Former member sues John MacArthur’s megachurch for public shaming

As an elder, I need to know when aspects of life problems fall outside my competence and the church's competence and need to be referred to civil authorities. Accusations of physical abuse are one of them.

Years ago we had a man, a member, married to a non-member in not-gospel-teaching church. They had a son together. As I recall, he already had a protection-from-abuse filed against his wife. Accusations included that she had threatened to pour gasoline on him and set him on fire (while he slept, I think). It is beyond my competence to say whether these were overblown words from an immature woman or credible threats, and there is no way I could counsel him not to take the threats seriously and act accordingly.

That said, this man was eventually disciplined from the church, because as the counseling sessions went on and we tried to help him navigate the situation, we learned (1) that his language to her was atrocious at times (based on SMS conversations he showed us, we realized just how bad he was at understanding his own behavior); (2) he committed adultery with an old friend; (3) he increasingly bucked counsel and eventually walked away from the church to avoid accountability.

I shouldn't be surprised at how many wild things come out about people's relationships if you stick with it long enough...but I'm still flummoxed sometimes. I don't recall that I personally had the chance to sit with both the husband and the wife in the same room, so sorting wild truths from wild lies was virtually impossible.

If things had progressed differently, we may eventually have approved a divorce. This was not to demand perfectly Spirit-filled behavior to a weak believer in difficult circumstances. But his own behavior, over time, revealed some significant spiritual problems that he was unwilling to address.

But in all this we provisionally accepted his reports about his wife, and his legal situation with the protection-from-abuse, as true, and encouraged him to engage legally in whatever way necessary for himself and his son.

Michael, well said. It can be dangerous to take every allegation at face value in this case, but if indeed Grace's counselors were telling a woman to just let her husband's physical abuse slide, someone needs to counsel them on the clear implications of Ephesians 5, Colossians 3:19, and 1 Peter 3:7. This is especially the case when we consider that those who are physically abused often "test" the person they're opening up to to see if it's safe. I'm actually pretty sure that I failed that test one time when a friend's marriage was blowing up by not cluing in quickly enough to what she'd just said to me. Hopefully someone else gave her good counsel.

(the "test" I'm speaking of will be a partial revealing of what's going on in the hope that the other person realizes that something is very wrong and acknowledges that)

Practicing church discipline is usually messy, especially when it is applied to relational conflict. God calls his church to engage in these hard and messy situations, not just put up our hands and give up. This includes when allegations of abuse are made, whether sexual, physical, spiritual, or emotional abuse.

Church discipline in these cases should be slow and deliberate. When someone seeks to short-cut the process by either legal threats and/or resignation, the elders must continue to pursue the biblical process.

GCC has been through this before. Anyone can sue a church claiming a violation of privacy and the inflicting of emotional harm. However, if the church's membership and discipline policies are clearly articulated and followed, and the member has given implied consent through signing a membership covenant, the church has a pretty strong defense against these kinds of lawsuits.

However, if the church's membership and discipline policies are clearly articulated and followed, and the member has given implied consent through signing a membership covenant, the church has a pretty strong defense against these kinds of lawsuits.

FWIW, I did not intend my post to imply any judgment on GCC's situation. I'm too distant from it and do not have enough facts, nor do I take the plaintiff's allegations at face value. We have members who attempt to resign their membership to avoid discipline, and we have to advise them of something should already have known: you can't resign your membership unilaterally. Even if you move away and join a gospel-teaching church, the congregation still votes to dismiss you.

One of the most challenging areas in church discipline is abuse in the home (both emotional and physical). Emotional is the hardest. One of the reasons is, that emotional is a lot of "he said, she said". Add on top the fact that the abuser wants perceived reconciliation in order to feed their abusive practices, while the abused wants separation for protection. Most churches focus on reconciliation, as the key goal, which ultimately feeds into the abusers cycle. Abusers are adept at moving through this, while abused are seriously suffering. In my years of experience, churches struggle at best to handle this and more times than not, create a big disaster which ultimately requires the abused to leave and be ostracized, while the abuser stays in good standing at the church.

Statistically speaking the ability for abusers to change is very low. There are significant challenges that churches face in trying to get abusers to change, including systemic brain issues. Churches seek the idea, the "God can heal all", and if we just get our thought process biblically aligned, we will resolve the condition. Not that simple in regards to an abusive situation. I have found most church councilling to be very poor in relation to this space. An abuser is very adept and skilled at identifying victims and at navigating through social pressure. Not to say that some don't correct their issue, but statistics paint a very dim picture.

