How to Survive Discipline: Flirting with a Church Your Church Hates (Part 6)

The key to this method is to appear that you find the discipline process so upsetting that you are getting ready to make major life changes other than those the church desires. We are going back to the defense layout. First off, what I mean by "a church your church hates" is a church your church considers a non-Christian cult or "heretical" a fake church.... Evangelicals, for example, would "hate" Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses and Uniterians. Fundamentalist churches would "hate" Catholic churches and liberal churches, but then, for them almost anything works. For liberal churches (though I'm not sure how much discipline they actually do), cults and possibly hardcore fundamentalist churches. For Jehovah's Witnesses: evangelical churches, particularly those with an interest in missions to Jehovah's Witnesses. For cults" almost anything outside the cult works. In other cases, you can figure out who the right groups are pretty easily.

It's important to pick a church your church hates primarily because otherwise the pastors are likely to have friendly relations and see things the same way. If you make a minor change, like Orthodox Presbyterian to Independent Fundamentalist Baptist, you'll have two pastors who work together or at least see eye to eye on most issues. The natural tendency is for them to work together to "resolve your problem". You need to go to a pastor with whom your own pastor would never consider cooperating.

Discipline serves three purposes.

1. To try and bring the member to repentance for their sin
2. To help the church by keeping it godly
3. To serve as a witness to the world

Flirting with a church your church hates undermines the whole discipline process. It would be like getting a new live-in girlfriend a week before a separation. First off, you are demonstrating you have a direction to go if you are excommunicated. You are developing an alternate source of emotional support. The purpose of the discipline process is to induce crisis by isolating you. That can't happen if you are busy going through the process of joining a new church. Second, since your church hates the other church, they are going to view joining it as apostasy. Apostasy is seen as a very serious sin. Your pastor doesn't want to induce apostasy.

This also undermines your church. It identifies itself as being "better" than the hated church. What would happen if the hated church brings you to repentance where your original church had failed? This, by the way, is not uncommon. Discipline processes are frequently successful in a new church where they were or would have been dismal failures in the old church. The new church doesn't have psychological and political baggage to work through, so it can address problems directly.

Let's take an example. Jill is a 17-year-old girl and a Jehovah's Witness who gets pregnant. Jay, her steady boyfriend, will not admit to being the father because he's terrified of admitting to fornication. Jill does not want to alienate the father of her baby. She knows Jay is going to be part of her life for years to come and "turning him in" would be destructive. She refuses to name the father and she hopes he comes forward when the baby is born.
Jill's pastor wants Jay confronted and says that Jill has not fully repented since she is still covering up details. He starts a disciplinary process to excommunicate Jill for unrepentant fornication since he can't prove anything regarding Jay until Jill cracks. Jill is miserable, so she starts going to the Catholic church. She also gives a full confession to the priest (who is bound by an oath not to talk). As the elders confront her, Jill bursts into tears and talks about how she can't find any solace in Kingdom Hall anymore and she goes to Our Lady of Chastity for peace. She tells them she made a full confession to Father Brown, and when asked why she talked to him, she responds that she just doesn't feel comfortable anymore talking to any of her elders because of the pressure. She makes sure to leave a brochure for Good Counsel Homes (Catholic Crisis pregnancy home) in her room and in plain sight. She also takes to carrying a rosary. Pretty soon everyone comes to believe she is cracking and the pressure disappears.

Notice that Jill never threatens and she seems emotional. She not rationally choosing to leave the Witnesses. She's just having trouble dealing all the pressure. She would like to stay part of the JW but she might fall away if they keep it up. She talks about how people aren't really listening, how they are just judging...how all she is looking for are people who really care about her...how hurt she is by all the cruelty...how the only time she can talk to Jesus anymore is when she has the peace and love of (hated church). She's just too upset to even try and pray in her current church.

There is one major downside to this method. If it doesn't work, it can speed up an excommunication. However, it's one of the few methods for staying in a church where submission is impossible. It also has the nice effect of starting the separation process in advance, thus making the separation, if it happens, less painful. Moreover, you may find yourself much happier with a type of congregation you never would have considered. It might be that you don't want to be a member of SPPV but really want to be a liberal Protestant, or don't want to be fundamentalist Independent Baptist and really do like the Jehovah's Witnesses more.