mike wrote: ↑Fri Oct 14, 2022 2:56 pm
jahertz wrote: ↑Fri Oct 14, 2022 1:19 pmI mentioned this earlier, but an issue that sometimes trips us up is that much of the domestic abuse we encounter in Anabaptist as well as other conservative church circles does not constitute a crime under the laws of the state. This makes it imperative that the church both understand its responsibility to report crimes to the state and also be competent to identify, confront, and resolve patterns of destructive sin that fall short of reportable crimes.
This bothers me. I have fairly clear ideas on what should be done about criminal behavior, whether in or out of the church. You take it to the proper authorities. When we get into behavior that doesn't constitute crime, I feel we enter a much more difficult zone. I have a lot of questions. Dealing with sin is in the domain of the church, and not all sins are crimes. So, yes, the church is responsible to deal with sins that are not crimes.
What church is truly competent to "identify, confront, and resolve" sins that fall short of being crime? How do incompetent churches get to the point of competence? Churches and church leaders aren't God, and they never will be. What do we do about the fact that churches fail in this task? Do our leaders need training other than what they get from mentors and personal study? Are we supposed to utilize secular or para-church "authorities" in determining what constitutes non-criminal destructive domestic abuse, and what the appropriate measures are? Is scripture insufficient as a text on determining these sorts of things? Who is the proper authority on these issues? (It's not the state, because we're not talking about crimes.) Is it some organization or person outside any particular local church that sets itself up as an authority? Who gets to define what abuse is? Who gets to define what competence is?
Mike, a string of challenging, constructive questions like this always seems to me like an excellent sign that a discussion is going somewhere useful. Indeed, the main burden I bring to this discussion and others like it is to see us all spend much more time asking, praying about, and wrestling corporately with these very questions. This only happens once we've (1. Become aware of the scale of our problem and (2. Admitted the possibility that our conditioned response patterns are falling far short of the call of the Gospel.
In short, in any area where we fall short of the standard of Christ, progress can happen only in an atmosphere of humility, the universal prerequisite to all learning. “If you were blind, you would have no guilt; but now that you say, ‘We see,’ your guilt remains" (John 9:41 ESV). This kind of epistemological humility can be especially difficult for groups, like Plain people, who value tradition highly, because once we have established patterns that seem to work for a range of common challenges, it's easy to be lulled into a sense of having "arrived" and then just keep doing the same things over and over, as if our churches were not in a constant state of spiritual flux, living ecosystems shifting around us in response both to the pressure of the outside world and to unfolding trends in our own history across generations.
If one generation drops the ball, say, on the teaching of a key Gospel theme that seemed less relevant at the time, it may take only a generation or two of inattention—and some corners of our culture have had far more time than that—for that omission to bear fruit in damaged relationships, and for that damage to metastasize into a full-blown crisis. The emergence of such a crisis does not mean we have been doing nothing of value, or that we must tear down everything and start over. It does mean we face a hard choice.
We can deny or ignore the problem and double down on what we have always done. The cancer will spread until it finally forces itself on our awareness, willing or not, and by that time it will probably be too late for any medicine to help. The lights will go out, the history of that culture will expire with a sigh, and the scattered refugees will find new homes with others who still remember how to heed the Spirit and to repent.
Or we can toll the bells, call a solemn assembly, weep before the Lord, and plead for mercy. We can do what the Laodiceans (a real church of real Christians like ours) perhaps never did: confess that we are not as spiritually rich, brilliant, and accomplished as we love to think ourselves, and that, at least in some aspects of our calling, we have become wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked.
When we do, the all-knowing Spirit will meet us on our knees and, when he has done his work, we will stand laden with his refined gold, the fig leaves of our shameful excuses replaced by the white garments of true holiness, with our healed eyes opened on a new world where our tattered religious habits appear as flimsy and disposable as they always should have in contrast to the incorruptible, ever-renewing, image of the crucified Jesus and the hope of the Gospel his death won for us.
I think I owe you an apology, Mike, for letting this subject carry me away again.
The weight of the burden I feel for the wounded and silenced among us is hard to overstate, and the moment I find myself in what feels like a good-faith discussion of the issue, with a bit of time on my hands, I tend to dump words all over the place. Thank you for indulging me.
As a cultural Anabaptist myself, I have been shocked again and again at the layers of spiritual pride and complacency the Spirit had to strip away in order to restore my own eyesight even to the point of seeing what else he was doing in the world outside Anabaptism, let alone to face the shocking extent of the relational dysfunction that has spread into so many of our families and now, I believe, threatens the moral credibility, if not the survival, of our culture itself.
All the above started out as a preamble to an actual discussion of your list of questions and got much longer than I meant it to. It's a really interesting list, and I think a gracious, good-faith exploration of it holds a lot of promise. I hope to do that in conversation with you and anyone else here who is equally interested, but I've run myself out of both time and mental energy at the moment. I look forward to seeing how the conversation has progressed whenever I make it back.
