Six brave people wrote letters to the Harvest Bible Chapel elders in early 2019 bringing charges against James MacDonald per 1 Timothy 5:19-21.
19 Do not admit a charge against an elder except on the evidence of two or three witnesses. 20 As for those who persist in sin, rebuke them in the presence of all, so that the rest may stand in fear. 21 In the presence of God and of Christ Jesus and of the elect angels I charge you to keep these rules without prejudging, doing nothing from partiality.
All six letters have since been published online. [NOTE: This post is not about the value of the letters being available online. We can tackle that another time.] When the letters were written and submitted, none of the six people wanted their letters to be public. We can readily assume then that none of them released their letter to be published. That means someone -- or multiple people -- leaked the letters. Some people have said that I leaked the letters. That is a lie.
Before I address that lie, let me tell you what I did with the letters. I sent the letters to all the elders in early February 2019. While those who wrote and submitted the letters did not want them made public, they did want the letters to go to the elders. Several elders vehemently opposed the letters going to the full elder board. (I still shake my head when I write that. If we do not have the letters, we cannot do our job.) Regardless of that opposition, I sent the letters to every elder, because the authors wrote and submitted the letters for the elders. To protect from the letters potentially being leaked, I sent them using Gmail Confidential Mode. Access to the email was limited to a set number of days. Recipients could not forward, copy, print, or download the email. The attachments -- i.e., the letters -- could not be saved or printed. I also password-protected the attachments. I still have my email in the Sent folder. Its contents are expired. None of the recipients have access. They have not had access since seven days after I sent that email in early February 2019. I did send the letters to all the elders via email while ensuring the letters could not be leaked from that email.
With that established, we can move on to the lie about me leaking the letters. The first time I heard someone say that I leaked the letters was in a March 2019 elder meeting. A fellow Harvest elder accused me of leaking the letters. I told him I did not leak the letters, that I would not have done so. He replied saying that I sent the letters to all the elders implying that could have been the source of the leak. I challenged him to check his inbox for my email and told him he would not have access, because the email had expired weeks before. I sat and waited. He did not check his inbox in front of me. I never heard about it from him again.
The most recent and more blatant occurrence of someone saying that I leaked the letters was in November 2020. Ex-pastor James MacDonald, and former Harvest Bible Chapel elder chairman, Ron Duitsman, state it as fact without using my name -- a very common MacDonald tactic -- in a video MacDonald released that month. The video “interview” remains on MacDonald's website. At the 8:43 mark, Duitsman says, "I know that one other elder was very involved in disseminating the letters against the wishes of the people who had written the letters." MacDonald comments, "They didn't want their names to be made public." Duitsman repeats verbatim what MacDonald just said. A bit later, at the 9:21 mark, shortly after an “Isn’t it true” question from MacDonald, Duitsman says, "And, of course, there was an elder who put them out pretty much everywhere. And they were all over quickly."
How do I know they were talking about me? Because of what MacDonald and Duitsman say next. MacDonald says, "Isn't it true that same elder -- we don't need to throw all these names out -- but isn't it true that same elder was really kind of filibustering in the meetings and ..." Duitsman jumps in before MacDonald finishes saying, "I can recall that particular elder always stood at the meetings with his Bible in his hand and reading Titus or Timothy or the appropriate verse to prove that there was a disqualification. There was this. There was that. There was … you know. He had his mind made up and would not be dissuaded. And I really tried, many times, to kind of shut him down. It's like, 'No, we're supposed to be open and honest. Let him speak.'"
I stood at elder meetings as I stand at most meetings, especially four and five hour meetings, since experiencing lower back problems in late 2012 which worsened throughout 2013 before I had lumbar spinal fusion surgery just before Thanksgiving that year. Standing at meetings is part of what I do for back health. I of course brought my Bible to elder meetings, opened it up, and, yes, read pertinent passages. I was that elder.
In that November 2020 video, Ron Duitsman and James MacDonald say that I leaked the letters. However, the fact is I did not leak the letters. I would not have leaked the letters. Those letters were written with the Harvest elders as the intended audience. Those who wrote the letters did not want them to be made public. They also insinuate that I made the names of the authors public. I did not do that either.
Why would James MacDonald push this story about me leaking the letters? It is part of an effort to create a narrative that I mishandled the letters when I did just the opposite. This narrative that I leaked the six letters submitted to the Harvest elders in late January and early February 2019 is a lie. It is meant to bring my actions into question. Because if I leaked the letters then maybe I mishandled the letters in other ways (e.g., sending them to the elders instead of the "reconciliation team"). This is a classic example of DARVO. I tweeted about this in May: https://twitter.com/CaptScrub/status/1399171943102824451?s=20
Not only did I not leak the letters, in a February 11, 2019 email to all my fellow Harvest elders, I urged them not to leak the letters, writing, "I urge whomever is leaking information not to release letters publicly that were meant for the board only. Protect these people's privacy. Our job is to act on what has been brought before the elder board."
I urged them not to leak the letters, writing, ' ... Our job is to act on what has been brought before the elder board.'
I did not leak the six letters. I did send the letters to the Harvest elders so we could do our job.
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