Talking Out Of Turn

Church polity and discipline in our group wasn’t codified anywhere, at least not anywhere that I had seen. Polity tended toward the single-pastor model, with elders being whoever had been around for a while and caused little or no trouble being in a sort of advisory role. Discipline was theoretically Matthew 18:15-18. Both issues only really came up when there was a big problem that was out in the open and couldn’t be ignored. There had been big problems before in my time, but they were always under the surface, and when they came out, then you knew that we were already near the end, and somebody was going out the door. Open communication was a laugh; the more savvy elder-like people communicated with the teacher via email, and enough of those emails were shared with me that I had quite a library of information about the sins and foibles of practically everybody in California or the St. Louis area.

Those of you who were connected with the ministry between 2000 and 2004, you should know that if you traded email with the teacher, then it is very likely that I know something about it. He encouraged and sometimes insisted on my reading his email (being the sysadmin for our server, I could do that). This made me very uncomfortable and I didn’t do it unbidden very often. The tricky part was, this was back when it was nearly impossible to keep a mailbox free of spam, and I had to tweak filters constantly to accomplish it. The teacher hated spam (well, who doesn’t?) and complained about it often enough that I had to pass a roving eye over this mailbox pretty regularly to catch the new ones before he saw them, and to get some idea of the trends. Also he asked for a few things to come that sure looked like spam to my untrained eye, so I had to keep watching to be sure that we didn’t automatically delete things he wanted. Occasionally I would get caught up in reading his email and do it for reasons that had nothing to do with spam filtering, to satisfy idle curiosity, and I would justify my actions to myself by remembering that he had told me to do it. But thankfully the Lord would often at these times send another criticism of me from somebody in the ministry to the teacher, and when I read that, I would become fairly angry (because rarely did these people complain to my face), and then I would realize that the Lord never meant for me to know a lot of these negative things, and I would stop reading his email until he complained about spam again. This is how I learned that he had told people I was a Calvinist (years before I became one or even really knew what that meant), among other things.

The storm of December 2002-January 2003 blew in during one of those times when I had stopped reading the teacher’s email. By this time the opinion in St. Louis was unanimous regarding the tapes we were getting from California: they didn’t do anything for anybody. The hour-long tapes were dense with information but nobody could learn anything from them. They hadn’t been about expositing the Bible for months, and many of them never cracked open a Bible. They were all about current events, about what the Muslims and the Europeans really wanted, about what “Edom and Dan” were doing behind the scenes. There was no power for living life in these tapes, no gospel message, not even a communicable understanding of prophecy; when we listened to a tape, we looked at each other and asked, “so, did we learn anything we can share with anybody?” And the answer was always “no.”

We were not confrontational, though, as I said before; the more charitable assumed that they just didn’t understand (we had one woman in the group who would listen to tapes 4-5 times, one right after another, trying to understand what was being said, and blaming herself when she didn’t), and the more practical just hoped that this would blow over and actual teaching would start up again at some point. We could get away with that sort of thing, though, since we were in St. Louis, and I, at least, was very committed to verse-by-verse teaching. The fact is, I wasn’t an entertaining or charismatic speaker at all; I had no anecdotes or tales to tell, no good jokes, no hook. Having to drive someplace and sit through this news-update teaching every week (or twice a week), however, might have been a different story for us. It was for one family (who are among my readers, and who I hope will let me know if I tell this part of the story wrong at all). There were several problems between the teacher and this growing family that were all coming to a head at the same time:

1. They had been chided for their lack of commitment, meaning they weren’t coming to both meetings every week, and remember that a meeting consisted of nothing but one hour of the teacher’s take on current events at this point, and solemn pronouncements about what was going to happen in the immediate future, or what to look for next, almost like a combination of play-by-play and color commentary on the Middle East.
2. They were struggling to integrate their new son-in-law into their family. This was another case of the confusing nature of God’s revelations to the teacher; at one point when the teacher met the future (at this time) son-in-law, he had decided that he was no good, but later when he met him again, he was quite sure that this was a good one. Both times had the usual weight of God’s “nudge and wink” leadership style with the teacher; he had a very subjective take on revelation from God.
3. They had trusted the teacher too much with their personal lives in a counseling setting.

