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WHO BLEEDS WHEN CHRISTIANS FIGHT?
#5
THE VIEW FROM THE RIGHT-FIELD PAVILION
Have you ever happened on a fight going on in some
grocery store parking lot? Somebody clipped a fender, or maybe a guy coming
out of a restaurant or bar has had too much to drink. Right there in front
of everybody, these two people either begin screaming epithets, or maybe
even taking swings at each other. And everybody watches. A crowd always
gathers.
It’s that way at Dodger Stadium, I’ve noticed. If a fight breaks out in
the stands, 45,000 people will stand up and crane their necks. All the
fans set down their Dodger Dogs; the bases could be loaded, but nobody’s
watching that. “What’s happening? What’s happening?” A fight is a fascinating
thing to observe.
And if you ARE an innocent bystander, you probably walk to your own car
later and get in shaking your head. “What a couple of losers,” you say
to yourself as you drive off. I think it’s natural that you just assume
that – instead of there being a clear right and wrong, a good guy and
a bad guy – both people probably have major problems or issues. If two
people can’t help but resort to fisticuffs in an Albertson’s parking lot,
they’re both messed up.
So that reality applies to you and me just in terms of our personal lives,
our friends and neighbors and grocery store runs. But when we’re believers,
a part of the Body of Christ, the stakes are multiplied ten-fold. Now
onlookers apply their shaking-of-the-head to the Church as well.
In his book, Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis has this poignant reminder:
“The outer world is quite right to judge Christianity by its results,”
he writes. “Christ told us to judge by results.” That’s Matthew 7:16:
“Ye shall know them by their fruits.” “A tree is known by its fruit,”
Lewis continues, “or, as we say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.
When we Christians behave badly, or fail to behave well, we are making
Christianity unbelievable to the outside world.”
Would you agree with that? When members feud, when
churches fight, when denominations battle each other over doctrines .
. . the bystanders in the parking lot drive away with real determination
that they’re not ever going anywhere near THAT. Christianity begins to
look like a failed formula.
We were just starting to think about this painful issue of fighting and
controversy when the Winter 2003 issue of Leadership magazine arrived.
Lo and behold, there was a major article, entitled “The Church of Cards,”
on this exact issue.
Harry McGee, the author — and that’s not his real name — was an associate
pastor under Allen Smith — and that’s not his real name either. Faith
Church in Philadelphia — fake name, fake state . . . so you can see where
we’re heading — seemed to be thriving. There was a pastoral staff of ten
people, and everyone had respect for Dr. Smith.
One day “Doug,” a church member, was talking to his kid about where to
go to college. And the dad said, “Hey, why don’t you go to Yale like Pastor
Smith did? That’s where he got his degree in clinical psych.”
And the kid, who was leafing through all the Ivy League catalogues at
that very moment, looked up and said, “Yale doesn’t have a Ph.D. in clinical
psychology, Dad.”
What?! Doug was stunned. Pastor Smith was talking all the time about his
doctoral degree, what he’d written his dissertation about, etc. And it
turned out to all be an enormous hoax. This associate pastor who wrote
the article, trying to follow the often-quoted guidelines in Matthew 18,
went with a very small delegation — just this dad and two elders — to
visit the senior pastor. And he denied everything. So they called Yale:
“Never heard of him.” They checked out the dissertation: no validation.
This preacher had three degrees hanging on his wall: all forgeries. He
claimed to go to continuing ed classes — never went. He would wear around
a white lab coat and tell parishioners he’d just been visiting patients
at local psychiatric units. Not true. And when it was all said and done,
the man was convicted of fraud, practicing psychology without a license,
and a whole bunch more.
But that’s just the tip of the ice berg. This preacher had about 200 loyalists.
