QA Gossip
how should we deal with gossip in the church?
(Questions/Answers)
Jason Procopio
Today’s going to be a strange one, because while we do have one main text, we’re going to have to do a bit of hopping around first before we get there.
I’ll be honest with you: I’ve been dreading this sermon for a while. Not because I didn’t know what to say about it, but because it hurts to even bring it up.
My father was a youth pastor for most of my young life, and he was a very good one. I wasn’t a Christian when he was my youth pastor, but even I had to admit that he was good. He taught the Bible clearly and passionately, and in a way that made us care about what he had to say (even if I didn’t entirely believe it at the time). He loved us and took good care of us (and was fair enough when we were there to not treat me differently because I was his son).
But I grew up in Pentecostal churches, and my dad was a moderate charismatic Christian in an extremely charismatic environment. And some influential leaders in the church disliked my dad’s emphasis on the Bible, and Jesus, and how the gospel changes us, and what they saw as his lack of emphasis on the miraculous gifts of the Spirit. So these people—men and women, members of families who had been in the church for decades and had significant influence—began spreading rumors about my dad.
To be clear: he had committed no sin. No one accused him of anything untoward. And nothing anyone said was completely untrue—my dad did emphasize the miraculous gifts of the Spirit less than other, more central teachings of the Bible. These influential church leaders simply talked in such a way that suggested to parents in the church (subtly but regularly, over a long period of time) that their kids were being spiritually shortchanged by my dad’s unwillingness to “let them be filled with the Spirit”.
If you don’t know charismatic churches and you don’t know what I mean by that, it’s okay: the point is that over time, the outcry from disturbed parents grew to such an extent that my dad was fired from his job. A few of these parents came to talk to him, and he tried to show them why what they had heard wasn’t true. But it wasn’t enough.
I was seventeen years old when this happened. I watched this experience break my dad (a man I had thought was unbreakable). It was only through the support of the church we moved to afterwards—the church my dad is still working for now, more than twenty years later—that he got over it. I watched what it did to him, and for years I hated the church for it.
Defining Gossip
But on top of whatever personal pain might be involved, gossip is a difficult subject to define, for two reasons.
The first reason is that it’s so sneaky, and it’s so attractive. It’s sneaky in that often you can be caught up in gossip without even realizing you’re doing it. And it’s attractive…well, because it is. Proverbs 18.8 compares gossip to tiny bites of delicious food:
The words of a whisperer are like delicious morsels; they go down into the inner parts of the body.
Gossip is entertaining; it’s stimulating. It’s exciting to hear something about someone else that you maybe shouldn’t know, or that no one else knows, because knowing makes you special. And it’s exciting to be the one sharing this information.
Or, if you’re actually angry with the person, gossip is a great way to get your shots in without the potential embarrassment of a confrontation. (And we wonder why social media is so popular.)
The second reason this is a hard subject is that we are all guilty of it. We have all, at some point or another, fallen into this trap. So we have a hard time speaking against this kind of behavior; we feel like hypocrites when we do.
The third reason is that, despite an abundance of biblical texts against it, gossip can actually be difficult to define biblically—not because of the Bible, but because of us.
There is no single verse you can point to and say, “This is what God means when he talks about gossip.” Rather, in order to see what the Bible is getting at, you have to widen the pool and look at many verses. For example:
Psalm 15.1-3:
1 O Lord, who shall sojourn in your tent?
Who shall dwell on your holy hill?
2 He who walks blamelessly and does what is right
and speaks truth in his heart;
3 who does not slander with his tongue
and does no evil to his neighbor,
nor takes up a reproach against his friend…
Proverbs 6.19 (when he describes things that God hates, here’s the last):
19 a false witness who breathes out lies, and one who sows discord among brothers.
Leviticus 19.16:
You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people.
James 4.11:
11 Do not speak evil against one another, brothers.
Proverbs 25.9-10:
9 Argue your case with your neighbor himself,
and do not reveal another’s secret,
10 lest he who hears you bring shame upon you,
and your ill repute have no end.
Romans 1.28-30:
God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done… They are gossips, 30 slanderers…
But here’s the thing: it’s really easy to take any one of those verses, individually, and say, “Well, I’m not doing that.” There is no one place in the Bible you can go to in order to make a complete case against gossip, so we are constantly looking for loopholes.
And what a horrible place to try to find a loophole. Anyone who has been in the thick of it knows the damage gossip can do. It is one of the most common sources of conflict within churches—very often, when a conflict breaks out between church members, its start can be traced back here.
