Promising a change of tone, Harvest Bible Chapel posted tonight on the church’s website what is described as an acknowledgment of failures and deficits. In an admission that they have been marginalizing critics, the church promised to stop:
The Executive Committee of the Elders has declared a moratorium on all efforts to minimize or marginalize our critics, except a carefully considered and conscious decision to pursue a legal remedy regarding attacks against the church that upon advice of counsel we believe are illegal.
Time will tell if church leaders will honor that promise. In my opinion, they should drop the suit. As I pointed out this morning, the existence of the suit heightens the tension and animosity. I doubt that a nicer tone in public remarks will change that.
In what seems like a violation of the spirit of that pledge, the church continues to refer to “three named defendants.” There are five. I cannot understand why the church continues to speak as if the wives of The Elephant’s Debt bloggers haven’t been sued as well.
The lawsuit against our three named defendants, moves slowly forward and again we state that we would gladly accept no financial settlement, no resolution of damage done or redaction of existing slander. All we ask is that they agree to stop attacking our church permanently and entrust the ongoing reforms to the Elders of our church.
I asked the church about this and did not get an answer about why the wives are being sued.
You can read the rest of the response from the elders here.
Nobody cares about them minimizing or marginalizing critics, or whatever other highroad-sounding Christianese they want to use. The public voices criticizing HBC care about the church minimizing and marginalizing everyone who witnessed the pastor being a bully or tyrant and dared to speak up. It’s a culture of silencing and intimidating people who witness duplicitous behavior in the leadership and in James.
The church wants the world to believe that every former elder who has spoken out about poor character behind the scenes is just disgruntled about the elder process or recent governance changes. So many different voices have spoken a remarkably consistent story about how, to quote Scot McKnight from earlier today, the person and the public persona of James MacDonald are quite different.
Perhaps harking back to the good old times (most notably Blackstone)? Husband and wife are one person (see coverture) and therefore they are only suing three people though two of them have two bodies.
Or, they could be trying to pit the spouses against each other? Encouraging the wife to pressure the husband to give up, or worse, pressuring the wife to testify against her husband.