Addressing Sin and Groupthink in the Church (Matthew 18.15-20)

The process that Jesus lays out in Matthew 18.15-20 for addressing sin in the church accomplishes several things.  The passage in the ESV reads as follows:

‘If another member of the church^* sins against you,^* go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone. If the member listens to you, you have regained that one.^* 16But if you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. ¹⁷If the member refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax-collector. ¹⁸Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. ¹⁹Again, truly I tell you, if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. ²⁰For where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.’

First, the passage addresses the confrontation of a sinner.  A more literal translation—one to be preferred—of verse 15 might be, ‘If your brother sins’ or, according to some manuscripts, ‘If your brother sins against you’.  The parallel passage in Luke 17.3-4 has both:

Pay attention to yourselves! If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him, ⁴ and if he sins against you seven times in the day, and turns to you seven times, saying, ‘I repent,’ you must forgive him.”

Thus, whether the sinner sins against you or in some other way, a fellow Christian, a ‘brother’, is obligated to point the sin out.  This is also a parallel to what Paul says in Galatians 6.1: ‘Brothers, if anyone is caught in any transgression, you who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness. Keep watch on yourself, lest you too be tempted.’  Christians are to look after one another not by affirming each other, dismissing sin or underplaying its significance, but by pointing it out.

Second, and this seen in the verses quoted, a Christian is not simply to point out the person’s sin but is to do it with the goal of restoration.  The Matthew passage is preceded with Jesus’ parable of the lost sheep.  The shepherd leaves the 99 safe sheep to go after the one lost sheep.  Paul adds that the spiritual person confronting a person about sin is to do so in a spirit of gentleness and with self-awareness as we are all vulnerable to sin.  The ‘spiritual’ are not invulnerable to sin and should not be self-righteous.

When someone sins in the church, it is easy to take sides.  One may automatically side with the weaker person as a victim, such as when a woman is assumed to be telling the truth about sexual abuse or to be right in the case of a marital break-up.  Whether or not she is right, the point of this text is to help the sinner.  We want to prune a tree, but this is the wrong image for the situation.  The right image is to heal the body, not cut off an ailing limb.  This is not so say that we ignore the injured party at all, but the Christian way is also to want to bring repentance and reconciliation.  The shepherd does not say, ‘Good, that stray sheep is gone.’

Third, restoration happens through repentance. The passages are very clear that the goal is not some sort of inclusion without repentance or even inclusion by denying that the sin is a sin.  They do not allow a process in the church that accommodates sin simply in order to maintain unity and peace.  Indeed, if the sinner is recalcitrant and unwilling to repent, he is ultimately to be excluded from the church.

Fourth, confrontation is to take place one on one, avoiding groupthink.  This might be part of what Paul means by doing so with gentleness.  In any case, the danger in a church is to spread the news about a sin and to discuss it in a group.  The group can begin to function as a unit over against the individual, ostracizing him before he can even repent.  The danger of groupthink is also very real for a church.  In 1972, psychologist Irving Janis identified three preconditions, three types, and eight symptoms of groupthink.  He defined groupthink as

a mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action,

Jarvis had different examples of groupthink than a church in mind, but one can see the dangers a church has in such a definition.  It is a deeply involved, cohesive group, and within churches certain in-groups easily and all too often do form: a prayer group, a Bible study group, a choir group, and so forth.  The sin of a sinner is easily and eagerly discussed as a way for the group to affirm its identity and cohesiveness rather than to restore the sinner to fellowship.

Even worse, groupthink can misidentify a person and accuse him of sin when there is no sin.  This easily happens when a member of the group is affirmed in his or her wrong accusation of another, such as in a marriage. 

According to Jarvis, the three preconditions to groupthink are a high cohesiveness in the group, certain structural faults of the group such as ‘insulation from outside opinions, preventing fresh perspectives from challenging internal consensus’, and a sense of anxiety or high stress of the group.  The last of these might be a group’s recent failures, moral discomfort, or time pressure.  In church situations, groups exist with high cohesiveness, structural faults (as noted), and anxiety when a sin or perceived sin or a wrongfully identified sinner creates disruption in the group’s community.  Conditions are right for groupthink, and this is particularly destructive when a person is wrongfully accused of something.

