More proof that "fundamentalist christians" and "evangelicals" are nutcases -- 71-yr-old Sunday School teacher arrested because she disagreed with the pastor

Banned From Church
Reviving an ancient practice, churches are exposing sinners and
shunning those who won't repent.

By ALEXANDRA ALTER
January 18, 2008; Page W1

On a quiet Sunday morning in June, as worshippers settled into the
pews at Allen Baptist Church in southwestern Michigan, Pastor Jason
Burrick grabbed his cellphone and dialed 911. When a dispatcher
answered, the preacher said a former congregant was in the sanctuary.
"And we need to, um, have her out A.S.A.P."

Half an hour later, 71-year-old Karolyn Caskey, a church member for
nearly 50 years who had taught Sunday school and regularly donated 10%
of her pension, was led out by a state trooper and a county sheriff's
officer. One held her purse and Bible. The other put her in handcuffs.
(Listen to the 911 call)

The charge was trespassing, but Mrs. Caskey's real offense, in her
pastor's view, was spiritual. Several months earlier, when she had
questioned his authority, he'd charged her with spreading "a spirit of
cancer and discord" and expelled her from the congregation. "I've been
shunned," she says.

Her story reflects a growing movement among some conservative
Protestant pastors to bring back church discipline, an ancient
practice in which suspected sinners are privately confronted and then
publicly castigated and excommunicated if they refuse to repent. While
many Christians find such practices outdated, pastors in large and
small churches across the country are expelling members for offenses
ranging from adultery and theft to gossiping, skipping service and
criticizing church leaders.


The revival is part of a broader movement to restore churches to their
traditional role as moral enforcers, Christian leaders say. Some say
that contemporary churches have grown soft on sinners, citing the rise
of suburban megachurches where pastors preach self-affirming messages
rather than focusing on sin and redemption. Others point to a passage
in the gospel of Matthew that says unrepentant sinners must be
shunned.

Causing Disharmony

Watermark Community Church, a nondenominational church in Dallas that
draws 4,000 people to services, requires members to sign a form
stating they will submit to the "care and correction" of church
elders. Last week, the pastor of a 6,000-member megachurch in
Nashville, Tenn., threatened to expel 74 members for gossiping and
causing disharmony unless they repented. The congregants had sued the
pastor for access to the church's financial records.

First Baptist Church of Muscle Shoals, Ala., a 1,000-member
congregation, expels five to seven members a year for "blatant,
undeniable patterns of willful sin," which have included adultery,
drunkenness and refusal to honor church elders. About 400 people have
left the church over the years for what they view as an overly harsh
persecution of sinners, Pastor Jeff Noblit says.

The process can be messy, says Al Jackson, pastor of Lakeview Baptist
Church in Auburn, Ala., which began disciplining members in the 1990s.
Once, when the congregation voted out an adulterer who refused to
repent, an older woman was confused and thought the church had voted
to send the man to hell.

Karolyn Caskey was expelled from Allen Baptist Church after clashing
with the pastor.

Amy Hitt, 43, a mortgage officer in Amissville, Va., was voted out of
her Baptist congregation in 2004 for gossiping about her pastor's
plans to buy a bigger house. Her ouster was especially hard on her
twin sons, now 12 years old, who had made friends in the church, she
says. "Some people have looked past it, but then there are others who
haven't," says Ms. Hitt, who believes the episode cost her a seat on
the school board last year; she lost by 42 votes.

Scholars estimate that 10% to 15% of Protestant evangelical churches
practice church discipline -- about 14,000 to 21,000 U.S.
congregations in total. Increasingly, clashes within churches are
spilling into communities, splitting congregations and occasionally
landing church leaders in court after congregants, who believed they
were confessing in private, were publicly shamed.

In the past decade, more than two dozen lawsuits related to church
discipline have been filed as congregants sue pastors for defamation,
negligent counseling and emotional injury, according to the Religion
Case Reporter, a legal-research database. Peggy Penley, a Fort Worth,
Texas, woman whose pastor revealed her extramarital affair to the
congregation after she confessed it in confidence, waged a six-year
battle against the pastor, charging him with negligence. Last summer,
the Texas Supreme Court dismissed her suit, ruling that the pastor was
exercising his religious beliefs by publicizing the affair.


Allen Baptist Church

Courts have often refused to hear such cases on the grounds that
churches are protected by the constitutional right to free religious
exercise, but some have sided with alleged sinners. In 2003, a woman
and her husband won a defamation suit against the Iowa Methodist
conference and its superintendent after he publicly accused her of
"spreading the spirit of Satan" because she gossiped about her pastor.
A district court rejected the case, but the Iowa Supreme Court upheld
the woman's appeal on the grounds that the letter labeling her a
sinner was circulated beyond the church.

Advocates of shunning say it rarely leads to the public disclosure of
a member's sin. "We're not the FBI; we're not sniffing around people's
homes trying to find out some secret sin," says Don Singleton, pastor
of Ridgeview Baptist Church in Talladega, Ala., who says the 50-member
church has disciplined six members in his 2½ years as pastor. "Ninety-
nine percent of these cases never go that far."

When they do, it can be humiliating. A devout Christian and
grandmother of three, Mrs. Caskey moves with a halting gait, due to
two artificial knees and a double hip replacement. Friends and family
describe her as a generous woman who helped pay the electricity bill
for Allen Baptist, in Allen, Mich., when funds were low, gave the
church $1,200 after she sold her van, and even cut the church's lawn
on occasion. She has requested an engraved image of the church on her
tombstone.