This last one had, and still has, a bad effect in this group. One assumes that such a man of God will be able to help, but advice was nearly always worldly and never biblical. The teacher had a distinctly sub-biblical view of divorce and remarriage, and it is surprising how often I saw people being advised to leave their husbands or wives. Psychological fads came and went; people were pushed to books like Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus rather than confronted with their own sinful habits and encouraged in the process of sanctification. It wasn’t even good Wesleyan counseling (and the teacher came straight from a Wesleyan perfectionism background, although I’m not sure he knows that). Then the teacher aired the counselees’ problems with anybody he felt close to at the moment, and unfortunately I learned so many things that I never ever wanted, or needed, to know. There are a lot of hurting people in the world, who have done terrible things or had terrible things done to them, but their pain was not softened by some man uncovering old sins for the world to see, or proclaiming their current struggles. Openness and accountability are good things, but only when people willingly submit to them, trusting to the body of Christ to help heal old wounds and strengthen what remains, guided by a loving shepherd placed in his position by God.

Sheep who have heard the Master’s voice at some point know when they haven’t heard it in a while… and sometimes they start asking to hear it again. I don’t condone grumbling, but sometimes it’s more of the low rumble of a hungry spiritual stomach. A shepherd should know the difference, and take care of the real needs with a light touch of correction about the grumbling. Every single person who talks back isn’t Korah and his sons, and the ground doesn’t always need to open up and swallow them. In short, on one or two occasions the “teaching” was disrupted by our family wondering out loud why any of this was important, and pleading for something more (although I will admit that it wasn’t clear to the teacher that this was anything short of open rebellion).

I have a megabyte or two of archived email about this, and my own notes from the period, but I will spare further details, and just give the general outline. The wife was cast out, being the more vocal of the two, and the husband was invited to remain. A kangaroo court of elders was convened, people who exercised no actual authority over the local church other than in moments like these, and they agreed with the assessment and recommendation of the teacher. The wife was labeled a grumbler and a backbiter, and given a list of conditions that must be met before fellowship would be extended to her again: mandatory attendance, public or semi-public apology, and silence in the church. The husband, deciding to ignore the “grace” being extended to him by the church, opted to defend his wife, and shared her fate. Loss of fellowship meant that she was not even to be given the tapes of the teachings anymore, which ironically was probably the part that was the least loss to her.

Where do I come into this? Because at some point, the family said that they had plenty of adequate teaching coming from their tape subscription to my teachings, and they encouraged others to get my tapes and listen to me as well. Whenever anybody complained in their presence about the lack of exposition in the California teachings, they were directed to try mine. Few did, but we did expand our subscription list by a couple of names. Word got back to the teacher that they had said that they wouldn’t go hungry for teaching, because they were getting my tapes, and then it came down to me. I was not ordered to cut them off, but I was invited to consider what the best thing was to do.

Now, for me to join in their discipline, I felt that I needed to be equally convinced of their guilt and their need for discipline. But, to be perfectly honest, I felt that they had said what nearly everybody I knew was thinking: what is the point of all this? When are we going to be hearing from the Word again? Their son-in-law had received a new Bible, and mentioned casually after months attending the studies in California, that he was really looking forward to the day when he would get to use it. What does this say, after all? So, I told the teacher that I had wondered the same things that they had asked. What is the point?

I think the teacher was a little surprised at this. How could Charlie not understand this? We had an interesting telephone dialogue about this, in which I learned that:

1. Bible teaching is not useful for life, because people who have a relationship with God get what they need directly from the Bible or the Spirit.
2. Evangelism (never discussed previously except with some derision) should be the focus of the people in our ministries.
3. All the evangelistic systems had failed, and the only effective way now to witness to people was to show them that we could predict the future via our prophetic system.
4. Teaching like I was doing was just “fattening calves.”
5. The family under discipline in California was tearing the church apart by telling people that I was on their side, and I needed to make a strong and clear statement to keep the church from splitting.

I had a higher view of church authority in practice than in my theology; I accepted these strong rebukes with as much humility as I could muster, although I was angry. There were so many inconsistencies in these points that they overwhelmed me, and I began to assume that I must truly be “more stupid than any man,” since I couldn’t grasp this. Standing on the solid presuppositional foundation that “God speaks to the teacher,” I found myself once again in a place where I couldn’t fight back. I doubted that the church would split over my opinion of this rift (as far as I could tell nobody there cared about a word I said except for Patrick and this family; the rest might subscribe for a month or maybe even a year the first year of the California move, and then not renew).

