strain the hours of counseling and strategizing had generated, and the continued tension of not knowing what might happen next. Away from it, they felt as though a deafening noise had suddenly quit. They could feel the quiet, the peace.
But vacations end. Nothing in Pineview had changed in their absence. As the days passed, they began to grow cynical: they no longer put much stock in Jack’s or Sharon’s professions. Both of them could flip-flop with alarming ease.
Yet they seemed to really mean it at the moment they said they were going to change. The problems were not as simple as whether or not the two wanted to obey. They both-in fact, all four-had developed patterns of thinking and relating that didn’t fit well with the difficult marriages they were in. Lee sat once with Jack in a restaurant late at night, drinking coffee and talking about the kind of marriage Jack wanted. “Every time a woman comes in here,” Jack said, “I look at her and think, Is this the woman I’ve been waiting for? Could this be the perfect one?” With such a made-in-Hollywood mindset, Jack naturally found it hard to look ahead to a lifetime with Georgina.
Nothing seemed to make a dent for long: Sharon still wanted Jack, and Jack still wanted Sharon, and neither one knew how to say no to desire. “More than a few times I wondered,” Lee says, “if we all wouldn’t be better off just letting them do what they wanted to do. If I hadn’t known them so well and cared about them so much, perhaps I would have. I hurt for them, and for the church.”
Lee continued to read the biblical passages on church discipline. He believed the purpose of discipline was not so much to punish as to reprove, with the goal of restoring the person to full fellowship. He could see that the confrontation he had done so far was not working; he began to think that the next step was called for: going with a witness. He saw this step, and the next one, less as escalating punishment than escalating pressure. It was pressure designed to push people out of their well-grooved rut, to shake them into seeing the direction they were going.
Dennis called one evening about suppertime. They were packing to go again, he told Lee. Sharon was packed and ready. Jack was on his way to pick her up. What should Dennis do? Lee hung up and called Jack’s house; he caught Jack on the way out the door. Jack didn’t try to deny it.
As on the first night, Lee leaned on his friendship. “Jack, it’s your choice, and nobody’s going to stop you. But will you do one thing for me? Will you wait just fifteen minutes at Sharon’s house while I come? I just want to read a few words to you and then let you go.”
“OK,” Jack said.
Lee called the church chairman, Ben. He was a muscular, soft-spoken older man, a retired carpenter whom Lee had worked beside all day every day for nine months building the church. Ben knew nothing about what had been going on. Lee told him there was some immorality he felt obliged to confront, and he asked Ben to go with him.
Ben did not say no, but he made his reluctance clear. Again, Lee relied on his personal relationship.
“Ben, will you do it for me? I need someone to stand with me.”
Finally Ben said he would, if he didn’t have to say anything.
In the car on the way over, Lee told Ben more of the facts. Ben did not say much; he never did. He was obviously uncomfortable in this role. They arrived at Dennis and Sharon’s little house: Jack’s pickup was in the drive. Lee’s face turned red, and he dreaded what would follow. He and Ben prayed briefly in the car. When he went inside, he noticed Sharon’s suitcase in the hall. She and Jack waited in the living room.
Lee gave a short preamble. “I love you both,” he said. “I don’t want you to go. I believe you’re hurting yourselves and you’re hurting others. But the choice is yours. You just have to live with the consequences of your choice. I’m going to read a few verses of Scripture to you that bring home the significance of what you’re doing.”
He took up his Bible and read “the scariest passages I could find,” including 1 Corinthians 6:9-10: “Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.”
When he had finished reading, he saw no reaction, so he got up and left with Ben.
At home, another call came. They had not gone. They had decided to repent. Elation again.
A few days later Jack had a carpentry job in the nearby town of Silverwood. He was out of town for a few days. Sharon went up to stay with him. They came back to their homes in Pineview when the job was done, but no one had any illusions the affair was over.
* * *
Sunday night, after the evening service, Lee singled out the visitors in the congregation. He expressed his pleasure they had come, and he hoped they would come again soon. “But we have some family business we’d like to do now, and it’s the kind of thing we want to keep within the church family.” The visitors left, and Lee began to talk about church discipline.
He spoke first about confidentiality. This worried him as much as anything in taking Jack and Sharon before the congregation; he and Bev had prayed that the news would not spread. So far, in the month since the facts had come out, no one outside those immediately concerned had found out.
Lee spoke about the purpose of church discipline: the hope that confrontation would lead to repentance and ultimately to restitution. Finally, he told the congregation that Jack and Sharon had committed adultery and had not responded to repeated confrontations. They were being suspended from the fellowship. He asked members to pray for them.
