Do not entertain an accusation against an elder unless it is brought by two or three witnesses. But those elders who are sinning you are to reprove before everyone, so that the others may take warning. I charge you, in the sight of God and Christ Jesus and the elect angels, to keep these instructions without partiality, and to do nothing out of favoritism. (1 Timothy 5:19-21)
When I am at work, I speak to customers gently so that they have a good experience. I carefully explain our products and the way things are made and avoid being patronizing so that they have a good experience and hopefully come back. When I am away from customers and speaking only to coworkers, I can share my frustrations or concerns that I might not normally. I can say that a customer took an excessively long time to order and because I am talking to co-workers I know that that information will remain in confidence. When I go home and talk to my wife about work, I can speak even more freely because we have an intimate relationship and because she is outside of the sphere of where I work. Maybe you can identify this kind of pattern in your life as well. There are circles of trust where if someone isn't part of that circle normally, hearing what goes on there might be confusing.
This whole book is like that. It's Paul speaking to Timothy about instructions for how the church should be governed. There's a high degree of trust and the things that they talk about are different in content and tone than some of Paul's other letters. It makes it a challenge to interpret because almost everything in here flies against the face of our modern sensibilities, especially when it comes to how women are treated.
Though I'm working from what I remember, I believe Paul's concern as he was establishing churches was that they might be free from scandal so that the Jesus movement (what would eventually become the Christian Religion) might not get stamped out because someone got involved in something so taboo that it turned everyone off of it. When we read Paul's instructions to Timothy about how to handle sins or scandals among elders, we are looking into a world where the success of each individual congregation had a huge impact on how the Church itself was perceived.
I believe things two things are different now. First I believe that no individual congregation is important enough that a single scandal would sink the entire practice of following Jesus. Second, I believe the appearance of a cover up or the decision to hide faults and sins is more of a risk to congregations than those sins themselves.When you hear about the discussion around the Roman Catholic Church's sexual abuse scandals, the focus is mainly on the fact that these sins were covered up for the sake of saving the face of both the Church itself, and the individuals in leadership who committed these crimes.
It is so strange to me that Christians who freely admit that they are sinful creatures in need of a saviour are so quick to point to leadership that is "above reproach". At this point in my life I am deeply suspicious of anyone who appears to be above reproach only because I hear of so many stories of secret depravity which later came out to sink the church. Do we need to have high standards of behaviour for our leaders? Yes, but we also need to hold them to a high standard of honesty and accountability so that when they do stumble we can have an open and honest conversation about how to move forward instead of allowing problems to secretly fester.
I think Paul is right to protect the reputation of the Congregations he works with, but I think that means something a bit different now than it did then.
No comments:
Post a Comment