Disciplining and Restoring Fallen Leaders Rich Nathan July 8, 2012 Derailed: What Causes People to Fail Series 1 Corinthians 5

I spent the last week reading some of the actual transcripts of what Roman Catholic priests did in abusing children in Ireland, in Boston, and in Philadelphia. Many of the details of what Catholic priests did to children are simply too disturbing to share in a public setting.

One case that I can share about discreetly took place in Ireland. Marie Collins was 13 years old when she was hospitalized back in 1960 at what was then called Our Lady’s Hospital for Sick Children. The chaplain, a Catholic priest, read to her in the evening and played games with her. But after the games, he began to sexually abuse her. Marie Collins, this 13-year old girl, said, “I had no idea what was going on. But I knew it was wrong.”

Very often the priest would abuse her at night and then serve her communion in the morning. Marie Collins spent most of the ensuing years dealing with depression, anxiety and agoraphobia. At the age of 30 she actually talked about her experience, first to a doctor, and then to the priest of her local parish. The priest told her that what happened was probably her own fault; that she may have tempted the other priest; but that he would forgive her.

Her abuser continued on as a priest and as an abuser. Ten years later Marie Collins wrote to the Archbishop of Dublin, Desmond Connell, who is now a Cardinal. She said that Connell told her that the priest who had abused her was a good priest and that she should not try to ruin his life. Eventually, with the help of the police, and despite intimidation from the church, Marie Collins succeeded in having this priest, Paul McGennis, thrown in jail. It was revealed during the trial that church authorities knew about his many abuses going back to the 1960s, but chose to do nothing.

In the United States over 6000 priests and other religious personnel have had sexual abuse charges brought against them in the past 20 years. That’s about 15% of all priests. And instead of protecting the innocent and holding priests responsible for their crimes, what has been the case, not only in the United States, but in Germany, Belgium, The Netherlands, Great Britain, Italy, Kenya and the Philippians and so on, is a systematic effort by the church hierarchy to cover up the abuse and to protect abusers.

A couple of years ago a scandal pointed all the way up to the Pope himself when it emerged that when as the Archbishop of Munich, he was informed of a decision to return a pedophile priest to church duty. As he was known back then,

Cardinal Ratzinger failed to listen to the pleas of American Bishops who asked the Vatican to defrock a priest in Wisconsin, who molested 200 deaf children over the course of 20 years. A national commission looked into the sexual abuse charges by Roman Catholic priests. The commission, called the Murphy Commission, headed by Yvonne Murphy, a circuit court judge, concluded that the interests of church officials were the maintenance of secrecy, the avoidance of scandal, the protection of the reputation of the church, and the preservation of its assets. All other considerations, including the welfare of children and justice for victims were subordinated to these priorities.

I’ve been doing a series that I’ve titled Derailed . We’ve been looking at the stories of individuals whose lives went off the rails because of a moral failure, or a character flaw. How should the church respond when one of its own, particularly when one of its own leaders, goes off the rails? Today I want to talk about church discipline – what it is and why Vineyard Columbus engages in this increasingly rare, very counter-cultural practice. I’m also going to talk about how we at Vineyard Columbus restore fallen leaders following discipline by the church. I’ve called today’s message, Disciplining and Restoring Fallen Christians . Let’s pray.

1 Corinthians 5 1 It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that even pagans do not tolerate: A man has his father’s wife. 2 And you are proud! Shouldn’t you rather have gone into mourning and have put out of your fellowship the man who has been doing this? 3 For my part, even though I am not physically present, I am with you in spirit. As one who is present with you in this way, I have already passed judgment in the name of our Lord Jesus on the one who has been doing this. 4 So when you are assembled and I am with you in spirit and the power of our Lord Jesus is present, 5 hand this man over to Satan for the destruction of the sinful nature so that his spirit may be saved on the day of the Lord. 6 Your boasting is not good. Don’t you know that a little yeast leavens the whole batch of dough? 7 Get rid of the old yeast, so that you may be a new unleavened batch—as you really are. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. 8 Therefore let us keep the Festival, not with the old bread leavened with malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.

The situation that the Apostle Paul is writing about involves a church member of the church in the ancient city of Corinth, who had taken a wife of his father’s – not his own mother, but a stepmother. This man was living with her sexually in an ongoing relationship. We don’t know if the father had died, or if there had been a divorce. But this kind of relationship, taking up with one’s own stepmother, was forbidden by all of the ancients – both Jewish and pagan.

