SPEAKING THE TRUTH IN SAFETY
When destructive people head for another church, do you warn the next pastor?
Name withheld
July 1, 1987
Names and identifying details have been changed in this true account to protect the people involved. Something was wrong with Faith Baptist Church. When I planted the church fresh out of seminary, I was short on practical experience but long on enthusiasm. The congregation grew slowly but steadily from a handful of people to a morning attendance of 140. But now, four years later, there was a deadly malaise of negative, critical attitudes seeping through the church. And it seemed centered in the Bilo family Claude Bilo, his wife, Vivian, and their two boys, Brad and Toby, had moved to town from out of state two years before. They joined the church and quickly became key leaders in our youth program. In a young church with many new believers, the Bilos were just the sort of Christians I needed. They had been believers for many years and were graduates of a Bible college. Even better, they'd been involved in a new church in their previous community, so they were no strangers to church planting. But our relationship began showing strain. I wasn't sure why. I assumed the problem was my pastoral inexperience. After all, they were both older than I, with more years in church work-a fact they had pointed out more than once. I began calling Claude every week just to keep in touch. Claude was invariably polite, but he kept his distance. My wife, Dionne, and I had Claude and Vivian and the boys over for dinner. The evening was pleasant enough, but after they left, Dionne said to me, "Do you think we'll ever move beyond chit-chat with them? We don't have this problem with anyone else in the church." I could only shrug my shoulders. One Saturday morning Phil and Marge Kennedy came to see me. Their fifteen-year-old daughter, Amber, and the Bilos' ...
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