If Your Brother Sins Against You

A recent comment received on this blog raises an issue which is worth a detailed consideration. “I also hope that future posts will show that the concerned members followed Jesus' command by going to their Pastor before they contacted the Conference.” This is a topic we had intended to bring up later where it best fit in with the storyline of the Epic, but since it has come up we will accelerate our timetable for addressing it.

We would like to first point out that nowhere in the Bible is there a statement from Jesus commanding us to speak with our pastors before ever communicating with our conferences. That said, we well understand that this is a reference to Matthew 18:15-17. In order to relieve your fears, David, we will say at the outset that we had no fewer than 13 separate private communications with Pastor DeSilva about our concerns both before and after the vote on the Paul Borden Report. We haven’t included these specifically in telling the Epic because A) they were private conversations, B) they did no good, and C) we dispute the premise that Matthew 18 is truly the biblical model most applicable to this situation.

As we understand the text, it is a formula for resolving disputes of a personal and private nature. Our concern is about policy, not any sort of personal offense, and it certainly isn’t private. Our senior pastor has attempted to paint this dispute as a personal campaign against him, rather than the policy disagreement that it truly is, but we have never claimed that this dispute was caused by any of our pastors having done us personal harm in any way. And our goal is not to cause personal harm to any of our pastors. All we want is proper compliance with SDA policy. The proper compliance with policy is a matter which concerns the entire congregation rather than just a single individual. Therefore, we believe that Galatians 2, in which Paul publicly reprimanded Peter for inappropriate behavior which affected the entire congregation, would actually be the more applicable biblical model to follow.

As mentioned earlier, we followed Matthew 18 anyway, just to be on the safe side. However, because this text is about the personal and the private we believe that in a situation like ours, which is impersonal and public, the spirit of the text is more applicable than the letter. We believe that that spirit intends that attempts be made to address concerns in a manner as quiet and non-confrontational as possible so as to avoid unnecessary embarrassment and hurt feelings. However, this spirit also acknowledges that the offending party may be disinclined to hear what you have to say, or take you seriously, and in such a situation it includes provisions for a gradual escalation of the confrontational nature of your efforts in order to impress the seriousness of the matter on the offending party.

This we have done.

Religious