Why did the church continue to tolerate this? Why did the Christian church at Corinth not do anything about such scandalous behavior?

It’s here that we have to talk about church discipline.

What is the definition of church discipline?

A dear friend of mine, who has gone on to be with the Lord, Dr. John White, was a Christian psychiatrist. He wrote a book some years ago titled Healing the Wounded: The Costly Love of Church Discipline . In his book, Dr. White said that discipline simply means training. For Christians, we need to be trained in godliness. Dr. White gave the illustration of swimming. He said:

I never learned to swim the crawl properly, however, until I prevailed upon a gruff YMCA instructor to take me in hand. Once he had me in the water, he seemed to forget the respect due to a middle-aged college professor. He hollered. He yelled. “Reach down! No, not like that. Reach right down with that left arm…come one! Let your upper body roll…and quit bending those knees!”

He would make me do the same thing again. And again. And again. He kept after me when my bones were heaving and my muscles quivering. But he had sized me up pretty well. The process took several weeks during which I had to practice daily on my own. He would praise me from time to time, and finally he was satisfied.

Who trains Christians? In theory, the Holy Spirit does. But clearly we cannot blame the Holy Spirit for the lack of trained Christians, nor for the pathetic moral corruption of many Christians in the church. So, who trains Christians? The most basic training God gives is meant to come from fellow Christians and everyday encounters. Church discipline is the training of the church by the church .

Now, typically, most churches assume that training in godliness that is training in what God wants for our lives happens entirely on Sunday morning. As you listen to God’s Word being taught you are going to be trained.

But the truth is the real context for being trained in godliness is a small group. Only where a Christian is around other mature Christians and they see how the Christian life is actually lived out in the workplace, in our speech, in our relationships, in our families, only where Christians can be personally encouraged to keep pursuing God’s will and discouraged against sin, only in the context of a small group where you are personally known and some of the things you struggle with are known, can you be trained in godliness. The reason why small groups are at the foundation of our church is because this is the ultimate context in which the church can train the church in godliness.

Today I’m going to speak about a particular type of training that the church does with the church – a small subsection of church discipline that I would call corrective church discipline. Correction is not the entirety of church discipline. The Apostle Paul lays out a broader understanding of the way the church trains the church in 1 Thessalonians 5:13.

1 Thessalonians 5:13 Hold them in the highest regard in love because of their work. Live in peace with each other.

Think of the example of installing smoke alarms in your home. If the only way you go about preventing your home from burning up is to install smoke alarms, you have a pretty limited fire prevention strategy. I hope that you also have your wiring installed according to building codes. Any kind of flammable materials – gasoline, kerosene – is stored safely. For the most part, we want to prevent a fire from beginning. We install a smoke alarm in case a fire does erupt so that we are able to put it out.

This is what corrective church discipline is. It is a smoke alarm. It says we have a major problem here. There is a fire starting. Corrective church discipline might involve a private warning by one Christian to another Christian in which a person says, “I’m really concerned about this new relationship that you’ve formed. It seems like it is really getting in the way of your relationship with God.” James 5:19-20 gives us a picture of corrective church discipline.

James 5:19-20 19 My brothers and sisters, if one of you should wander from the truth and someone should bring them back, 20 remember this: Whoever turns a sinner from the way of error will save them from death and cover over a multitude of sins.

If a person listens, they’ve been won back. If they don’t listen, Jesus gives us a process of having two people go to an individual and talk with them. If they continue to refuse to listen, there is a range of options in bringing correction to a person. Here at Vineyard Columbus we have, from time to time, asked someone to stop attending a small group while they got their life together through counseling. At other times we’ve said to someone, “You need to stop taking communion with the rest of us because your life is lived in absolute contradiction to what you’re saying at the communion table which is ‘I want more of you, Jesus, and more of your reign and rule in my life.’” Occasionally, we’ve said to someone, “What you have done is so destructive that you need to leave the church.” Or as the Apostle Paul says here in 1 Corinthians 5:2:

1 Corinthians 5:2 And you are proud! Shouldn’t you rather have gone into mourning and have put out of your fellowship the man who has been doing this?

