TEXAS
Baptist News
By Jeff Brumley
A Dallas megachurch got some unwanted publicity recently thanks to its harsh disciplining of a member some leaders believed improperly ended her marriage.
On May 28, however, Pastor Matt Chandler of the Village Church stepped in, stopped the process and later offered an apology to the woman who had left her husband when he admitted to a years-long child-porn habit, Christianity Today reported.
Public discipline actions like that brought against the woman at Village Church, a Southern Baptist multi-site congregation, may have been more common decades and centuries ago when Matthew 18 was followed more closely. But experts tell Baptist News Global such practices are increasingly rare today — and especially so in moderate and even conservative Baptist churches.
“I don’t think we gain very much by the public trashing of someone,” said Frank Broome, who has served as executive coordinator of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship of Georgia for close to two decades. “In 18 years I have no example of anyone being dressed down.”
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