After kneeling before 1,200 of his former parishioners, Gordon MacDonald, former president of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship (IVCF), was recommissioned to public ministry during a service of restoration on May 1.
Held at Grace Chapel in Lexington, Massachusetts, where MacDonald pastored for 12 years until 1984, the service came 11 months after his admission of adultery and resignation from IVCF.
“The very first thing I’d like to say to you is that I’m very sorry I let you down,” MacDonald told the congregation during a 30-minute address. “Perhaps the worst kind of brokenness is the brokenness of being an utter failure because of some bad choices you have made in your life.”
The Sunday evening service represented the culmination of months of church discipline and counseling. Several months before his resignation from IVCF, MacDonald began receiving counseling from a group of church leaders. Last summer, he and his wife, Gail, renewed their membership at Grace Chapel in order to submit to discipline that included further counsel with three elders from the church. During the past year, MacDonald was permitted only limited speaking engagements to small groups, mostly pastors, said Judson Carlberg, chairman of the church subcommittee formed specifically to work for MacDonald’s restoration.
Carlberg said the recommissioning service was conceived after all those involved in counseling MacDonald reported he had grown from an overwhelming sense of guilt to a true sense of forgiveness. Vernon Grounds administered to MacDonald the vows of consecration at the service and urged him to “preach the gospel of a second chance.”
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