Even after this “Doctor” Smith resigned his position, they believed in
him. So they decided to set him up in a new church. The renegade faction
of the flock agreed to withhold all of their offerings so that they could
help Dr. Smith get started. But they kept their membership in Faith Church
so that they could still vote on anything that might pertain to their
fallen hero. So it was a major-league mess. They finally decided to sue
Faith Church, sue all of the remaining pastors, and even seek damages
from the elders. Three million dollars. Faith Church’s lawyers advised
that the church would be ruined unless they countersued . . . for FIVE
million. So, with great reluctance, grieving over the reality that despite
what it says in First Corinthians chapter six, they couldn’t simply stand
by and let Faith Church go down the tubes, they let the countersuit go
forward. After all sorts of splashy attention, both in the secular and
religious media, they won in court and the issue slowly faded away.
But friend, imagine the damage done on the secular sidelines! How could
you invite your barbecuing neighbor to come to EITHER church . . . with
news helicopters hovering over the church steeple and members toting their
Uzis into the choir loft? Well, not like that, but you get the idea.
What can we take from a story like this one? What a tragedy! All the names
were fiction, but the story itself was agonizingly real. Back in I Corinthians
6, which we just referred to, Paul writes, almost with ferocity:
“If any of you has a dispute with another, dare he take it before the
ungodly for judgment instead of before the saints?” A couple of verses
down: “One brother goes to law against another — and this in front of
unbelievers! The very fact that you have lawsuits among you means that
you have been completely defeated already. Why not rather be wronged?
Why not rather be cheated?”
And the awful reality here is that sometimes you just
can’t let the entire church BE cheated. Without the legal weapon of a
countersuit, there would be sharks and vultures out there who would pick
every church clean with fabricated allegations. And here at this “Faith
Church,” there was a leader who plainly had violated the principles of
pastoral leadership. He had misrepresented himself, pretended to be something
he wasn’t. No two ways about it: he HAD to go. If it took all four steps
of Matthew 18 to get him out of the office and evicted from the parsonage,
they had to do it. As kindly as they could, with lowered voices, with
prayer and fasting. This writer admits in his article:
“I have since learned, especially when faced with an accusation, to pray
more and talk less.”
But when all was said and done, this incident was a
painful blow to the body of Christ. It really hurt — as the Bible plainly
SAYS it would really hurt.
And friend, when the stark, battleground realities of life in a fallen
world come to our parish, let’s at least be on the side of those that
pray and grieve. Let’s not seek out the fight. Let’s not rejoice over
the fight. Let’s not fuel the fight. Let’s pray for quick resolution.
And nothing’s ever 50-50; let’s be willing to accept the 40 instead of
the 60 in the settlement. And let’s realize, every day and every hour
while the smell of gunpowder is in the air . . . that God’s cause is suffering.
Is the carnal joy of being in a conflict worth as much as how deeply we
ought to love God and His Church?
And there’s one more thing we should say, inspired by a quiet little verse
found in First Peter chapter three. Peter used to love a good fight too,
as you may recall. But after giving some calming counsel to husbands and
wives in the church, he writes these powerful words:
“Finally, ALL OF YOU, live in harmony with one another; be sympathetic,
love as brothers, be compassionate and humble.”
And one thing we should take from that advice is this:
friend, let’s live our own lives so that we don’t constantly throw others
onto the Matthew 18 treadmill. Let’s not behave in such a way that the
church elders are always having to come to our door in twos and threes.
“Be compassionate and humble,” Peter writes. If this senior pastor hadn’t
lied in order to spike his own resumé, if he hadn’t always claimed
to have done things he never did, the associate pastors wouldn’t have
been thrust into that terribly uncomfortable role of Chief Confronter.
Finally, let’s let the big things be the big things. Let’s let the Cross
dominate our lives. A few years after this “Faith Church” crisis, this
same “Doug” had tragedy hit again. His daughter had a virulent lung infection.
And there in ICU, repentant people from the original “Faith Church” and
also the now defunct renegade church met to pray and seek God. As this
suffering teenager breathed her last, Calvary and the hope of the resurrection
grew, and the old bitterness faded into the shadows.
“Once again,” the author writes, “God used an innocent person to build
a bridge of forgiveness.”
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