After the meeting was over, the members went out into the foyer and talked about everything under the sun except what had just taken place. Lee was delighted by the awkward avoidance of the one topic everybody, obviously, was thinking of.
He was even more delighted by the response of Jack and Sharon when he talked to them the next day. Both were shocked. They could not believe he had actually taken their case before the congregation. They were flabbergasted to learn they could no longer be a part of the church fellowship. But neither one was angry. Rather, they were ready to repent at once. The thought of being alienated from the church’s fellowship was really painful to them. They did love the Lord and love his people. They had simply wanted to have their cake and eat it too-to commit adultery and yet enjoy the warmth of Christian fellowship. Up to now it had not hit them that they would not be allowed to do that.
Lee had seen too many flip-flops to be ready to embrace their repentance immediately. He gave them a month. “Prove to me for thirty days that you can keep away from each other.” But this time he felt a very real difference in attitudes, especially in Sharon. She began to despise Jack, for she felt used.
“I think in Jack spiritual motives were the key in repenting,” says Lee now. “He told me later he was really afraid he would lose his salvation. I’m a Calvinist, so I don’t quite know what to think of that. But there it was. Sharon I suspect was moved by more practical motives. I think she finally saw that she wasn’t going to be allowed to get what she wanted-that all her determination was useless. As soon as she saw that, she was ready to change. And she was ready for real spiritual change, too.” Small children do not learn not to steal through moral argumentation: they learn first, through punishment, that crime does not pay. Sharon was in some ways still a child.
Lee encouraged one family to attend the morning church service, the other the evening. With the strong physical attraction Jack and Sharon felt, it seemed wiser for them to keep out of each other’s sight. Lee also encouraged both families to begin visiting a Christian counselor he knew in Pineview.
When the month was over, Lee worked closely with both of them to prepare a statement for the congregation, a statement that did not mince words-he particularly wanted them to use the word adultery instead of some euphemism-and yet did not say too much. He planned the order of events very carefully. After the Sunday evening service, visitors were again excused, and after a short introduction Sharon came in to make her confession. She wore a spaghetti strap sundress, Bev remembers, cut low-a dress most women would not wear to confess adultery. But what she had written was sincere. The words came out of her throat grudgingly. She said what she had done, and she asked forgiveness.
Lee then asked the couple who had been counseling them to pray for Sharon and Dennis. After that, Lee invited members of the congregation to come forward and express anything they wanted to. Everybody came, as if for a receiving line, giving words of encouragement, hugs, and tears.
Dennis and Sharon left, and Jack and Georgina, who had been waiting in the office, came out. Jack’s confession, though in his own words, was similar to Sharon’s. He had it written on a three-by-five card. He would look down at it, take a breath, and choke out a little more. Then he would look down again. After he was done, Georgina stood beside him, and the church prayed for them. Then, again, tears and hugs and words of welcome.
* * *
A few months after the confession, Jack and Georgina got a chance to move closer to family on the West Coast, and they did so. Dennis and Sharon stayed in Pineview longer, but in a year Dennis’s company transferred him to Omaha. Lee and Bev keep infrequent contact with both couples now. Their marriages have lasted, and they have apparently gone on in their Christian faith with real sincerity.
“I think of them as very fortunate people,” Lee says. “In 99 percent of such situations, they would have come apart. We just poured everything we had into them. Perhaps we were too involved. But it worked.
“It’s not my normal pattern to be confrontive. I believe some pastors could find confrontations like that a piece of cake. But I’ve never been excited about it. The real temptation was to be passive, to do nothing. After all, you think, It’s their decision. What can I do to stop them?
“But we just would not let go of them. I can’t help thinking that’s what the church ought to do. How many marriages, if they had that kind of support from people willing to give their lives to make it work, would find the strength to keep trying?”
Lee and Bev have since moved on to a larger church in Illinois; they have seen other cases of church discipline, and cases where it was lacking. “When there was clear, loving confrontation, healing followed,” he says. “Where a pastor was unwilling to confront a powerful member of the church, a festering wound was allowed to continue, and you could never have a therapeutic healing.”
Lee admits, though, that it is far less easy to intervene in a church of three hundred than it was in a church of seventy-five, for a leader simply knows the people less and has less time to give them. What shape would church discipline take in a congregation numbering in the thousands? He does not pretend to know. What he does feel very strongly is that church discipline is not something to be dodged. It is meant to be done, for the good of the body of Christ. When done in love, it can restore rather than destroy.
Tim Stafford is a free-lance writer in Santa Rosa, California.
Copyright © 1984 by the author or Christianity Today/Leadership Journal. Click here for reprint information on Leadership Journal.