Still, I struggled. I had to have this excommunication trial all over again internally, but who could I accept as witnesses? Both sides said that the others had lied. The elders of the group in California, as far as I could tell, had reasons for going along with the status quo, and some had been personally offended by the family in question in the past. The “trial” in California had been conducted with evidence provided by the teacher, and there was no real attempt at communication or reconciliation that I had seen, except for a couple of olive branches held out to the husband—never the wife.

Both sides pleaded with me. Because I was still thinking that the ministry was a godly one deep down, I “knew” that at some level, there was no call for any attempts to dismantle it, from inside or out. (Obviously if I still held that opinion, I wouldn’t be writing this.) And there is the real problem: my presupposition, that the teacher was from God, warts and all, forced me to my ultimate decision. After hemming and hawing for a month or two (or more? Don’t remember now), I decided to side with the church against the family. I knew in my heart that the family was more in the right than the teacher was, that a good shepherd would gently lead and take care of the real needs of his sheep, and that ultimately the teacher was less trustworthy in personal matters than this family was. But I had to stand with God, and God, I was sure, would ultimately be on the side of the ministry.

My slowly-growing view of the sovereignty of God had something to do with this, too. I was learning that our Father does look out for His children, and that even if this was a travesty of justice, it was one that He permitted, and even in some sense ordained. I had to make the best call as I saw it, so I sided against the truth in this case, because I didn’t want to be responsible for the destruction or further disintegration of God’s work in the ministry. I cut them off. It took a while, and I never, ever stopped feeling guilty for it.

They came back eventually, and then were cast out again, but by then there were many other factors which made them the least of my problems, and they continued to receive our tapes until we stopped making and sending them to anybody.

In the long run, I betrayed the truth and sold the sheep to the hireling. I was confused and disoriented, thinking that black was white and wrong was right, but I still bear responsibility for that. I should have stood firm. We should have separated from that ministry at the beginning of 2003. But the Lord still had more for us to learn, and the year 2003 was the year that we would learn it.

The rest of this post is what I wrote at the lowest point, when I was forced to make the decision between the family and the church. I was (and likely still am) a hopelessly pretentious writer. Please put up with the secular music quotes.

Originally posted in the Living Torah Journal, 27 January 2003, by Charles Sebold.

The Liar’s Chair

What a week. Once again I write so seldom that all the other entries on the page are pushed off into the archive oblivion.

What can I say? The downward spiral has continued.

Of all the things that I learned from watching Tracey take a logic class, few stand out as strongly to me as this truth: sometimes communication problems are the only problems, and sometimes they mask actual fundamental disagreements. It is disheartening to pursue the truth in communication with people, think that they have not understood each other, delight in solving superficial problems, and then discover that in fact, they still don’t agree. Then you press harder to at least come to some sort of truce, and find that somebody is lying to you. And you don’t know who it is, and you have no just means to find out.

I’ll hide behind a smile
And understanding eyes
And I’ll tell you things that you already know,
So you can say
“I really identify with you, so much”
And all the time that you’re needing me
Is just the time that I’m bleeding you.
Don’t you get it yet?—Henry Rollins, Liar

There are tricks to recognizing liars; Judge Judy has made millions by catching the easy ones. Hey, if babies were involved you could try Solomon’s clever trick, but the stakes aren’t that high. Somewhere in the middle you will find me, trying to figure out who is playing me and who is the victim. I don’t know the tricks; I was always a terrible liar.

A part of me says that you bet with the side that is most often right. Humans must generalize to learn, and sometimes we have to take risks based on the generalities that make up our knowledge. My money is on the side of authority. There is definitely an easy way out and a hard way out, but I cannot be sure that right and wrong divide themselves so cleanly. Perhaps one has hurt others before, but this is not the time to bring justice for all those, is it?

Do not be a witness against your neighbor without cause, And do not deceive with your lips. Do not say, “Thus I shall do to him as he has done to me; I will render to the man according to his work.”—Prov. 24:28,29

Division, in fact, is the problem. How do we divide correct and incorrect, moral and immoral, right and wrong? This would be easy if one side were always on moral high ground, but in fact both sides have failed to live up to Biblical standards of conduct. Precedent doesn’t favor one or the other; in my life, precedent favors sitting tight and waiting until this one blows over. So many problems solve themselves. Can’t this one do the same? Apparently not. And the divide threatens to extend, to cut the fabric of a large group of people. Again, my name keeps coming up. “Charlie said this.” “Charlie agrees with me.” “Charlie is one of us.” When enough people hear that, the voices change. “Charlie is playing both sides.” “Charlie is telling people what they want to hear.” “Charlie is causing division.”