Publicity around this depends upon the notoriety of the sin and the influence of the person who has run through all of the warnings, rejected counsel, and persisted in disobedience. For the average person attending Vineyard Columbus, the only folks who might know about an action of discipline might be the few other members of their small group. But if someone was a senior leader here at Vineyard Columbus and had influence throughout the church, then we might communicate about the person’s activity and the discipline leveled to the entire church. The scope of publicity regarding a person’s sin would be the scope of the individual’s influence in the church.

Now, most of the Christian church today in the Western world does not practice the corrective church discipline that we read about here in 1 Corinthians 5.

What are the objections to church discipline?

One of the major barriers to churches exercising discipline is:

The radical individualism of our culture

About 25 years ago, a woman named Marian Guinn sued the 160-member Collinsville Church of Christ in Collinsville, Oklahoma, for over $1 million because they exercised church discipline against her. She alleged an invasion of privacy and intentional infliction of emotional distress.

According to the trial transcripts, Marian Guinn’s sister was a church member and introduced her to the congregation. The church reached out to Marian in a loving and generous way. It moved her and her children to the community after she went through a divorce. It paid her rent for a period of time, took care of her utilities, gave food and clothing to her children.

Marian Guinn joined the church and became a regular attender. While there she learned about the church’s process for withdrawing fellowship from people who persisted in public sin. Sometime after Guinn joined the church, she began drifting away. It became public knowledge in that little bedroom community that she was having an affair with the town’s former mayor, a man by the name of Pat Sharp. The church elders approached Guinn regarding the rumors on three different occasions and urged her to break off her relationship with this married former mayor. But she continued to maintain her relationship with the married man and the elders wrote to her calling her to repent or else they would report the matter to the congregation the following Sunday and request that they remove her from membership.

The next Friday, two days before the congregational meeting, Marian Guinn sent a letter to the elders resigning her membership. But the elders, who believed they still had spiritual responsibility for Marian Guinn, reported the matter to the congregation. Her lawyer during the trial argued before the jury that it doesn’t matter if Marian Guinn fornicated up and down the street [these were his literal words]; it was nobody else’s business but hers. The jury of her peers apparently agreed, as did a sizeable portion of Tulsa’s population. Most people felt that it was not the church’s business to get involved in the private lives of its members. The jury awarded Marian Guinn $390,000. The Oklahoma Supreme Court later reversed the lower court on several of its rulings, but returned the case for retrial on an invasion of privacy charge. The church ended up settling out of court with Marian Guinn for an undisclosed sum. Now this kind of individualism in which we say, “It’s nobody else’s business what I do with my life” is completely incompatible with trying to be a Christian. You cannot hold on to radical American individualism and also be a Christian. The way someone becomes a Christian is that you give your life to Christ. We confess our sins to God and we receive God’s forgiveness and his healing. And then we undertake spiritual disciplines of prayer, Bible-reading, sharing our faith with others and these disciplines assist us to grow. But this Christian life can only flourish in the context of community. You can’t flourish as a Christian on your own. Alcoholics Anonymous discovered this principle 75 years ago. If someone is an addict, what that means is that your will is nailed to some kind of object, or desire, or person and on your own you can set your will free from the thing that it is attached to. Alcoholics Anonymous says that we need to admit our powerlessness over addiction, this case, alcohol, and we have to turn our lives over to God. But we have to become honest about our moral failures. We have to confess our shortcomings in the context of a supportive community. We then need to give away what we’ve learned to other people. None of this, AA says, can be done alone. They have a line in AA that applies to the Christian life. The line in AA is:

When we isolate, we are sick. Recovery takes place in community.

When we isolate, we are sick. We say, “My life is nobody else’s business” and we continue to live a lie, we’ll remain sick. The only way to get healed is to come into the light in a supportive community, a small group, a recovery group, and we say, “Hi, I’m Pete; I’m an alcoholic.” “Hi, Pete…” And then the healing begins.

So, we can support radical American individualism and have millions and millions of people remain sick, nailed to the various objects of addiction, or we can come into the light with each other in community and then the healing begins.

The other main objection to church discipline is:

The radical misunderstanding of the word grace

The Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 5 corrects two sins in the church in Corinth. Only one of them had to do with the offender’s sexual sin. The other was the arrogance of the church.

1 Corinthians 5:2 And you are proud! Shouldn’t you rather have gone into mourning and have put out of your fellowship the man who has been doing this?

