Anonymous Asks (405)

“How should the church deal with gossip?”

Words can be a deadly poison. The gossip presents himself in public as a friend, then stabs you in the back when you’re not expecting it. He betrays confidences, reveals secrets and causes endless unnecessary heartache. Jeremiah said that tale-bearing is characteristic of the “stubbornly rebellious”. That’s not a inscription I’d want on my tombstone.

Let’s not kid ourselves. Gossip happens among Christians too.

Hard to Diagnose and Difficult to Root Out

Partly this is because gossip is not a flagrant violation of Christian social norms, especially if the person passing it on is adept at giving himself plausible deniability. Most of us enjoy fellowship and rarely notice when it becomes something else entirely, especially when it’s done discreetly and gradually. In churches, gossip effectively disguises itself as concern so loving you may find yourself tempted to comfort the “distressed” gossip. The person hearing a juicy tidbit may wonder whether the subject is appropriate to be talking about, but challenging the gossip requires we make assumptions about his motives, and these may or may not be correct. So we try to view a questionable conversation in the best possible light, and the problem continues. Moreover, we may now have become enablers to the sinner and unintentionally encouraged a gossip to persist in his bad habit.

That’s the problem with gossip: it spreads sin around in more ways than one.

Some people just love drama. Not everybody is disposed to stir up trouble (and of course they would never call it that), but people with too much time on their hands often succumb to the temptation to get the pot boiling just to keep their own lives interesting. Paul warns about this tendency in younger widows. He writes, “They learn to be idlers, going about from house to house, and not only idlers, but also gossips and busybodies, saying what they should not.”

Don’t imagine for a moment that only young widows are tempted to gossip (that is certainly not my experience). Paul may single them out for two reasons: (1) they are his subject in the context; and (2) there’s an easy fix in their situation: get busy. Life is full of opportunities for service. Christians who spend too much time chatting inappropriately are insufficiently occupied in doing good.

So then, gossip is a problem hard to diagnose and difficult to root out. Both testaments deal with it. Our reader asks what a church should do about it. What might be a biblical response?

A Biblical Response

Let’s start with this: Paul’s list of reasons for excommunication does not include it. 1 Corinthians lists six sins that are cause for exclusion from Christian fellowship for the sinner’s own good. Gossip is not among them, and I see no safe way to expand the list without going beyond the wording of scripture. It might be okay if we were building a godly principle for ourselves to follow, but adding arbitrary violations to impose on others would take us into fantasyland, and a legalist fantasyland at that. Gossip is serious, but it’s not a matter for leadership to take to the congregation and make public. If we are going to keep our response to gossip biblical rather than bureaucratic, we need to recognize that dealing with specific instances of gossip is not actually a matter for the church at all. It’s a matter for individual Christians who encounter it. This is not only more practical, it’s also consistent with the Lord’s teaching in Matthew 18.

When a brother or sister in Christ sins in front of you by whispering about others, that’s your cue to call him out or shut her down, not subtly, but with plain, honest, unmistakable clarity. “I don’t think I should be hearing that.” “That’s none of my business, and I don’t think it’s any of yours either.” We live in a culture consumed with other people’s business. That should not be the way with Christians. Peter writes, “Let none of you suffer as a meddler.” If a sharp rebuke doesn’t solve the problem, the Lord taught that escalation is necessary, but it certainly seems to me that the object of his teaching in Matthew was to contain the problem in the smallest possible circle rather than making it worse. A clear, direct rejection of the temptation to participate in a gossip chain may not end a gossip’s budding career as self-appointed heir(ess) to Rona Barrett, but it will almost surely end the problem for you. That’s a pretty good start.

A Few Suggestions

While church leadership may not be directly responsible for rooting out gossips and delivering them over to Satan to learn their lesson, they can certainly help to create an environment in which busybodies are unlikely to thrive. A few suggestions for elders concerned about the problem:

Teach on the subject. The scriptures about gossip are not ambiguous, but immature believers may not realize a practice encouraged in their social circles, schools and workplaces is not even slightly helpful and genuinely sinful. Social media couldn’t exist without meddling, gossip, slander and endless unnecessary drama. Human resources departments all over the Western world not only contribute to the problem of gossip indirectly; they also demand workers at every level participate in it. They breed rats for a living. Regular teaching from scripture may be needed if people don’t recognize that what’s encouraged in the world is unwelcome in church.

Keep potential gossips occupied. When you see sheep with too much time on their hands, give them something constructive to do. That was Paul’s remedy, and it applies to more than young widows. Work is a great cure for all kinds of evils, idle hands really are the devil’s playground, and idle lips are sometimes worse.

Kick the problem back where it belongs. People frequently assume every problem they encounter in church is a matter for the elders. That’s simply untrue. Dealing with specific instances of gossip should not normally be an elder’s problem unless he is the one on the receiving end of it. Believers who take lower-level rumors and concerns to their elders should be encouraged to deal with the problem biblically. Gossip requires two to tango. Ask “What did you say?” or “Did you rebuke her?”

Rebuke it if it happens to you. If someone brings an inappropriate concern to an elder, he should respond the same way any other Christian ought to: “That’s not my business, and I’m pretty sure it’s not yours either.”