Funny that one of the primary characteristics of the Word of God is how good it is… at dividing things:

For the word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, and piercing as far as the division of soul and spirit, of both joints and marrow, and able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.—Heb. 4:12

“Soul and Spirit”—the difference between your thoughts and God’s thoughts in you, as a believer. “Joints and marrow”—that which moves you, and that which serves as your foundation. And most importantly, it is “able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.” But I am not a trained swordsman in this regard. How do I wield the short sword? It is so short that it is almost a defensive weapon—I have to get in close, and get my hands dirty, to use it. I continue to have to stay within striking distance, to find the evil and divide it from the good. I am a coward at heart; I don’t like being this close to the fighting. So why do I do it? Because I have to, I’m the one to whom this has been given, and I take responsibility seriously. I didn’t always but I do now.

Surely I am more stupid than any man,
And I do not have the understanding of a man.
Neither have I learned wisdom,
Nor do I have the knowledge of the Holy One.—Prov. 30:2,3

I have been entrusted with the Truth. So has every believer, but I am only concerned with myself for the moment. The key to understanding is within my grasp, but I have to reach for it. I have to try. I have to take the Word of God and apply it, again and again, and never stop until I find the fit. Who is lying? Who is telling the truth? Who is motivated by what? Where is the path to reconciliation? How do we rebuild trust?

Why is He “the Holy One” in this Prov. 30:3? Why not “the Wise One” or “the Omniscient One”? Because when we say that He is “holy,” we mean that He is above everything that contaminates. He does not sin and He does not countenance sin. He does not fail and He demands perfection. He does not lie and He is not taken in by lies. Therefore wisdom and knowledge are not attributes He gains, but are the natural state of His distance from this fallen world. He is Holy, above all things, and therefore true wisdom aspires to consider itself as being above this world. The “real world” is spiritual; it is the foundation and underpinning of the world of our senses.

Does this mean that we should shut ourselves up in caves and become “contemplative missionaries” to achieve enlightenment? Heaven forbid. God is Holy, but “in Him we live and move and have our being” (Acts. 17:28). He exists here; He can be at our side and yet distant from sin. We, too, can be holy, even though we live in a world of sin. The first step is recognition that holiness is unattainable in our present state. We need someone to grant us the beginning of holiness. In the Messiah we find the first steps to Wisdom.

But to what shall I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the market places, who call out to the other children, and say, “We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we sang a dirge, and you did not mourn.”—Matt. 11:16,17

I have been hearing a lot of flute playing and dirge singing in the last couple of weeks. Everybody is offended that I didn’t dance or mourn. Some of the tunes have been catchy, and I have come close to shedding real tears as the mock funeral processions go by. Who’s dying? My ministry? Somebody else’s? Somebody’s self-esteem? Somebody’s relationships? Is that a real funeral, or what?

I’m getting cynical. People who have been in the business of helping people longer than I have tell me that this is the next step—detachment. They tell me that I will stop believing what I hear, and learn how to recognize the liars. But everybody who tells me that has made a mistake at some point in front of me. How can I make decisions and change people’s lives forever, if nobody can show me how to consistently be right?

And the answer is, nobody is always right. Sometimes you have to go with your gut, and sometimes your gut makes you fight it out. Sometimes you just have to trust that your misjudgment of somebody is God’s way of diverting them to His will in another way. But that feels like abrogating responsibility, and I won’t let anybody have it—it’s mine! Mine! Nobody takes the weight of the world off my shoulders, whether they’re the Messiah or not!

Oh, wait a minute. Um. Strike that. But it’s funny—I retract the last statement because I know it’s wrong, but not because it feels wrong.

No you can’t take it
No you can’t take it
No you can’t take that away from me

It is appropriate to quote Nine Inch Nails when I’m being rebellious and failing to allow God to work in somebody’s life, isn’t it? Perhaps I should work on my own attitude.

My son, if you will receive my words
And treasure my commandments within you,
Make your ear attentive to wisdom,
Incline your heart to understanding;
For if you cry for discernment,
Lift your voice for understanding;
If you seek her as silver
And search for her as for hidden treasures;
Then you will discern the fear of the Lord
And discover the knowledge of God.
For the Lord gives wisdom;
From His mouth come knowledge and understanding. —Prov. 2:1-6