It is wrong for a teenager to use drugs. But there is something even worse about parents who know their teenagers are using drugs and then refuse to do anything about it. I know a young woman who said her mother found pills in her purse when she was a teenager. She said her mother took the pills out of her purse and put them on her dresser and never said anything to her. She said, “At that moment, I realized my mother hated me. She didn’t care enough about me to talk to me about my drug use.” And so the woman in rebellion and anger spiraled down into serious drug addiction.

There is something wrong when a person has an affair and commits adultery against their spouse. But there is something even more wrong when their mate says, “I don’t care.” The refusal to confront sin, the flabbiness and weakness of America today in demanding more from our leaders - our political leaders, our church leaders, the general shrug of the shoulders, the almost arrogant, “Oh, come on now, are you still so hung up? Everyone does it.” Paul says what grieves him more than the individual’s incest is the church’s refusal to deal with the incest. He says instead of being so arrogant, so proud of their freedom in Christ, and their refusal to judge anyone, they really should have mourned. “But shouldn’t you rather have been filled with grief and put out of your fellowship the man who did this?”

The reason that many churches have such flabby responses to radical sin in our midst is because of a deep misunderstanding of the word “grace.” Grace is not simply a doctrine in which we say to people, “Don’t worry about your sin. You are saved and you will be going to heaven.” Grace is not simply a religious exercise. “Don’t worry about your sin; you’ve taken the Eucharist, you’re OK.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer called such grace – grace as a doctrine, grace as a sacrament – that was being dispensed by the German church in the 1930’s as being “cheap grace.” He wrote in his classic book The Cost of Discipleship :

That is what we mean by cheap grace, the grace which amounts to the justification of sin without the justification of repentant sinner who departs from sin and from whom sin departs. Cheap grace is not the kind of forgiveness of sin which frees us from the toils of sin. Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession, absolution without personal confession. Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.

So many Christians today, including Christians and leaders in Vineyard Columbus, regularly misuse the word “grace.” If someone is living in a way that is radically contrary to the will of our Lord Jesus Christ and a Christian will say, “Well, we need to show that other Christian grace” which essentially means we need to unconditionally support this other Christian in their self-destructive lifestyle. We need to let the other Christian know that even though they are damaging themselves, they are damaging their relationship with God, and they are hurting people around them, that’s OK. Real grace, as Bonhoeffer said, does not simply justify the sin, it justifies the sinner. Real grace comes to someone who is living a self-destructive life and says, “I want to connect you up with God. I want your life to flourish. I want to see you succeed and be blessed and prosper. I love you too much to watch you go headlong down this path toward hell. So I’m going to take a risk in our relationship; I know that you might reject me, but I’m going to talk to you about the impact of what you’re doing on yourself, on God, and on those around you, who love you.”

Why do we exercise church discipline?

What are the purposes of church discipline?

Let’s read 1 Corinthians 5:1 again.

1 Corinthians 5:1 It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and of a kind that even pagans do not tolerate: A man has his father’s wife.

The first reason why the church needs to exercise discipline is to:

To restore the reputation of the church

Do you know the impact of the Roman Catholic Church’s refusal to exercise discipline against thousands of Catholic priests, who were known to be abusing children and teenagers? Do you know the impact of the massive cover-up by the Roman Catholic Church for decades of the abuse by their own clergy? The impact of refusing to hold people accountable?

In Ireland, which was the most Catholic nation on earth, the Irish government had a unique relationship with the Vatican. The Vatican basically prescribed Irish legislation. In Ireland Roman Catholic attendance at Mass was cut in half in a little over a decade. It dropped from 80% to less than 40% in a little over a decade.

The Roman Catholic Church in America is hemorrhaging members. It is estimated that they are losing four to five Americans for every one convert that they’re seeing. And certainly the reason for this is not just a growing secularism of our society, but as the result of the scandal and foot-dragging, the reputation of the church got so damaged that many, many Roman Catholics said, “I don’t want to be part of any institution that is capable of this. I certainly don’t want to raise my children in an institution that tolerates the abuse of children.”

A few decades ago, one of the great evangelical leaders of the second half of the 20 th century, John Stott, wrote this:

The secular world is almost wholly unimpressed by the Church today. There is widespread departure from Christian moral standards. So long as the Church tolerates sin itself and does not judge itself…and fails to manifest visibly the power of Jesus Christ to save from sin, it will never attract the world to Christ.

