Spinning Matthew 18
by Scot McKnight & Laura Barringer
The excerpt below is taken from A Church Called Tov by Scot McKnight and Laura Barringer, published in 2020 by Tyndale House Publishers (© 2020 by Scot McKnight and Laura McKnight Barringer), and is shared here with the authors’ permission.
Tov - the Hebrew word in Scripture that we translate “good.”
[A] method that leaders in a toxic church culture sometimes use to control the narrative is to attack the way in which critical feedback or allegations of wrongdoing are brought to light. At Willow Creek, for example, the women and supporters who alleged inappropriate behavior by Bill Hybels were told they should have “followed Matthew 18” and talked to Bill privately first. This appeal to Scripture sounds right initially. Following the Bible is a good thing—except for when “following the Bible” is actually not following the Bible. Here is the text of Matthew 18:15-17 (NRSV), along with some brief commentary:
If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone.
Sometimes this kind of conversation works.
If the member listens to you, you have regained that one.
Sometimes it doesn’t work. There are no statistics on this, but some people will never admit to doing anything wrong. They might make excuses or try to cast blame somewhere else. They may try to minimize or trivialize the other person’s concern. They might fake their way through an apology while plotting revenge. Or they may flat-out deny everything. When such refusal happens, Jesus said, try again, but take someone else with you as a witness.
But if you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses.
If this doesn’t work, the consequences become more serious.
If the member refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church.
The goal of all these steps is to bring about repentance and restoration. But if telling the church doesn’t work, the person must be separated from the congregation. This has often been understood to refer to excommunication.
If the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.
It’s one thing to set this procedure in motion when someone has said something ugly about another person or has wrongly taken credit for something. But when a woman or a child who has been sexually abused is required to meet one-on-one with the perpetrator, it becomes morally inexcusable and psychologically violent to insist upon legalistically following Matthew 18. Such an approach becomes a cynical dodge and is almost always designed to protect the leader or the church. Yet it happens far too often.
At Willow Creek, “following Matthew 18” was trumpeted loudly by leaders who sought to protect the reputation of the institution rather than showing concern for the victims. “We are saddened with the way this has played out in the media recently,” the head of the Willow Creek elder board said on April 10, 2018, “and we are committed to moving forward in a biblical manner.” The obvious inference was that the women and their supporters, in going public, had taken an approach that was not biblical.
A similar appeal to Matthew 18 was made by Wes Feltner, who sexually abused two teenage female students in 2002 while serving as their youth pastor at First Southern Baptist Church in Evansville, Indiana. After years of suppressed silence […] the two women went public with their stories. In response, Feltner took issue not with the allegations but with how the abuse came to light:
The Bible directs God’s people to take their grievances first to the person accused and, if that person won’t listen, to try again and bring a witness; and if the person still won’t listen, then to take it to the church (Matthew 18:15-17). The group circulating these allegations did not bring them to me, rather, they took them directly to the church and, not being satisfied with the church’s response, they have taken them to the general public. . . .
Meanwhile, not having spoken with me for 17 years, they have organized to destroy my reputation and my career.
When the women’s allegations were made public, Feltner was dropped as a candidate for a pastoral position in Tennessee and subsequently resigned as lead pastor of a church in Minnesota where he had worked for six years.
Two or Three Witnesses
Another biblical text that is often misapplied in cases of sexual abuse is 1 Timothy 5:19: “Do not entertain an accusation against an elder unless it is brought by two or three witnesses.” Again, as with Matthew 18, an otherwise reasonable biblical standard becomes psychologically and morally inexcusable when applied legalistically to cases of sexual abuse. Think about it: Sexual harassment and abuse do not typically happen in the presence of witnesses. Consider two well-known cases for example: Mark Aderholt did not assault Anne Marie Miller in the middle of a youth group meeting; Andy Savage did not sexually assault Jules Woodson until he was alone with her in a car on a deserted country road.
Before anyone makes 1 Timothy 5:19 a proof text for a biblical approach to allegations of sexual harassment, abuse, or assault, consider the circumstances with wisdom. Assuming that most men who harass women do it privately, which is more than a fair assumption, one would have to say that this text almost never works for sexual allegations against church leaders. In fact, using Matthew 18 and 1 Timothy 5 in such cases is profoundly unbiblical and profoundly harmful to victims of sexual harassment and abuse.
What is especially tragic, and ironic, in the stories about the Roman Catholic Church, Willow Creek, Sovereign Grace Church, Harvest Bible Chapel, and any number of other examples that could be named, is that multiple people came forward—in other words, more than two or three witnesses—with enough similarity in their stories, and yet they still were not believed. Instead, the wounded were retraumatized by church leaders who responded with biblical law instead of grace, mercy, and discernment.
Keeping It In-house
A third passage that is sometimes used as an argument for not making allegations public is 1 Corinthians 6:1-8, which reads in part, “If any of you has a dispute with another, do you dare to take it before the ungodly for judgment instead of before the Lord’s people? . . . Is it possible that there is nobody among you wise enough to judge a dispute between believers? But instead, one brother takes another to court—and this in front of unbelievers!” This is an important text in which the apostle Paul establishes a godly principle for conflict resolution within the church. But it’s also obvious, is it not, that sexual abuse and sexual harassment are not merely “a dispute between believers.” And certainly if the act is criminal, it must be reported to law enforcement and resolved through the legal system. This is a lesson that the church at large has been all too slow to learn.
The answer to how these verses should be applied in situations of abuse involves simple wisdom: The abused don’t need to face their abuser—and certainly not one-on-one. And no church should ever demand two or three witnesses for abuse that happens in secret. It’s unconscionable and profoundly unbiblical. Moreover, Scripture should never be used to deflect attention away from what happened to focus instead on how the allegations were brought to light.
Caring for the people involved while pursuing the truth with wisdom should always be our objective—even if the truth is ugly. But far too often, churches make decisions that first and foremost protect the institution and its leaders. What will happen to giving, to attendance, to our reputation if this story comes out in public? How a church responds to criticism, or handles information that could damage the reputation of a leader or the church, reveals the culture of that church. Again, compassion, truth, and wisdom should be our guiding lights. But when a culture is toxic, priorities change and truth-telling often takes a backseat.
Eventually, however, though it may take a very long time, the truth will come out. When a congregation learns that all the denials, all the spin and alternative narratives were a lie, the church’s culture is unmasked as toxic, and the pastor and elders and deacons and other leaders are shown to be complicit—and even intentionally deceptive at times.
The word most often on the lips of Jesus for this was hypocrisy. When pastors tell lies, the truth quotient in a church collapses—leading to cynicism, mistrust, and betrayal. When people sit in church on Sunday morning, looking at the pastor and thinking, “What’s he hiding?” or “What’s the full story?” or “What’s really going on with this guy behind closed doors?” the church’s credibility collapses. An American scholar of the Vatican put this all into depressingly clear terms:
The Catholic Church is certainly the organization that talks most about the truth. The word is always on its lips. It is forever brandishing “truth” around. And at the same time it is an organization more given to lying than any other in the world.
Pastors, leaders, and congregants in a church with a tov culture are free to tell stories that are true. In a toxic church culture, pastors and leaders tell stories that are false, while the congregation either goes along with the deception or lives in blissful ignorance. […] The spin at work in these narratives is yet another warning sign of a toxic culture taking root.
Scot McKnight is a professor of New Testament at Northern Seminary and an author.