NOTES for Ti1 5:19

How often we arrange for others a "post-flight review" on the basis of completely unreliable information or simply a biased attitude. Paul insists that in the Church this is inadmissible. An elder, a person clothed with authority and responsibility, can be accused only in the presence of three witnesses. Precisely witnesses. Not gossipers, not people who have their own opinion, but witnesses who have facts for accusation. This is hard to accept because then it becomes impossible to call to account a person who has committed a misdeed or crime if only the injured party can testify. But there is no criminal code in the Church, and it lives by other norms and rules. In the Church everything secret becomes manifest. Both bad and good sooner or later comes out. And if in the world people want immediate recompense, in the Church we know exactly that vengeance can be given over to God.