According to the complaint, she told counselors she was afraid for her safety and the safety of her daughter, alleging that her then-husband was physically abusive. Her lawyers said church leaders pressured Zielinski to drop her request for a legal separation.

This isn't the first time this has happened. Its been a pattern for at least two decades, which former elder Hohn Cho has documented when he went public.

https://www.christianitytoday.com/2023/02/grace-community-church-elder-biblical-counseling-abuse/

https://julieroys.com/former-elder-at-john-macarthurs-church-confronts-awful-patterns-of-endangering-abuse-victims/comment-page-1/

Cho had always been considered a respected elder at GCC, but when he challenged them for mishandling these abuse cases for protecting abusers, he was kicked off GCC's board. In my years of interactions with those of you who have commented on this post, I have much more trust that you'all would handle it differently in a way that would protect the abused than what has been done over the years at GCC.

I'm not defending Grace against the current allegations--telling women to go back to physically abusive spouses does violate what God tells us about marriage--but going back to the original comment, I'm not quite so sure that we do well to relegate this to the police. Some things I've learned:

• Most of the time, investigation of crimes starts and ends with the police report. This was found in a 2017 Star-Tribune report about sexual assault allegations, where 80% of allegations did not get a decent investigation, and my son-in-law has found few decent leads for the use of his forensics degree. Police departments generally don't hire detectives; they make them out of meter maids and speeding ticket grantors.
• In 1997, soon after the passage of the Violence against Women Act, a 20 year trend of declining rates of intimate partner homicide reversed. Since 1997, the rate of femicide has increased slightly faster than population growth, and androcide is increasing at over twice the rate of population growth. Overall, about 30-40% of perpetrators of intimate partner violence and intimate partner homicide are female--it's about the most egalitarian violent crime out there.
• However, many police forces are still using the Duluth Model, which presumes the perpetrator is male.
• When someone is prosecuted for domestic violence, contact with the victim--a family member--can be seen as witness tampering. So the process can blow up normal family dynamics and the resolution of issues.

So we may be able to do a lot better. I'd suggest starting by acknowledging that the wonderful reduction in intimate partner homicide (especially androcide) probably is due in great part to no fault divorce--people who previously wouldn't have accused their spouse of adultery or abandonment were free to leave a bad relationship. I know it was a huge relief to my mom when she divorced my dad in 1983.

We might further suggest that if retreat saved lives due to no fault divorce, it can save lives today if we don't "corner" the accused, and if we allow the accuser to separate for a while. We might do well as well to provide safe places for the resolution of relational issues.

I'd suggest starting by acknowledging that the wonderful reduction in intimate partner homicide (especially androcide) probably is due in great part to no fault divorce--people who previously wouldn't have accused their spouse of adultery or abandonment were free to leave a bad relationship.

I don't have the time to fact check this; I'll just assume you've done the legwork and are correct.

Biblically, no-fault divorce is still a travesty, even if we grant this side benefit.

Either divorce is precipitated by sin or it is a sin. There's no way around that.

Perhaps the better approach for the church would be to make it plain that when abuse is involved, a victim is OK to make their case and--barring repentance and radical change--get a divorce.

Michael, the calculations of intimate partner homicide rates by population growth are my own from Bureau of Justice Statistics numbers. Hard to get much better than BJS in this area. Especially for androcide, the trends are really bad. (and feel free to check/quibble with my calculations!)

One super interesting thing about the BJS documents is that in the older document, they make no comment about why the drop in intimate partner homicide from 1976 to 1996 might have occurred, nor does the second document calculate the rate of androcide. They almost appear to be "hiding" the reality of men getting murdered by their lovers--almost a sop to the Duluth crowd.

Regarding no fault divorce, though, consider that 1 Corinthians 7:12-16 commands believers to allow an unbelieving spouse to leave if they want. So previous "at fault" divorce laws were trying to impose on nonbelievers something that we believers can't always do. The one big difference I can see between modern "no fault" and Roman law is that today's law takes care of women and children through a split of assets, while Roman law did it through the retained dowry. Paul basically accepts the Roman system when unbelievers are involved.

So I'd argue that the provisions of the first part of 1 Corinthians 7 are really meant to be implemented by the church, and an interesting thing is that if one identifies sin, and that sin is not repented of, Matthew 18 suggests that that person will be treated as an unbeliever--and that unbeliever is then free to leave, and will tend to do so if his (her) sin results in separation from his (her) spouse.

Hence I would argue that the church's role in certain cases ought to be not to punish those who want to separate from a violent spouse, but to assist them as they test the veracity of the allegations.