Jarvis’ three types of groupthink are associated with the eight symptoms, as follows:

Type 1: Overestimations of the group

Symptom 1: Illusion of Invulnerability (‘excessive optimism and risk taking.  Members believe nothing can go wrong and dismiss warnings as overly cautious’)

Symptom 2: Belief in Inherent Morality of the Group (‘unquestioned assumption that the group’s cause is just’)

Type 2: Closed-Mindedness

            Symptom 3: Collective rationalisation (explaining away warnings and contradictory

information)

Symptom 4: Stereo-typing outgroups (‘Viewing opponents as too weak, evil, biased, or stupid to pose serious threats or counter the group’s plans’)

Type 3: Pressures toward uniformity

Symptom 5: Self-censorship (‘suppressing personal doubts’, minimizing concerns to maintain group harmony)

            Symptom 6: Illusion of unanimity (‘mistaking silence for agreement’ in the group)

Symptom 7: Direct pressure on dissenters (‘questioning the loyalty of members who express doubts, pressuring them to conform to the group consensus’

Symptom 8: Self-appointed mindguards (‘members protecting the group from dissenting information by filtering out contrary evidence and viewpoints’)

 When a group forms a viewpoint, individuals support each other by dispelling doubts, presenting evidence, weaving it into a narrative, distorting facts, trashing the whole person for a sin or imagined sin, and so forth.  The person may not be guilty at all, but groupthink will make him into the worst rogue imaginable despite his innocence. By telling a Christian to go privately to a brother who has sinned or who has sinned against him (both), Jesus avoids groupthink in the church.  The first step is pastoral, and the process is meant to restore the lost sheep.  

Fifth, by taking one or two others to confront the person, the group dynamics of groupthink are further halted by introducing judicial proceedings. Having refused to repent, the question of whether the person really has sinned or not must be addressed.  Witnesses are now required.  This judicial process is important because the person may be wrongfully accused.  He deserves to face his accusers, and he deserves a fair trial.  A judicial process is meant to protect the innocent person, whether that is the one sinned against or the one wrongly accused of having sinned.  If the person has sinned and refuses to repent, the person needs to be expelled from the church and ostracized.  Paul provides a real example of this in 1 Corinthians 5 when removing a person who has sexually engaged, possibly married, his father’s wife.  Paul further affirms the church’s role in making judicial judgements in the next chapter. In 2 Corinthians 2, Paul tells the same church to restore someone who has been judged and has repented (this seems to be a different person).  In Matthew 18, this judicial role of the church is what Jesus has in mind when he says,

Truly I tell you, whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. ¹⁹Again, truly I tell you, if two of you agree on earth about anything you ask, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven (vv. 18-19).

These words are directly about the church’s deciding matters about a sinner’s sin.  The church may, metaphorically, bind or loose the sinner, as long as there is not a single person passing judgement.  These verses have wrongly been used in reference to prayer, but that is not at all their context: this is about the church's judicial role.

A sixth matter to observe in the Matthean passage is that the situation between a sinner and the person going to him to tell him his sin is not about a person going to a person in a superior position of authority and doing so.  This is especially so if the right reading of the text is that the sinner has sinned against the brother who then confronts him.  In that case, the one who has been sinned against is in an inferior position, if anything.  He is not a manager or leader in authority who is going to sort out an employee.  A person sinned against struggles to confront the sinner.

Matthew 18.15 has often been misused in this way.  A leader of an organization, wanting to suppress dissent and exact loyalty from others, quotes this verse and says, ‘If you have a problem with something or with me, you are not to start gossiping but are to come directly to me and tell me.’  In Jesus’ example, the person going to the sinner is the shepherd, the sinner is the stray sheep.  The leader of an organization using this verse wrongly turns the situation upside down: he is expecting the sheep to go to the shepherd, so to speak.