Most National Assoc. of Evangelicals board members say Bible does not forbid all civil lawsuits between Christians

Original headline: “Most evangelical leaders say Bible does not forbid lawsuits between Christians” … it’s not clear how this claim could be supported by a poll of NAE’s directors. I don’t see anything in the article to explain that.

OK, so they polled….their own board of directors. Here’s a list. I must confess that apart from Ron Hamilton (“Patch”?), I don’t know very many of these names. OK, I know who Ed Stetzer is, too, and Phil Ryken. Other than that….I’d have to do some Googling.

Now I don’t know precisely how representative this board is of American funda-gelical Christians, or to what degree it’s representative of church leadership, but it does strike me that if the leadership of the NAE says that suing your church is not prohibited in all circumstances, that is a shift at least from the policies of many churches that more or less say that you’re either going to get a decision in your favor from the church leadership, or you can just pound sand. Such a poll would obviously find its way into courts as churches try to prevent disaffected congregants from suing.

Personally, I think the viewpoint is healthy; as I’ve headed my church’s Sunday School ministries for a while, one thing I’ve emphasized is the fact that even if you can depend on believers not to sue when something goes wrong, you’ve got to understand that some kids’ parents are not believers, and won’t hesitate to pull that trigger. Alternatively, you’re going to find some people are walking away from the church and will no longer feel bound by that (if they ever were) in such an action as well.

It’s a different world than we had during the 1970s and such.