A Theft In Texas - Follow Up

 

The church in Texas that produced the musical Hamilton without permission, changing its content, has admitted wrongdoing, apologized, and is destroying all its recordings and images of the production. Furthermore, its pastor wrote:

 

"I recognize as the Pastor of the church that I have an obligation and responsibility to follow the law and educate our community about these protocols."

 

While this is certainly a smart legal move by the church and pastor, it is a smarter spiritual move, for when we have sinned, is there any better move than confession, repentance, and making amends when possible? Furthermore, when we sin publicly, ought we not to repent publicly? When leadership sins, ought it not to acknowledge such publicly?   

 

This is indeed an all too rare occurrence among Christian churches and organizations. The church in Texas indicated that it is looking at this as a learning opportunity and notice that it isn’t attempting to justify its actions, to make excuses. This is a model for both the professing church and the world – a model of how to receive correction and how to respond to correction – both as leadership and as the people of Christ. And note that in this case, the professing church received its correction from the world, not from within the church culture – perhaps we could also learn from this. When elements of the world look at the church and say, “This ought not so to be,” perhaps we ought to pay attention?

 

As Francis Schaffer used to say, the world has a right to judge the Church. Jesus gave it that right in John 13:34 – 35 and John 17:21 23; we should be judged by our love for one another and by our unity. From where I sit, we look like a pretty sorry bunch.

 

We can model reconciliation, we can model repentance, we can model what to do when we sin, when we do what we ought not to do – and the sooner we do it, when we are wrong, the better off we are all. I have found that when this is our way of life, that when we do this in what we think are small things, that we will also do it in large things (in things that may cost us dearly – but it will cost us more dearly if we don’t repent), and please understand that there are no small things, for there are no small people, no small sins, no small hurts, no small testimonies. May I give you some examples in my own life?

 

I recall a telephone conversation that escalated into loud voices when I was CFO of an organization. My door was open, and my entire team could hear me up and down the hall. The conversation, if it can be called that, terminated when I and the person I was speaking to hung up without closure. After I hung up I thought, “O my, what have I done?”

 

I immediately went into every person’s office and apologized for my behavior. Then I called the other person back and apologized, we then solved the problem at hand. The sooner we, by God’s grace, move to reconcile and make things right the better off we usually are, sometimes things can be more complicated, but as a rule, “the sooner the better” is the best course of action.

 

I think of another time I was having a phone conversation (telephones and emails can be challenging!) with one of my managers and I fell into sarcasm toward her (O what an idiot I can be!). After we concluded our chat and I quickly reflected on my attitude, I called her back and apologized. Now here is a critical thing, she said, “Bob, that’s okay, I know you are under a lot of pressure and you don’t need to apologize.”

 

I replied, “Susan” (not her real name), “I was wrong to have that attitude toward you and I need to tell you that I am sorry and ask you to please forgive me. You must never accept it when someone speaks to you like that, and I must never pretend it didn’t happen when I do it. I need your forgiveness; will you please forgive me?”

 

I’d like to give you two more examples that are a bit different. In the next example I was having a disagreement over the phone with another executive within our company, and while I was right in my position, I was wrong in the way I was handling the discussion. The other person got extremely angry and hung up. In this instance I did not immediately try to make things right, and upon reflection I’m not sure that I could have considering the nature of the disagreement and a few other dynamics…I’m not making excuses, I just don’t know what I might have done in the circumstances. The situation was exacerbated in that our offices were located in different regions of our state and we had never met – in fact this was the first time we had ever spoken.

 

After a few weeks I emailed her and asked if we could have lunch, I really felt that we needed to meet face to face due to the nature of our disagreement and the fact that we’d never met face to face.

 

Lunch was great, we tried to beat each other with the first apology, and other than that we got to know each other – we did not talk about the substance of our disagreement and I think that was fine in this instance. What mattered was hitting the reset button on our relationship. From that point forward we had, I believe, a good relationship and I never sensed any stress or tension and I certainly came to understand her in a way that, perhaps, I would not otherwise have had we not had our disagreement and subsequent lunch.

 

I’ll share my fourth example and have some more reflections in my next post.