Gossip and Slander

Her expulsion came as a shock to some church members when, in August
2006, the pastor sent a letter to the congregation stating Mrs. Caskey
and an older married couple, Patsy and Emmit Church, had been removed
for taking "action against the church and your preacher." The pastor,
Mr. Burrick, told congregants the three were guilty of gossip, slander
and idolatry and should be shunned, according to several former church
members.

"People couldn't believe it," says Janet Biggs, 53, a former church
member who quit the congregation in protest.

The conflict had been brewing for months. Shortly after the church
hired Mr. Burrick in 2005 to help revive the congregation, which had
dwindled to 12 members, Mrs. Caskey asked him to appoint a board of
deacons to help govern the church, a tradition outlined in the
church's charter. Mr. Burrick said the congregation was too small to
warrant deacons. Mrs. Caskey pressed the issue at the church's
quarterly business meetings and began complaining that Mr. Burrick was
not following the church's bylaws. "She's one of the nicest, kindest
people I know," says friend and neighbor Robert Johnston, 69, a
retired cabinet maker. "But she won't be pushed around."


Karolyn Caskey reads her Bible.

In April 2006, Mrs. Caskey received a stern letter from Mr. Burrick.
"This church will not tolerate this spirit of cancer and discord that
you would like to spread," it said. Mrs. Caskey, along with Mr. and
Mrs. Church, continued to insist that the pastor follow the church's
constitution. In August, she received a letter from Mr. Burrick that
said her failure to repent had led to her removal. It also said he
would not write her a transfer letter enabling her to join another
church, a requirement in many Baptist congregations, until she had
"made things right here at Allen Baptist."

She went to Florida for the winter, and when she returned to Michigan
last June, she drove the two miles to Allen Baptist as usual. A church
member asked her to leave, saying she was not welcome, but Mrs. Caskey
told him she had come to worship and asked if they could speak after
the service. Twenty minutes into the service, a sheriff's officer was
at her side, and an hour later, she was in jail.

"It was very humiliating," says Mrs. Caskey, who worked for the state
of Michigan for 25 years before retiring from the Department of
Corrections in 1992. "The other prisoners were surprised to see a
little old lady in her church clothes. One of them said, 'You robbed a
church?' and I said, 'No, I just attended church.' "

Word quickly spread throughout Allen, a close-knit town of about 200
residents. Once a thriving community of farmers and factory workers,
Allen consists of little more than a strip of dusty antiques stores.
Mr. and Mrs. Church, both in their 70s, eventually joined another
Baptist congregation nearby.

About 25 people stopped attending Allen Baptist Church after Mrs.
Caskey was shunned, according to several former church members.

Current members say they support the pastor's actions, and they note
that the congregation has grown under his leadership. The simple,
white-washed building now draws around 70 people on Sunday mornings,
many of them young families. "He's a very good leader; he has total
respect for the people," says Stephen Johnson, 66, an auto parts
inspector, who added that Mr. Burrick was right to remove Mrs. Caskey
because "the Bible says causing discord in the church is an
abomination."

Mrs. Caskey went back to the church about a month after her arrest,
shortly after the county prosecutor threw out the trespassing charge.
More than a dozen supporters gathered outside, some with signs that
read "What Would Jesus Do?" She sat in the front row as Mr. Burrick
preached about "infidels in the pews," according to reports from those
present.

Once again, Mrs. Caskey was escorted out by a state trooper and taken
to jail, where she posted the $62 bail and was released. After that,
the county prosecutor dismissed the charge and told county law
enforcement not to arrest her again unless she was creating a
disturbance.

In the following weeks, Mrs. Caskey continued to worship at Allen
Baptist. Some congregants no longer spoke to her or passed the
offering plate, and some changed seats if she sat next to them, she
says.

Mr. Burrick repeatedly declined to comment on Mrs. Caskey's case,
calling it a "private ecclesiastical matter." He did say that while
the church does not "blacklist" anyone, a strict reading of the Bible
requires pastors to punish disobedient members. "A lot of times,
flocks aren't willing to submit or be obedient to God," he said in an
interview before a Sunday evening service. "If somebody is not willing
to be helped, they forfeit their membership."

In Christianity's early centuries, church discipline led sinners to
cover themselves with ashes or spend time in the stocks. In later
centuries, expulsion was more common. Until the late 19th century,
shunning was widely practiced by American evangelicals, including
Methodists, Presbyterians and Baptists. Today, excommunication rarely
occurs in the U.S. Catholic Church, and shunning is largely unheard of
among mainline Protestants.

Little Consensus

Among churches that practice discipline, there is little consensus on
how sinners should be dealt with, says Gregory Wills, a theologian at
Southern Baptist Theological seminary. Some pastors remove members on
their own, while other churches require agreement among deacons or a
majority vote from the congregation.

Since Mrs. Caskey's second arrest last July, the turmoil at Allen
Baptist has fizzled into an awkward stalemate. Allen Baptist is an
independent congregation, unaffiliated with a church hierarchy that
might review the ouster. Supporters have urged Mrs. Caskey to sue to
have her membership restored, but she says the matter should be
settled in the church. Mr. Burrick no longer calls the police when
Mrs. Caskey shows up for Sunday services.

Since November, Mrs. Caskey has been attending a Baptist church near
her winter home in Tavares, Fla. She plans to go back to Allen Baptist
when she returns to Michigan this spring.

"I don't intend to abandon that church," Mrs. Caskey says. "I feel
like I have every right to be there."

http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB120061470848399079-yroutLlKBwF3MzxS2afA5ZaVWFw_20090117.html?mod=rss_free

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Nuts. Completely, absolutely, around-the-bend nuts. Leaves me "wide-
eyed-in-wonder" at just how nutty these people are.


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