I’ve told you on many occasions that I was raised in a Jewish family in New York City. By the time I was a teenager I became an atheist. Then I went off to college in Cleveland at Case Western Reserve and met a young woman named Marlene, who began to talk to me about Jesus. After we became friends, the thing that spoke most loudly to me about the reality of Marlene’s faith, was definitely not her words, or her arguments, but the extraordinary attactiveness of her life. Marlene was the first really decent human being that I had ever met. She told the truth. She went out of her way to apologize when she blew it. She maintained a really high moral standard concerning her dating and sex life. It was this distinctiveness, her refusal to blur the lines that drew me to Christ.

Some people think that if a church begins to exercise church discipline, most people will leave. I think the opposite is true. I think people are attracted today to places and institutions that hold themselves accountable. We’re looking as a country for leadership. As a country we’re looking for transparency. We long to believe, but no place is enabling us to believe. No institution is credible.

Roger Finke and Rodney Stark examined church records in the U.S. from the founding of our Republic in 1776 for the next 220 years. Here is what these two sociologists of religion discovered about church going in America throughout our history.

Many observers have discounted the rise in church membership on the ground that it was accompanied by a decline and an acceptance of traditional religious doctrines. But this simply isn’t so. Not all denominations shared in this immense rise in membership rates [over the last 220 years], and to the degree that denominations rejected traditional doctrines and ceased to make serious demands on their followers, they ceased to prosper. The churching of America was accomplished by aggressive churches committed to vivid other worldliness.

What Finke and Stark are saying is that the only churches that have ever grown in America are churches that are deeply committed to the doctrines taught to us by Jesus and the Apostles, and to the distinctive life modeled to us by Jesus and the Apostles. It is this distinctiveness that makes the Christian church attractive.

Why do we exercise church discipline? To restore the reputation of the church.

To restore the faith of the offender

1 Corinthians 5:4-5 4 So when you are assembled and I am with you in spirit and the power of our Lord Jesus is present, 5 hand this man over to Satan for the destruction of the sinful nature so that his spirit may be saved on the day of the Lord.

What is the Apostle Paul talking about when he says, “hand the person over to Satan for the destruction of the sinful nature,” or more literally, “the destruction of the flesh?” What Paul is speaking about when he talks about the flesh being destroyed, is that when a person is removed from the warmth, affection, and love of the local church and turned back over to the world, when the approval and the support of a person from their church is withdrawn, this will strike a blow to the

person’s flesh. In the Bible, when Paul uses the term “flesh”, he is talking about a person’s independence from God, their self-sufficiency, their “living life” detached from the real source of life, which is Christ. To live in the flesh is to live apart from Christ, to just do your own thing, to follow your own wisdom, to refuse to trust in the Lord with all your heart. And it is that autonomy, that independence from God that is shattered by church discipline. Church discipline essentially exposes people’s lies.

When people are living a lie, when their whole existence fundamentally is a lie, when they are lying to others about how well they are doing and how spiritual they are and how much they are serving and giving, and they begin to lie to themselves and convince themselves that this sin is no big deal, this sin is just a weak area and everyone has their weak area. Everyone has his or her particular problem. This sin is my little weakness and it is not so bad. They not only lie to others and to themselves, but they lie to God. And if you keep lying, your relationship with God is more and more just a product of your own imagination. You say before God that you have a real relationship with God while you disobey God’s warnings and refuse to heed God’s corrections and treat God as if God will not ever expose and bring to the light.

Corrective church discipline is meant to be a wake-up call. It’s a mirror held up saying, “Let us show you where you are at.” It is a pail of ice water in the face. It is the simple statement of truth that, friend, your life is completely out of sync with your profession of Christianity. Whatever else you say, think, profess, and pray, here is the reality of where you are living.

We exercise corrective church discipline because we know people’s lives go better when they live in the truth. We can’t make up our own universes. We can’t make up our own rules for life. We exercise church discipline, to rescue the unrepentant.

1 Corinthians 5:5 When you are assembled in the name of our Lord Jesus and I am with you in spirit, and the power of the Lord Jesus is present, hand this man over to Satan so that the sinful nature may be destroyed and his spirit saved on the day of the Lord.

In other words, remove this person from the warmth of Christian fellowship. Turn the person out into the world. Let them go their own way, away from the protection and the care and the affection of the church. Do we hate the person? Shun the person? No. He is not an enemy. But you can’t continue to relate to the individual as if everything is normal.

