A Case of Church Discipline
by Quinn
Note: “Andrew” and “Seth” are pseudonyms
This story is painful for me to write, in a different way. You could argue about whether what I did in this story constitutes spiritual abuse. I think it’s debatable; abuse is a strong word. What I did was wrong, for sure.
I’m going to leave quite a few details ambiguous, so that the identities of the other parties cannot be determined. At some point during my time at Friday Night, a brother named Andrew was in sin. It was a situation where he did not believe he was in sin, but I did.
Another guy, named Seth, agreed with me. I found out Seth had already gone to Andrew on a Matthew 18 basis to confront him about his sin. Seth told me that Andrew did not repent.
I agreed to go along with Seth to confront Andrew on a 2:1 basis, consistent with Matthew 18. Seth reached out to Andrew and asked for the 2:1 meeting, and he unequivocally said no. My immediate response to Seth was that that means he’s not willing to listen, so the next step was to “tell it to the church.” I mentioned how I wasn’t sure what that would look like since Andrew had formerly been at Friday Night but had been disconnected for quite some time.
A few days later, Seth asked me to meet with him and Dave for lunch. When we met, Dave basically told us that we made a mistake by asking Andrew to meet instead of just going to him. Dave made a really big deal about the word “go” in Matthew 18:15, and how it didn’t say “text him.” It seemed like a pretty flimsy argument to me, and that he was putting way too much stock in the word “go”.
I wasn’t able to put my finger on it at the time, but Dave was basically saying that the correct course of action was blindsiding. I can only think of two reasons to take that approach:
Take away his ability to decide for himself whether he’s willing to sit down and talk with us.
Gain a psychological upper hand by surprising him / not allowing him to mentally prepare.
I contested Dave’s interpretation of Matthew 18, but I don’t remember exactly what I said.
However, Seth found Dave’s argument compelling. That was pretty surprising to me. Seth was not an aggressive person, so I did not think he would be comfortable with the idea. While it really went against my gut, I decided that if Seth and Dave both saw it the same way, maybe I just wasn’t seeing clearly. So I caved, and we made a plan to “go” to him. We couldn’t go back in time and blindside him, but we could force the issue now.
We ended up texting Andrew and telling him we’d be at his place around 6PM on a certain day, and whether he answered or not was up to him. Again, this was after he had already communicated in no uncertain terms that he was unwilling to meet with us.
And that’s what happened. We drove to his place, my heart pounding the whole time. I didn’t know if Andrew was going to yell profanities at us from inside the house, threaten us, call the police, or what. We knocked on the door, set a 60-second timer, and left when the timer went off. I found out later he wasn’t home and didn’t know we had actually gone through with it.
…
I apologized to Andrew on 3/20/25, three days after leaving Friday Night.
Looking back now, it’s easy to see how the way Dave influenced us fit into his broader pattern of controlling behavior. He used a shoddy Biblical argument to control us, and by extension, to exert pressure on Andrew.
…
“Calling them to Himself, Jesus *said to them, “You know that those who are recognized as rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them; and their great men exercise authority over them. “But it is not this way among you…”
Mark 10:42–43a