So let me share with you a working definition of gossip that I like a lot, and that takes the Bible’s teaching on how we are to speak into account. I got this from an article by a pastor named Matt Mitchell:
Gossip is bearing bad news, behind someone’s back, out of a bad heart.
Let’s break that down quickly (and I’m borrowing some of this from Mitchell’s article). Gossip is bearing bad news. That mean one of two things.
First, it could mean sharing incorrect or slanderous information. The story might be untrue, and you know it’s untrue, in which case it’s not just gossip, but slander (which the Bible condemns abundantly, of course). We can easily see why slander would be damaging.
But this “bad information” could also be a truth or a half-truth, but that’s twisted in such a way that the end result is untrue. Let me give you a theoretical example of what this second case could look like. (And just to make it simpler to follow, I’m going to use members of my own conseil d’administration as examples here—I’m not calling them out, this is a completely imaginary illustration.)
Let’s say that Timothée hears something disturbing about Deborah, a sin she has committed. So he goes to see her. Debs has apparently asked forgiveness for this sin and has repented…but Timothée doesn’t understand how she could have fallen into such a trap, and even after that conversation, he’s still worried.
So what does he do? He talks to Alice about it; his intentions are good, he’s just confiding. But when he does this, he doesn’t mention Deborah’s repentance, and Deborah isn’t present to mention it herself.
So Alice leaves, now disturbed herself. She feels a certain weight on her, because she knows that Joe is also friends with Deborah. So, again with good intentions, wanting to look out for him, Alice goes to see Joe and says, “Listen, be careful around Deborah. She apparently did something wrong, she may not be trustworthy.”
Of course Joe is worried now, so he goes to his community group and asks them to pray, saying, “Apparently Deborah has fallen into sin; let’s pray that God brings her to repentance.”
So now we have an entire group of people, who have heard information about Deborah. But this information has been taken out of context, the whole notion of repentance has been removed, and Deborah has not been present to explain what happened. So this group of people all have this idea now that they need to watch what they say around Deborah, because she obviously can’t be trusted now, and they know, because they “heard it from someone who was there.”
Can you see why this kind of talk is so dangerous? This is what rumors do. This is what gossip does. Even if the information (to start with) is true, gossip gives the truth the social media treatment; it erases all possibility of nuance or subtlety or explanation, and paints people in an unfair light, damaging their reputation—and all the time, they’re not even around to say anything about it.
This sort of thing happens all the time—it’s happened numerous times, in our church, this year. It’s still happening.
We might want to give ourselves a pass on this, if we’re convinced that what we’re sharing is true; but in the end, whether it’s true or untrue is irrelevant; that’s not the point. As Mitchell says in his article, “Just because someone actually did something wrong does not mean that we need to, or get to, talk about it with others.” Every person has the right to tell his or her own story first. They should be able to decide when and how to tell their story. We always encourage people to tell someone—we are called to confess our sins to one another and pray for one another (James 5.16)—but everyone has the right to decide when to make his story open to everyone.
So anytime we’re speaking, there are a number of questions that should be at the forefront of our minds.
• “Is this story true? How do I know?”
• “Is this story mine to tell?”
• “Is this story bad news?”
• “How would I feel if I were on the receiving end of it?”
And that’s why we talk about “bad news”—we wouldn’t consider it gossip to say to someone, “Wow, Floriane did a great job singing at the baptism service.” “Oh really? I haven’t heard her sing.” “Oh, you should—she has a beautiful voice.” We wouldn’t characterize that as “gossip”, because it’s good news.
So gossip is bearing bad news, firstly; secondly, behind someone’s back. The person concerned is not in the room to speak for himself (or if there are two people concerned, they’re not both in the room). We’ll come back to this later too.
So the questions to ask here are simple:
• “Is the person concerned here?” (Or, “Are they both here?”)
And to take it further:
• “Would I be telling this story if he or she was here?”
• “Would I want someone to talk this way about me if I were not present?”
Of course there are times when we should and must speak about people who aren’t there. It’s not gossip to report a crime to the police, or to warn someone about a dangerous individual. But most of the time, that’s not what is happening.
So we can always come back to the essential questions: “Is it true? How do I know?” “Would I like someone to do this to me?”
Lastly, gossip is bearing bad news behind someone’s back out of a bad heart.
