Loving the Church, Leaving the Scandals
Someone once said it: Everywhere the apostle Paul went they had a riot or a revival. Now all we do is serve tea and cookies.
Not exactly.
Riots are still much in vogue. But instead of non-Christians attempting to kill Christians, it is now believers throwing stones at each other.
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Every day, it seems, you can read another news article about a church split, scandal or lawsuit. Of course, we never read about these horrible bloodlettings in the Christian press. We’re busy defending the kingdom. Instead, the articles appear in the secular press. And for every fight that makes the newspapers, there are hundreds of others that remain successfully hidden. These are the private wars accomplished by smiling hoodlums under the guise of love and honor.
More and more, however, God seems to be allowing things formerly done behind the closed doors of church business meetings to now become public.
It used to be a pastor could abandon his wife and abscond with some poor young thing half his age, a deacon could slug it out with a fellow deacon in the choir room over who gets to say the prayer at the Lord’s Supper or the youth director could be fired because his wife wore slacks to the church picnic—and no one outside the select few would ever know.
Not anymore.
Now, thanks to the miracle of the media, let a church treasurer be accused of stealing, let the head of a parachurch ministry use donations to buy a new car, and the entire world will read about it in the papers the next morning.
Take the case of the Good Neighbor Baptist Church in Newark, New Jersey—a tiny group of people who somehow forgot to be good neighbors.
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