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There is more unrest at Vision Forum as the Board of Vision Forum Ministries today announced the closing of Vision Forum (VF) Ministries.  This announcement comes 12 days after Doug Phillips announced his resignation from VF as president, and allegedly nine months after Phillips stepped down from his pastoral role as “teaching elder” at Boerne Christian Assembly.

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The Closing of Vision Forum Ministries

In light of the serious sins which have resulted in Doug Phillips’s resignation from Vision Forum Ministries, the Board of Directors has determined that it is in the best interests of all involved to discontinue operations. We have stopped receiving donations, and are working through the logistical matters associated with the closing of the ministry. While we believe as strongly as ever in the message of the ministry to the Christian family…

Ordinarily, I would think that the following fact is bizarre:  the vast majority of church discipline practiced today is unbiblical. But the fact of the matter is, as a former elder, I was on an elder body that practiced errant discipline. What we were doing had a semblance of  biblical correctness and the church had always done it that way – it’s an easy trap to fall into. In the Christian life, most assumptions (concerning truth not verified) are dangerous; you eventually learn that. However, my past error will serve to make my initial points.

Like everyone else, we used Matthew 18:15-20 as a schematic for church discipline. That was our first mistake. The passage has nothing to do with church discipline, it is clearly a procedure initiated by Christ to resolve conflict among Christians. But worse yet, we didn’t even use the wrong text the right way once we…