In his article, Mitchell writes: “The Scriptures do not provide a definition of gossip in one location. Instead, they describe gossip in action and intimately tie it to the character of the people participating in this tantalizing sin. The Bible often uses the word gossip to describe a kind of person more than just a pattern of communication.”
We might think that’s harsh, because we can look back on times that we have done this, and we still think that our motivations were good: we were trying to help. So maybe we were unwise, maybe we made a mistake, but it wasn’t sinful.
There’s a problem with that. Listen to how the apostle James puts it in James 1.26:
If anyone thinks he is religious and does not bridle his tongue but deceives his heart, this person’s religion is worthless.
A person who is growing in holiness, growing in Christlikeness, is learning how to bridle his tongue—to speak in the appropriate way, at the appropriate time, in the appropriate context. Because if he can’t bridle his tongue, he is deceiving his own heart.
How can James say that? In fact, he’s just expanding on what Jesus himself said. Luke 6.45:
The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure produces evil, for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks.
This is a big deal.
So that’s what gossip is—all of that is what not to do, and helps us see what’s happening in our own hearts when we fall into this trap. But none of that answers the question of what to do.
the goal of our words: building up (Ephesians 4.25-32)
The big question in our minds should not be, “What am I allowed to say?”, but rather, “What should I say? How should I speak?”
On that question, the Bible is even more explicit.
And since it’s still fresh in most of our minds, I’d actually like to take us back to the passage we were in last week: Ephesians 4.
I was hesitating when deciding which passage to take you to, because my initial instinct was to go to Matthew 18.15-17, where Jesus says,
15 “If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault, between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have gained your brother. 16 But if he does not listen, take one or two others along with you, that every charge may be established by the evidence of two or three witnesses. 17 If he refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church. And if he refuses to listen even to the church, let him be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.
The reason why I decided not to camp out here, in the end, is because I’ve had several conversations with people around this subject of gossip, and I asked the question, “Well, why didn’t you go talk to the person directly, like Jesus tells us to do in Matthew 18?” And they said things like, “Well, it wasn’t really a question of sin here, so I didn’t think it applied.” Or even: “Well, he didn’t sin against me, he sinned against someone else. So I didn’t think it applied.”
It’s true: if you take Jesus’s words here extremely literally, it wouldn’t apply. But I think Jesus was after something bigger than just laying out a process. I think he was teaching his disciples the way they ought to deal with each other.
And that’s exactly the direction that Paul points us in here.
So we’re going to read Ephesians 4.25-32, but let’s remember the context—this is what we saw last week.
Paul has just been exhorting the Ephesians to maintain unity between the members of each individual church whom the Spirit has brought together. Since Jesus Christ has united them to God and to one another, through his sacrifice for them on the cross, they are now members of one another, different members of the same body. So Paul calls them to help one another to grow up into Christ, into spiritual maturity. And then he explains what that maturity looks like, by reminding them that they are not to walk as the unbelievers do. Because that’s not how they learned Christ: they learned to put off the old self (which still lived according to corrupt and deceitful desires) and to put on the new (which lives like Christ).
That’s what he says just before—now, in v. 25, he tells them, for this reason…
25 Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another.
(And there we have it: he doesn’t say, “Speak the truth about your neighbor, to other neighbors.” He says, “Speak the truth to your neighbor.”)
26 Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, 27 and give no opportunity to the devil. 28 Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need. 29 Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear. 30 And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. 31 Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. 32 Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.
So you can see that Paul is giving a lot of various commands here which concern how we are to speak to one another. And he’s not just giving us interdictions (“Thou shalt nots”), but rather positive exhortations: “This is how you are to speak to one another.”
Think of how a parent—a good, loving parent—talks to their child. When the kid’s a baby, and learning to walk, a good father doesn’t yell at the kid for being clumsy and falling. He says, “You’re doing it! You’re walking! That was great—do it again!” And he picks the kid up, and sets him on his feet for another go.
Then the kid gets a little older, and is learning to ride a bike. The dad is there, coaching the kid along: “You’ve got it, you’ve got it, don’t look at your feet, look up—oh, you fell. It’s alright: let’s get the gravel out of your knees. I know that hurt, but it’s okay—try again, you’re doing fine.”
The goal of our speech with one another should be like like that. Paul is very explicit in this chapter that the goal of everything we do together is to build one another up in love, that we might grow together to be like Christ. That should be the purpose of every word we say to one another in the church.
Now. What happens if we don’t do this? We don’t speak the truth with our neighbors; corrupting talk comes out of our mouths and tears our brothers and sisters down. We feed bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and—yes, there it is, in v. 31—slander. There isn’t forgiveness, there isn’t reconciliation. Instead, there is division.
