The pastors know about the affair and know that he filed for D... There are no consequences in the church. I guess that adultery isn't a big issue for them.
No...NoCode, unfortunately, even solidly orthodox churches try to avoid conflict.
Excommunication is not fun business. It requies us, not only to show the mercy, but the righteous passion for holiness that our God possesses in his very being.
Aslan is good, but he's not safe.
We have all but neutered the loving, but strong, Fatherly face of our God.
I think we should stop teaching our children the 10 commandments unless we are willing to hold ourselves accountable to them.
I hear ya'... They've known about it for a long time. It seems as though they think that they just need to pray harder and the sin will- *poof* - go away.. It's easier to avoid confrontation and conflict. It's easier to just convince yourself that God is all-forgiving and "eventually" H will stop sinning and will be forgiven. Isn't that easier than confronting??
But I think they forgot Matthew 18 where Jesus explicitly gives intructions on how to deal with things like this. It's a moderate, approach that escalates the pressure. In the end if your husband refuses to end the affair, he gets excommunicated.
It's nasty business, but Jesus did give the keys of the Kingdom to the church. Kind of a power-of-attorney. What we bind and loose on earth is bound and loosed in heaven.
The goal is always to restore the person. Sometimes the gravity of the threat of excommuincation is serious enough to get a person to stop. These days they just go to another church.
Too bad.
Sometimes I wonder if the dark ages were all that dark. We can learn a little from them.
Your husband can use the church going medieval on his a$$.
Theo, I have a "Bible thumping" friend who I adore. She ticks me off sometimes but her heart is always in the right place. Anyway, she was the first person I told about the A waaay back when I first found out. At the time, she sent me this long e-mail quoting every Bible verse that applied to our sitch. Then, she called the Pastors and told them they needed to do something. Not kick him out of the church but make him step down from his positions of leadership. Well... they did nothing.
I talked to them numerous times over the next few months. They did nothing. I made H go to them with me so that they would know that he filed for D. I expect nothing. I have given up on there being any consequences within that church.
However, I know that, in the end, there will always be consequences..
