For seven years I served as the staff chaplain for our local sheriff’s office and as such I spent hours each week riding along with different officers as they performed their duties. Thankfully during my time serving, I was never on the scene of an active shooting incident. I was on the scene after and did spend hours in hospital waiting rooms with the families of officers who had been shot in the line of duty.
On one occasion, after a particularly violent shooting, I was speaking to some of the deputies as they shared the events that had taken place. The deputies had followed a suspect as he fled from the scene of a crime and surrounded him in the front yard of a house. It was then that the suspect jumped out of the vehicle with a weapon in his hand and ran in the direction of two of the deputies. The deputies responded by firing seventy-one bullets at the suspect hitting him with four of them. That is correct, sixty-seven of the bullets fired at the suspect by trained law enforcement officers missed the suspect and hit something else.
I am not sharing this story to make the deputies look bad. I am sharing it because everyone of the deputies who fired their weapons that day had trained for many hours to prepare for a situation just like the one they were in and even with their many hours of training they still missed their target with the vast majority of bullets they fired that day. Their intentions were good but their emotions and adrenaline pumping caused them to not only miss their intended target which was bad, but it also caused them to hit things they were not aiming for nor intended to damage.
You may be wondering why I am writing about police missing the dangerous suspects they fire their weapons toward. The reason I am writing this today is because over the past few years I have witnessed a series of similar events take place within the body of believers in Yeshua (Jesus). We all are aware that there have been numerous pastors and/or ministry leaders who have fallen into sexual sin. Some of those sins were consensual, others were abusive but all of them were immoral. These leaders were publicly exposed by the media and then rightly excoriated by others within the body of believers. The Bible is clear about how sinful and dangerous these ministers' actions were to themselves, their families, their congregations and the entire body of Messiah and I would never think about making excuses for their actions.
I would however like to encourage and remind those who have pulled their weapons to fire at these men and women that just as those trained law enforcement officers missed their target with the majority of their bullets. Many of those who have publicly fired rounds in the general direction of these sinners also missed their targets, only to hurt their spouses, their families, and their congregations. And I am only talking here about those who were trained to protect and defend the flocks, the shepherds.
Unfortunately, in the case of the attacks against these fallen ministry leaders, it wasn’t and isn’t only the trained protectors who are firing bullets in the general direction of these fallen leaders it is the untrained, the biblically illiterate who are also firing as quickly as they are able to pull their triggers. Some of these rapid fire of statements in sermons, social media posts, memes shared, videos on YouTube and instagram shorts have certainly hit their intended targets. However the majority of these shots fired went right past their target and hit innocent people. The wild shots hit spouses, families, congregations and those in the greater body of Messiah of which we are all a part. While those firing these “bullets” intended for them to hit the sinner way too many hurt, injured and in some cases caused the death of the innocent.
Before you think about pulling the trigger on another post, statement or meme, please remember that if you miss your target you may hit someone innocent and that someone may even be you.
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