MK forum

no, I´m not a mole, no, I´m not trying to break up the ranks...I just occasionally like a little conflict...the fightin' Irish in me

@ sun: in my previous post I noted that though ornery's thoughts ranged far afield (although he later connected it all via the Bastille . . . . LOL!), I was not disputing ANY of his facts.

I agree, Mrs. OT is pretty . . . . Mr. OT is a lucky man.

Thank you, however, for getting me in hot water!!!

Always a pleasure, any time

If my memory serves me correctly Donna Beach is related to NTM royalty..maybe Ken Johnston's grand daughter? Memories are cloudy so I may be wrong but somebody should check it out!!

I’ve been looking over this blog, thinking about some of the things people are upset about, and it seems to me that, what some people think was a cover up about the man that ‘was in charge of the little dorm’, was really just that people were trying to obey what it says in Phillippians 4 – “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable--if anything is excellent or praiseworthy--think about such things.”

It seems like some people took this to an extreme. They probably didn’t have a clue, didn’t understand that kids NEED to talk about these things. They NEED HELP to process them. I agree, that’s wrong. What Paul says is not wrong. Its talking about these things in the light of the Bible, using the right way of thinking about them to help kids process their feelings about the things that they are going through. That's really the Bible’s idea about the way we should think and talk. It also helps us to cope with the feelings that keep coming up when we stir the pot of our past.

MKfromBrazil,

I think I understand where you are coming from...you think The Truth was not told to everyone because they were following Paul's mandate to think of "good things"?
That reasoning might work, if we believed everyone at Via was following through with everything Paul taught us in the New Testament. He wrote a letter to the Corinthians (which was read all throughout Asia Minor) that denounced a man for sleeping with his father's wife. (Implicit in the passage you quoted is the fact that in Christian communities, because of man’s sinful nature, there are going to be bad reports.) Paul dealt very openly with sexual sin.
So the verse commands us to not meditate on those bad reports…but on the good reports…like the Gospel. What is does not say to do is neglect the truth. In fact, the verse starts with the truth and moves towards justice.
At Via the truth does not seem to have been a priority. The truth was not told to the parents or the kids in the little dorm. The truth was not asked of the parents or the kids. Most likely sweet children, who desperately needed counseling, did not receive it because their parents believed “the best little dorm dormparents” were unjustly put on maintenance detail. Mr. Parker was not treated as a pedophile, but as someone who was unjustly defamed. The truth was not encouraged or shared and I, for one, do not think for a minute that that was an accident. The people who chose to keep things quiet, most certainly were not doing it to protect the victims…if they had… everyone would have been told that their children could have been one of his victims. The truth was just too “yucky.” It was too “yucky” to tell Sanford, way too “yucky” to tell parents who might choose not to keep their kids at a boarding school any longer and make the staff’s jobs irrelevant, and much too “yucky” to admit they had failed in any way.
So, MKfromBrazil, it is your prerogative to believe that somehow this was just overzealous missionaries who could only focus on “good reports.” (And yet all the posts are about MK’s who were scarred for life over the staff’s focus their “bad reports.”) I, for one, choose to believe that the people who chose to keep Mr. Parker in the dorm, and then chose to not make the truth known about him to others, were not like Paul, but cowards. If they want to personally write me and apologize for all the unnecessary pain in my life and my family’s, and give me their Godly reasons, I’m all ears to hear the theology behind their decisions. I’d even be glad to post them on this website. But, I have a feeling I will not be getting any PM’s on this subject. The truth is way too “yucky.”

Excuse my ignorance if I sounded like one, but I took MKfromBrasil's observation to mean that scriptures were applied selectively, not effectively, not correctly. I think that is beyond debate.

Clearly, as Momof4 points out, the shepherds in Via were not at all concerned about obedience to the Word.

And, like the Christians at Corinth, NTM leadership seems to have been tolerant of deviant behavior that even nonbelievers would denounce. (Change verb tenses as required.)