And I bring up division, quite simply, because division is the opposite of unity, and that’s what Paul’s talking about. Division happens when someone drives a wedge between two or more people in the church. And unfortunately it happens very frequently. It’s happened, and frankly is still happening, in our church.
Division comes up often in the church, and it almost always comes up when someone is in disagreement with someone else, or has been hurt by someone else, but doesn’t deal with that hurt in the right way. When we have a problem with someone in the community, and we don’t want our life to change, what do we do? We gossip. We slander. We try to get the rest of the community to have the same problem we do (or at least to make them doubt the character or the intentions of the person we have a problem with).
And the result in the church is catastrophic. It is the exact opposite of everything Paul calls us to here.
Paul doesn’t come down hard on the subject of division here, but he gets more explicit in other letters. Here’s just one example from Titus 3.10-11:
As for a person who stirs up division, after warning him once and then twice, have nothing more to do with him, 11 knowing that such a person is warped and sinful; he is self-condemned.
(And we should notice that in these warnings against division, there’s no footnote that says “Unless your anger is justified. Unless your concerns are justified.”)
So this is a big deal.
And it’s a big deal because it goes against the instinct we should have toward members of our own body. There should be an ingrained generosity in us toward one another, a desire to see our brothers and sisters grow.
And that is why (v. 29 again):
29 Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear.
Now here’s where we come back to what we were saying earlier. Often we will need to address specific issues of obedience or understanding in the church—these situations will always involve real, actual people. And we’ll need to speak in such a way that our brother or sister is built up, that they receive grace to pursue Christ.
And when we do that, that person should be present for that discussion.
It sounds silly to say it like that, but here we are: how are we going to build up our brother or sister, how are we going to give grace to them through our speech, if they’re not there to hear what we’re saying? How is my talking about them, rather than to them, building them up?
This is why Jesus’s exhortation to go and talk directly to a brother or sister who has sinned makes sense: if the goal is not simple adherence to a rule, but actually building one another up in love, because we’re members of the same body, I’m not going to be able to do that if the person concerned isn’t there to be built up.
Now that’s the positive exhortation. Here’s the negative—here’s what to “put away,” as Paul says (v. 31):
31 Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and SLANDER be put away from you, along with all malice. 32 Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.
Bitterness is easy. Anger is easy. Slander is easy. I said this last week, but obviously, Paul’s option is more painful. Reconciliation is always painful. Forgiveness is always painful. Speaking to the person, rather than about the person, is difficult. What Paul calls us to do here is a lot harder than saying things in secret, spreading rumors, spreading gossip, and turning others against a brother. It requires a lot of patience, and sacrifice, and humility. It always hurts.
But it was far more painful, far more difficult, for Jesus to do what he did for us. The sacrifice he asks of us, the pain he sometimes asks us to endure, the difficult reconciliation, is nothing compared to what he himself suffered so that we might be reconciled to God.
And what Jesus understood, what Paul explains to us here, is that even if the efforts we must make can be incredibly painful, the pain is preferable. The difficulty is preferable. The sacrifice is preferable. It’s better to go through the pain of reconciliation, to go speak to the person rather than about the person to others. Because the stakes are high: nothing less than the health and the unity of the body of Christ, of which that person is a member.
So we must do everything in our power to avoid division and to pursue unity in the way we speak. And if we hear someone speaking in such a way that division could be created, if we hear someone even riding the line of gossip, we need to stop that conversation, and encourage our brother or sister to go speak directly to the person concerned, and to do it with the expressed goal of building them up.
Conclusion
Brothers and sisters, the way people speak in the church should be radically different than the way people speak outside the church. And when I say that, it’s not merely a question of tone or intensity. Some of you have ideas of what is appropriate that come from the culture around you, or from the way you were brought up, or from what certain influential friends have shown you is okay—but which actually go against what the Bible expects of us.
Creating division in the church through things you say about other people rather than to them is the absolute antithesis of what God calls us to. He calls us to think about what we say. He calls us to think about how we say it. He calls us to think about why we say it. And he calls us to think about to whom we say it.
Why? Because we are members with one another of the same body, called to build one another up in love. I’m a little cynical about this actually happening, but my sincerest prayer is that we would never again have a report of rumors or gossip within our church. Because that would mean we are living in obedience to what Paul commands us here. What a joy that would be, and what an honor to the Lord who saved us.