Why do we exercise church discipline? To restore the reputation of the church. To restore the faith of the offender.

To restore the purity of the church

1 Corinthians 5:6-8 6 Your boasting is not good. Don’t you know that a little yeast leavens the whole batch of dough? 7 Get rid of the old yeast, so that you may be a new unleavened batch—as you really are. For Christ, our Passover lamb, has been sacrificed. 8 Therefore let us keep the Festival, not with the old bread leavened with malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.

The apostle Paul is saying that sin is like yeast. Actually, a better translation for yeast is leaven. See, what people would do in the ancient world is they would keep a portion of last week’s dough and allow it to ferment and then add it to this week’s dough. They would keep that up week after week. They would make what we call sour dough bread. Anyway, if you keep this up too long, bacteria can spread and make people sick. So once a year the people were ordered to purge their houses of all leaven and start up the process all over again. This was the Feast of Unleavened Bread that corresponded with the Passover.

Paul is saying that sin in an individual is like that leaven. It has a tendency to infect everything. It poisons the atmosphere. If sin is left unchecked in a church, it can kill a church. And doesn’t our experience tell us that one person’s sin can affect more than himself or herself, that we are not autonomous. That gossip will affect our ability to trust each other and our ability to trust the leaders of the church. Someone gets divorced and other marriages that are teetering will also begin to fall over.

Paul, later in 1 Corinthians, says, “Bad company ruins good morals.” We say that to our children. We are concerned when our children begin to hang around with the wrong crowd; we know they are going to be influenced. And when you get a bunch of people in the church who don’t take discipleship seriously, don’t take sin seriously and don’t take God seriously, and they lower the overall tone of the church and their influence spreads poison in the church.

The Lord Jesus Christ wants to come back for a bride, a bride called the church – a pure and spotless bride, not some streetwalker. He is coming back for a clean church, a holy church, a church that loves him and wants to spend eternity with their husband.

What is the ultimate hope of church discipline?

You know, it is absolutely the case that some people will not receive correction – private conversation, public disclosure – some people won’t receive that. We read in Proverbs 17:10:

Proverbs 17:10

A rebuke impresses a discerning person more than a hundred lashes a fool.

And in Proverbs 14:9:

Proverbs 14:9 Fools mock at making amends for sin, but goodwill is found among the upright.

And in Proverbs 27:22:

Proverbs 27:22 Though you grind fools in a mortar, grinding them like grain with a pestle, you will not remove their folly from them.

Some people when confronted will become angry and defensive. Some people when you challenge them will go on the warpath – how dare you challenge me? Some people may lie to our faces or simply refuse to talk about the situation and tell you that it is none of your business. But some may be heart-broken; some may be convicted by discipline. Some may wake up and recognize that their lives are a mess. They may look into the mirror that you’re holding up and say, “I don’t like what I see. I’ve really gotten myself into a bad place. The Lord has been speaking to me about this for months, or years. I realize I do need to change.” And the person my fully turn their lives over to Christ.

The ultimate hope of church discipline is the restoration of the believer and the restoration of the relationship. That’s what happened in Corinth after the discipline was exercised against this offender, apparently, he repented.

2 Corinthians 2:5-8 5 If anyone has caused grief, he has not so much grieved me as he has grieved all of you to some extent—not to put it too severely. 6 The punishment inflicted on him by the majority is sufficient. 7 Now instead, you ought to forgive and comfort him, so that he will not be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow. 8 I urge you, therefore, to reaffirm your love for him.

The discipline had the desire affect. Now Paul says, it is time for you to reaffirm your love for the offender.

In February 2011, following our church services on a Sunday, I was out in the lobby between the staircases greeting people as I always do. One of our pastors came up to me and said, “Rich, Bill Christensen, our associate pastor, says, that you’ve got to come down now to our ministry center – that is our office complex – right way. He needs you.” I said to the pastor, “What does he need me for? There are lots of pastors around and I’m greeting folks.” He walked away and he came back and said, “Bill said it is an emergency; you’ve got to come.”

So I thought to myself, “What could the emergency possible be? Why does he need me?” As I was walking down the hallway from the main building to our office building, my anxiety level began to rise. I thought, “Did something happen to Marlene or Naomi or to one of my kids? Did something happen to my dad? What’s the news that he must tell me about now?”

I was ushered into this private counseling office with Bill and a man that I knew from the church and another man that I had never met. Bill said, “You need to sit down.” So I sat down and this man that I’d never met introduced himself to me. He began to tell me a story of his wife and some difficulties she had had in the past. The longer he talked, the greater my fear became. I thought, “Lord, please don’t have him say that his wife had an affair with one our pastors. Please, Lord.” I was silently praying and this man kept talking. And then he got to the end of his story and he said, “And so, beginning in August, Steve Robbins, one of your pastors, began sleeping with my wife.”

The impact of that revelation, that one of my dearest friends in the church, one of our respected senior leaders was carrying on an immoral relationship felt like I was hit by a wave and turned onto my head, in the course of just a few moments. This revelation was absolutely shattering. I just put my head in my hands and began to weep. I said, “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry that this happened to you.”

About an hour later I called Steve into my office and asked him if it was true. He told me it was. I asked him to describe what had happened. He told me what happened and I fired him on the spot. Then I reported exactly what we had learned to our pastors, to our staff, and to you here in the church.

We made a decision as leaders here that however embarrassing and heartbreaking the news of one of our leaders’ fall would be, that we weren’t going to cover it up in some kind of misguided attempt at institutional self-preservation. We said to ourselves, “The only thing really that binds our church together is our trust that good or bad the pastors will tell us the truth. If we don’t tell the truth to the church about this crisis in our leadership, then we may as well pack up and close up shop and go home.”

You responded wonderfully well. Oh, we had lots of critics. But the overwhelming majority of people in this church wrote me letters and cards, stopped me on the street with words of encouragement saying, “Thank you. We’re so sad that this happened to Steve, but our esteem for Vineyard Columbus has grown immensely. We feel like it is a much safer place now. We know that if something happens, you will tell us and we’ll go through it together.” The overwhelming majority of you were incredibly supportive during what was the most painful experience that I’ve had in 25 years of ministry.

We laid out a course of repentance for Steve. Of course, the relationship had to be completely broken off with absolutely no contact between the parties. We insisted on marriage counseling for Steve and his wife, and individual counseling. And we insisted on an extended period of time for personal reflection.

Steve did everything that we asked him to do to demonstrate his repentance.

Back in the 1970s there was a song written by a guy named Tony Orlando. It was called Tie A Yellow Ribbon . The song was about a guy who was in prison for three years and who was just released. He was making his way back to his hometown on a bus. He was wondering whether or not his wife (or girlfriend) would receive him back after his fall and his imprisonment. Here are the words to the song:

I'm comin' home, I've done my time Now I've got to know what is and isn't mine If you received my letter telling you I'd soon be free Then you'll know just what to do If you still want me If you still want me

Tie a yellow ribbon 'round the old oak tree It's been three long years Do you still want me (still want me) If I don't see a ribbon 'round the old oak tree I'll stay on the bus Forget about us Put the blame on me If I don't see a yellow ribbon 'round the ole oak tree

Bus driver, please look for me 'cause I couldn't bear to see what I might see I'm really still in prison And my love, she holds the key A simple yellow ribbon's what I need to set me free I wrote and told her please

Now the whole damned bus is cheering' And I can't believe I see A hundred yellow ribbons 'round the old oak tree

I'm comin' home…

Yellow ribbons have become a symbol now of welcoming troops back home after service in Iraq and in Afghanistan. I believe that the blood of Jesus Christ, shed

on the cross, tied a yellow ribbon around the gates that open up to the Kingdom of God telling repented sinners that they are welcome, that they are welcome back into God’s family. And I believe that every single church, if it is going to be true to the gospel, ought to be decorated with hundreds of yellow ribbons, saying to sinners who repent: Welcome Home!

Today, I have the privilege of welcoming Steve Robbins back into fellowship here at Vineyard Columbus! He’s not coming back on our pastoral staff. We’re not bringing him back into leadership. But we are bringing Steve back as a beloved brother in Christ, a brother who fell, but who has repented and who is now welcome back home!

Disciplining and Restoring Fallen Leaders Rich Nathan July 1, 2012 Derailed: What Causes People to Fail Series 1 Corinthians 5

I. What is the definition of church discipline?

II. What are the objections to church discipline? A. The radical individualism of our culture B. The radical misunderstanding of the word “grace”

III. What are the purposes of church discipline?

A. Restore the reputation of the church

B. Restore the faith of the offender

C. Restore the purity of the church

IV. What is the ultimate hope of church discipline?